The air that escapes the sealed section isn't stale. It should be, after six months of quarantine with no apparent ventilation schedule logged, but it moves against my face with a warmth that has no business being here. A current, faint and steady, as if something deeper in the section is exhaling.

  Dexter notices too. I see it in the way his hand moves to the sidearm on his hip, instinctive, the weapon already drawn before his conscious mind has decided to be afraid. "You feel that?"

  "Yes."

  We move in. The corridor beyond the seal is standard station architecture, durasteel walls and grated flooring, but the lighting has been modified. The overhead strips are off. In their place, someone has installed low-output lamps at floor level, casting everything in an amber wash that turns our shadows into tall, wavering things that follow us like attendants. The air smells like soil after rain, except I haven't smelled actual rain since I was seven years old on a planet I barely remember.

  "Someone's been living here," Dexter says, low.

  He's right again, and I'm going to stop keeping count. The first room we enter is part lab, part living quarters. A cot, neatly made, its blanket military-tight. A hydration station with protein supplements arranged by date. A pair of boots by the door, worn at the heels, sized for a man of average build. Corso Vell's boots, presumably. Except Corso Vell isn't here.

  What is here: research equipment. A portable spectrometer, analysis screens, data cores stacked in careful towers. And notes. Handwritten notes, actual pen on actual paper, which is an extravagance on a station where every gram of non-essential material is a luxury.

  I know the handwriting before I read a single word. The sharp, angular script that leaned hard to the right, as if the hand that made it was always in a hurry to get to the next thought. Malachar Torrence wrote like a man being chased by his own ideas.

  I pick up the first page. Dexter comes to stand beside me, close enough that I can hear his breathing change as he sees it too.

  Readings consistent for the fourteenth consecutive day. The tear is stable. Oscillation within predicted parameters. Corso continues his monitoring rotation without complaint, though I've noted his sleep patterns deteriorating. Exposure effects remain within acceptable thresholds. Must determine if proximity duration correlates with cognitive impact before proceeding.

  The tear.

  I set the page down and pick up another.

  The other side is not empty. Spectral analysis confirms structures. Whether organic or constructed, I cannot determine from this distance. The tear permits observation but resists physical interaction. Tools inserted beyond the threshold return altered at the molecular level. Living tissue has not been tested. I will not test it on Corso.

  I will not test it on Corso. Which begs the question my father's careful handwriting doesn't answer: who was he willing to test it on?

  Dexter has moved deeper into the lab, pulling open cabinets, scanning data cores with the portable reader he brought. His silence tells me more than his usual noise would. We're both reading the shape of something we didn't expect, and neither of us knows what to do with the geometry of it.

  "Zane." His voice is different now. Quiet, almost careful, which sounds so wrong coming from him that I cross the room before I've made the decision to move. He's standing in front of a console built into the far wall, its screen dark, and his hand rests on a small device plugged into its base. A holocaster. The kind used for personal recordings. "It's addressed to us."

  The label on the device, in that same urgent handwriting: For Z. and D. Torrence. Play in my absence.

  In his absence. Not "in case of emergency." Not "if something happens to me." In his absence, as if he knew, with the same precision he applied to everything else, that he was going to leave.

  Dexter looks at me. I look at the device. The lab hums around us with its impossible warm air and its faint ozone smell and the silence of a room that's been keeping secrets for half a year.

  I press play.

  My father's face fills the air above the console, rendered in the blue-white grain of holoprojection, and for one vertiginous second I am twelve years old and he is explaining to me why mercy is a resource that must be spent wisely. He looks tired in the recording. The lines around his eyes are deeper than I remember, and his hair, silver at the temples when I last saw him, has gone full white. He's wearing a lab coat over his station clothes, and behind him I can see equipment I don't recognize, structures of light and metal that don't conform to any engineering I know.

  "Zane. Dexter." His voice is the same. Precise, measured, the voice of a man who has weighed every word before releasing it. "If you're seeing this, I didn't come back."

  Dexter makes a sound beside me. Small, involuntary, the kind of sound a man makes when something hits him in the chest.

  "The anomaly is real. What I've been studying, what I've been documenting in these notes, it's not a malfunction. It's not radiation. It's a tear in the structure of space itself, and it's been here longer than this station. Perhaps longer than our species. There is something on the other side." He pauses, and in the pause I see him choose his next words the way he used to choose which son to discipline. Carefully. With an understanding of consequences. "I'm going to find out what."

  The hologram flickers, as if even the light carrying his image is uncertain.

  "Don't follow me. Whatever you find in these notes, whatever Corso tells you if he's still here, do not attempt to cross the threshold. I don't know what's on the other side for certain, and I won't have my sons pay for my curiosity."

  He leans forward slightly, and for a fraction of a second the composed mask drops and I see something I've never seen on my father's face. Not fear.

  Something past fear, on the other side of it, where a man arrives after he's been afraid for so long that the emotion has burned itself out and left only the residue: resolve.

  "Don't trust anyone who tells you to follow me. Not the council. Not your advisors. No one." His eyes, even in holographic rendering, find the exact place where I'm standing. "And sons. Whatever I was to you, don't let it determine what you become."

