"You don't know that."
"I know you," he said. "That is enough."
She nodded and moved to start the physical part. The packing.
She packed the way she did everything when she was trying not to think — efficiently, without looking directly at what she was doing.
One bag. She had made that decision before she started, which was the only way to make it cleanly. One bag meant she had to decide, before she touched anything, what she was willing to lose. Most things, it turned out. The answer had come quickly and hadn't surprised her. She was a journalist. She had always traveled light.
She took a change of clothes. Practical, dark, the kind of thing you could move in and sleep in and not notice you were wearing. She took her personal recorder — smallest one, the one that fit in an inside pocket, the one she had carried on every story for three years. She was aware that this was slightly absurd given the circumstances. She took it anyway.
She stood in the doorway of her bedroom for a moment and looked at it — the narrow bed, the shelf of data pads she had read and meant to re-read, the mirror where she had pressed her fake implant into place every morning for four years and checked that it looked right and gone out to be unremarkable. She was going to a place where unremarkable didn't matter. Where the implant didn't matter. Where the careful architecture of normal she had spent her adult life constructing was going to be entirely beside the point.
She didn't know yet what that felt like.
She crossed to the desk. The photograph was in the bottom drawer, where it had been since the year she moved out — slightly blurred, her father squinting into a sun that was too bright, his collar turned up against a wind she could no longer remember, the expression on his face the one he made when he was thinking about something else and didn't know anyone was looking. She had taken it herself. She had been nineteen and it had been a good day and she had thought, at the time, that she was documenting something ordinary.
She understood now that she had been documenting something she would want back.
She stood with it in her hand for a long time.
Then she put it in the bag, because the alternative was leaving it, and she was not going to leave it.
She looked at the apartment the way she looked at everything she was going to write about, committing it to the part of her memory that didn't let things go. She had the distinct and irrational thought that the apartment deserved to be remembered by someone who had lived in it.
She was going to be that person.
She picked up the bag and went back to where Edi-Veen was waiting.
He leaned against the far wall, caffe in hand, watching her with that steady blue-green gaze that had been the first thing she'd seen clearly in a freezing loading dock what felt like a lifetime ago.
He looked like someone who had made a decision and was at peace with it. She wasn't sure when that had happened but it had, somewhere between the tribunal and the kitchen last night and everything in between.
"Are you afraid?" she asked.
"Yes," he said. Not of what was coming — she understood that. Of what he was leaving behind. The Collective. Kra-May. The room no one else had found. All of it going into a stasis pod and emerging on the other side of six months into whatever the Barrens held.
"Me too," she said.
He crossed the room and held out his hand — not a gesture she expected, not quite Fraluma in its formality, not quite human in its simplicity. Something in between. Something that was just his.
She took it.
"Then we go afraid," he said.
"Yes," she agreed. "We do."
Chapter Fifteen
Coreni
Trevort at night smelled like salt water and possibility, which had always struck Coreni as unfair given how rarely the two things delivered on each other.
Tonight she was choosing to take it as a good sign.
They moved through the dock district the way she had moved through it a hundred times before — heads down, pace measured, unremarkable in the way of people who had somewhere to be and no interest in being seen getting there. She knew these streets. She had spent three years learning which corners had working surveillance panels and which ones didn't, which alleys absorbed a person and which ones spat them back out onto main thoroughfares. She had learned all of it for stories. She was using it now for something considerably more permanent.
Edi-Veen moved at her shoulder, matching her pace exactly, and said nothing, and she was grateful for both things.
