Halfway up, the trees thinned enough to offer the first clear view of the valley beyond, and Taisen stopped without deciding to, the way a body sometimes simply refuses to keep walking before the mind has finished arguing about why. Below and to the left, half hidden now by two decades of unchecked growth, lay the low, sloped depression in the earth that had once been his family's home, its foundation lines still faintly visible beneath the green if you knew, as he did, exactly where to look for them. He had not seen this particular angle of it since the night the sky over that valley had turned white, then orange, then, finally, the dull and terrible red of a fire burning through everything it had ever loved.
"That was our house," he said, to Lyn and Alita both, though his eyes never left the depression in the earth. "Not that structure they built. That one, the shape in the ground you can barely see now. My mother kept a garden along the south wall that my father complained about constantly and never once asked her to move, because he liked, I think, having something to complain about that made him laugh instead of worry. I used to hate weeding it. I would give a great deal, standing here now, to hate weeding it again."
Neither Lyn nor Alita said anything to that, because there was nothing to say to it that wouldn't have cheapened it, and after a long moment Taisen simply resumed walking, and they fell in beside him without a word, and the three of them climbed the rest of the way to the memorial in a silence that felt, for the first time since the Beluga died, like the right kind rather than the heavy kind.
The structure itself, up close, was smaller than the orbital scans had suggested and considerably more deliberate: a low, curved wall of pale stone, open to the sky, enclosing a single flat marker set into the earth at its center, and around the inside of the wall, cut into the stone in a script Taisen recognized instantly and had not seen rendered anywhere but in his own oldest memories, a single unbroken line of Falmeri text running the whole circumference of the enclosure.
Lyn watched his face as he read it, and saw something move across it that she had never once seen there before, not in the shuttle bay, not in the ten seconds after the Beluga died, not even in the quiet hour he'd finally told the crew the word family out loud. It was not grief exactly, though grief was somewhere inside it. It was closer, she thought, to the particular stillness of a man reading his own name carved into a stone he hadn't known existed.
"What does it say," Alita asked, very quietly.
"It's a name," Taisen said, and his voice had gone thin in a way she had never heard from him before. "Mine. Not Taisen. The other one. Bora Shrie, rendered in the old formal script my mother used only for things she meant to matter, followed by a line I've seen exactly once before in my life, on the marker my own people raised over an empty grave they built for me after the bombing, when they believed, wrongly, that I'd died alongside everyone else." He read it again, silently this time, his lips moving without sound around the words. "It translates, roughly, to: he lived, and the debt for it is not yet paid."
"Malkor wrote that," Lyn said. It wasn't a question.
"Or someone writing at his direction, in a script only a handful of scholars anywhere in occupied space could still read correctly," Taisen said. "Either way, yes. He knows I lived. He has known, I suspect, for a very long time, considerably longer than the weeks since Ashera's soul stone first showed him my face. This was never a message meant to arrive with the invitation to Triskelion, Colonel. This was built, and tended, and left waiting for years, on the chance that I would one day come looking for it, because he was certain, in the particular, patient way that certainty apparently ran in whatever passed for his blood, that I eventually would."
He crouched, slowly, beside the flat marker at the enclosure's center, and brushed the pale dust from its surface with two fingers, the grey ash ring already spreading further along both hands than it had been an hour earlier, an accruing debt he had made no conscious choice to spend and could not, for the first time in either of his two lives, work out how to stop paying.
Beneath the dust, cut into the stone in the same careful hand, a single further line waited, shorter than the first, and considerably colder.
Come to the shore at dusk. Alone, if you're the man I believe you are. Bring the ring, if you're the man I hope you'll become.
Taisen went very still, his fingers resting on the last word, and felt, behind him, Lyn's hand come to rest lightly on his shoulder, and Alita's breath catch audibly at his back, and understood, reading it a second time to be certain he hadn't imagined it, that whatever else Malkor knew about Bora Shrie, he knew, impossibly, about the small ring of pale, silvery metal still riding in the breast pocket of Taisen's coat, given to him by a frightened man named Uros on a station neither Malkor nor anyone loyal to him should ever have had cause to hear about at all.
"He knows about the Monjitari," Alita said, very quietly. "Taisen. He knows about Uros."
Taisen rose slowly to his feet, the ring's small weight suddenly the loudest thing in the world against his chest, and looked out past the enclosure's low wall toward the shore beyond the trees, where the light was already beginning its long, slow slide toward evening, and said nothing at all for a long moment, because there was nothing left, standing in that place, that felt like it deserved to be said before he understood exactly how much further this particular debt was about to run.