She stepped forward and took Coreni's hands in both of hers — the same grip as the first time, gentle and careful, but different now. Not examining. Just holding.
"Go," she said. "Do what you were made to do. And come back, if you can."
"I intend to," Coreni said. "Tell Sraaak —" She stopped. Started again. "Tell her I understand why it was difficult. And that I hope she'll understand too, eventually."
Dremma nodded. She released her hands and stepped back.
It was time to go.
Three levels above the water, the commercial port bristled with the ordinary chaos of a working dock at night — freight handlers, transport crews, the constant low thrum of engines running warm. It was the best possible place to disappear into, which was exactly why Dremma had chosen it.
The Loverly transport was older than Coreni expected. Not decrepit — maintained, clearly, with the careful attention of someone who took pride in what they had — but not new. It sat in its berth with the solid, unshowy confidence of a ship that had been somewhere and intended to go somewhere again, and she found, unexpectedly, that she trusted it.
There were no crew visible. The cargo hold entrance was open. The stasis chambers were already inside, arranged against the port wall, their surfaces catching the dock lights in the dull gleam of expensive engineering.
Coreni stood at the bottom of the loading ramp and looked at them.
"You do not have to decide anything tonight that you have not already decided," Edi-Veen said at her shoulder.
"I know." She picked up her bag. "I've already decided."
She walked up the ramp.
The chamber assigned to her was the one closest to the starboard wall, separated slightly from the others. She looked at it for a moment — the sealed surface, the small display panel, the narrow viewport in the door through which, she supposed, someone could look in or she could look out, depending on which side of the glass you were on.
She turned to find Edi-Veen standing a few feet away, watching her with an expression she had no category for. Not the careful neutrality. Not the professional distance. Something open and unmanaged and entirely his own.
"Six months," she said.
"Approximately."
"And then the Barrens."
"And then the Barrens," he agreed.
She looked at him. The last few days flooded her.
The dock and the cold and the word she hadn't known that had hit her like a door opening. The pink light and stone smell and a tribunal she'd heard through the floor. She thought about the warehouse and the underwater city and the twin suns going silver-gold through the upper ocean.
A list with five names on it and a question mark, and a father who had held her too long at the door because he already knew.
She thought about a room full of unreadable words that a twelve-year-old boy had kept to himself for seventeen visits because he wanted one thing that was simply his.
Simple was no longer a valuable choice for her. For him. For any of them at this point. It seemed like an eternity ago when she was just trying to find a story about a scheming politician.
"When we get there," she said. "When this is over — whatever over looks like. I want to know the rest of it. The things you couldn't tell me. All of it."
"Yes," he said. Without hesitation. Without qualification.
"And the consort —"
"Is a conversation for the other side," he said. "When there is a later. You said so yourself."
She almost smiled. "I did."
"You were right."
She looked at him for one more moment — the copper-blond hair, the honey-brown skin, the blue-green eyes that had been the first clear thing she'd seen in a freezing dock and had not stopped seeing clearly since.
