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I set the dull blade across both palms, the way I was taught as a child. “Ritual requires sincerity. If I enact sacred surrender while believing no sacred recipient exists, is that honoring the tradition or mocking it?”

“Maybe it depends on what you’re surrendering to.”

“There is no Grand Design.”

“No.” Her voice remains gentle. “Probably not.”

“There is no destiny placing our suffering into order.”

“Not from the outside.”

I look at her sharply.

She holds my gaze without flinching. “That does not mean there is no order we make from the inside.”

I look back at the blade. “A scholar’s answer.”

“A terrified scholar’s answer,” she corrects. “Small distinction, but important.”

The ship hums around us. Somewhere beyond the closed door, recovery teams catalogue debris, League officials draft demands, and survivors learn the cruel grammar of aftermath. In this shrine station, the smoke continues rising as if ancient rituals are patient with the wounded, even when belief is not.

“I thought despair would be the only honest response,” I say.

Anita’s hand moves slightly, then stops before touching me. “Is it?”

“No.”

The answer surprises me because it is true.

I wait for the next wave of emptiness, but what arrives instead is less dramatic. It is not joy. It is not peace. It is a strange open space where certainty once stood, wide and frightening and not entirely barren.

I draw a slow breath. The cedar-smoke tastes different now. Not sacred. Not false. Human hands would say crafted, though this is Vakutan smoke and not human at all. Someone chose the wood. Someone carried the mineral. Someone cut the spiral into stone and stocked the rack with symbolic blades because they knew people in pain might need an action when explanations failed. The ritual’s power did not descend from the universe.

It came from those choices.

From repetition.

From care.

From generations of my people making a place for grief and calling that place holy because they needed holiness and therefore built it.

My throat tightens.

Anita notices. “What?”

“I think I hated them for lying.”

“Your ancestors?”

“The priests. The myth-makers. The soldiers who repeated what they were told. The mothers teaching children that suffering could serve purpose.” I swallow, and the motion hurts less than the words. “But perhaps they were not only lying. Perhaps some of them were building shelter with the materials they had.”

Her eyes shine. “Yeah.”

“That does not excuse those who turned shelter into a weapon.”

“No. It doesn’t.”

“It does not absolve the commanders who used sacred language to make slaughter obedient.”