Like they don’t fully trust gravity anymore.
“I need to go home,” I say.
He looks at me carefully.
“Do you want me to come with you.”
“No,” I reply. “I need to do this part alone.”
The safehouse feels smallerthan it did this morning.
Heavier.
Like the walls have leaned in while I was gone and decided to stay that way.
Tur is in the ops room again, shirt back on, shoulder taped and still angry-purple under the compression seal, eyes tracking a wall display full of Alliance telemetry noise like he’s daring it to blink wrong.
He looks up when he hears the door.
“You’re back early,” he says.
I don’t answer.
I walk straight past him into the kitchen and start clearing the table.
Not gently.
Not angrily.
Just with the flat, methodical precision of someone making space for something terrible.
He follows me.
“Kimberly,” he says slowly. “What’s wrong.”
I set my tablet down on the table.
Then the data core Ishaan printed the shard onto.
Then my personal slate with the zoning overlays loaded.
Then I finally look at him.
My hands are shaking hard enough now that it’s visible.
“I found it,” I say.
His body goes still.
Not alert-still.
Not tactical-still.
The other kind.
The one I now recognize as terror.
“What,” he says quietly.
