The light figures dissolved.
Jiseok lowered his hand and the rendered space between them went dark and it was just the two of them in the workshop again, the completed pieces in their cases along the walls, the single unfinished piece on the working surface, the Stellar Breaker leaning against a flat surface where Kang Min had set it.
Kang Min looked at him.
"You knew," he said. He kept his voice at the same register he used for everything that mattered. Flat. No edge to it because edges were for things that could still be argued. "When you built the body, you knew whose soul was going to end up in it."
Jiseok held the expression from before, the one that gave a question all the time it needed.
"The star I built the body for was dying," he said. "I built it for that star. That was what I knew when I built it."
"And after."
