Chapter Fourteen
Coreni
She spent the night making lists.
Not on paper, not on a data pad — in her head, the way she'd always done her best organizing, running through names and contacts and resources in the dark while the city breathed outside her window and Edi-Veen kept his silent watch from the couch.
What she had. What she needed. Who she could trust and who she couldn't and who she'd have to trust anyway because the alternative was worse.
Dremma had said days. Perhaps less.
Coreni had decided to treat it as hours.
By the time the first sun cleared the horizon she had a shape of it — not a plan, not yet, but the skeleton of one.
She would need to move her father. Not to the lab, not to any address connected to his name.
She knew a woman in the eastern district who owed her a favor large enough that she'd never called it in, had been saving it for something that mattered.
This mattered. She would contact Draka — not to explain, but to arrange coverage at the outlet so her absence didn't immediately flag. She would —
Her comm unit sounded.
She looked at it. Unknown designation. Which meant either a government line or someone who didn't want to be traced, and at this hour, in this context, the distinction didn't matter much.
She answered it.
The voice on the other end was Kra-May's.
She had never spoken to him directly. She knew his voice from the way Edi-Veen described him — measured, deliberate, the voice of someone who chose every word with the care of someone who understood that words had weight. It was exactly that.
"They moved last night," he said. "I am sorry. I could not get word to you sooner."
The room went very still around her.
"My father," she said.
"His laboratory. Three hours ago. They took everything — the research, the data pads, the physical samples. And they took him." A pause, brief and precise. "He is alive. They want the research interpreted, which means they need him functional. You have a window. It will not be wide."
"Where?"
"A government holding facility in the northern district. I can get you a designation but not an access point. That is beyond what I can provide from where I am."
"I understand. Thank you."
"Edi-Veen will know what to do," Kra-May said. And then, quietly, in a register that was not quite professional: "Your mother would have been proud of you. I knew her, briefly. She was extraordinary."
The line closed before she could answer.
She sat with the comm unit in her hand and looked at nothing for a moment. One moment, which was all she was going to allow herself.
Then she stood up.
Edi-Veen was already on his feet.
He had heard. She didn't know whether it was the call itself or something in the quality of the silence after it, but he was standing when she came out of the bedroom and his face had the particular focused stillness of someone who had already begun calculating.
"Kra-May," she said.
"Yes."
"They took my father."
"I know." He crossed to her in three steps, not touching her, just close. Presence rather than contact. "I felt it when Kra-May made the call. His mind was —" He stopped. "He was concerned. He does not concern easily."
"He said you'd know what to do."
"I do." He said it without hesitation, which was the most reassuring thing anyone had said to her in three days.
"But Coreni — your father is alive and they will keep him that way while they need him.
If we move on the facility before the Collective's plan is activated we risk everything.
All of it. Every Fraluma on every world who is waiting for what you carry. "
She looked at him. "You're telling me we can't go after him."
"I am telling you that going after him now is what they want.
They took him to make you move. To make you visible.
" His voice was careful and direct and entirely without cruelty.
"The best way to protect your father is to get to the Barrens.
If the cure is synthesized — if the Fraluma are free — the Chancellor loses his leverage. Over the Fraluma. Over you. Over him."
"And if we don't get there in time?"
He held her gaze. "I know what I am asking you to accept. I am not asking you to pretend it is easy."
She turned away from him. Crossed to the window.
The dock district was waking up outside, going about its ordinary morning, entirely unaware that in a northern holding facility a quiet man with vials on every surface was sitting in a room he didn't choose and waiting for a daughter who couldn't come.
She thought about what he'd said at the door. She would have loved you. She did love you. Just — early. Before you were here to receive it.
She thought about twenty-six years of careful silence. All the theories he could have shared and didn't. All the questions he could have answered and held instead. Everything he had carried alone because a woman he loved had handed it to him and trusted him to carry it.
He had carried it. Right up until the moment they came for him.
"He knew," she said quietly, to the window. "Didn't he. When I came to dinner. He knew something was coming. That's why he held me so long at the door."
Edi-Veen said nothing. Which was its own answer.
She pressed her forehead briefly against the cool glass and let herself have that too. One more moment. The last one she was going to allow for a long time.
Then she straightened.
"How long do we have?" she asked.
"Dremma is already moving. The ship is being positioned. If we go to the warehouse tonight, the transport will be ready."
"Tonight."
"Yes."
She nodded. She turned from the window and looked at her apartment — the battered couch, the data screens still running her research, the cabinet door that always needed a second try. The life she had built in the dock district of Trevort, small and imperfect and entirely her own.
She looked at it the way she had not let herself look at it since Dremma's words in the tea house — all of it, at once, without the editorial distance she usually kept between herself and things she didn't want to feel.
The couch she had pulled from a street market three years ago because she liked the color of it.