  The recording ends. His face collapses into light and then into nothing, and the lab settles back into its amber-lit quiet, and my brother and I stand side by side in the space our father used to occupy, breathing air that smells like something that shouldn't exist.

  Dexter's hands are fists at his sides. "He left. He just... left."

  "He did what he always did." My voice comes out flat, controlled, and I don't trust it. I don't trust the steadiness of it, because underneath that surface I can feel something structural threatening to give way. "He made a decision. He executed it. He didn't consult anyone who might have talked him out of it."

  "He didn't say goodbye."

  "He said don't follow. That's close enough."

  Dexter turns to me, and the look on his face is one I haven't seen since we were children. Since the night our mother was traded and he climbed into my bed because the dark in his room was too large to hold alone.

  Raw. Young. Furious in the way that only loss can make a person furious, when the thing you've lost didn't have the decency to be taken from you but chose to go.

  "I need to hit something," he says.

  "Later." I reach past him and eject the holocaster from the console, pocketing it. "Right now we secure these notes. Every page, every data core. Astra gets copies. No one else."

  "Not Ethan?"

  The question sits between us with more weight than it should.

  "Not Ethan," I say. "Not yet."

  Dexter searches my face, finds something there he doesn't like but understands, and nods once. We work in silence after that, cataloguing and packing with the methodical efficiency of men who need their hands busy because if they stop, they'll have to think, and thinking right now is a door that opens onto a room neither of us wants to enter.

  I go to Talia.

  Not for strategy. Not for her intelligence on the debtors or her sharp mind or any of the things I should want from her, the useful things, the things that make sense within the framework of what she is to me. I go because the corridors are too quiet after Dexter splits off to handle the evidence, and my quarters feel like a mausoleum, and somewhere between the sealed section and my own door I stopped walking toward solitude and started walking toward her.

  Her quarters. I override the lock because I can, because the station responds to me the way it responded to him, and I am trying very hard not to think about what that means.

  She's awake. Sitting cross-legged on her bed with a datapad balanced on her knee, wearing a thin shirt that doesn't belong to me and loose pants that ride low on her hips, and her hair is down around her shoulders in a way that makes her look like a different person. Softer. Younger. Someone who might have existed before debts and missing fathers and me.

  She looks up when I enter, and whatever she sees on my face makes her set the datapad aside without a word. She doesn't ask what's wrong. She doesn't offer platitudes or comfort or any of the things that would make me turn around and leave. She just watches me, those dark eyes reading me the way she reads everyone, except with me she doesn't bother hiding that she's doing it.

  "You look like someone who just found out something they can't unfind," she says.

  I close the door behind me. The lock engages. The room is small, smaller than mine, and it smells like her. Like the soap the station provides, generic and clean, but underneath that something warmer, something that lives in her skin and her hair and has started to live in my lungs when I'm not careful.

  "My father left a message." The words come out before I choose to release them. "He's gone. He left. Voluntarily."

  She doesn't flinch. She doesn't do the thing people do when you tell them something terrible, the theatrical widening of the eyes, the performance of sympathy. She absorbs it. Her jaw tightens, just slightly, and she nods once.

  "Are you here because you want to talk about it?"

  "No."

  "Are you here because you want to not talk about it?"

  I cross the room in three strides. She's on her feet by the time I reach her, not retreating, not bracing, just rising to meet whatever I'm bringing through her door. My hands find her waist and I pull her against me with a force that should frighten her, and maybe it does, maybe that slight catch in her breath is fear, but her hands come up to my chest and she doesn't push me away. She grabs the front of my shirt and holds on.

  "Then don't talk," she says.

  I kiss her like I'm trying to leave a mark on the inside of her mouth. She makes a sound against my lips, surprised, hungry, and her fingers tighten in my shirt and pull me closer. The anger in my chest has nowhere to go except into her, and she takes it, opens for it, meets it with something of her own that tastes like defiance and need and the same caged fury I've been carrying since I heard my father's voice tell me to let him go.

  Her back hits the wall. The sound her body makes against the metal is dull, solid, real in a way that cuts through the noise in my head. She gasps, and I swallow it, pressing her harder into the surface until there's nowhere for her to go, nothing between her and the cold steel except the thin fabric of that shirt and the heat pouring off both of us.

  "Tell me to stop." I don't know why I say it. I don't want to stop. I won't stop, not unless she makes me, and even then the stopping might break something in me that I can't afford to lose right now.

  Her eyes find mine. Close, so close I can see the flecks of blue in the grey and the way her pupils have gone wide and dark. "No."

  I pull her shirt over her head. She lets me, lifting her arms, and the wall is cold against her bare skin and she hisses at the contact but doesn't move away. I press my mouth to her throat and bite down, not gently, and the sound she makes goes straight through me like voltage. My hands are rough on her, rougher than they should be, fingers digging into the curve of her waist, her hip, pulling at the waistband of those loose pants until they're around her ankles and she kicks them away.

