"She left," Coreni said.
"Yes."
"And you raised me alone."
"Yes."
"And you spent your entire career studying Fraluma injection biology." She said it without inflection. "Because of me."
"Because of what she told me." He looked at her steadily, the way he always looked at her when he wanted her to understand something precisely. "I didn't know about any prophecy. I didn't know what you were in — in any larger sense. I only knew what Sevaaki told me, which was that you were different and the difference mattered and I needed to understand it. So I got as close to the relevant biology as I could and I spent twenty-six years trying to understand what you carry."
"What do I carry?"
"Something extraordinary." His voice was quiet and certain and entirely without performance. "Your body produces a compound that I have spent two decades trying to synthesize in a lab and cannot. It exists in you naturally, in your blood, in every cell. And based on everything I've been able to determine —" He paused. "It would make the Fraluma injections completely unnecessary. Permanently."
Coreni sat with that.
The work. His entire career. The long nights and the vials on every surface and the simulations still running on the screen behind her. All of it circling the same question, the one he'd been handed by a woman who loved him enough to leave before she got him killed.
"Did you know," she said carefully, "that the government has been looking for me?"
Something crossed his face. "I suspected. I've been careful. I buried the research in layers — nothing that leads directly from my work to you, nothing that would let someone draw the line from the compound to its source." A pause. "I thought I had been careful enough."
"There's a question mark next to your name on a thirty-year-old list," she said. "They haven't connected it yet. But they're close."
The silence between them was different now. Not the silence of a secret being kept but the silence of two people standing on the same side of something, looking at the same horizon.
"What happened to her?" Coreni asked. "Sevaaki."
Her father looked at the table. "I don't know. She told me not to look. I looked anyway, for years, and I found nothing. Either she hid herself very well or —" He stopped.
"Or they found her first."
"Yes."
Coreni nodded slowly. She thought about a folder stripped to a single page. A cover sheet with three lines of text and the rest blacked out. Subject removed from active service.
She thought about a woman she had never known who had made a choice that should have been impossible and had paid for it in ways Coreni was only beginning to understand.
"She knew," Coreni said. "When she left you. She knew what I was going to be."
"I think so." He met her eyes. "She said you would be something the world had never seen. I thought she meant it the way parents mean things — the specific blindness of love. But she wasn't being sentimental. She was being precise."
Coreni breathed in slowly. Breathed out.
"I have a lot of questions," she said. "I don't have time for all of them tonight."
"I know." He reached across the table and put his hand over hers — a gesture so familiar she felt it in her chest. "Ask me what you need to ask."
"Did you know about the Cremmilek?"
He frowned. "The word is familiar. I've seen it in some of the older Fraluma cultural documents I accessed during my research. A prophesied figure. I didn't — I never connected it to —" He stopped. Looked at her. "Is that what they're calling you?"
"Some of them," she said. "The ones who believe it."
Her father was quiet for a long moment. She watched him doing what he always did with new information — turning it over, fitting it against what he knew, testing the edges of it. Then he looked up at her with an expression she didn't have a name for.
"Your mother knew," he said. "Didn't she. That's what she was protecting."
