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.
They were four hours into the Fold crossing when Swan finally got Taisen to sit still long enough to look at the hand properly, and even then it took Camaro standing in the sickbay doorway with her arms folded, refusing to leave until it was done, to make the sitting still actually stick.
"You've been holding it curled since the beach," she said, not a question. "I noticed on the ramp. I noticed again in the corridor. You do it without thinking about it now, the way a person favors a bruise they haven't told anyone about yet."
"It doesn't hurt," Taisen said, which was true, and which he understood, saying it, was not the same thing as an answer to what she'd actually asked.
"I didn't ask if it hurt, Commander. I asked why you're hiding it. Sit down."
He sat. Sickbay aboard the Arctic was a narrow compartment built for efficiency rather than comfort, one exam table, two cabinets of supplies that had been restocked twice since the Beluga and were already thinner than either Swan or Camaro liked, and a single overhead light that Swan swung down now on its jointed arm until it hung a foot above Taisen's open palm, pitiless and white and considerably more honest than the warm amber light of the corridor had been.
The grey went past the second knuckle now on three of his fingers, and had reached it on the fourth. A faint ashen bloom, under the skin rather than on it, the way a bruise sits under skin gone pale with cold.
Except this didn't fade when he flexed the hand.
And it didn't warm when Swan, frowning, wrapped both of his own hands around it to check.
"Cold," Swan said. "Colder than the rest of you. Cold like something's not getting blood the way it should, except your pulse reads fine at the wrist, fine everywhere else I can check without equipment this ship doesn't carry. I don't know what I'm looking at, sir. I want to say that plainly before I say anything else, because I'd rather you hear I don't know honestly than hear me guess and dress the guess up as a diagnosis."
"I'd rather that too," Taisen said. "For what it's worth."
Camaro had come the rest of the way into the room without being invited. She stood now at the edge of the exam table, her own bandaged hand held loosely against her side, the wrap grown thin and a little grey at its edges from three weeks of wear.
She looked at Taisen's palm. Then down at her own. Then back again.
Alita, who had followed her in a step behind without quite meaning to intrude, understood what she was doing before Camaro ever said it out loud.
"We're a matched set now," Camaro said, flat, not quite a joke. "You spent something you didn't mean to spend on a beach, talking to a monster. I spent something I didn't mean to spend on a woman I trusted, for exactly long enough to get burned for it. Neither one of us asked for the bill.
"Neither one of us gets much say in when it comes due." She unwound her own wrap, slowly, with the same economical care she brought to every motion since the Cell system, and held the bared hand up beside his under the light: hers scarred pink and shining where the graft had taken, still tight and unpracticed in its movement, his grey climbing steady and cold and entirely without a mark to show where it had come from. "The difference is, mine's healing. Yours is getting worse. I'd like to know if anyone on this ship actually understands what happens if it doesn't stop."
"No one on this ship does," Taisen said. "I include myself in that. I've spent this cost across two lifetimes and never once seen it behave the way it's behaving now, spending itself simply because I stood still on a beach and remembered something. I don't have a chart for that. I don't know anyone who does."
"Then find someone who might," Camaro said, and there was no give in it at all.
Swan, still holding Taisen's hand in both of his own under the light, turned it slowly, studying the exact edge where grey met living color along the fourth finger, a border that did not look, up close, like the clean line a bruise made. It looked, he thought, and did not say out loud because he wasn't yet certain he trusted the thought, like something advancing at its own pace regardless of what anyone standing in the room decided about it.
"I want to run a proper scan," he said instead, "the kind this sickbay wasn't built for, the kind we'd need a real med bay and real equipment to run right. I can't tell you what it means. I can tell you it's not slowing down between the second knuckle and here," he touched, lightly, the base of Taisen's ring finger, "and I can tell you that whatever's driving it, it isn't behaving like tissue damage. It's behaving like something being spent. Like you said." He set the hand down, carefully, the way a man sets down something he's decided, for now, not to be afraid of out loud. "I'd like your permission to keep the exact numbers between the three of us in this room for now, sir. Not to hide anything from the crew. Because a number like how far, how fast is the kind of thing that gets repeated in a mess hall before anyone means it to, and I don't think this ship needs to watch that countdown in real time while we're trying to solve it."