"And the alien himself, sir?"
"Tell him I want him ready in five hours." Zhang turned back to the window, to the skyline, to the quiet, expensive calm of a capital that had no idea yet how thin that calm actually was. "Log the order. Destination: return transport standing by for Colonel Lyn's team, pending further briefing. Purpose: investigation of the synthetic threat located in the outer system." He paused, weighing, the way he weighed everything, for the exact cost of what he was about to authorize before he authorized it. "Whatever this Sahir turns out to be worth to us, I'd rather find out with him inside the tent than out. Make the call."
"Yes, sir." The aide hesitated at the door. "And the three million, sir, will the Senate ask where that came from?"
"Only if they find out," Zhang said, "which they won't, because you're about to make certain of it." He didn't turn around again. "That's all, Torvald."
Five hours. Somewhere across the city, in a low-ceilinged tavern that smelled of a dozen species at once, a dark-skinned man who had once commanded the whole of this fleet under a different name sat with an untouched drink in front of him, entirely unaware that the summons already on its way to him would put his hand on the wheel of a ship called the Arctic before the week was through, unaware, too, that the crew he'd bury and the crew he'd command were about to become considerably harder to keep separate than he currently imagined, or that a woman he'd once called Colonel in a life he no longer had the name for was, at this exact moment, standing at a viewport somewhere in this same glittering city, turning a chipped bead bracelet over once between her fingers before she put it away and went to fetch him.
Lyn found him exactly where Zhang's aide had said she would, in the same booth, behind the same sticky partition, the same untouched glass of something the color of motor oil sitting in front of him gone flat and warm. Jorun was gone (off settling his own accounts somewhere deeper in the tavern's back rooms, no doubt), and Taisen sat alone with his sword across his knees, watching the door the way a man watches a door when he has already decided, privately, what he intends to do about whoever walks through it.
"Commander Zhang wants you at Whitehall," Lyn said, sliding into the seat across from him without asking. "Five hours."
"For what."
"He didn't say. He also didn't ask." She turned the chipped bead bracelet over once more in her pocket, out of sight, and let it go. "Get up. You smell like the underworld, and I refuse to be the one who explains that to a room full of admirals."
The shuttle lifted out of Upper Earth's private hangar a little before dawn, and Taisen watched the city fall away beneath them through a viewport still faintly fogged with someone else's breath: three navy troopers riding in silence at the rear of the cabin, Link folded into the seat across from him with his mechanical half catching the running lights in a way flesh never quite did, Alita beside Taisen with both hands pressed flat to her knees again, the same posture she'd worn coming down onto Avaros's dead ground weeks ago, as if stillness in the hands could be borrowed against whatever the rest of her felt.
Below, the gridlines of impulse traffic wove between the towers in their thousand-lane dance, packed and precise and entirely unbothered by the fact that a war none of them could see yet was already gathering somewhere past the edge of the sky. The pilot eased them up into a lane reserved for military transponders, and Taisen watched the city's landmarks slide past and resolve into memory one at a time: there, the pale colonnade of the Academy where he'd spent the better part of his adolescence learning to become exactly the kind of officer the Senate now distrusted; there, past it, the industrial stacks breathing superheated vapor into a sky that had forgotten what stars looked like; there, further still, the Senate dome itself, squat and self-important beneath towers that dwarfed it on every side.
Decades gone, in the life this body hadn't lived. And still his chest did something involuntary at the sight of it, some old animal recognition older than guilt, older than the name Herman Wrath. He put the feeling away in the place he put everything he wasn't ready to examine in daylight, which had become, he reflected without much humor, a very crowded place indeed.
"You're doing the thing with your jaw," Alita said, quietly, not looking at him. "The one where you're pretending you're not thinking about anything at all."
"I'm thinking about several things at once. That's simply how my face looks while I do it."
"That's not reassuring."
"It wasn't meant to be."
Link, across from them, said nothing for a long while, his organic eye tracking the skyline with an attention that had nothing casual in it. When he finally spoke, it was pitched low enough that the troopers at the rear of the cabin wouldn't have caught it over the engine noise.
"You used to hate this city," he said. "Before. You told me once that everything above the fortieth floor was built to make a man forget how far down the people who built it actually lived."
"I remember saying something like that." Taisen didn't look away from the window. "I don't remember it being to you."
"It wasn't. Not the first time." Link's jaw (the half of it still built from muscle rather than servo) tightened, and for a moment the old, careful blankness he wore around Lyn and Alita slipped, just slightly, just for the two of them. "You said it to my face once, actually, a long time before I earned the right to be spoken to like a man instead of a weapon you'd already decided to break. I want you to know I remember every word of it. Even the ones that weren't kind."