She turned away from him. Crossed to the window. The dock district was waking up outside, going about its ordinary morning, entirely unaware that in a northern holding facility a quiet man with vials on every surface was sitting in a room he didn't choose and waiting for a daughter who couldn't come.
She thought about what he'd said at the door. She would have loved you. She did love you. Just — early. Before you were here to receive it.
She thought about twenty-six years of careful silence. All the theories he could have shared and didn't. All the questions he could have answered and held instead. Everything he had carried alone because a woman he loved had handed it to him and trusted him to carry it.
He had carried it. Right up until the moment they came for him.
"He knew," she said quietly, to the window. "Didn't he. When I came to dinner. He knew something was coming. That's why he held me so long at the door."
Edi-Veen said nothing. Which was its own answer.
She pressed her forehead briefly against the cool glass and let herself have that too. One more moment. The last one she was going to allow for a long time.
Then she straightened.
"How long do we have?" she asked.
"Dremma is already moving. The ship is being positioned. If we go to the warehouse tonight, the transport will be ready."
"Tonight."
"Yes."
She nodded. She turned from the window and looked at her apartment — the battered couch, the data screens still running her research, the cabinet door that always needed a second try. The life she had built in the dock district of Trevort, small and imperfect and entirely her own.
She looked at it the way she had not let herself look at it since Dremma's words in the tea house — all of it, at once, without the editorial distance she usually kept between herself and things she didn't want to feel. The couch she had pulled from a street market three years ago because she liked the color of it. The data screens covered in threads she had been pulling for a week that were never going to become a published story, not now, maybe not ever. The cabinet door that always needed a second try, which she had meant to fix since the first month and had never fixed because it had stopped bothering her and become simply part of the texture of the place, part of what she knew when she was home.
The desk by the window where she had built everything she was professionally proud of. The view of the dock district from that window, the water catching the twin suns in the morning, the particular quality of light at the end of the day when the first sun dropped behind the freight buildings and the second one followed twenty minutes later and for that twenty minutes everything went copper and impossible.
She had watched that happen four hundred times from this window.
She was not going to watch it again.
She set that down somewhere careful inside herself, next to all the other things she was carrying that she didn't have time to grieve properly, and turned back to the room.
"I need an hour," she said.
"You have it."
"I need to send a message to Draka. Untraceable, nothing specific — just enough that she knows to cover for me. And I need to —" She stopped. Looked at him. "I need to leave something for my father. In case he gets out before we can tell him what happened. He needs to know I'm all right. He needs to know I chose this."
"I will step out," Edi-Veen said. "Give you the room."
"No." The word came out before she'd decided to say it. She looked at him steadily. "Stay. I'd rather — I'd rather not be alone right now. If that's —"
"It is," he said simply. And went to make caffe, because that was what he did, and because some things didn't need more words than that.
The message to her father was the hardest thing she'd written in three years of writing hard things.
She kept it short. She kept it true. She told him she was safe, she was going somewhere she needed to go, she would come back when it was over. She told him that she understood now — all of it, what he'd carried, what it cost him, why he'd done it. She told him that the work he'd spent his life on was not wasted. That she was going to make sure of that.
She did not tell him she didn't know if she'd see him again. He already knew that. He was a scientist. He understood probability.
She encrypted it three layers deep and set it to deliver to a channel only he would know to check, routed through enough relay points that it would take a government team the better part of a day to trace it back to nothing.
Then she sat with her hands flat on the desk and breathed.
"It is good," Edi-Veen said, from across the room. He hadn't read it. He didn't need to.
