I let him go. There's nothing I can say that would make this smaller. There's nothing anyone can say.
Some truths just have to be carried.
Elissa isin the holding suite on deck nine.
Not a cell. I was specific about that. A suite, with a bed and a functioning wash unit and food that isn't ration packs. She's not being held as a traitor. She's being held because we don't yet understand the full scope of what Ethan did to her, what he offered, what he planted in her head during those weeks of careful manipulation, and until we do, she's safer here. We're safer with her here.
The guilt of that calculation sits in my sternum like a stone.
She's sitting on the edge of the bed when I enter, her feet bare against the cold floor, her hair down in a way she never wears it. Elissa Torrence, adopted into our family at six years old, given our name and our protection and, apparently, our father's particular talent for being drawn to darkness.
She won't meet my eyes.
I pull the single chair from the desk and position it across from her, close enough to talk, far enough that she doesn't feel cornered. She's staring at her own hands, her fingers working against each other in a rhythm that might be anxiety or might be something she learned from Ethan. Idon't know. I should know. I should have been paying closer attention.
"He didn't hurt me." Her voice is small. Not broken, just small, pulled inward like the rest of her.
"I know."
"He said he wanted to show me something." Her fingers still, then start again. "The other side. What Father found."
My blood goes cold in a specific, targeted way, concentrated in my hands and the back of my neck. What Father found. Malachar's obsession in his final years, the research that consumed him, the questions he kept asking about the dark between stations and what lived in it. We destroyed those files. We thought we destroyed all of them.
"What did he tell you?"
"That Father was right. That there's something out there. Something that changes things." She looks up, finally, and her eyes are red-rimmed but dry. She's been crying, but not now. Not for me. "He said I could understand it because of what I am. Because of where I came from."
The stone in my sternum grows heavier. Elissa's origins are sealed records. We know she was found on a derelict ship, the only survivor, with no identification and no memory of anything before she was discovered. Malachar adopted her within weeks. At the time, we thought it was uncharacteristic generosity. Now I'm wondering what our father saw in a six-year-old girl from a dead ship that made him reach for her.
"Would you have gone?" I ask. "With Ethan. If he'd asked you to leave with him. Would you have gone?"
Silence. The kind that has texture and weight, that fills the room the way water fills a sinking compartment, one centimeter at a time.
"Yes." She says it quietly, but she says it looking at me. "I would have."
I sit with that. Let it land. Don't flinch from it, even though it cuts somewhere deep, somewhere that still believes family means something unbreakable.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay?" A flicker of something in her expression. Surprise, maybe. Or disappointment that I'm not angry.
"You're telling me the truth. That matters more than the answer."
She looks at me for a long moment, searching for the lie, the anger underneath, the judgment I must be hiding. She doesn't find it. Not because it isn't there, but because I've been hiding things from people who are better at reading me than Elissa, and right now my sister needs honesty more than she needs my rage.
"We'll figure this out," I tell her. "Whatever he did, whatever he showed you, we'll untangle it."
She nods. Goes back to looking at her hands.
I leave. The door seals behind me, and I stand in the corridor and let myself feel it for three seconds. The fear. The understanding that my father's legacy is a bomb with a timer we can't read, and Elissa might be holding a piece of the detonator.
Three seconds. Then I seal it away and move.
She'sin my quarters when I get there.
Our quarters. We haven't named it that out loud, but the evidence is everywhere. Her jacket over the back of the desk chair. A second coffee mug, the ceramic one she took from the mess because she said the standard-issue cups tasted like recycled polymer. Her boots by the door, placedneatly beside mine, and the sight of them together, her small worn ones next to my larger pair, does something to my ribs that I don't have a word for.
Astra is standing by the viewport, looking out at the scarred hull of the station and the stars beyond it. She's stripped down to a tank top and the soft pants she sleeps in, and from behind she looks almost relaxed. Almost peaceful. Until she turns, and I see her face, and I realize she's been standing here working herself up to something.