  She reaches for my belt. I let her open it, let her shove my pants down far enough, because I need to be inside her more than I need to be in control and that terrifies me in a way my father's disappearance didn't. She wraps one leg around my hip and the angle is imperfect, desperate, both of us grabbing at each other like we're trying to get purchase on something that keeps sliding away.

  I pin her wrists above her head with one hand. She tests the grip, once, and finding it immovable, makes a sound in her throat that's half frustration and half relief, and something in that sound strips the last rational layer off whatever I'm doing. I push into her and she cries out, loud, her head falling back against the wall with a crack she doesn't seem to feel. I don't give her time to adjust. I don't give myself time. I fuck her hard, each thrust driving her shoulders into the metal, and the sounds between us are obscene, wet and rhythmic and underscored by her breathing, which comes in sharp, punched-out gasps that I can feel against my collarbone.

  "You're going to take all of it." My voice doesn't sound like mine. Lower. Wrecked. The voice of something that's come unmoored. "Every fucking thing I'm carrying tonight, you're going to take it."

  "Give it to me." She says it through gritted teeth, her eyes glassy, her wrists straining against my hand. "Stop holding back and give it to me."

  I shift my grip. My free hand finds her throat, fingers settling over the pulse that hammers against my palm like a living thing trying to escape. I don't squeeze. Not yet. I let her feel the weight of my hand there, the potential of it, and her whole body goes taut against me, a wire pulled to its limit, vibrating.

  "Breathe in," I tell her.

  She does.

  I close my hand.

  Her air stops and her eyes go wide and her body clamps around me so hard I nearly lose the rhythm. The sensation is staggering. She's squeezing me like she's trying to pull me deeper, and I can feel her pulse under my fingers, fast and frantic and completely at my mercy. I hold the pressure for three seconds. Five. Seven. Her face flushes, her lips part, no sound escaping because I've taken the sound from her along with the air. Then I release.

  She drags in a breath that sounds like a sob. I fuck her through it, through the rush of oxygen that hits her system like a drug, and her legs are shaking, both of them wrapped around me now, her full weight suspended between my body and the wall. My marks are blazing. I can see them in my peripheral vision, bright enough to cast shadows, the bioluminescent lines along my arms and chest throwing blue-white light across her skin. They've never done this before, never burned this hot, and the light makes her look like something sacred, something profane, something I'm desecrating in real time.

  I close my hand again. Lighter this time, enough to restrict but not cut off, and I set a pace that matches the squeeze: thrust when I tighten, breathe when I release. She catches the rhythm before her conscious mind does, her body learning the pattern, and soon she's moving with it, riding the edge of air and deprivation and pleasure with an instinct that would humble me if I were capable of humility right now.

  "That's it." I press my forehead to hers. Our breath mingles, hers rationed, mine ragged. "That's it, take it, let me hear you."

  She comes with my hand on her throat. The orgasm rips through her in a long, shuddering wave that starts where we're joined and rolls up through her body until she's arching off the wall, her mouth open on a sound that's been building since I walked through her door. It's raw. Wrecked. It sounds like grief and rage and release all tangled together, and it doesn't stop. I keep moving, keep the pressure on her throat calibrated to the razor edge of too much, and she comes again, or she never stopped, her body convulsing around me in pulses that destroy what's left of my control.

  I bury myself in her and let go. The release is violent, savage, pulled out of some depth I didn't know I had, and my vision whites out for a second, two seconds, long enough that when I come back she's the first thing I see and the first thing I feel and the only thing in the room that's real.

  We stay like that. Pinned to the wall, tangled together, both of us wrecked. Her breath comes back in stages, each inhale deeper than the last, and I release her throat, letting my hand slide down to rest at the base of her neck where the pulse still runs wild. My marks dim slowly, the light fading from incandescent to a low, steady glow, and in the shifting luminance I can see what I've done to her. The red print of my fingers on her throat. The bruises forming on her wrists. The place on her shoulder where I bit down hard enough to leave the impression of my teeth.

  She should look damaged.

  She looks like she's entirely and completely mine.

  I carry her to the bed because her legs won't hold her. She doesn't protest, doesn't joke, just lets me set her down and then pull the thin blanket over both of us when I lie down beside her. She fits against me in a way that defies geometry, curling into my chest with her face tucked under my jaw, and I wrap myself around her and hold on.

  Neither of us speaks. The silence fills the room like water, slow and total, and it's the most intimate thing I've ever experienced. More intimate than the sex. More intimate than my hand on her throat. This, the quiet after, the two of us breathing in the dark while the station hums its endless mechanical lullaby around us. She doesn't ask what happened. I don't offer. She traces patterns on my chest with one finger, slow, idle, and I let her, and the touch is so gentle after everything that came before it that my throat closes around something I refuse to name.

  I stay. I don't get up. I don't leave. I don't retreat to my quarters to process in solitude the way every instinct I have is screaming at me to do. I stay in her bed with her body pressed against mine and her heartbeat slowing under my palm, and I let the silence hold what words would ruin.

  That's new. I know it's new. She knows it too, because at some point her hand stills on my chest and she exhales, long and slow, with a quality of settling into something that feels like the opposite of temporary.