"Get some rest," Taisen said. "Or whatever it is you do instead."
Colonel Lyn found him alone at the edge of a cliff a few days later, the night of the Festival already well underway below them. Thousands of paper lanterns, lit with small purple flames, drifted upward across the whole floor of the valley in a slow, silent flood, turning the desert dark into something closer to a second sky. It was beautiful in the specific way that only genuinely sad things ever manage to be beautiful, and Lyn's scientific mind kept circling it, hunting for context it didn't have.
Taisen appeared beside her without a sound, the way his people apparently always did.
"A thousand years ago, on this exact night, a fleet came to this world," he said, before she'd fully recovered from the surprise of him. "They burned the cities. The forests. Every animal that couldn't outrun fire. This whole world was swampland before that. I mean to give it back what was taken, someday."
"Is that why you need me," Lyn said. "Relics and scrolls of the Enjarians, to unlock what the Skyforge can actually do."
"That's very perceptive of you." A faint, approving smile. "You're exactly right. I need the arcane knowledge that governs its operation."
Lyn turned back to the lanterns, tragic and lovely in equal measure below them.
"The Skyforge is a dangerous tool to hand to the wrong person. How do I know I can trust you with it?"
"You don't. But if you refuse, my people cease to exist within a generation. We can't grow food or draw water fast enough without it. It's the last hope we have left."
She should have wanted more than that: more time, more evidence, a dozen careful questions any competent officer would ask before handing a legendary weapon's operating instructions to a stranger who'd held her prisoner two days ago. Instead she found the decision already made somewhere she hadn't consciously visited, solid and complete, the way a fact feels once you've known it long enough to stop questioning it. She didn't trust people that fast. She never had. It unsettled her enough that she nearly said so out loud, and didn't, because she had no answer ready for the obvious next question: since when.
"Then I'll help you," she said. "On the condition that whatever it does, it does for good, and nothing else."
"Agreed," Taisen said.
Four days later, the Hermes dropped out of the Fold above the Obradon system and turned her nose toward the alpine world of Avaros.
Something was wrong before anyone could name what, exactly.
Frank came aft to find Lyn in the main cabin, his usual grin nowhere in evidence. "Colonel. We've got a problem."
"What is it?"
"We've been hailing the operators at Avaros for hours. Nothing. Not one signal back, and it's not just their tower gone quiet. We can't raise a single channel out of that whole planet."
"That's not normal for a world this developed," Alita said, already on her feet, worry plain on her face.
"I'm sure your people are fine, Alita," Lyn said, with more confidence than she currently felt, before turning back to Frank. "Take us to the rendezvous. With any luck our contact's just running late."
"Colonel, I'd think twice before we go in blind," Taisen said. "We could be walking straight into something we're not ready for."
"No. We have to know if the Quinians down there are all right. It's our duty," Alita said.
"Emotion has no place in a decision like this one," Taisen said evenly.
"I'm still the ranking officer on this ship," Lyn said. "Captain. Take us down."
"Aye," Frank said, already moving for the bridge, and the Hermes began her descent toward a world that had gone entirely, unnaturally silent.
The Hermes set down in a clearing a few miles outside Moira, engines ticking as they cooled, and nobody moved for a long moment after the ramp finished lowering.
Inside, the cabin still smelled faintly of scorched insulation from the crossing, an ozone tang that clung to the back of the throat no scrubber had quite managed to chase out. Alita sat with both hands flat on her knees, the posture of a woman keeping herself in the chair by main force, staring at the closed hatch as if it might tell her something useful about what waited on the other side of it before she had to find out the hard way. Lyn checked the charge on her sidearm twice in the space of a minute, not because she doubted the readout the first time, but because her hands needed something to do that wasn't shaking.
No lights. That was the first wrong thing, visible even through the narrow strip of the viewport before the ramp had finished its slow descent. A city that never saw daylight and lit itself instead, Alita had said once, half-boasting, back when this had still been an errand rather than a dread, and here it was, throwing off nothing but the dark blue nothing of Avaros's permanent night, no glow rising off the rock formations at all, no wash of colour bleeding up into the low cloud the way she'd described a hundred times to anyone who'd listen.
The second wrong thing was the quiet. Not the ordinary quiet of a forest at night, which has its own business going on underneath it: insects, wind through bare branches, some distant animal deciding whether to be afraid of you. This was a quiet with the machinery switched off. Colonel Lyn had spent enough of her life on dead worlds to know the difference between a place that was simply empty and a place that had been emptied, and this, unmistakably, was the second kind. Even the air tasted different for it, thin and untouched, as if nothing warm-blooded had breathed it in longer than made sense for a planet with thirty-six inhabited cantons and a permanent population in the millions.