Almost.

  "There's a gap," I say. "Between 1340 and 1407. Twenty-seven minutes where your tracker went dark."

  His half-smile doesn't shift. "Tracker malfunction. The EMP burst from the Vex breaching charges knocked out half the personal systems on that level. You can check the maintenance logs."

  "I did. Fourteen other trackers went down in that corridor. Yours was the only one that came back online in a different location than where it dropped."

  A beat of silence. The hum of the air recyclers fills it, that constant subliminal drone that you stop hearing after your first month on station and never fully stop feeling in your back teeth.

  "I moved during the blackout," he says. "Headed toward the secondary armory to grab supplies for the evac team."

  "The secondary armory is two levels up and three sections aft of where your tracker reappeared."

  "I got turned around. The corridors were dark, there was debris."

  "You've lived on this station for ten years, Ethan. You could walk it blind."

  That half-smile again. Patient. Warm. A wall built to look like a window. "People make mistakes in combat situations, Zane. Even people who know the ground."

  I let it hang. Let him sit with the shape of his own excuse in the air between us, and I watch his hands. They're still. Perfectly, deliberately still, resting on his thighs with the practiced ease of a man who's trained himself never to fidget. Most people miss that. Most people see stillness and read calm. I see stillness and read control, the kind that takes years to build, the kind that means the body underneath has been taught to lie as fluently as the mouth.

  "We decoded a message," I say. "From Malachar."

  There it is. Not in his face, which stays exactly as it was. Not in his hands, which don't move. In his breathing. The space between one inhale and the next stretches by a fraction of a second, so small that anyone who wasn't watching for it would miss it entirely. But I've spent my life reading the people around me for the micro-tells that separate truth from performance, and that tiny hesitation screams louder than a confession.

  "Malachar sent a lot of messages," Ethan says. "Most of them were noise."

  "This one wasn't." I push off the wall. Take a step toward him. Then another. Close enough now that I can see the texture of his skin, the faint lines at the corners of his eyes that didn't used to be there when he first arrived on station a decade ago. He's aged here. Lived here. Grown into the spaces between us like something organic, rooted and real. "This one named a faction. Named a handler. Named a purpose."

  I stop. Two feet from his chair. Looking down at him the way I look at people when I want them to understand that the conversation has moved past the territory where lies are tolerated and into the territory where they become expensive.

  "It named you."

  Ethan Eames looks up at me, and for one long, held breath, nothing changes. The half-smile stays. The grey eyes stay. The warmth stays. He is a perfect, seamless surface, and I can feel the shape of his lie pressing against it from the inside like a hand against glass.

  Then his eyes shift.

  It's fast. A fraction of a second, maybe less. The grey bleeds into something else, a luminous, saturated blue that has no business in a human iris. Full Empri blue, the color of deep-space bioluminescence, the color that the Collective uses to mark their own. It pulses once, bright enough to throw faint light against his cheekbones, and then it's gone. Swallowed back behind grey like a door slamming shut.

  But I saw it. And he knows I saw it.

  His half-smile changes. It's still a smile. But the warmth drains out of it like heat from a hull breach, and what's left is something thinner, sharper, honest in a way that his warmth never was.

  "How long have you known?" he asks.

  My hand is on my sidearm. I don't remember reaching for it. The grip is warm from my body heat, the textured polymer biting into my palm with the familiar pressure of something I've held a thousand times. My thumb rests on the release. I don't draw. Not yet. But we both know the distance between intention and action is measured in fractions of a second, and at two feet, I don't miss.

  "Long enough," I say. "Not long enough. Pick whichever answer makes this easier for you."

  "Neither does." He uncrosses his legs. Places both feet flat on the floor. Hands open on his thighs, palms up, a gesture of surrender that I don't trust for a second because a man who can shift his eye color at will probably has other tricks I haven't catalogued. "So. What happens now?"

  "That depends entirely on what you tell me in the next five minutes."

  He looks at my hand on the weapon. Looks at my face. Something moves behind his eyes, a calculation so fast I can almost hear it, the quiet click of options being weighed and discarded. Then he exhales, and his shoulders drop by a degree, and for the first time in ten years, I think I'm seeing Ethan Eames without the performance.

  He looks tired.

  "I was placed here by a faction within the Empri Collective," he says. "A branch that operates outside the main hierarchy. They knew about the anomaly before your family did, before anyone on this station had any idea what was sitting in your backyard. My mission was simple. Watch. Report. Wait for the right moment." He pauses. Swallows. The sound is audible in the sealed room. "That was ten years ago."

  "And the right moment?"

  "Never came. Or it came and I didn't act on it. Depending on who you ask."

  I pull the sidearm. Don't aim it. Let it hang at my side, the weight of it a punctuation mark in the conversation, a reminder that this room has no cameras and the soundproofing works both ways. "Keep talking."

  "When Malachar found out about the anomaly, he ran." Ethan's voice is steady, but there's a grain in it now, a texture that wasn't there before. Like someone scraping the smooth paint off a wall to show what's underneath. "Went through it. I still don't know exactly what he found on the other side, but whatever it was scared him badly enough that he chose the anomaly over facing the people he'd been working with. He thought the other side was safer than staying."

