Chapter Fifteen
Coreni
Trevort at night smelled like salt water and possibility, which had always struck Coreni as unfair given how rarely the two things delivered on each other.
Tonight she was choosing to take it as a good sign.
They moved through the dock district the way she had moved through it a hundred times before — heads down, pace measured, unremarkable in the way of people who had somewhere to be and no interest in being seen getting there.
She knew these streets. She had spent three years learning which corners had working surveillance panels and which ones didn't, which alleys absorbed a person and which ones spat them back out onto main thoroughfares.
She had learned all of it for stories. She was using it now for something considerably more permanent.
Edi-Veen moved at her shoulder, matching her pace exactly, and said nothing, and she was grateful for both things.
"We are being followed," Edi-Veen said quietly, without changing his pace or his direction.
"Since when?"
"The corner of Merrat and Docks. Two of them. Civilian clothes, government implants if you know what to look for."
"Do they know where we're going?"
"Not yet. They are tracking, not intercepting. They want to see where we lead them."
She processed that. "Can you lose them?"
"Yes. But not the way you are thinking. Stay with me."
He turned left at the next junction, into an alley she knew — the one that ran behind the old freight buildings, connecting to the service lane that came out three blocks east of the warehouse.
It was a longer route. It was also a route with no surveillance coverage, something she’d figured out eighteen months ago on a previous story she worked on.
She heard nothing behind them. She took that to mean either that they'd lost the followers or that the followers were better than average. She decided to trust Edi-Veen's assessment and keep moving.
"Clear," he said, two blocks later.
She exhaled.
"You knew about this route," he said. Not an accusation. Observation.
"I know all the routes. It's the job."
"It is more than the job," he said, and this time she heard the echo of every time he'd said that and understood that he had been telling her something she didn't yet have the vocabulary to receive. She had it now.
"Yes," she said. "It is."
The warehouse was dark and quiet and smelled exactly as it always had.
She stood in it for a moment when they came through the door, looking at the space she had used for years without knowing what it was — the water-stained ceiling, the decommissioned freight panels, the floor that looked like any floor.
She thought about all the conversations she'd had six meters above an entire civilization. All the secrets she'd collected in this building without knowing the largest one was beneath her feet the whole time.
"Ready?" Edi-Veen said.
"No," she said. "But that stopped being relevant a while ago."
The floor opened.
The transport that met them below was not the same one she'd ridden before — smaller, faster, the stripped-down configuration of something built for urgency rather than comfort.
Dremma was there, waiting, standing at the far end of the narrow chamber with her hands folded and her face composed in the particular way of someone who had made their peace with an outcome and was now simply present for it.
Five other Fraluma were already in the chamber. Coreni recognized none of them. They were large and still and looked at her with varying degrees of the same expression — assessment, recognition, something she didn't yet have a name for but thought might be reverence, which was deeply uncomfortable.
"The ship is positioned," Dremma said. "Loverly Transports, docked in the commercial port, third berth east. The pilot doesn't know what she carries — only that the cargo is valuable and the route is specific. She is good at her job and she asks the right number of questions, which is none."
"The stasis chambers," Coreni said.
"Seven, including yours and Edi-Veen's. The others will go ahead." Dremma's eyes moved briefly to Edi-Veen. "You have both been briefed on the emergency protocols?"
"Yes," Edi-Veen said.
"Then there is nothing left to say except —" Dremma paused.
She looked at Coreni for a long moment with those tired, very aware eyes.
"Your mother asked me once if I thought the prophecy was real.
I told her I thought prophecy was a word people used for patterns they couldn't otherwise explain.
" Something moved through her expression — not quite a smile, but the ghost of one.
"I have spent thirty years reconsidering that answer. I believe I was wrong."
Coreni looked at her. "What do you believe now?"
"That some things are simply true," Dremma said. "Whether or not we have the wisdom to see them coming."
