Lyn was waiting in the corridor outside, arms crossed, her back against the cool bulkhead, her face carrying the particular stillness of a woman who had heard every word through the cracked hatch and was choosing, for now, not to say anything about it until Taisen did first.
"Her," she said finally, when he didn't. "You heard that too."
"I heard it," Taisen said. "I don't know who she was. I don't think he was going to tell me tonight even if Swan had given him the hour."
"Do you think Kade knows."
"I think Kade found the Forge because Zhang sent her there," Taisen said, "and I think whatever happened to the person he watched die reaching into it is the reason he never went back himself, and I think, whatever else that means, it means the Forge is not a locked door waiting for the right key the way the original survey implied. It's a wound, Colonel. Zhang used almost that exact word tonight before Swan cut him off. Something that answers wrong when a person reaches into it without understanding what they're actually asking it for."
Lyn was quiet a moment, turning that over with the same careful attention she gave most things that arrived heavier than they first sounded, her eyes fixed on some point past Taisen's shoulder, somewhere in the middle distance of a corridor that had gone, at this hour, almost entirely still around them. "That sounds," she said slowly, "considerably too close to what Swan's been telling you about your own hand for either of us to be comfortable with the coincidence."
"I've had the same thought," Taisen admitted. "I don't have anywhere useful to put it yet."
Alita found them there a few minutes later, having waited outside at a respectful distance for exactly as long as her own patience allowed, her boots quiet against the deck plating, and fell into step beside them as they started back toward the ready room, her own face carrying the particular tight focus of someone who had spent the last hour thinking rather than resting.
"I ran a search while you were in there," she said. "Fleet's personnel archive, the parts I still have clearance to reach without raising a flag. There's no record of any survey team accompanying a young Zhang anywhere near the Forge's coordinates, forty one years ago or otherwise. Whatever he saw, he saw it unofficially, off any record anyone's ever filed, which either means the mission was classified above anything I can currently touch, or it was never a mission at all. Something he found on his own, the way Kade apparently found it on her own, decades later, standing exactly where he once stood."
"Which would explain forty one years of silence rather better than an official survey would," Lyn said. "A classified mission has a paper trail somewhere, even a buried one. A young officer who wandered somewhere he shouldn't have and watched someone die for it has every reason in the world to make certain no trail exists at all."
Taisen said nothing for a long moment, feeling the cold in his ruined hand settle deeper of its own accord, the way it always did when the shape of a thing mattered enough to notice, and found, weighing everything Zhang had given him against everything he hadn't, that the hour had done considerably less to answer his questions than it had done to multiply them. He looked down the length of the darkened corridor, at the low emergency lighting that ran along its base in a thin amber line, and thought, not for the first time this month, that he had spent two lifetimes learning to read a room and a battlefield both, and had never once learned to read a silence quite this large.
"Get some rest," he said finally, to both of them. "Tomorrow, we hear the rest of it, and I suspect, whatever it is, we're going to need to be considerably more rested than we are right now to hear it properly."
Swan found him alone an hour later in the narrow observation gallery above the shuttle bay, watching the Fold's slow amber churn through the thick viewport glass with the particular stillness of a man who had come there specifically to be alone with a thought he wasn't ready to share yet, and set his scanner case down on the rail without asking permission, because he had learned, across the last month, exactly how much permission this particular commander actually wanted before someone did their job around him.
"I told you I'd check the arm properly once the adrenaline wore off," Swan said, already unpacking the scanner, its small components clicking into place with the practiced economy of a man who had assembled the same kit a hundred times in worse light than this. "This is me checking it properly. Sit still and let me do my job, Commander, and I promise I'll keep the bad news brief."
Taisen held his arm out without argument, watching Swan's face rather than the scanner itself, and read, in the particular careful blankness the man wore while he worked, considerably more than he suspected Swan meant to let show.
"How bad," he said, before Swan had finished the pass.
"Past the shoulder," Swan said, plainly, setting the scanner down with the same deliberate care he always used to deliver something he'd rather not. "Just barely, at the collarbone's edge, but past it, which is a threshold I told you two weeks ago I hoped you wouldn't reach for another several uses yet, and you reached it in one, because that one use ran the well all the way dry for the first time either of us has ever seen it do that. I don't have a clean model for what happens next, Commander. I told you that in the shuttle and I'm telling you again now because it's still true. What I can tell you is that resting doesn't seem to be undoing any of it. It slowed the climb. It didn't reverse a single inch of what you'd already spent."
"And if it reaches my chest," Taisen said, quiet, watching his own hand where it lay against the cold rail, the grey ash-ring around each fingernail catching the gallery's dim light in a way that made it look, for one strange moment, almost beautiful, a wound dressed up as something worth admiring.
"I don't know," Swan said, honest, the same honesty he'd offered every time this question had come up, and it cost him visibly more to say it plainly this time than it had the last. "I don't know if it stops being cosmetic at some point and starts being something I actually have to treat as a medical emergency instead of a debt we're all pretending is manageable because pretending is easier than the alternative. I'd like to tell you I have a plan for that eventuality, Commander. I don't. I have a very sick feeling about it, and considerably more respect for whoever built whatever mechanism is doing this to you than I had two months ago, because it clearly wasn't built by someone who cared very much what happened to the person paying for it."
Taisen looked down at his own hand a long moment, grey now well past the wrist and climbing steadily toward his collarbone, and felt, for the first time since the listening post, something that wasn't quite fear and wasn't quite resignation either, something colder and stranger than both, sitting low in his chest where the grey hadn't yet reached. Outside the viewport, the Fold's churn shifted through some slow, private rhythm of its own, amber bleeding into a deeper bronze and back again, and he found himself watching it the way a man watches a fire he can't quite bring himself to look away from.
"Then I ration what's left of it," he said finally, "the way I promised Lyn I would, and I don't reach for it again until there's no other option left standing, and I trust the rest of this crew to keep me honest about the difference between no other option and the option that's simply fastest."
"I'll hold you to that," Swan said, "and for what it's worth, Commander, I intend to tell Lyn and Camaro both exactly what I just told you, tonight, whether you'd rather I waited or not. This crew's spent too long finding out your costs after the fact. I don't intend to be the reason that habit continues." He hesitated a moment, packing his scanner away with more care than the task strictly required, and added, quieter, "For what it's worth, I don't think you're imagining the resemblance to what Zhang described tonight. I've been running theoretical models on your own condition for weeks now, mostly at night, mostly because I can't sleep until I've tried something new against it, and none of them have ever accounted cleanly for a well running dry the way yours did. A wound that answers wrong when pushed too hard, though. That, I could build a model around. I just don't like what the model predicts."