The supply chain ran through a single authorized manufacturer. One company, one contract, renewed automatically every five years for the last century. No competitive tender. No independent review. Just a quiet perpetual arrangement between the government and a lab she'd never heard of, buried in a satellite district of Alpha Prime.
She flagged it and kept going.
The deeper she went the more the picture clarified — not through what the records said but through what they conspicuously didn't. There were gaps. Not the ordinary gaps of bureaucratic incompetence, missing a form here or an update there, but deliberate gaps, the kind that came from someone systematically removing information over a long period of time. Someone who knew what they were doing and had the access to do it cleanly.
Someone very close to the program.
She sat back and looked at the ceiling for a moment.
The Fraluma's entire existence was contingent on those injections. She'd known that in the abstract — everyone knew the Fraluma required some form of medical maintenance, the way everyone knew their own implants required calibration. It was presented as biology, as engineering, as simply the cost of what they were. It had never been presented as a leash.
But that was exactly what it was.
"How long," she said, not quite to him, not quite to herself.
"Since the beginning," Edi-Veen said quietly. "It was designed this way."
She looked at him. He was looking at the floor, his jaw set with a tension she hadn't seen in it before. He'd answered without meaning to, she thought — or had meant to and decided the truth was more important than the order not to say it.
"They built you to need it," she said.
"Yes."
"So you could never leave."
He didn't answer. He didn't need to.
She turned back to her screen and sat with that for a moment, letting it settle into its proper weight. Then she opened a new search, because that was what she did when a thing was too large to look at directly — she looked at the thing next to it instead and worked her way in.
She searched for Fraluma cultural history. Publicly available scholarship, academic papers, the thin academic literature that existed because the government had never bothered to suppress what it didn't consider threatening. History was not threatening. History was for people with time to read it.
The results were sparse but not nothing — a handful of anthropological surveys from the early days of the program, before the government had understood that documentation could be a liability. She pulled the oldest one, a dry institutional report on the Fraluma's developing social structures, and started reading.
Most of it was clinical and nearly useless — observations made by researchers who had not understood what they were observing, who had noted the existence of Fraluma ritual and tradition with the detached curiosity of people cataloguing a novelty. But she had learned to read the space around what documents said, and what this one said, in its dry institutional way, was that something had surprised them. The Fraluma had developed a spiritual tradition more complex and internally consistent than anyone had anticipated. They had language, mythology, prophecy.
She flagged it and kept pulling.
The word appeared in the fourth document. A partially declassified cultural assessment, sixty years old, written by a government researcher who had clearly been told to get closer to the Fraluma's inner life and had gotten considerably closer than her handlers intended. Her report had been heavily redacted — whole paragraphs blacked out, pages missing entirely — but enough remained to see the shape of what she had found.
There was a word, repeated in the fragments that survived. The researcher had transliterated it carefully, noting its untranslatability, noting that the Fraluma she interviewed had gone uniformly silent when asked about it. She had found references to it in the Fraluma's oral tradition and in carved markings in locations she hadn't been able to identify. She had concluded, in the single paragraph that survived her handlers' redactions, that it referred to a prophesied figure. A chosen one, in the most literal sense — chosen by something, though what that something was the researcher couldn't determine, because the Fraluma she asked had simply looked at her and said nothing.
Cremmilek.
Coreni sat very still.
The word on the page was the word from the dock. The same syllables, the same specific weight, written in a government document sixty years ago by a researcher who had gotten too close and been redacted for it. She read the paragraph three times, slowly, the way she read things that required her to be certain she was understanding them correctly.
A prophesied figure. Chosen by something. The Fraluma went silent when asked.
She had heard that word in the dark, on a dock, from a Fraluma warrior who had looked down at her with his face doing something she couldn't name and said it like he already knew.
She looked up. Edi-Veen was on the couch, watching the room, not watching her.
"Edi-Veen."
"Yes."
She turned her screen toward him without a word.
