Alita felt something cold settle at the base of her spine, the particular, familiar cold of a suspicion she'd been carrying quietly for weeks finally finding a shape solid enough to hold. "Venemis's station," she said.
"I didn't want to say the name first," Swan admitted. "In case I was wrong."
"You're not wrong," Alita said, and did not feel any satisfaction at all in saying it.
She brought it to Taisen that evening, in his quarters, laying the timestamp and the terminal log out on the small desk between them without commentary, because she had learned by now that he preferred to read a thing plainly before anyone told him what to feel about it. He studied it a long while, longer than the data strictly required, and when he finally looked up, whatever had been sitting unspoken behind his eyes since the Cell system ambush had resolved, at last, into something with an edge to it.
"I suspected this the day it happened," he said. "I told her so, obliquely, and she gave me an answer smooth enough to pass for innocent if I'd wanted to believe it. I didn't have proof. I have proof now."
"What do you want to do with it."
"Ask her, first," Taisen said. "Directly, and alone, and give her the chance to tell me something I haven't already worked out for myself. I owe her that much, whatever she's done. I know what it is to be a person with no good options left, forced to choose the least unforgivable one available."
He went to her that night, alone, having told Lyn plainly where he was going and why, and having declined, with a firmness that ended the conversation before it started, her offer to come with him.
Venemis was seated cross legged on the narrow floor of her quarters when the door chimed, not deep in trance this time, simply still, the way she'd taught herself to be still across weeks of being watched by people who didn't trust her, and she rose to meet him with the same careful, practiced formality she'd offered him the first day aboard.
"Commander," she said. "This is an unusual hour for a visit."
"It is," Taisen agreed, and did not sit when she gestured toward the single chair the room offered, choosing instead to stand near the door, close enough to see her face clearly and far enough that neither of them could mistake this for a conversation between equals. "I know about the transmission, Venemis. The one you sent from the navigation bay, before we reached the Cell system. Encrypted, short range, timed precisely to a window you thought our systems weren't watching. I have the log. I have the timestamp. I don't need you to confirm it. I'm asking you to, regardless, because I want to hear what you say when you're given the chance to say it honestly, and I want you to understand that whatever you tell me next will be the last thing I take purely on your word."
The winglets along her jaw went rigid, the way Taisen had learned, across weeks of watching her, meant genuine fear rather than performed composure, and for a long moment she said nothing at all, her third eye closed beneath its lidless black film, her hands very still in her lap.
"You already know," she said finally, quietly.
"I know what happened. I don't yet know why. I'd like to."
She was silent a while longer, and when she finally spoke, her voice had lost the careful, formal cadence she'd worn like armor since the day she'd come aboard, replaced by something rawer, older, closer to the sound of a woman who had simply run out of places to hide the truth.
"My daughter," she said. "And her daughter after her. Malkor's people hold them, on Monjit, alongside every other hostage they judged useful enough to keep breathing rather than useful enough to kill outright. I was permitted to leave my own world, Commander, permitted to travel, permitted even to serve you, on exactly one condition: that I report, whenever asked, anything I learned that Malkor's people judged worth knowing. I was not given a choice in the matter, the way you might understand the word choice. I was given a smaller and crueler thing instead. I was given a schedule, and a code, and the understanding, made explicit to me in a room I still dream about, that my silence would be answered with my granddaughter's death inside a week of my failing to report."
"When were you approached," Taisen asked, his voice giving away nothing.
"Before you ever set foot on Arkania Prime. Before I had ever heard your name. I had already been theirs, in this fashion, for longer than you've commanded that ship."
"And the burst transmission at the Cell system. What did it say."
"Your approach vector," Venemis said. "Your ship's configuration. The rough number of crew aboard, insofar as I'd been able to observe it. I sent what I believed was the minimum required to keep my granddaughter alive one more week, and I told myself, sending it, that I would find some way to warn you in turn before it cost you anything. I was wrong about the timing. I was wrong about how quickly they'd act on it. A man died because I was wrong, and I have not slept a full night since, and I do not expect you to find any of that a sufficient excuse, because it isn't one. It's simply the truth, offered to you now because you've already found the parts of it you didn't need me to hand you."
Taisen studied her for a long time in silence, the particular silence Alita had learned to recognize as a man weighing a judgment he had no interest in making carelessly, and when he finally spoke, his voice carried none of the cold fury Venemis had visibly braced herself to receive.