Chapter 25 #2
The smuggling relay. A vessel in the deep dead zone running a patrol pattern that matches the node deaths.
The charter officer, still active, still in these waters, still checking the damage they did.
The holdout’s testimony about the ship that came six years ago with Guild-marked equipment and left Toreth screaming in the stone.
The proximity, shrinking with every day the restoration advances.
The fact that every signal the node sends as we restore it is a beacon that draws the person who killed it closer.
He has known for days. Since the relay message.
He has been sitting on this knowledge while I fought Vael and documented and bled on the star-iron and filed and argued and laid my certification on the line.
He watched me do all of that with half the information.
He watched me build a case with a missing wall and he held the bricks behind his back because he decided the wall was too dangerous for me to build.
My hands are flat on the hatch cover. Through the star-iron fittings, the bond carries everything: his pulse, fast and unsteady.
The indigo flooding his forearms. The amber at his throat.
I read all of it. Every color. Every frequency.
And underneath the data his body is screaming, I read the shape of what he did.
He chose for me.
He looked at the danger and the information and the stakes, and he decided what I could handle, and he gave me the part he thought was safe, and he kept the rest behind his teeth.
“You kept this from me so I’d stay safe.” My voice is flat. My hands are flat. Everything is flat. “You decided what information I could handle. You decided the risk was too much for me. You made my choices for me.”
“I was-” He stops. His hands are pressing into his thighs, the thumbs digging into the webbing between his fingers. “I thought the restoration was more important than the-” He stops again. The sentence has no shape. His light is cycling through colors so fast I can’t read them.
“You thought protecting me was more important than letting me have the full picture.” I stand up from the cargo hatch.
My knees ache. My hands ache. Everything aches and I am so tired of being the one who folds.
“Eadith thought protecting me was more important than letting me trust my own hands. You did the same thing in different clothes.”
He flinches. The whole body. Not just the face, the whole body, and his light goes a deep, saturated indigo that means everything he can’t say. I see it. I read it. It is not enough right now. The damage is the same shape as Pelketh and no amount of light changes the shape of the cut.
“I’m filing my report,” I say. “My report. In my format. With everything my hands have read and everything your navigation data shows and the charter officer’s trail and the institutional evidence and all of it. And I’m doing it alone.”
I step off the cargo hatch. My boots hit the deck. The star-iron in the planking carries the bond and I can feel his heartbeat under my feet, wild and crashing, and I keep walking.
“Tova.”
I don’t stop.
“Tova, I don’t know how to-”
I step off the gangway. My feet hit the stone dock and the bond goes quieter, attenuated by the distance from the ship’s star-iron, but it’s still there.
His pulse in the dock pilings. Fading as I walk up the harbor road.
The net-menders look up as I pass. I don’t stop.
My hands are gripping my chalk roll so hard the leather wrap creaks.
The ridge path is long in the dark. The star-iron veins glow under my boots.
I walk fast, faster than the path warrants, my breath clouding in the evening air, and the signal from the node grows stronger with every step and his signal grows fainter and the divergence is a physical thing, a splitting, like the delamination I’ve been reading in damaged star-iron for weeks. Two layers pulling apart.
I go to the node. I sit on the floor. I put my palms on the star-iron and the signal runs warm and steady and true, and the star-iron has never lied to me, not once, not ever.
The star-iron says what it is. The star-iron does not decide what I can handle.
It gives the full data and lets me build my own assessment.
My hands shake. I grip my wrists and hold. The gauze is soaked through with red. The chalk dust is caked into the blood and the blood is caked into the stone and my report is on the floor and it is mine and I am going to file every word of it.
I press my forehead against the star-iron wall. Cool surface. One texture. The old grounding. The one I reach for when the world is Too Much.
Through the stone, far off, his heartbeat.
Still running fast. I press harder against the wall and close my eyes and I do not cry because crying doesn’t fix fractures.
But my hands are shaking and the star-iron is warm and the person I trusted made the same choice as the person who broke me and there is no mortar in the world for what that feels like.
I sit up. I unwrap the gauze from my left hand. I pick up my chalk.
I start writing.