"So do I," Lyn said. "I've never once enjoyed being right about the worst version of a plan. It simply happens to me more often than I'd like, in your company."
They raised Camaro on the short-range channel before starting down, and her voice came back through the comm bead tucked behind Taisen's ear flat and steady, the particular steadiness she'd worn like a second skin since the Cell system, the kind that cost her something to maintain and never once let anyone hear the cost. "Sensors are clean," she said. "No other heat signatures on that whole stretch of coast, no craft in the water, no craft in low orbit that isn't ours. If he's bringing an army to that beach, Commander, he's doing it invisibly, and I don't love betting your life on the idea that Reza tech is that far ahead of ours."
"Neither do I," Taisen said, "which is exactly why I intend to be careful in every way that doesn't involve bringing an escort I was explicitly asked not to bring. Keep watching, Ensign. If anything changes, however small, I want to hear about it the instant it does, not the instant it seems worth interrupting me for."
"Copy that, sir," Camaro said, and then, after a beat just long enough that he almost missed it under the channel's low static: "Come back in one piece. I've had enough funerals for one deployment."
"So have I," Taisen said, quietly, and meant it in a way that surprised even him a little, hearing it out loud.
Swan's voice came in a moment later, holding the Arctic in her low patient hover somewhere above the tree canopy, out of sight but close enough to reach in under a minute if the worst happened. "For the record, sir," he said, "my mother still thinks I'm flying cargo. If this is the part of the story where I have to explain to her that you walked into a meeting with the most dangerous man alive completely alone because a rock told you to, I'd like it on record that I think that's insane, and I'm saying so now so nobody can claim later that the crew didn't have concerns."
"Noted, Ensign," Taisen said, and something in his voice, for just a moment, carried the ghost of the old dry humor he hadn't quite managed since the Beluga. "Your concerns are a matter of permanent record. I appreciate you filing them so promptly."
The path down from the memorial ran a different line than the one they'd climbed to reach it, cutting away from the ruined foundation of the house he'd once lived in and angling instead toward a break in the tree line where the land dropped in long, easy shelves toward the water, and Taisen walked it the way he walked most things now, unhurried on the surface and racing, underneath, through every version of the next hour he could construct. Lyn and Alita fell back a half pace behind him without being asked, the particular, wordless deference of two people who understood that the last stretch of this walk belonged to him in a way no part of the mission ever had, and the three of them went down through the thinning trees in a silence broken only by the crunch of dry grass underfoot and, somewhere off to the left, the slow, patient wash of surf against a shoreline none of them could see yet.
The light was doing the thing dusk light did on worlds with a thin, clean atmosphere and nothing much in the way of pollution to muddy it, deepening from gold to a deep, bruised orange in the space of a few minutes, throwing long shadows out ahead of them that made the whole hillside look, for a disorienting moment, considerably older than it actually was, as though the land itself had decided to dress for the occasion. Taisen found himself watching those shadows more closely than the path, tracking the exact angle of his own shadow against the grass, because somewhere in a childhood he'd spent forty years and one entire death trying not to remember too precisely, he had watched this same light do this same thing on this same slope, chasing a smaller shadow that had belonged, once, to a boy who hadn't yet learned that the world could take everything from him in the space of a single night and simply keep turning afterward, indifferent, the way it always did.
"You've gone somewhere else," Alita said quietly, close enough behind him that only he could hear it over the wind coming up off the water ahead. "I can tell. Your shoulders do a particular thing when you're not fully here."
"I noticed you noticed that, some weeks ago," Taisen said, without turning. "I've never once managed to stop it happening, whatever I do about the rest of my face."
"I'm not asking you to stop it," she said. "I'm asking if you want to tell me where you've gone, or if you'd rather I simply walk beside you until you come back on your own."
He considered the question longer than it strictly required, watching his own long shadow slide across a patch of pale grass just starting to silver in the dying light. "Boys don't remember grief the way men do," he said finally. "They remember weather. Smells. The exact color the sky goes at a particular hour on a particular kind of evening. I have spent two lifetimes being unable to explain to anyone why a certain slant of orange light makes my chest feel like it's caving in, because the explanation was never a story I could tell in a sentence. It was simply this. This exact light, on this exact slope, at this exact hour, and a version of me small enough that his whole world could still fit inside one house with a garden his father complained about." He was quiet a moment. "I used to think, as Herman Wrath, that I'd burned that boy out of myself entirely, the way you burn a field to clear it for something harder and more useful. I find, walking down this hill in this light, that I was wrong about that in a way I don't yet know how to feel about."