"Say the sentence again," Camaro said, when Taisen had finished laying it out. "The exact words. Not your summary of it. His."
"Not above Zhang," Taisen said. "Beside him."
The room held that a moment.
"That's not a name," Swan said. "That's a riddle with three seats' worth of guesses in it. Anyone close enough to Zhang to be beside him is by definition someone he trusts, and if it's someone he trusts, it's someone he's not looking at right now, because trust is exactly the thing that keeps a person out of the suspect column in the first place."
"Which is precisely why Malkor gave it to us that way," Alita said. "He didn't hand us a name. He handed us a method. Look at who Zhang trusts, not who Zhang has cause to doubt, and you've narrowed the search to a considerably smaller circle than Fleet Command's entire officer corps. That's either an extraordinary gift, or it's a scalpel he's handed us specifically because he wants us cutting into that circle ourselves, and I confess I don't yet know how to tell the difference between those two things from here."
"You don't trust it," Lyn said.
"I don't trust him," Alita said. "The information could be entirely true and still be a weapon. A man who spends a century learning to be careful with the truth doesn't hand a piece of it to his enemy for free, out of some sudden fit of sportsmanship. If he wanted Zhang weakened, wanted Fleet Command chasing its own tail, wanted the one honest ally Taisen has left in that whole apparatus paralyzed with suspicion of the people around him, exactly the kind of information he gave us tonight would be the cheapest, cleanest way to manage it. We'd be doing his work for him, and calling it vigilance."
"That's true," Taisen said. "I've turned it over the same way since the beach. I don't have an answer for it that resolves it cleanly, and I distrust any answer that would, because he built me a memorial with his own hands and waited years for me to find it, and a man that patient does not hand out gifts by accident."
"Then what do we actually do with it," Camaro said. "Sitting here arguing about whether it's poisoned doesn't get us any closer to knowing if it's true."
"We give it to the one person who's actually positioned to know," Taisen said. "Zhang. Carefully. Not as gospel, and not attributed to its actual source, because the moment I write Malkor's name in a transmission Zhang has to carry in his own head for the rest of this, I've handed the leak, whoever it is, a reason to move against Zhang directly the instant they learn he's been told. I'll frame it as an unconfirmed intelligence fragment from a hostile source, exactly true, and let him weigh it the way he's weighed everything else since this began, with his own judgment rather than mine."
"And if he does something with it that gets him killed," Lyn said, "because we handed him a live grenade with the pin already half pulled and called it a favor."
"Then that will sit on my ledger the same way Usyk does," Taisen said, quiet, "and I'll carry it the same way. I don't see a version of this where I simply keep the information to myself because acting on it might cost him something. He's already spending his own career to buy me time. I don't think he'd forgive me for deciding, on his behalf, that he'd rather not know the one thing that might actually save him."
Nobody argued that particular point, though Lyn's silence carried, plainly, all the argument she'd chosen not to make out loud.
"There's a second thread," Alita said, into the quiet that followed, "and I think it matters more, in the long run, than the leak does, however urgent the leak feels tonight. The ring. What it protects. What happens to Uros's line if something happens to the ring, or to the man carrying it, before anyone's worked out what to actually do with either."
"I've thought about that too," Taisen said, and reached into his coat, and drew it out: a small ring of pale, silvery metal, worn thin at one edge in a way that suggested it had been someone's for a very long time before it had ever been his, its faint coiled markings catching the ready room's flat overhead light without any of the strange, patient luminance Malkor's own disc had held on the shore. He set it on the table between them, and for a moment all five of them simply looked at it, the smallest object in the room and, by a wide margin, the heaviest.
"I don't know if Uros is even alive," he said. "I don't know how many people that oath actually shields, or where they are, or whether the treaty's terms are as clean as Malkor described them or considerably more fragile than he let on. I know it's worth more, sitting on this table, than every credit this ship has ever carried, and I know I've been keeping it in my coat pocket like a man carrying a family photograph rather than a treaty with the weight of an entire people's future attached to it. That was a mistake. I'd like to correct it, and I'd like the rest of you to help me work out what correcting it actually looks like."
Lyn found Alita afterward in the small galley off the mess hall, nursing a cup of something that had gone cold twenty minutes ago and hadn't been drunk yet, staring at nothing in particular with the specific, unfocused attention of a person replaying a conversation for the third or fourth time and still not arriving anywhere new with it.
"You're thinking about the hillside," Lyn said, settling across from her without asking, the way she'd stopped asking permission for that particular thing months ago.