"That's not quite an answer."
"No," he said. "But it is the truest one I have."
She looked at him across the table. He looked back, steady and waiting, the way he always waited — as if patience were not a practice for him but a state of being, something he inhabited rather than performed.
"All right," she said. "We go."
The tea house was the kind of place that had been there so long it had stopped trying to be anything in particular and had become simply itself — low ceilings, mismatched chairs, the smell of something dark and warm that had been brewing in the same pot since before Coreni was born. The kind of place where nobody looked up when you came in because nobody had looked up in years.
Dremma was already at the corner table when they arrived. No cloak today — she wore plain civilian clothes, the kind of clothing that made her look like any elderly woman taking her morning tea, which was almost certainly the point. Her hands were wrapped around a cup and her eyes were on the door, and when Coreni came through them something in her expression settled, the way expressions settled when a thing you'd been waiting for finally arrived.
Edi-Veen took a table near the entrance without being asked. Not close enough to hear. Close enough to matter.
Coreni sat across from Dremma and said nothing, because she had learned early in her career that the person who spoke first in a room like this gave away more than they intended to.
Dremma looked at her for a long moment. Then she said, "You already know."
It wasn't a question.
"Most of it," Coreni said. "My father told me about my mother. I found the rest in the archives."
"Sevaaki," Dremma said. The name in her mouth was different than it had been in Coreni's father's — older, heavier, the name of someone she had known and lost and spent decades carrying. "She was one of the finest warriors this generation produced. She was also one of the most stubborn people I have ever encountered, which is saying something, given that I have spent forty years on a council of nine."
"Did you know her well?"
"Well enough to tell her she was making a mistake. Well enough that she listened to everything I said and did exactly what she intended to do anyway." Something that was not quite a smile moved through Dremma's expression. "She came to me before she left. She told me what she was going to do and why. She told me that the child would carry something the Collective had been waiting for, though she could not tell me what it was exactly — only that she had felt it the way you feel a current in still water. Before you see it move."
"She knew about the prophecy."
"She believed in it in a way most of us only practiced believing. For Sevaaki it was not doctrine. It was — certainty. The kind that sits in the body rather than the mind." Dremma turned her cup slowly. "I thought she was wrong. I was wrong about that, as it turns out."
Coreni absorbed that. Outside the tea house's small window, the street moved through its ordinary morning — vendors, transport workers, the particular unhurried busyness of a city that didn't know anything was happening.
"Tell me about the Cremmilek," she said. "Not the prophecy. What it actually means. What I actually am."
Dremma looked at her steadily. "You are half of two things that have never been allowed to exist together. Half human — which means your body doesn't deteriorate the way full humans do, doesn't need the cybernetic reinforcement that everyone around you takes for granted. And half Fraluma — which means you don't need the injections. You exist entirely outside both systems of control." She paused. "That alone would make you significant. But there is more."
"The compound," Coreni said.
"Your father told you."
"He's been trying to synthesize it for twenty years."
"Yes. We know of his work. We have been — watching it, from a distance, as carefully as we could without alerting the government to what he was close to understanding." Dremma's voice was quiet and precise. "What your body produces naturally, in your blood, in the chemistry of you — it renders the injections unnecessary. Not temporarily. Permanently. One exposure, properly administered, and a Fraluma's dependency is broken for life."
The tea house hummed quietly around them. Coreni kept her hands still on the table.
"You need me to go somewhere," she said. "Somewhere the compound can be studied and synthesized properly. Somewhere the government can't reach."
"The Barrens," Dremma said. "There is a ship. A transport company out of Alpha Prime, a pilot who has been vetted carefully and knows nothing of what she carries. The route is long — six months in stasis — but it is the route least likely to be intercepted. And in the Barrens there are resources, people, infrastructure that has been building quietly for years in anticipation of this." A pause. "In anticipation of you."
Coreni sat with that for a moment. The weight of it was considerable. Not frightening, exactly — she had moved past frightening somewhere around the second day of finding things out — but heavy in a way that asked something of her posture.
"The council doesn't all agree," she said.
"No."
"Sraaak doesn't believe I'm the Cremmilek."
