A week passed in open space, and Noah spent most of it thinking.
He flew with Storm through long stretches of empty black, the Karnfly bite on his forearm finally closed over, the Zenomurph planet and the shrine both sitting further behind him now, and the theory he'd built in that chamber kept circling back no matter how hard he tried to put it down and just focus on the search.
Two pairs. A woman and a stranger with a V-shaped pendant, standing together once, then apart, then one of them gone entirely by the time a whole city burned. Himself and the General, carrying the same unexplained flag with nothing to show for it except a punch that had once folded a star into a fist.
'If that pattern's real,' he thought, drifting against Storm's neck while the wyvern coasted easy through a stretch of dead space, 'then it's not just two people who happened to end up with matching jewelry. It's a structure. Something that repeats.'
