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Now I stand in a chamber built before every sacred story my people ever carried into battle, and the foundation begins to crack without making a sound.

Anita looks at me, and her fear hurts more than the ruin.

She is frightened of the archive, but she is also frightened of what the archive is doing to me. I can see guilt move across her face with painful clarity. Her fingers tighten around the case handle. Dust clings to her cheek. Sweat darkens the curls escaping from her pins. Her eyes are too bright in the silver glow, not with tears alone, but with hunger, dread, and the merciless need to know.

“You can say it,” she murmurs.

I keep my gaze on the central opening. “Say what?”

“That this is a bad idea.”

Brakk snorts without humor. “It is absolutely a bad idea.”

Anita does not look at him. “I meant him.”

Brakk lowers his hand. “Fine. I’ll just stand here being professionally ignored by doom.”

I want to tell Anita to close the case. I want to tell her the chamber is too responsive, the systems too awake, the risks too vast. I want to use every practical argument I possess because practical arguments are safer than admitting I am afraid of truth itself. I have faced artillery, vacuum breaches, Reaper boarding lines, and men smiling while ordering villages burned. None of those frightened me like Anita standing at the edge of this archive with a key in her hands and uncertainty in her eyes.

Sira turns from the gap. “Anita, once opened, this system may not allow simple refusal. The records here were preserved against erasure. They may carry safeguards we cannot predict.”

Anita exhales through her nose. “That is a very elegant way of saying the archive might bite.”

“It may do more than bite.”

“Does anyone have a comforting lie handy? I am suddenly seeing the practical appeal.”

Brakk raises a finger. “I once told a customs officer I was transporting religious cheese.”

Anita glances back despite herself. “Religious cheese?”

“It comforted me.”

“Did it work?”

“No, but the beating was brief.”

A small, strained laugh escapes her, and I feel the bond catch on that sound as if even terror wants to keep something alive between us. She looks at me again, softer now, but not weaker. Anita Prentiss does not know how to become weak. Even when shaking, she gathers herself around the shaking and makes a weapon of honesty.

“Ghar,” she says, “I need you to tell me the truth.”

“That has been the source of several problems.”

“Yeah, well, we seem committed to the theme.” She shifts the archive case against her chest. “Do you think I should open it?”

The chamber waits.

Sira does not answer for me. Brakk, mercifully, keeps his mouth shut. The silver strands around Anita’s hands brighten as if the ruins themselves lean toward my response.

I glance at the archive, and a thousand old voices rise inside me.

My mother’s voice, telling me that strength without purpose becomes brutality. My first arms-master, striking the back of my legs with a training rod until I learned never to kneel from pain. The chaplain aboard the cruiser Harrow-Veil, speaking of the Grand Design while we dropped into a city where children hid under broken transit platforms. The dying voice of a soldier I could not carry fast enough, asking whether the Precursors saw him.

The answer I gave him then returns to me with the cruelty of memory.

They see all warriors who serve with honor.

I believed it when I said it because he needed me to believe it. I believed it because I needed the universe to be worthy of the dead.