Chapter 13 #3
“Here,” I said, pointing. “And here. And here. Six women. All cleared for departure in the last four months. All with transit delays in the Kallan corridor. All with the same missing waypoint.”
Astoria leaned over my shoulder, close enough that I could smell us on her skin, and I felt her go still as she understood.
“These are my clients,” she said. “I cleared these women. I drove Colleen to the hub myself. I waved until the shuttle was a dot.”
“I know.” I pulled up the Survey Corps charts, the ones that showed what the civilian logs did not.
“The missing waypoint. It is not a malfunction. It is a redirect. Gate three in the Kallan corridor leads to Ossari space. It has always led there. Someone has edited the civilian logs to hide it, to make it look like standard transit when the ships are being rerouted mid-flight.”
“Ossari space.” She said the name the way she might say a diagnosis. “Azyr, that’s a trafficking corridor. The IDA has warnings about there.“
“I know.” I turned to look at her, and I saw it happening, the collapse I had feared since I first understood who she was.
“Astoria. The crime was designed by someone who understood exactly which administrative layer is never audited. That the transit authority runs the corridors while IDA runs the matching. No one watches the place where they meet.”
She stared at the screen. I watched her understand, watched her reach for the knowledge the way she had reached for me, with the whole of her attention.
“The goodbyes,” she said. Small. Broken. “I perfected them. I made them so clean, so professional, so…” She stopped. Her hand went to her mouth. “The women I cleared. The ones who stopped answering their advocates. I thought they were busy, that they were happy.”
She was shaking. I reached for her, pulled her against me, and she came without resistance, her face against my chest, her body trembling with the realization.
“I built this,” she said, muffled. “I built the system they used. The clean goodbyes, professional distance, and the way to make leaving look like the most reasonable thing in the world.”
“You did not build this.” I held her tighter, feeling her grief as my own, the way I felt everything now. “You built something to help people choose. Someone else weaponized it.”
“But I didn’t see.” She pulled back, and her face was terrible, the way it had been at the Council hearing but worse, because this was her own work she was seeing twisted. “I didn’t look. I was so busy being professional, being the goodbye person.”
She stopped. Her eyes found the screen again, the six names there, the six women she had cleared and sent into the dark.
“How many?” she asked.
“I do not know. I have found six. There may be more.”
“Find them.” She straightened, and I saw her armor up, the way she had at the Council, the procedural determination that carried her through horror. “Find all of them. And then we end this.”
I looked at her, the woman I had just been inside, the woman who was already moving toward battle, and I felt the thing I had spent eight years running from. The love that was also fear. The belonging that meant loss was possible.
“I will find them,” I said. “I will map every route, every edit, every hand that touched these logs. And I will stay. I am not leaving you to face this alone.”
She looked at me, and I saw her hear it, the promise I was making, the unpacking I was committing to in words because I had not yet found the courage to do it with my case.
“You lied to your service,” she said. “The extensions. The anomalies.”
“Yes.”
“For me.”
“For you… for this. For…” I stopped, because the translator was still off, and I had no machine to hide behind, and the words were coming out wrong, coming out true. “The chance to be someone who stays.”
She was quiet for a long moment. The radiator gurgulated, decided again not to speak.
Outside, Portland woke to another grey morning, and we stood in the office where she had built her terrarium, where I had learned to want permanence, and we looked at the evidence of a crime that had used her own care against her.
“Then stay,” she said finally. “Help me fix what I made. And when it’s done…” She stopped, and I saw her choose the risk, the leap she had spent four years refusing to counsel for herself. “When it’s done, we’ll see what we built instead.”
I reached for her hand. She let me take it. The blue rose in my fingers where they touched hers, visible, undeniable, and she saw it and did not look away.
“Eleven systems,” I said. “And I never found anything worth returning to. Until you.”
“That’s almost a feeling,” she said, the way she had in the dark, on the floor, when we were first learning each other.
“I will deny it under oath,” I said. “Unless the translator testifies.”
She laughed, cracked and exhausted and real, and I memorized the sound, laid it down in order with everything else I would carry, everything I would not forget.
Then we turned back to the screen, and we began to work, and I felt the first true hope in eight years that I might finally have found a reason to stop moving.