"We are being followed," Edi-Veen said quietly, without changing his pace or his direction.
"Since when?"
"The corner of Merrat and Docks. Two of them. Civilian clothes, government implants if you know what to look for."
"Do they know where we're going?"
"Not yet. They are tracking, not intercepting. They want to see where we lead them."
She processed that. "Can you lose them?"
"Yes. But not the way you are thinking. Stay with me."
He turned left at the next junction, into an alley she knew — the one that ran behind the old freight buildings, connecting to the service lane that came out three blocks east of the warehouse. It was a longer route. It was also a route with no surveillance coverage, something she’d figured out eighteen months ago on a previous story she worked on.
She heard nothing behind them. She took that to mean either that they'd lost the followers or that the followers were better than average. She decided to trust Edi-Veen's assessment and keep moving.
"Clear," he said, two blocks later.
She exhaled.
"You knew about this route," he said. Not an accusation. Observation.
"I know all the routes. It's the job."
"It is more than the job," he said, and this time she heard the echo of every time he'd said that and understood that he had been telling her something she didn't yet have the vocabulary to receive. She had it now.
"Yes," she said. "It is."
The warehouse was dark and quiet and smelled exactly as it always had. She stood in it for a moment when they came through the door, looking at the space she had used for years without knowing what it was — the water-stained ceiling, the decommissioned freight panels, the floor that looked like any floor.
She thought about all the conversations she'd had six meters above an entire civilization. All the secrets she'd collected in this building without knowing the largest one was beneath her feet the whole time.
"Ready?" Edi-Veen said.
"No," she said. "But that stopped being relevant a while ago."
The floor opened.
The transport that met them below was not the same one she'd ridden before — smaller, faster, the stripped-down configuration of something built for urgency rather than comfort.
Dremma was there, waiting, standing at the far end of the narrow chamber with her hands folded and her face composed in the particular way of someone who had made their peace with an outcome and was now simply present for it.
Five other Fraluma were already in the chamber. Coreni recognized none of them. They were large and still and looked at her with varying degrees of the same expression — assessment, recognition, something she didn't yet have a name for but thought might be reverence, which was deeply uncomfortable.
"The ship is positioned," Dremma said. "Loverly Transports, docked in the commercial port, third berth east. The pilot doesn't know what she carries — only that the cargo is valuable and the route is specific. She is good at her job and she asks the right number of questions, which is none."
"The stasis chambers," Coreni said.
"Seven, including yours and Edi-Veen's. The others will go ahead." Dremma's eyes moved briefly to Edi-Veen. "You have both been briefed on the emergency protocols?"
"Yes," Edi-Veen said.
"Then there is nothing left to say except —" Dremma paused. She looked at Coreni for a long moment with those tired, very aware eyes. "Your mother asked me once if I thought the prophecy was real. I told her I thought prophecy was a word people used for patterns they couldn't otherwise explain." Something moved through her expression — not quite a smile, but the ghost of one. "I have spent thirty years reconsidering that answer. I believe I was wrong."
Coreni looked at her. "What do you believe now?"
"That some things are simply true," Dremma said. "Whether or not we have the wisdom to see them coming."
