Dremma was quiet for a moment. "Sraaak has reasons for her position that are older than her doctrine. She knew your mother. She was on the council when Sevaaki disappeared." She looked at her hands. "Sometimes the people who are most certain they understand a prophecy are the people who cannot bear to discover they understood it wrong."
"And you?"
"I held your hands in that room beneath the ocean," Dremma said simply. "I felt what you carry. I knew your mother's signature in it before I knew anything else." She looked up. "I have been certain since that moment. I am more certain now."
Coreni looked at the old woman across from her — no implants, no armor, nothing between her and the world except decades of paying attention and being willing to act on what she saw. She thought about Sevaaki, who had sat in an alcove in the oldest part of a hidden city and told this woman she was going to do an impossible thing and done it anyway.
"What happens to the Fraluma," she said, "if I don't go?"
"The revolt continues. The government tightens the injection supply further — they are already doing it, in retaliation for the unrest. Warriors who have missed their doses are beginning to deteriorate. The council cannot hold the Collective secret indefinitely under this kind of pressure." Dremma's voice was level, not dramatic. She was reporting, not pleading. "The window is not unlimited. Whatever happens — with or without your consent — it will happen soon. The only question is whether you are part of it."
"That's not much of a choice."
"No," Dremma agreed. "It is not. I am sorry for that. I wish I could offer you better."
Coreni looked out the window again. The street. The ordinary morning. The people who had no idea that in a tea house two streets from the waterfront, a woman was sitting across from a prophet elder and being told that her blood was the answer to a century of slavery.
She thought about her father in his apartment full of vials, running simulations of a compound he couldn't synthesize because it didn't exist anywhere but in her. She thought about Edi-Veen at twelve, sitting alone in a room full of words no one could read, holding the fact of it for a little while before giving it up because it was too important to keep.
She thought about later, when there is one.
"I'll need time to arrange things," she said. "My father has to be warned. There are people who —"
"You have very little time," Dremma said quietly. "Less than you think. The Chancellor's office has been moving faster than we anticipated. Kra-May sent word this morning."
Coreni went still. "How fast?"
"Days. Perhaps less."
She absorbed that. Reorganized. The version of this where she had time to be careful collapsed and she built a new one in its place, faster and simpler and considerably more frightening.
"Then I need to talk to Edi-Veen," she said. "Tonight. All of it — what you've told me, what the plan is, what comes next." She looked at Dremma steadily. "He deserves to know what he's being asked to do."
"He already knows most of it," Dremma said. "He has known since the dock. He has been waiting for you to be ready to hear it."
Coreni stared at her.
"He could not tell you," Dremma said, without apology but without hardness either. "Those were his orders. But knowing and telling are different things, and he has known since the moment he looked down at you on that dock and felt what you were." She paused. "Why do you think he gave up everything he had built to keep you safe? He understood what it meant. He simply could not say it."
Coreni sat with that for a long moment.
She thought about the dock. His face on the container above her. That thing that had passed through his expression like weather and left the landscape altered.
She understood, now, what it had been.
Recognition.
"All right," she said, and her voice was steadier than she had any right to expect. "Tell me what I need to do."
Chapter Fourteen
Coreni
She spent the night making lists.
Not on paper, not on a data pad — in her head, the way she'd always done her best organizing, running through names and contacts and resources in the dark while the city breathed outside her window and Edi-Veen kept his silent watch from the couch. What she had. What she needed. Who she could trust and who she couldn't and who she'd have to trust anyway because the alternative was worse.
Dremma had said days. Perhaps less.
