"It's a memorial," Alita said, very quietly, understanding arriving in her chest a half second before she found the words for it. "Taisen. Someone built a memorial on the exact spot where your family died, and someone has been maintaining it, ever since, and the only person in this entire galaxy who could possibly know that spot mattered enough to mark it is the one man who's asked you to meet him here."
Nobody on the bridge said anything for a long moment. Taisen stood very still at the center of it, his grey ringed hands loose at his sides, his eyes fixed on the pale, tended stone at the center of the display, and felt, for the first time since the message from Malkor had first crossed his desk, the last remaining shred of the comfortable idea that this could still, somehow, be coincidence finish dying in his chest.
"He knows," Taisen said, finally, and his voice, when it came, held none of the careful composure it had held for every other reckoning of his two lifetimes. "He's known this whole time. He didn't choose Triskelion because it was convenient, or because it was remote, or because it was neutral ground far enough from either of our territories to feel safe to both of us. He chose it because he knows exactly who Bora Shrie was, and exactly who Bora Shrie became, and he built that thing down there, and has kept it standing all these years, specifically so that I would see it, the moment I finally came looking for him."
"Then we don't go down there," Lyn said immediately, sharp, already half turned toward the tactical station. "Not until we understand what we're walking into. Not with a memorial built for exactly this occasion sitting in the middle of it."
"We go down there," Taisen said, "because he's already told me, as plainly as a man can tell another man anything without saying a single word aloud, that there was never any version of this meeting where I didn't already know he'd been waiting for me my whole life. That isn't a reason to turn back, Colonel. It's the only proof I've needed all along that I'm finally in the right place."
He looked back out at the pale stone shape on the display a moment longer, at the swept path and the tended walls and the hillside beyond it that he had not set foot on in two lifetimes, and felt the grey at his fingertips spread, slow and cold, another fraction of an inch toward his palm.
"Take us down," he said. "Quietly, and carefully, and with every eye this ship has watching every inch of ground around that structure the entire time we're on it. Whatever he's waiting to tell me, I intend to hear it standing on my own two feet, on the ground where he clearly always meant for me to hear it."
The Arctic began its long, slow descent through Triskelion's thin high cloud a few minutes later, the pale coastline resolving beneath her, mile by careful mile, into green and stone and the low, patient shape of a memorial that had been waiting, tended and untouched, for exactly this arrival for longer than anyone aboard had known to look for it.
They set down in a clearing a quarter mile from the structure, close enough to walk it in a reasonable time and far enough, Lyn insisted, that anything waiting for them at the memorial would have to cross open ground to reach the ship first, and Taisen had not argued the point, because it was, on its own careful merits, exactly the kind of caution he would have insisted on himself in any other circumstance. The landing party was small by his own choice: himself, Lyn, and Alita, with Swan holding the Arctic in a low hover overhead and Camaro at the sensor board tracking every heat signature the surrounding hillside offered up, which, for the first several minutes after touchdown, was none at all.
The air outside, when the ramp lowered and Taisen stepped onto it for the first time in two lifetimes, smelled of nothing he had expected and everything he suddenly, achingly remembered: cut grass gone to seed, a faint mineral sweetness carried up from some unseen stream, and underneath it all, the particular, resinous scent of a native flowering shrub that grew nowhere else in the galaxy so far as any archive Taisen had ever consulted could confirm, a smell his body recognized a full half second before his mind caught up to why, dropping him, for one disorienting instant, backward across two lifetimes into a small boy's memory of running down this exact slope on a warm evening with his mother calling his name behind him, not urgently, simply fondly, the way a mother calls a child she expects to come back the moment he's finished whatever small adventure had carried him out of earshot.
He stood very still on the ramp a moment, one hand braced against the cold metal of the hull, until the memory passed and the present reasserted itself around him: Lyn beside him, watching him with the careful, unobtrusive attention of a woman deciding, moment by moment, whether this was a thing that needed her help or a thing that needed her patience instead; Alita a step behind, her sidearm drawn but held low, sweeping the treeline with the calm, professional focus that had become, over the weeks, simply the shape her fear took when she refused to let it show anywhere else.
"You don't have to do the walking part alone," Lyn said, quietly, falling into step beside him as he started across the clearing. "I know you'd prefer it. I'm telling you anyway that you don't have to."
"I know," Taisen said. "I'm glad of the company, Colonel, whatever I might have said about it an hour ago."
The path up the hillside had been cleared with the same careful, deliberate maintenance as the structure itself, a narrow track of packed earth free of the choking undergrowth that swallowed everything to either side of it, wide enough for two to walk abreast and worn smooth enough, in its center, that Taisen understood, climbing it, that it had been walked many times, by someone, over many years, with the patient regularity of a rite rather than a chore. He found himself counting his own steps without meaning to, an old habit from a childhood spent counting things to keep from crying in front of people who expected a Falmeri child to bear grief with more composure than any child, of any species, should reasonably be asked to manage.