Chapter 16
Dexter
I standon the command deck of Veridian-7 and watch the damage reports scroll across the tactical display, each line a small accounting of what we paid. Hull breaches on decks four through seven, sealed but not repaired. Seventeen dead. Forty-three wounded. Infrastructure damage that will take months to restore, if we bother, if this station is even worth holding after what bled through its corridors.
The Vex are broken. Scattered into the dark between stations with their leadership gutted and their supply lines severed. My people are already running salvage on their abandoned ships, stripping them for parts and intel, and by tomorrow there won't be enough of their fleet left to threaten a cargo shuttle.
We won.
The word sits wrong in my mouth. Tastes flat. I keep looking at the damage reports as if one of them will tell me something I don't already know, something that makes the number seventeen feel like a cost and not a failure. Seventeen people who trusted the Torrence name to keep them breathing.
I close the display.
Astra is in the corridor outside, leaning against the bulkhead with her arms crossed and her face carrying the particular stillness she wears when she's holding something sharp. I know that look. I've been on the other end of it enough times to recognize the blade before it falls.
"Webb talked," she says. No preamble. No softening.
"I know."
"He talked about Sigma-9."
My feet stop moving. The corridor hums around us, that low-frequency vibration of a station holding itself together through sheer engineering stubbornness, and for a moment it's the only sound. Sigma-9. The ambush that almost killed my brother. The one that took his unit, his people, and left him with scars the Empri marks couldn't cover.
"Tell me."
She does. All of it. Webb's confession, recorded and verified, laying out in meticulous detail how Malachar Torrence arranged for the ambush. How he fed coordinates to a third party. How the attack was designed to push Zane toward a specific psychological break, one that would make him more controllable, more dependent on the family structure Malachar had built. And the woman. A civilian, taken during the chaos, held as leverage for a deal that Malachar never intended to honor.
Astra's voice doesn't waver as she delivers it. Clinical. Precise. The way she used to brief mission parameters back when she was still pretending she was just an asset.
"Zane needs to hear this from us," I say.
"From you." She uncrosses her arms. "He needs to hear it from his brother."
She's right. I hate that she's right.
Zane isin the private meeting room off the secondary command hub, the one our father used for conversations he didn't want recorded. The irony of the location isn't lost on me. Talia is with him, sitting close but not touching, her presence the kind of quiet anchor that Zane gravitates toward even when he won't admit he needs it.
He looks up when I enter. His marks are steady, a slow pulse of deep blue that means he's calm, centered, present. I'm about to ruin that.
Astra comes in behind me and closes the door. The lock engages with a soft click that sounds, in the silence of this room, like a round being chambered.
"What is it?" Zane reads me the way he always has. Faster than anyone, more accurately than I'd like. His gaze moves from my face to Astra's and back, and I watch the blue in his marks shift half a shade darker. "Dex."
"Webb gave us a full confession." I pull the chair out across from him and sit because I want to be at his level when I say this. Not standing over him. Not delivering it like a briefing. "About Sigma-9."
The room changes temperature. I don't mean that metaphorically. Zane's marks flicker, and Talia's hand moves to his forearm, and the air between us takes on the quality of a held breath.
I tell him everything. The arranged ambush. The coordinates fed to hostiles through a chain of intermediaries that all trace back to our father's private accounts. The woman taken as collateral for a deal Malachar was running with a faction that doesn't exist anymore, a faction he burned after they served their purpose. I tell him that his people, his unit, the soldiers whose names he still recites in the dark hours when he thinks no one's listening, died because Malachar Torrence needed his son broken in a specific way.
I tell him our father was the architect of the worst day of his life.
Zane's marks go dark.
Not dim. Not faded. Dark. Every bioluminescent line on his skin extinguishes like someone pulled a breaker, and in the artificial light of the meeting room his face looks wrong without them. Exposed. The Empri marks are part of him the way my bones are part of me, and seeing them absent is like watching a man lose something fundamental. Something structural.
Talia's fingers tighten on his arm. She doesn't speak. She knows what this is. Emotional shutdown, the Empri body protecting itself from a grief so large that feeling it all at once would be destruction.
Zane sits perfectly still for eleven seconds. I count them.
