"I'm not hurt," he said.
"Not in the way you mean.
I'm not certain there's a way to explain the way I actually am, standing here, that would make either of you feel better about hearing it, so I'd rather save the attempt for the ship, where Swan can put a proper light on my hand and tell us all whether I've done something to myself tonight that's going to matter later."
Lyn lowered the rifle at last, slowly, and turned to look at him with an expression that had gone, in the space of a few seconds, from raw fear straight through anger and out the other side into something quieter and considerably more tired.
"You're going to tell me everything he said," she said.
"Every word of it, Taisen, on the walk back up that hill, because I stood in those trees for the better part of an hour listening to you talk to a man who apparently knows the exact contents of your dead life better than you do, and I am done, completely and finally done, watching you carry things alone that the rest of us are already carrying the consequences of whether you tell us about them or not."
"I know," Taisen said, and this time there was no argument left in him to offer against it, only the plain, worn-down agreement of a man who had run out of reasons to keep anything back.
"I'll tell you everything.
All of it.
I promise you that much, at least, before we're back aboard."
They started up the dark hillside together, the three of them, the tide rising slow and steady behind them to erase whatever footprints the evening had left in the sand, and somewhere above the tree line the running lights of the Arctic swung low and patient through the darkening sky, waiting to carry them all back up into a night that had, in the space of one conversation on an empty shore, changed the shape of considerably more than any of them had walked down that hill expecting it to.
He told them everything on the climb back, exactly as he'd promised, stopping only twice, once to steady himself against a tree when the weight of saying Boettia's name out loud to Lyn for the first time in his second life caught him harder than he'd braced for, and once, near the top, when Alita simply stopped walking entirely and made him repeat, word for word, what Malkor had said about the recall order, because she had gone very pale hearing it the first time and wanted to be certain, hearing it again, that she hadn't imagined the shape of what it meant.
"Beside him," she said, finally, once he'd repeated it.
"Not above Zhang.
Beside him. That means someone Zhang trusts.
Someone close enough to see everything he sees."
"That's what it means," Taisen agreed, "assuming Malkor told me the truth, which I have no way of confirming and every reason to suspect he had a purpose in telling me regardless of whether it's accurate.
He gives nothing away for free, Alita. Not information, not mercy, not even the shape of his own doubt about whether he's right about men like me.
If he told me that, it's because he wanted me carrying it home, and I don't yet know why, and I find that I trust the gift a great deal less than I trust the man who gave it."
They reached the ship in full darkness, the ramp lowering to a warm, familiar light that felt, after the black water and the colder dark beyond it, almost aggressively ordinary, and Swan met them at the base of it with a medkit already open and Camaro close behind him, her bandaged hand tucked awkwardly against her side, both of them reading, in the particular way a crew learns to read its own people after weeks of shared danger, that whatever had happened on that beach had not stayed on that beach the way they'd all quietly hoped it might.
"Report, Commander," Camaro said, and there was no ease in it at all, only the flat, careful attention of an officer bracing to hear something she already suspected she wouldn't like.
Taisen looked at the four of them standing there in the ramp's warm light, Lyn and Alita still carrying the sand of that beach on their boots, Swan with the medkit already open in his hands, Camaro with her burned hand held carefully against her side, and understood, looking at all of them, that whatever this crew had signed on for when they'd chosen the shuttle he'd never made them take, it had just become, in the space of one conversation with a man who walked into darkness and simply stopped existing, considerably larger and considerably more dangerous than any of them had bargained for when they'd stayed.
He held up his hand instead of answering right away, turning it slowly under the ramp's light so all four of them could see the grey climbing well past the second knuckle now, spreading, faint but undeniable, toward the base of his palm.
"I have a great deal to tell you," he said.
"Some of it about Malkor.
Some of it about the ring in my pocket, and what it's actually worth, and to whom.
And one piece of it, which I suspect will matter most of all before this is finished, about a leak inside Fleet Command that none of us have any business trusting until we know a great deal more about it than a dead man's enemy chose to tell us on a beach at dusk."
He closed his hand slowly, watching the grey vanish beneath his own fingers, and felt, for the first time since the shore, the cold, clear certainty that whatever came next, it would not wait for any of them to finish catching their breath first.
"Get us off this planet, Ensign.
I'll explain the rest once we're back in the dark where I can't see that shore out the viewport anymore.
Some conversations, I've found, are considerably easier to survive once there's real distance between you and the place you had them."
The ramp closed behind them a few minutes later, sealing out the last of Triskelion's cold night air, and the Arctic lifted off the dark hillside and climbed, slow and steady, back toward the waiting stars, carrying away from that shore a ring that had just become worth considerably more than any of them had understood when it first crossed the threshold of a mining station's cargo bay, a confession two lifetimes in the making, and a single, unconfirmed sentence about a traitor standing close enough to Fleet Marshal Zhang to see everything he saw, that none of them, not even Taisen, yet had the first idea how to begin proving true.