The street was wet.
Kazuki and Elena walked in silence. The club was two blocks behind them. The city didn't care what had just happened in that basement — it just kept moving, loud and careless, the way it always did.
Kazuki's broken arm throbbed inside the cast.
He kept thinking about the black suit.
Not the vision itself. Not the frozen city or the silence or the thousands of stopped heartbeats.
The comfort.
That was the part he couldn't shake. The way his body in that vision had been sitting in the middle of a dead world like it was the most natural place to rest. Like it had finally found somewhere quiet.
That scared him more than anything Titus Kaine had done to his bones.
"You're grinding your teeth," Elena said without looking at him.
"I'm fine."
"You've said that twice since we left. People who are fine don't say it twice."
Kazuki didn't answer.
They turned a corner.
The old man was sitting on a bench outside a closed pharmacy.
Nobody else was nearby. Just him. Sitting perfectly still, hands on his knees, looking at nothing. He wore a grey coat that was too big for him. His hair was white.
Kazuki walked past him.
The man spoke.
"The black one isn't the suit," he said.
His voice was quiet. Not directed at anything. Like someone finishing a thought out loud.
Kazuki stopped.
Elena kept walking three more steps before she realized he wasn't beside her. She turned. "What?"
Kazuki looked at the man.
"What did you just say?" Kazuki asked.
The old man turned his head slowly. His eyes were the most unusual thing about him. Not the color. Not the shape. Just the depth. Like looking through a window into a room that kept going back further than it should.
He looked at Kazuki the way someone looks at a word they've read a hundred times.
"You already know what it is," the man said. "You felt it in the vision. You just don't want to."
The city noise was still there. Horns. Drones. Rain.
But around this bench, Kazuki couldn't hear any of it.
"Who are you?" Kazuki asked.
The man smiled. It wasn't a warm smile. It was the smile of someone who finds things sad rather than funny but smiles anyway out of habit.
"Tired," he said.
He looked back at the street.
"Don't run from the still world, Kazuki. The still world is the answer." A pause. "It's also the question."
"Kazuki." Elena's hand on his shoulder. "You're staring at an empty bench and talking to yourself. The painkillers—"
Kazuki looked at her.
Then back.
The bench was empty.
The grey coat was gone. The white hair. The deep eyes.
Just a wet bench with a cracked armrest.
Kazuki stood there for three seconds. Four.
"Let's go," Elena said carefully.
He followed her. He didn't tell her what he heard.
He was getting good at that.
Back at the clinic, Aeva was waiting.
She had the look she got when she found something she didn't want to have found. Jaw tight. Eyes focused on the screen like if she looked away, the information might rearrange itself into something less terrible.
"Talk," Kazuki said.
Aeva turned the monitor toward him.
"I've been running the signal analysis. The one from when the Helix Fortress hit the bay six months ago." She pointed at two lines on the map. "We knew one signal went to Malvorn's fleet. That's the one coming at us right now."
"And the second one?" Elena asked.
Aeva zoomed out. Way out. Past the Pacific. Past the atmosphere. Past the mapped zones of known space.
The second signal line extended outward. And then stopped.
At a fixed point. Sitting completely still.
"It's been there since the night the fortress fell," Aeva said. "Six months. It received the signal and it hasn't moved."
"Maybe it's a relay station," Elena suggested.
"Relay stations don't respond," Aeva said.
She clicked one more key.
A second line appeared on the map — thinner, barely visible, like a breath on cold glass.
"It sent something back," Aeva said. "Not to Malvorn. Not to us." She looked at Kazuki. "To the Core."
The room went still.
Kazuki looked down at his chest. The blue veins pulsed, slow and even.
The way they did when the suit was listening.
"When?" Kazuki asked.
Aeva checked the timestamp.
"Six months ago," she said. "The same night you first put it on."
Nobody spoke.
Outside, the rain got heavier.
Somewhere in deep space, something had known Kazuki's name before he did.
And it was still waiting.