She stepped forward and took Coreni's hands in both of hers — the same grip as the first time, gentle and careful, but different now. Not examining. Just holding.
"Go," she said. "Do what you were made to do. And come back, if you can."
"I intend to," Coreni said. "Tell Sraaak —" She stopped. Started again. "Tell her I understand why it was difficult. And that I hope she'll understand too, eventually."
Dremma nodded. She released her hands and stepped back.
It was time to go.
Three levels above the water, the commercial port bristled with the ordinary chaos of a working dock at night — freight handlers, transport crews, the constant low thrum of engines running warm. It was the best possible place to disappear into, which was exactly why Dremma had chosen it.
The Loverly transport was older than Coreni expected.
Not decrepit — maintained, clearly, with the careful attention of someone who took pride in what they had — but not new.
It sat in its berth with the solid, unshowy confidence of a ship that had been somewhere and intended to go somewhere again, and she found, unexpectedly, that she trusted it.
There were no crew visible. The cargo hold entrance was open. The stasis chambers were already inside, arranged against the port wall, their surfaces catching the dock lights in the dull gleam of expensive engineering.
Coreni stood at the bottom of the loading ramp and looked at them.
"You do not have to decide anything tonight that you have not already decided," Edi-Veen said at her shoulder.
"I know." She picked up her bag. "I've already decided."
She walked up the ramp.
The chamber assigned to her was the one closest to the starboard wall, separated slightly from the others.
She looked at it for a moment — the sealed surface, the small display panel, the narrow viewport in the door through which, she supposed, someone could look in or she could look out, depending on which side of the glass you were on.
She turned to find Edi-Veen standing a few feet away, watching her with an expression she had no category for. Not the careful neutrality. Not the professional distance. Something open and unmanaged and entirely his own.
"Six months," she said.
"Approximately."
"And then the Barrens."
"And then the Barrens," he agreed.
She looked at him. The last few days flooded her.
The dock and the cold and the word she hadn't known that had hit her like a door opening. The pink light and stone smell and a tribunal she'd heard through the floor. She thought about the warehouse and the underwater city and the twin suns going silver-gold through the upper ocean.
A list with five names on it and a question mark, and a father who had held her too long at the door because he already knew.
She thought about a room full of unreadable words that a twelve-year-old boy had kept to himself for seventeen visits because he wanted one thing that was simply his.
Simple was no longer a valuable choice for her. For him. For any of them at this point. It seemed like an eternity ago when she was just trying to find a story about a scheming politician.
"When we get there," she said. "When this is over — whatever over looks like. I want to know the rest of it. The things you couldn't tell me. All of it."
"Yes," he said. Without hesitation. Without qualification.
"And the consort —"
"Is a conversation for the other side," he said. "When there is a later. You said so yourself."
She almost smiled. "I did."
"You were right."
She looked at him for one more moment — the copper-blond hair, the honey-brown skin, the blue-green eyes that had been the first clear thing she'd seen in a freezing dock and had not stopped seeing clearly since.
Then she stepped forward and kissed him, and it was not brief — she had told herself it would be brief, had planned for brief, had understood that brief was the responsible choice given the circumstances and the timeline and the six Fraluma presumably already sealed in their pods six feet away.
Brief lasted approximately two seconds.
His hands found her face, her waist, pulled her in with a certainty that suggested he had also planned for brief and had also abandoned the plan.
She went and didn't argue and stopped thinking about the Barrens and her father and the six months. Instead she focused on the warmth of him, the way his hands felt in her hair, the quality of his attention turned on her with nothing managed and nothing held back.
She got her hands under his jacket.
He made a low sound and guided her until her back met the cargo hold wall between two of the dark stasis chambers.
She pulled him with her because she was not interested in distance. The need to feel him, to be against him, filled her.
To know him, in all the ways she could, now, just in case.
She needed this.
He needed this.
"We have time," she said against his mouth. Not a question. An accounting.
"Yes," he said. His voice was already not entirely his usual voice. She found she liked that.