The Maker turned.
The motion was unhurried, the same quality everything about him carried, and when he faced Kang Min fully the lower half of the face was readable in the way that the face of someone who had spent decades thinking about problems was readable. Lines around the mouth. A jaw that had set itself into a particular shape and stayed there. The nebula in the cloak's folds shifted with the turn and then settled.
He looked at Kang Min's neck.
Not at his face. At the fracture line, the golden light at its edge that Kang Min had been carrying since the aquarium like a debt he hadn't chosen to take on. The Maker studied it for a moment with the reading-quality, the same assessment he had given materials in the practice bay forty years ago, and then he looked at Kang Min's face.
"Talk," he said.
Kang Min set the Stellar Breaker against the nearest flat surface and crossed his arms.
