"I made enough for two," he said. "I had a feeling you'd come."
She sat at the table that had been in this apartment her entire life — scarred plasteele, four chairs, one of which had always been hers and one of which had never been used — and watched him serve the food and thought about a list with five names on it and what it meant that her father's name had been written by someone else's hand.
They ate for a while without talking, which was normal. Her father had never been uncomfortable with silence. He treated it the way he treated everything — as information, as data, as something that told you things if you were patient enough to listen to it.
She had learned that from him.
"Tell me about the story," he said eventually.
"It's about the Chancellor."
He set his fork down. A small movement, carefully controlled. "That's a large subject."
"It keeps getting larger." She kept her eyes on her plate. "I started with the Fraluma revolt. The political angle, the budget implications, the usual entry points. But the deeper I go the more it leads back to the same place."
"What place?"
"The injection program." She looked up. "Specifically, who controls it and why the control is structured the way it is. And then, from there, to the breeding program. And the compliance reports. And the cases where the protocol was broken."
Her father was very still.
She had seen this stillness before, she realized. In Edi-Veen. The particular quality of someone who had been trained to hold themselves together under pressure and was now applying every bit of that training to the simple act of sitting at a dinner table.
"Coreni," he said.
"I found case BPV-7741," she said. "Or what was left of it. And I found the annex. And I found a list with five names on it, and beside four of them was the word terminated, and beside the fifth —" She stopped. Steadied. Continued. "Beside the fifth was a question mark. And your name. In someone else's handwriting."
The silence that followed was the longest of her life.
Her father looked at the table. At his hands. At some middle distance that wasn't the room they were sitting in. Then he looked at her, and his expression had the quality of something that had been held for a very long time finally being set down.
"How long have you known?" he asked.
"Two days." She kept her voice even. "I've known something was wrong since the dock. I've known something was wrong about me my whole life. But the file — two days."
"The dock." He said it softly, and something shifted in his face. "The dream I had. That wasn't —"
"No," she said. "It wasn't."
He closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, he looked older than he had a minute ago. "I should have told you."
"Yes."
"I didn't know how. And then the longer I didn't tell you, the harder it became to find the way in." He turned his glass in his hands. "I kept thinking there would be a right moment. Some occasion that would make it easier. There never was."
"Tell me now," she said. "Tell me all of it."
His name was Davan Mekkans. He had been twenty-three years old when he met a Fraluma warrior at a government research facility where he was doing his postgraduate work on genetic modification and she was there on a security assessment. He had not known what she was at first — she was in civilian clothes, civilian implants, she looked like anyone else, which was the point. By the time he understood what she was he was already in love with her, and love, he had discovered, was not a condition that responded well to information.
Her name was Sevaaki.
Coreni held that name carefully, the way you held something that might break.
They had been together for two years. Hidden, always hidden — she understood the risk better than he did, which was perhaps why she was the one who had insisted on every precaution, every protocol, every layer of distance between their life together and the world that would have ended it. He had thought she was being overcautious. He had been twenty-three and in love, which meant he had been a fool, but a sincere one.
When Sevaaki discovered she was pregnant she had told him three things. That she was leaving. That she would not contact him again. And that whatever the child was, whatever she carried, Davan needed to understand that she was not ordinary and he needed to protect that with his life because there were people who would want to use her and people who would want to destroy her and both were equally dangerous.
He had not understood. He had been twenty-five by then and still largely a fool.
