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“I heard you,” he replied, voice low.

“That wasn’t an answer.”

“No.”

“Then answer me.”

He exhaled through his nose, a sharp, controlled sound, and stepped around me. “Move.”

I held my ground, and his eyes narrowed. “This is my record,” I insisted.

“And this is my laboratory,” he shot back, each word clipped.

“You really want to do this?” I asked, and in the silence that followed, the yellow ŭre beneath his skin pulsed faintly—once, twice. That told me everything I needed to know. Whatever was happening here went beyond annoyance or fear of reprimand; this was something deeper, something that had him truly scared. So I moved.

Sera’n took my place at the workstation and entered an access sequence too quickly for me to follow. The screen changed, replacing my registration record with a black field covered in lines of Zunatorian text.

I crossed my arms. “What are you doing?”

“Checking something.”

“That’s very informative.”

He ignored me.

His fingers moved over the controls, opening one directory, then another. I recognized portions of the interface from the records system I used every day, but he had accessed administrative layers I had never seen.

That irritated me immediately.

“You have access to the original logs.”

He stopped moving. Just for half a second, but I saw it, and I almost laughed.

“You really need to stop doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“Freezing every time I figure something out.”

“I am not freezing.”

“You absolutely are.”

“Talia.”

There was my name again in that warning tone.

Normally, it would have annoyed me enough to push harder just because I could.

This time, something in his expression stopped me.

I leaned against the edge of the neighboring table instead.

“Fine. Check.”

He turned back to the screen.

For the next minute, I watched information populate in columns I could only partially read. Zunatorian wasn’t impossible, but technical Zunatorian was another monster entirely. The spoken language was hard enough. Their written medical terminology looked like someone had decided apostrophes and accented vowels needed to reproduce.