The data screens covered in threads she had been pulling for a week that were never going to become a published story, not now, maybe not ever.
The cabinet door that always needed a second try, which she had meant to fix since the first month and had never fixed because it had stopped bothering her and become simply part of the texture of the place, part of what she knew when she was home.
The desk by the window where she had built everything she was professionally proud of.
The view of the dock district from that window, the water catching the twin suns in the morning, the particular quality of light at the end of the day when the first sun dropped behind the freight buildings and the second one followed twenty minutes later and for that twenty minutes everything went copper and impossible.
She had watched that happen four hundred times from this window.
She was not going to watch it again.
She set that down somewhere careful inside herself, next to all the other things she was carrying that she didn't have time to grieve properly, and turned back to the room.
"I need an hour," she said.
"You have it."
"I need to send a message to Draka. Untraceable, nothing specific — just enough that she knows to cover for me.
And I need to —" She stopped. Looked at him.
"I need to leave something for my father.
In case he gets out before we can tell him what happened.
He needs to know I'm all right. He needs to know I chose this. "
"I will step out," Edi-Veen said. "Give you the room."
"No." The word came out before she'd decided to say it. She looked at him steadily. "Stay. I'd rather — I'd rather not be alone right now. If that's —"
"It is," he said simply. And went to make caffe, because that was what he did, and because some things didn't need more words than that.
The message to her father was the hardest thing she'd written in three years of writing hard things.
She kept it short. She kept it true. She told him she was safe, she was going somewhere she needed to go, she would come back when it was over.
She told him that she understood now — all of it, what he'd carried, what it cost him, why he'd done it.
She told him that the work he'd spent his life on was not wasted.
That she was going to make sure of that.
She did not tell him she didn't know if she'd see him again. He already knew that. He was a scientist. He understood probability.
She encrypted it three layers deep and set it to deliver to a channel only he would know to check, routed through enough relay points that it would take a government team the better part of a day to trace it back to nothing.
Then she sat with her hands flat on the desk and breathed.
"It is good," Edi-Veen said, from across the room. He hadn't read it. He didn't need to.
"You don't know that."
"I know you," he said. "That is enough."
She nodded and moved to start the physical part. The packing.
She packed the way she did everything when she was trying not to think — efficiently, without looking directly at what she was doing.
One bag. She had made that decision before she started, which was the only way to make it cleanly.
One bag meant she had to decide, before she touched anything, what she was willing to lose.
Most things, it turned out. The answer had come quickly and hadn't surprised her.
She was a journalist. She had always traveled light.
She took a change of clothes. Practical, dark, the kind of thing you could move in and sleep in and not notice you were wearing.
She took her personal recorder — smallest one, the one that fit in an inside pocket, the one she had carried on every story for three years.
She was aware that this was slightly absurd given the circumstances. She took it anyway.
She stood in the doorway of her bedroom for a moment and looked at it — the narrow bed, the shelf of data pads she had read and meant to re-read, the mirror where she had pressed her fake implant into place every morning for four years and checked that it looked right and gone out to be unremarkable.
She was going to a place where unremarkable didn't matter.
Where the implant didn't matter. Where the careful architecture of normal she had spent her adult life constructing was going to be entirely beside the point.
She didn't know yet what that felt like.
She crossed to the desk. The photograph was in the bottom drawer, where it had been since the year she moved out — slightly blurred, her father squinting into a sun that was too bright, his collar turned up against a wind she could no longer remember, the expression on his face the one he made when he was thinking about something else and didn't know anyone was looking.
She had taken it herself. She had been nineteen and it had been a good day and she had thought, at the time, that she was documenting something ordinary.
She understood now that she had been documenting something she would want back.
She stood with it in her hand for a long time.
Then she put it in the bag, because the alternative was leaving it, and she was not going to leave it.
She looked at the apartment the way she looked at everything she was going to write about, committing it to the part of her memory that didn't let things go. She had the distinct and irrational thought that the apartment deserved to be remembered by someone who had lived in it.
She was going to be that person.
She picked up the bag and went back to where Edi-Veen was waiting.
He leaned against the far wall, caffe in hand, watching her with that steady blue-green gaze that had been the first thing she'd seen clearly in a freezing loading dock what felt like a lifetime ago.
He looked like someone who had made a decision and was at peace with it. She wasn't sure when that had happened but it had, somewhere between the tribunal and the kitchen last night and everything in between.
"Are you afraid?" she asked.
"Yes," he said. Not of what was coming — she understood that. Of what he was leaving behind. The Collective. Kra-May. The room no one else had found. All of it going into a stasis pod and emerging on the other side of six months into whatever the Barrens held.
"Me too," she said.
He crossed the room and held out his hand — not a gesture she expected, not quite Fraluma in its formality, not quite human in its simplicity. Something in between. Something that was just his.
She took it.
"Then we go afraid," he said.
"Yes," she agreed. "We do."