He looked at it. Something moved through his face — not surprise, not the thing she expected, which would have been the expression of a man who had just been caught. Something quieter than that. Like a door that had been almost closed, for a long time, recognizing the person on the other side of it.
"You know what that word means," she said.
"Yes."
"You called me that. On the dock."
"Yes."
She held his gaze. He held hers. Neither of them looked away, and the apartment was very quiet around them, and outside the second sun was fully up and the city was going about its ordinary business with no idea at all.
"There are things I cannot discuss," he said. His voice was careful. Not cold — she had stopped expecting cold from him several interactions ago. Careful, the way you were careful with something you didn't want to damage by handling it wrong.
"I know." She turned the screen back toward herself. "But I found it. So now it exists in the same room as both of us and we're both going to have to live with that."
He didn't answer. He didn't need to.
She filed it — the word, the document, the expression on his face — in the part of the catalogue that was getting very full, and opened a new search.
She searched for Fraluma breeding program violations.
The results were sparse. Most of the records were classified far above her access level. But there were fragments at the edges — mentions in tribunal records, references in old government memos that had been partially declassified, a single paragraph in a decade-old administrative review that mentioned, almost in passing, the ongoing investigation into unauthorized biological unions and the tracking of their resultant lineages.
Resultant lineages.
She read that phrase three times.
"The government has been tracking people," she said slowly. "Not just the Fraluma who broke the breeding protocol. Their children."
Something shifted in the room. She felt it rather than saw it — a change in the quality of Edi-Veen's stillness, the way a held breath was different from ordinary breathing.
"Yes," he said. The word was careful. Precise. The word of someone who had just stepped onto uncertain ground and was measuring every movement.
"For how long?"
"A very long time."
She stared at the paragraph on her screen. Unauthorized biological unions. Resultant lineages. Words designed to make people sound like problems. Like administrative errors that needed correcting.
"Edi-Veen."
"Yes."
"Is this what the Chancellor is looking for? When he said 'find the women' — is this what he meant?"
The silence was long enough to be its own answer.
"There are things I cannot discuss," he said finally.
"I know." She closed the search window. Her hands were steady. She was proud of that too. "But I'm going to find out anyway. You understand that."
"Yes," he said. "I know."
She picked up her caffe, found it had gone cold while she wasn't paying attention, and drank it anyway.
"I need to get into the physical archives," she said. "The press building. They have access to government records that aren't in the public system."
"When?"
