Zhang's eyes had already drifted half shut by the time Taisen found his voice again, the effort of the last several sentences visibly the largest expenditure his body had made since the listening post, his breath coming shallow and uneven under the thin sickbay blanket, and it was Swan, standing just inside the hatch with his arms folded and his face set in the particular flat warning of a medic counting down a clock only he could see, who spoke before Taisen could.
"That's the five minutes," Swan said. "I let it run because I could see it mattered to both of you, and I'm not sorry I did, but I meant what I told you before you walked in here, Commander. He's spent everything he had left standing up in that cell for weeks on end, and this conversation has cost him more of it in ten minutes than the last three hours of rest put back."
"I'm not finished," Zhang said, thin, but with an edge of stubbornness that had apparently survived even the worst of the last six weeks intact. "I've carried this forty one years, Commander. I can carry it another hour if the alternative is leaving it unfinished."
"You can carry it another day," Swan said, not unkindly, "which is not the same thing as should, and I outrank both of you in this specific room regardless of what either of your collars says anywhere else on this ship." He looked at Taisen directly, and something in his face softened by a fraction, the particular give of a man who understood exactly how much this cost to interrupt and was choosing to interrupt it anyway because the alternative cost more. "You have my word he'll still be here tomorrow to finish it, Commander. I can't promise you that if I let this go another hour tonight, and I'd rather be the man who made you wait a day than the man who let a patient talk himself into a relapse because nobody in the room was willing to say no to him."
Taisen held Zhang's gaze a long moment, weighing the plain, honest shape of Swan's warning against the raw, unfinished weight of what Zhang had already handed him, and found, doing the arithmetic the same careful way he did every other decision that mattered, that there was only one answer that didn't cost someone something neither of them could afford to spend tonight. The sickbay's low light caught the lines of exhaustion carved into Zhang's face, deeper than they should have been on a man not yet sixty, the particular hollow look of someone who had spent weeks being fed just enough to keep him alive and not one calorie more, and Taisen found, studying it, that he could not in good conscience ask this man to spend what little he had left simply to satisfy a curiosity that had already waited forty one years.
"Tomorrow, then," he said, quiet. "But Marshal, before I go. You said everyone's been chasing Kade and her forty one years, and that you let them, because it was easier than the truth. I need one thing more before I leave this room, even if it's the only thing you have strength left to give me. Whatever you saw out there, that made you run instead of going back a second time. Was it Malkor."
Zhang was quiet a long moment, his eyes fully closed now, the rise and fall of his chest slow and shallow under the thin blanket, the sickbay's low hum the only sound in the room besides it, and when he finally answered, his voice had dropped so low that Taisen had to lean in close to catch it at all, close enough to smell the faint, clinical scent of the salve Swan had worked into the raw skin along his wrists.
"No," he said. "Not Malkor. Something older than him. Or something he'd already lost to, a very long time before either of us were anyone worth losing to." His hand moved, weak and searching, until it found Taisen's sleeve and closed around it with what little strength remained in his grip, the knuckles pale and trembling with the effort of the gesture alone. "I saw what the Forge does to a person who reaches into it wrong, Commander. I saw it happen to someone standing eight feet away from me, and I have spent forty one years being grateful, in the particular ugly way a coward is grateful, that it happened to her and not to me."
"Her," Taisen said, very still, the word settling into him with a weight that had nothing to do with the cold already climbing his ruined arm.
"Tomorrow," Zhang said again, his hand loosening, his voice fading past the edge of anything Swan was willing to let continue, and Swan was already moving, already easing Taisen back from the bed with a hand on his shoulder that brooked no further argument, firm and final in a way that reminded Taisen, distantly, of the same grip Swan had used to keep Camaro's hand elevated in a shuttle that felt, now, like it had happened in some other, older lifetime rather than a handful of days ago. The last thing Taisen saw before the sickbay hatch closed behind him was Zhang's face going slack with exhausted sleep, one word still sitting unfinished in the air of that room like a held breath nobody had been given permission to release.