Taisen woke in sickbay some hours later to the low, steady hum of the Arctic's Fold drive and the particular clean ache of a body that had spent everything it had and was only now beginning to understand the size of the bill, his ruined arm bound tight against his chest in a sling Swan had clearly fitted while he was still unconscious, the grey along it visible even through the bandaging, climbed now past his shoulder, a faint ashen shadow just beginning to show along the line of his jaw when he turned his head.
"Don't," Swan said, quiet, from the chair beside the bed, before Taisen had even finished the thought of trying to sit up. "You're not moving that arm, or testing whether the Aether answers you, or doing anything at all except lying still and letting me tell you what I found, because I've spent the last several hours finding out considerably more about the shape of this cost than either of us wanted to know tonight."
"Tell me," Taisen said, hoarse, and let his head fall back against the pillow, because arguing the point felt, for the first time in longer than he could remember, genuinely beyond him.
"You ran the well dry," Swan said, plainly. "Not close to empty. Dry. Whatever this power actually draws from, wherever in you it actually lives, you asked it for something in that corridor and there was nothing left to give you, and your body responded to that the same way it would respond to any other resource running out mid-crisis: it shut down the parts of you it judged least essential to keeping you alive, starting with consciousness. I don't know if the well refills on its own given enough time, or if what climbed past your shoulder tonight is simply the price of having asked it for too much, too fast, one time too many. I don't have a model for this, Commander. Nobody's ever handed me a patient who ran this particular tank all the way to empty before."
Taisen was quiet a long moment, feeling the truth of that settle into him alongside everything else the night had already cost, and found, weighing it honestly, that he did not have a comfortable answer to offer either of them.
"Zhang," he said finally. "Is he."
"Stable," Swan said. "Barely, and it'll be a while before he's strong enough for a real conversation, but stable. He asked for you before he went under properly. Insisted on it, actually, in a way that took considerably more out of him than his own body could really afford to spend. Said there was something he needed you to hear from him, and only him, before anyone else got to him first."
Lyn appeared in the sickbay doorway before Taisen could ask what that might mean, her face carrying the worn, guarded exhaustion of a woman who had spent the last several hours running a ship through danger on too little sleep and too much fear, and something in her expression eased, fractionally, at the sight of him awake and breathing.
"He's asking for you too," she said. "Zhang. Swan says he shouldn't be talking at all, and Swan's almost certainly right, but he's been asking every time he surfaces, and I don't think either of us is going to get any peace out of him until he's said whatever it is he's decided has to be said."
Swan looked between the two of them a long moment, weighing, plainly, the cost of the thing he was about to allow against the cost of refusing a man who had clearly already decided the matter for himself, and relented with the particular reluctant grace of a medic who had learned, this last month, exactly how little patience this crew had for being kept from each other when it mattered.
"Five minutes," he said. "No more. And if either of you so much as raises your voice in there, I'm ending it myself."
They found Zhang propped against the second bed's raised headrest, gaunt and hollow eyed but conscious now in a way he hadn't quite managed to be at the listening post, his gaze finding Taisen's the moment he crossed the threshold with an intensity that seemed to cost him something significant to sustain.
"You're the one they sent," Zhang said, his voice still thin but steadier now than it had been aboard the shuttle. "The one Lyn trusts with things she won't explain to me. I've had a long time to think, out there, about who might actually come looking, and a longer time still to think about what I'd need to tell him if he did."
"You have my attention, Marshal," Taisen said, quiet. "Whatever you need to say."
Zhang was silent a moment, his gaze drifting past Taisen toward the sickbay's small viewport and the amber churn of the Fold beyond it, and when he spoke again, his voice had dropped into something low and private, the voice of a man handing over a weight he had carried alone for far longer than the weeks he'd spent in that cell.
"Everyone's been chasing Kade," he said. "Dr. Rosalind Kade, and her forty one years, and her eleven years of patience before that. I let them chase her, because it was easier than telling the truth, and because I genuinely believed, for most of those forty one years, that the truth didn't matter anymore." He drew a slow, careful breath, the effort of it visible in the tight lines around his eyes. "Kade wasn't the one who found the Forge first. I was. Before her. Before any survey, before any official record. I found it, Commander, when I was young enough to still believe finding something that big meant it was mine to understand, and I was the one who told her where to look, because I didn't have the nerve myself to go back to it a second time. She had the nerve. I never did. I've spent forty one years letting the whole Fleet believe she found it alone, because the alternative meant admitting what I saw out there before I ran, and I don't think either of us has the time left tonight for me to explain that properly."
The sickbay went very quiet, the low hum of the Fold drive the only sound left in the room, and Taisen, standing very still with the cold in his ruined arm settling deeper than it had all night, found he did not, for once, have any answer ready at all.