15. Althea
ALTHEA
"It's open," Caelis says, and from his face I can tell he wishes it weren't.
We're alone in the engine bay with the stolen core, which Saren ordered sealed and which I asked Caelis to crack the rest of anyway, because I have spent every year I can remember being kept in the dark for my own good and I am done being a box.
The full map blooms above the core. Not just coordinates now — a route, threading the dead zone, terminating at a cluster of structures the core labels in the old Ishani script Elsyn's been teaching me. I can read three words of it. One of them is archive. One of them is home.
"That's not a treasure map," I say slowly.
"It's a directions-home map. Somebody on Armstrong had the location of a piece of Saren's whole dead civilization sitting in a data core, and they slid it into the bag of a scavenger they expected to die in a ditch, so that if anyone ever traced it, it'd trace to me.
Not them." The shape of it makes me feel sick and clear at once.
"I wasn't a runner. I was a fuse. They lit me and walked away. "
Caelis is quiet. Then: "Does the captain know what's at the end of it?"
"He knows. That's why he wanted it sealed.
" And I understand, finally, why Saren looked the way he did on the bridge — not afraid of the map, afraid of what wanting it would do to a man who has trained himself not to want.
Those ruins are the one thing that could give his people back their history.
They are also bait, and a battlefield, and a way to get everyone he loves killed chasing a ghost.
I copy the decoded map onto a chip before I seal the core back up — insurance, because I have watched too many irreplaceable things vanish into the dark on someone else's say-so, and I will not let the only road home to a murdered history exist in a single copy that one frightened man can decide to delete.
When Saren comes looking for me that night, I don't hide it.
I've spent my whole life being handled for my own good, kept in the dark by people who swore it was kindness, and I'll be damned before I do the same thing to him.
So I tell him I had Caelis crack it. I tell him I made a copy.
I put the chip in his hand and fold his fingers over it before he can argue.
"I'm not asking you to fly us there tonight," I say.
"I'm asking you to stop pretending the choice isn't yours to make.
You don't get to seal your own people's history in a drawer and call it safety. Not anymore. Not with me aboard."
He doesn't thank me. He doesn't argue, either.
He closes his hand around the chip and the map home both, and something in the careful set of his shoulders shifts — a weight redistributing, maybe, now that he isn't the only one holding it.
It's the first time I make him share a burden instead of swallowing it whole.
I already know it won't be the last.