  "You didn't report his disappearance."

  "No."

  "Why?"

  His jaw tightens. The muscle jumps once, twice, and settles. "Because something had changed. I don't have a clean answer for you, Zane. I don't have a strategic justification or a calculated betrayal narrative that makes this make sense. Something had changed, and I didn't report it, and I couldn't explain to myself why." He looks at me, and his eyes are grey again, steady and human and lined with something that could be exhaustion or grief. "I've been here ten years. I've eaten at your table. I've watched Dexter build weapons systems that shouldn't work and then make them work through sheer stubbornness. I've taught Elissa how to read star charts. I've watched your father hold this station together with his bare hands and then watched you take over and do the same thing."

  The name hits me in the chest. Elissa. He says it with a softness that makes my trigger finger itch.

  "This is my home now," he says. "The people I was supposed to spy on, the family I was supposed to help destroy." He stops. Breathes. "I don't want to destroy them anymore."

  The room is so quiet I can hear the blood moving through my own ears. The recycled air tastes flat and metallic on my tongue, the way it always does in the sealed rooms where the filtration runs on backup systems. Gun oil from the sidearm mixes with it, sharp and familiar, grounding me in the physical reality of what I'm holding and what it can do.

  I want to believe him.

  That's the problem. That's always the problem with Ethan, with the warmth that might be real, with the decade of shared history that might be genuine, with the tired eyes of a man who might actually mean what he's saying. I want to believe him because the alternative is that he's the best liar I've ever encountered, and I've met liars who could sell a corpse its own funeral.

  But wanting to believe and being able to verify are two very different currencies, and in my world, the first one is worthless without the second.

  "How do I know any of this is true?" I say. "Your control is too good. You shifted your eyes back in under a second. You sat in this chair and lied to my face about a tracker malfunction without a single physiological tell until I cornered you. Give me one reason to believe that the truth isn't just another layer of the act."

  "You can't know." He says it simply. No defensiveness, no plea. "My training makes that impossible, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of lie. But I can give you information. Names, dead drops, communication protocols, the structure of the faction that placed me here. Everything I have. Everything I know."

  "That could be curated. Fed to me to direct my attention where they want it."

  "It could be. But it's all I've got." His hands are still open on his thighs. I notice, distantly, that his fingertips are trembling. Micro-tremors, barely visible. "Kill me if that's what you've decided. I won't fight you. But understand what you'll lose. I know their methods. I know their personnel. I know what they want from the anomaly and how far they're willing to go to get it. You kill me, and you're fighting blind."

  He's right. The calculation is ugly and it's cold and it sits in my gut like swallowed glass, but he's right. He knows too much about the station, the anomaly, the faction, everything.

  Removing him doesn't just eliminate a threat.

  It eliminates a resource I can't replace, in a war I didn't know I was fighting until three days ago. I can't afford to throw away the only intelligence asset I have, even if that asset has been lying to me since the day we met.

  I raise the sidearm. Level it at his chest. His breathing doesn't change. His eyes don't close. He watches the barrel with the calm attention of a man who has considered this outcome and made peace with it, and I hate him for that composure because it makes it harder to pull the trigger and easier to respect him, and I don't want to do either.

  The door opens.

  The sound cuts through the room like a blade, the pneumatic hiss of the seal breaking, and I know who it is before I see her because only three people have the override code for this room, and Elissa sounds nothing like Dexter.

  Elissa stops in the doorway.

  She's still wearing yesterday's clothes, wrinkled from sleeping in them if she slept at all. Her hair is pulled back in a knot that's coming loose, dark strands framing a face that looks younger than twenty-five, but older than it did a month ago.

  She takes in the scene the way a person takes in a car wreck. Her eyes go to me first. Then to the gun. Then to Ethan, sitting in the chair with his hands open and my weapon aimed at his heart.

  "What's happening?" Her voice cracks on the second word. She steps inside, and the door seals behind her, and the room that was already too small shrinks to the size of a coffin. "Zane, what are you doing?"

  I can't answer her.

  The truth is a bomb with too many blast radiuses. To explain what Ethan is, I have to explain what he might have been doing with her. Every conversation, every lesson in star charts, every casual touch that might not have been casual at all. Touch-based manipulation is what the Empri are known for, the ability to read and influence through physical contact, and Elissa has been closer to this man than anyone on the station.

  If I tell her that, if I crack open that particular box, I don't just reveal Ethan's betrayal. I reveal that her own feelings might not be her own. That the infatuation she thinks is hers might have been planted, cultivated, grown in soil he prepared.

  I can't do that to her. Not here. Not like this. Not with a gun in my hand and her looking at me like I've become someone she doesn't recognize.

  "Routine debrief," I say. The lie tastes like ash. "Post-siege protocol."

  "With a gun pointed at him?" She's not stupid. She's never been stupid, and the hurt in her voice is already crystallizing into something sharper, something that looks like the beginning of choosing a side. "Zane."

