"So," Jorun said. "I've lost my planet, my crew, and my afternoon. What's next?"
"I have to report what happened," Lyn said. "Officially. All of it."
"Bad idea," Taisen said.
"Why."
"Because someone with real access has been feeding your position to whoever wants you dead, on a fixed schedule, for weeks. You report everything to the wrong ears, you're handing them your next itinerary."
Lyn's jaw tightened. "How do you know that."
"Link told me before we crashed. I put the rest together myself." He didn't elaborate further, and something in the flatness of his voice told her not to ask twice. "From here, we deal only with people we have real reason to trust. Not policy. Not rank. Reason."
"Agreed," Alita said, and caught Lyn's look before it had fully formed. "I know. I hate agreeing with him. He's still right."
"You didn't hate agreeing with your own father two days ago," Jorun observed, apparently to no one, examining a chip in one yellowed claw. "Funny how that works. Different men, different rules."
"That's not remotely the same thing."
"Didn't say it was the same thing. Said it was funny." Jorun didn't look up. "I don't take sides in family arguments. Bad for business, and I've buried men who did."
"Fine," Lyn said, in the tone of a woman conceding a point she intended to revisit later, under better lighting. "Who, then?"
"Admiral Usyk," Taisen said.
"The man who trained the Butcher of Boettia?" Alita's eyebrows climbed. "Setting aside how you know that name at all."
"He's disgraced, forgotten, and has nothing left that anyone could threaten to take from him," Taisen said. "Which means he's the one man in this whole chain of command with no reason to sell any of us out."
"That's a bleak way to pick an ally," Lyn said.
"It's the only way that's kept me breathing this long."
"What about me," Jorun said, from his perch on the table, entirely unbothered by the philosophy of the thing. "I lost a decade's worth of business getting you off that rock. What do I get out of this?"
"What do you want," Lyn asked.
"Three million credits. Clean. No flags, no trace, no polite conversation about where it came from."
"That can be arranged," Lyn said.
"Good." Jorun slid off the table. "I'll hold you to it, Colonel. I've been disappointed by better dressed people than you."
The migraine found Taisen somewhere over the midpoint of the flight, the way it always did now: sudden, total, a white pressure behind both eyes that had nothing to do with the current under his sternum and everything to do with a name he hadn't said out loud in this new life yet. Boettia. He hadn't even needed to land on it a second time. The wreck of the Hermes sitting on its ash had been enough.
He came back to himself lying across Alita's lap, her hands pressed lightly to either side of his skull, her breathing slowed into the particular rhythm she used when she was somewhere he couldn't follow her: the trance her people called the Nightingale's Hush, named for the goddess who was supposed to have granted the first Quinian healer the gift of carrying another's pain for them, if only for a little while.
"There," she said, drawing back, blinking hard as if surfacing from deep water. "Better?"
"For now." He sat up too fast and regretted it. "How long."
"A few hours, this time. It always comes back."
"Then we'll do this again in a few hours."
"You could tell me what it actually is," she said, quiet, careful, the way a person tests a floorboard before trusting their whole weight to it. "I felt the shape of it, when I touched you. Grief, and something under the grief that felt like guilt wearing grief's coat so it wouldn't have to answer for itself directly. That's a heavy thing to carry alone, whatever it is."
For one unguarded second (shorter than a breath, shorter than the numbness took to leave his fingers after a real fight), he almost did. He felt the shape of the sentence sitting right behind his teeth: I did this to this planet once, in another body, and Frank is dead now on the same ground because I brought him here. It got as far as his throat before every instinct he'd built across two lifetimes closed around it and put it away again.
"Never mind," he said, and heard how thin it sounded even to his own ears this time, nothing like the flat wall he usually built the word into. "That's the last time you do that to me."
Alita studied him a moment longer than she needed to, and didn't push, because she'd heard the difference too. "You almost said something else just then."
"I didn't."
"No," she agreed, gently. "You didn't. But you almost did, and we both know it." She rose, smoothing her flight suit, and left him to sit with that alone, which was, he understood distantly, its own kind of mercy.
Earth's skyline came up out of the dark in a wash of light that struck Taisen harder than he'd expected it to: decades gone in his last life since he'd last seen it lit up like this, and something in his chest that wasn't the current at all recognized it anyway. He thought, unbidden, of Kharsat's own dark sky and the quiet order he'd left standing behind him there (Ness, patient and pleased, building a fleet Simika still knew nothing about) and put the thought away in the same place he put everything he wasn't ready to examine in daylight. That debt, too, would come due eventually. Not today.
"Everyone stays with the ship," Lyn said, once they'd docked at a high-priced hangar in the government sector. "I'll go talk to Usyk myself."
It took Lyn the better part of twenty minutes just to find the office, tucked away down a corridor with no outward-facing windows at all, as far from the building's better real estate as a man of his former rank could be moved without technically demoting him on paper. The nameplate read only ADMIRAL, in lettering gone dull enough that someone had clearly stopped bothering to polish it years before she'd ever heard the name Usyk spoken aloud. Inside, false windows threw a projected skyline across the walls in place of a view he'd apparently lost the right to, and a tired man with a balding head and a beard trimmed into an upside-down triangle looked up at her without much curiosity in it, a half-finished cup of something long gone cold at his elbow.