"Leave me."
Two words. Flat as station hull plating. No anger in them, no grief, nothing at all, just a man closing a door from the inside and turning off the lights.
"Zane."
"Leave me." He doesn't look at me. Doesn't look at any of us. His eyes are fixed on a point somewhere past the far wall, past the station, past everything. "Please."
The "please" is what moves me. My brother doesn't say please. Not to me, not to anyone. That single word is the only crack in the shutdown, the only evidence that behind the dark marks and the dead voice, something is screaming.
I stand. Astra is already at the door. Talia hasn't moved.
"Tal," Zane says. Still flat. Still nothing.
She leans in and presses her lips to his temple, a gesture so tender it makes my chest ache, and then she rises and walks out with us. The door closes behind her, and through it I hear nothing. Absolute silence. WhateverZane Torrence does with his grief, he does it alone and without sound.
Talia leans against the corridor wall and closes her eyes. "How bad?"
"Bad," Astra says.
"His marks have never gone fully dark before." Talia's voice is steady, but her hands are pressed flat against the wall behind her, fingers splayed, holding on. "Not even after Sigma-9 itself."
"He didn't know the truth after Sigma-9," I say. "He thought it was enemy action. Random. The kind of loss you can metabolize because it belongs to the war." I look at the sealed door. "This is different. This is his father."
"Your father too." Talia opens her eyes.
"I already knew what he was." The words come out harder than I intend. "I've had years to sit with it. Zane still had... pieces. Things he held onto. Memories of the man before the monster, or the version of the man he needed to believe existed."
"And now?" Astra, beside me.
"Now he knows there was no before. There was just the monster, all the way down."
We wait. The corridor hums. The station breathes its recycled breath around us, and we wait.
Two hours later,Zane emerges.
His marks are back, but they're wrong. Muted. Running at maybe half their usual luminance, like a system operating on backup power. His eyes, though, are clear. Too clear. The kind of clarity that comes from burning away everything soft and leaving only the framework.
He finds me in the secondary corridor near the medbay. I'm waiting because I knew he'd come here. Zane processes things in a specific order: alone first, then with me, then with the world.
"Our father was a monster." He says it like he's reading a status report. Factual. Settled. "We knew that."
"We did."
"This is just specificity." He stops in front of me, and up close I can see the evidence of those two hours in the room. Nothing visible. Nothing dramatic. Just a man who walked in carrying something and walked out having set it down. Or buried it. "Details on a picture we already had."
"Zane."
"It doesn't change anything." His voice stays level. Controlled. The voice of a man who has decided what he feels about this and will not be moved from that decision, regardless of what his body or his marks or his memories try to tell him. "He's gone. What he did is done. We move forward."
I want to reach for him. I want to grip his shoulder or pull him in or do something physical that says I know you're lying, I know this is killing you, I know the child inside you who loved him is choking on this. But Zane has chosen his architecture for this grief, and it's made of control and forward motion, and if I crack it now, here, in a corridor where anyone could walk past, he'll never forgive me.
So I nod.
"Forward," I agree.
He nods back. Something moves behind his eyes, quick and raw, and then it's gone. Buried under the clarity. Under the decision.
He walks past me toward wherever Talia is waiting, and I stand in the corridor and feel my brother's grief like aphantom limb. The child who loved a father despite everything, learning that "despite" was never going to be enough. That the man he loved had done the math on his son's suffering and found it acceptable. Useful. A variable in an equation that only Malachar could see.