  "Elissa." Ethan's voice, warm again, and I want to shoot him for that warmth, for the way she turns toward it like a plant toward light. "It's fine. Your brother has questions. He's entitled to them."

  "He has a weapon aimed at you."

  "He has good reasons." Ethan looks at me over her head, and there is something in his grey eyes that might be gratitude or might be the most sophisticated manipulation I've ever witnessed. He's giving me an out. He knows I can't explain, and he's making it easy for me to step back from the edge, and I can't tell if that's mercy or another play.

  I holster the sidearm. The click of the retention strap is loud in the silence.

  "We're done here," I say to Ethan. My voice sounds like someone else's, flat and controlled in a way that costs me more than anyone in this room will ever know. "For now."

  He stands. Smooth, unhurried, every movement telegraphed and nonthreatening in a way that only someone trained to be dangerous would bother performing. He passes Elissa on his way to the door, and I watch his hand, watch it like a hawk on a thermal, and he doesn't touch her. Not even a brush of the shoulder. He leaves the narrowest possible margin of space between them, and whether that's restraint or strategy, it's the only reason he walks out of this room alive.

  The door seals behind him.

  Elissa stares at me. "What was that?"

  "Leave it, Elissa."

  "Don't do that. Don't give me that command-voice like I'm one of your officers. I walked in and you had a gun on him. On Ethan. You owe me an explanation."

  "I owe you nothing that compromises station security." The words come out harder than I intend, and I watch them land on her face like a slap. Her chin comes up. Her eyes go bright, and not with tears. With the particular fury that runs in our family like a genetic defect, the kind that makes us hold on tighter when anyone tries to pry our fingers loose.

  "One more secret," I say, and I'm not sure if I'm talking to her or to the ghost of Ethan still sitting in that empty chair. "One more lie. And I'll handle it the way I should have handled it today."

  She leaves without another word.

  The door closes, and I'm alone in a room with the electric aftermath of something that isn't over.

  I press my hands against the table. Lean my weight into it until my arms shake. Close my eyes and see the blue flash behind Ethan's grey, that pulse of something alien wearing a human face, and I breathe through my teeth until the shaking stops.

  Then I go find my brother.

  Dexter is in the command center, because Dexter is always in the command center when there's a problem he can solve with data instead of conversation. He's pulled up the anomaly readings on three separate displays, cross-referencing energy signatures with the Vex attack patterns, and the shadows under his eyes are so deep they look like bruises. He doesn't look up when I walk in.

  "You let him go," he says.

  Not a question. He already knows. Of course he already knows. Dexter's surveillance net runs deeper than the official systems, and he doesn't apologize for it any more than I apologize for the gun I pointed at a man I used to trust.

  "I let him go." I drop into the chair beside him. The display light catches the angles of his face, sharpening them, making him look less like my brother and more like something carved from the same cold material as the station itself. "With conditions."

  "Conditions." He says the word like it tastes bad. His fingers move across the display, pulling up Ethan's movement data from the siege, the same data I just spent an hour studying. "You should have let me handle him."

  "I know."

  "I wouldn't have hesitated."

  "I know that too."

  He turns then. Looks at me full-on, and the expression on his face is the one I hate most, the one that says he's already three steps ahead of the emotional calculus I'm still trying to solve. "You're letting him live because of Elissa."

  The statement sits between us like an open wound. I don't flinch from it, but I don't confirm it either, which is its own kind of confirmation, and Dexter reads silence better than most people read words.

  "Because you can't break her heart," he continues, each word measured, precise, placed with the careful efficiency of a man who builds weapons for a living and knows where to put the payload for maximum damage, "while you're still using Talia."

  The name lands somewhere below my ribs.

  He's right. He's right in the specific, surgical way that only Dexter can be right, cutting through every justification and strategic rationale I've been building in my head to find the soft, human thing underneath.

  I can't stand in front of Elissa and tell her that the man she cares about has been manipulating her, that his touch might have been rewriting her feelings for a decade, because that particular truth requires a moral authority I don't possess.

  Not while Talia is sleeping in my quarters. Not while I'm keeping her close for reasons that started strategic and have become something I don't have the honesty to name.

  I don't respond. There's nothing to say that wouldn't prove his point further.

  Dexter turns back to the displays. The anomaly data pulses on the screen, rhythmic and alien, like a heartbeat that belongs to something vast and patient and utterly indifferent to the small human dramas playing out in its proximity.

  "The Vex attack was a test," he says. His voice shifts registers, moving from brother to analyst with the clean efficiency of a man who's more comfortable with threats he can quantify. "The fleet composition was wrong for a real assault. Too many scouts, not enough heavies. They were probing our defenses, mapping our response times, cataloguing our weapons systems. They lost ships they didn't need to lose because the losses were the point. The data was worth more than the hardware to someone."

  "Ethan's masters."

  "Ethan's masters. Or whoever's pulling strings behind the faction that placed him here." Dexter pulls up a star chart. The anomaly sits at its center, a smear of impossible energy that our instruments still can't fully map. "They're coming, Zane. And when they do, they won't test." He highlights approach vectors, calculated fleet positions, the cold mathematics of invasion laid out in light and numbers. "They'll take."