Link raised his right hand, held out three fingers, and drew them once across his chest above where a heart would have been, had he still owned enough of one to matter.
Jorun's expression didn't change. Whatever the gesture meant, he pocketed it without comment, the same way he pocketed everything else worth remembering: quietly, and only ever for a price.
"Search them," he said to his men. "Take anything worth taking. Leave the blade, it's cut two of you already and I'm tired of the paperwork." He looked back at Link. "You'll come talk to me properly, once we're somewhere that isn't a crime scene with a corpse in it. I don't do business over the dead. Bad for the appetite."
"Where are you taking us?" Alita demanded, once they'd been bound and loaded onto the backs of the fliers.
"Somewhere with a roof," Jorun said, not unkindly, not warmly either: simply stating a fact he had no reason to embellish. "You crashed on my planet. That makes you my problem until I decide otherwise, and I'd rather decide that with a meal in front of me than out here in the ash."
The settlement sat low in a valley shadowed by the mountain the Hermes had gone down against, a scatter of half-collapsed bunkers patched with sheet plastic, the ground a grey paste of ash and old mud that squelched underfoot no matter how dry the air smelled. Old artillery emplacements lined the valley's rim, rusted into permanent silence, their barrels canted at odd angles like the fingers of a hand that had died reaching for something. Nothing grew. Nothing, Taisen understood as they were marched through it, had grown here in a very long time, and no one in this valley had bothered pretending otherwise by planting so much as a single hopeful patch of anything green.
They were marched into the largest of the structures and locked into a cell lit by a single portable lamp, the walls damp, the whole place smelling of rust that had given up trying to become anything cleaner. Somewhere above them, muffled through concrete, music of a kind played on (off-key, cheerful, entirely at odds with the valley outside), the sound of people who had made peace, a long time ago, with living inside the wreckage of something bigger than themselves and had decided that dancing on it was preferable to grieving it forever.
Jorun came alone to the bars a while later, still in the same unhurried coat, a data-slate tucked under one arm.
"Cyborg," he said. "Explain the sign, or explain why a science ship needed a blade that cuts through hydraulic steel like wet paper. Pick one. I have time for exactly one story tonight."
"There was something aboard our ship," Link said. "Feeding off the reactor. It killed our pilot before we killed it."
"Blasters exist for that."
"Blasters didn't work on it. His blade did." Link nodded at Taisen without looking away from Jorun. "He's the reason the rest of us are alive to be your problem right now."
Jorun studied Taisen for a long moment: the ruined suit, the exhaustion carved into every line of him, the numbness he was visibly still failing to hide in his own sword hand.
"What's your price for the blade," Jorun said. "Just the blade. Not you."
"It isn't for sale," Taisen said. "And it wouldn't work for you even if it were. It only answers to my hand."
"Convenient story for a man who doesn't want to sell his sword."
"Test it, if you don't believe me."
Jorun considered that, weighed it, and apparently decided the entertainment wasn't worth the risk to his remaining fingers. "Fine. Keep your toy." He turned back to Link. "What's the sign worth to you, exactly? I've had a great many men flash three fingers at my chest hoping it bought them something. Most of them were lying."
"I served under Herman Wrath," Link said, quiet. "So did the man who taught me that sign, before this planet ended him along with everything else it ended. I'm not asking you to like me for it. I'm asking you to remember what it cost the people who taught it to you, and decide from there whether I'm worth feeding."
Something shifted, briefly, behind Jorun's flat yellow eyes: gone again before it had properly arrived. "You'll get fed," he said. "That's not the same as trusted. Sort out the difference on your own time." He rapped once on the bars and walked off without waiting for a reply.
"What was that gesture," Lyn asked, once he'd gone.
"An old code," Link said. "From a war neither of us walked away from clean. I'll tell you the rest of it someday, Colonel. Not tonight."
Alita, still shaking faintly from the ride in, wrapped her arms around her own knees and stared at the damp wall a while before she spoke. "He was almost kind, back there. Under all that flat talk."
"Jorun doesn't do kindness," Link said. "He does ledgers. Somewhere in that ledger, we're worth more alive than dead right now, and he hasn't finished deciding whether that stays true tomorrow. That's the whole of the mercy you're going to get out of him, and it's more than most people ever manage on this planet."
Taisen said nothing, sitting with his back against the damp stone and his blade across his knees, listening to the off-key music drifting down through the concrete above them, and thought, not for the first time since they'd crashed, that a world could apparently survive almost anything done to it, provided the people left standing on it decided, stubbornly, to keep dancing anyway.
Jorun set the Lady Luck on autopilot for Earth and called them all into the map room: a cramped, close space built for four that now held five, plus Jorun himself perched on the edge of the holographic star table like it was the only chair in the world he trusted his own weight to.