"Whichever it is," Taisen said, "it isn't a conversation Avaros is having with us. Not tonight."
Alita knew a way in: an old service tunnel, half-collapsed, that ran under the rock shelf into the lower levels of the nearest tower, a shortcut she'd used as a girl to sneak into the market district without her mother catching her doing it. It smelled of standing water and cold stone the whole way through, and none of them spoke until they came up through a rusted grate into the tower's ground floor and found, in the flat white light of a maintenance lamp someone had left burning, a row of cages.
Blue-skinned prisoners sat behind wire mesh, in bright ceremonial tunics gone dull with dust, more of the same silent sentries standing over them like patient shepherds. There were perhaps thirty of them in the row of cages, Taisen counted, sitting or lying with the particular economy of motion of people who had learned, the hard way, that any gesture too large drew attention they couldn't afford. A few looked up at the newcomers with something that might have been hope, quickly and deliberately smoothed back down into nothing before it could cost them anything.
"Dad!"
Alita was through the gap in the mesh before either of the others could stop her, on her knees in front of a lean, gray-haired man whose hands came up automatically to catch her before he'd registered who was catching him.
"You shouldn't have come," he said, and the warmth in his voice sat strangely alongside the words, as if the two things had learned to live together a long time ago and stopped fighting about it.
"You're a prisoner on your own world," Alita said. "Of course I came."
"We don't need soldiers. We need ships. Passage out, nothing more."
Taisen studied the cage, the sentries, the dozen other prisoners sitting with a stillness that read less like fear and more like something rehearsed. "You outnumber whatever's guarding you. Twelve to one, by my count. Why haven't you simply walked out?"
"Because it is not our way," the old man said, without heat, the way a person states their own height. "We eschew violence. Even in defence of ourselves."
"Your people have been caged like livestock," Taisen said, "and you'll die in here rather than lift a hand to stop it. That isn't peace. That's cowardice wearing peace as a disguise."
"Enough." Alita, sharp, rounding on him with her whole body. "You don't get to say that to him."
"Then correct me. Tell me the difference."
"The difference," her father said, before Alita could answer for him, "is that a coward is afraid of what violence will cost him. I am not afraid of that at all. I have simply decided, a long time before you arrived on this world, what I am and am not willing to become to survive it. That is not the same fear you're describing, young man, however alike they may look to you from where you're standing."
Taisen opened his mouth to press the point further, and it was Lyn's raised hand, not Alita's glare, that stopped him, because in the half-second of quiet that followed, one of the sentries at the end of the row had turned. Not toward the cage. Toward them.
Its head (if the boxed housing at the top of its chassis could be called that) tracked slowly across the four of them and stopped, hovering, on Taisen. The muzzle beneath it began, with a low mechanical whine, to rotate up out of its resting angle.
"Everyone stay very still," Alita's father said, in exactly the same unhurried tone he'd used a moment ago to call Taisen a coward's opposite, and rose from the floor of the cage with his empty hands held open and visible at his sides, moving the way water moves rather than the way a man moves, no sudden angle in him anywhere. He walked to the near edge of the cage (not toward Taisen, away from him, putting his own body between the sentry's rising muzzle and the strangers who'd just been standing over a pair of gutted synthetics with blood still on their blades) and began, very softly, to hum.
It wasn't a song Taisen recognized. It didn't need to be. The whine in the sentry's targeting servo climbed another half-step and then, with an audible click, stood down, the muzzle sinking back into its resting angle as if it had simply lost interest, its head tracking away from all of them and back out toward the empty corridor beyond the cages.
Nobody in the room breathed for a three-count.
"How," Lyn said, very carefully, "did you just do that."
"These things hunt by intent, not by shape," the old man said, lowering himself back down among his people with the same unhurried care he'd stood up with. "We learned that the hard way, the first week they put us in here. Anger reads to it as a threat signature. Calm reads as nothing worth spending a shot on. It is a very simple machine wearing a very complicated face, and it has never once, in all the weeks we've watched it, mistaken genuine stillness for a trick." He looked, not unkindly, at Taisen. "Your friend there is carrying enough leftover violence in his blood right now to have painted the walls of this room, cub. I imagine that machine felt every ounce of it and was two seconds from deciding you were worth the ammunition. My stillness is not a performance for your benefit. It is the only weapon my people have ever needed against a thing exactly like this one, and tonight it happened to also be the only weapon that could have kept the four of you from dying in a cage that isn't even yours."
Nobody had an answer to that. Taisen, least of all. He looked at his own hands (the drying black-and-red mix of synthetic blood still crusted along one knuckle, the sword still humming faintly with the last of what he'd drawn from it outside) and understood, with the specific discomfort of a man watching a favourite argument take a hit it might not recover from, that the old man wasn't wrong about the shape of what had just happened, only about what it proved beyond that one room.