Lyn didn't press him. She had learned, across the weeks since the Beluga, exactly how much good pressing him actually did, which was, in her considered judgment, very little, and considerably less than simply standing beside him in a silence that didn't demand anything of him at all.
"I trust you," she said instead, after a while, quietly, and heard the words land somewhere she hadn't quite expected them to, because she hadn't planned to say them, hadn't rehearsed them the way she usually rehearsed the things she meant to tell him, and found, saying them now, that they were simply true in a way she'd never once managed to fully explain to herself. "I've trusted you since the derelict, before I had any good reason to, before I even knew your real name, and I've spent every week since trying to work out why, and I've never once landed on an answer that made sense to the part of me that spent thirty years being suspicious of exactly this kind of certainty for a living. I don't have an answer for you tonight either. I only wanted you to know, before whatever's waiting on that planet gets its turn to test it, that the trust was never conditional on you explaining yourself to me first."
Taisen turned to look at her, something unguarded moving briefly across his face before the old careful architecture reasserted itself, gentler this time than usual, but present all the same. "Thank you," he said, simply, and it was, Lyn thought, watching him say it, the most honest two words she'd heard out of him since the day they'd met.
They dropped out of the Fold at the edge of the Triskelion system on the ninth day of the crossing, and the planet itself hung in the forward viewport a full three hours before the Arctic reached orbital range, a pale, blue green world wrapped in thin ribbons of high cloud, unremarkable in every way a planet could be unremarkable, which was, Taisen thought, standing very still at the center of the bridge with his eyes fixed on it, exactly the cruelest thing about it. It looked like nowhere in particular. It looked like a hundred other worlds he'd catalogued across two lifetimes of study, ordinary and blue and quiet, giving no outward sign at all of the thing it had once taken from him.
He felt the numbness reach his fingertips before he consciously noticed he was clenching his hands, a familiar, unwelcome tightness spreading slow and cold from the tips inward, and when he finally looked down at them, unclenched, he found the faint grey ash ring already forming at the edge of each nail bed, the visible receipt of a debt his body had apparently decided to start paying before he'd asked it to spend anything at all.
"Sir," Alita said quietly, close enough that only he could hear it, her eyes flicking once, briefly, to his hands before returning to his face, "your fingers."
"I know," Taisen said.
"You didn't use anything. Not that I saw."
"No," he agreed. "I didn't." He looked at the grey ring a moment longer, turning his hand slowly in the pale light of the bridge, and something in his voice, when he spoke again, carried a weight she hadn't heard from him before, not fear exactly, but its close and careful cousin. "I've always understood the cost as a ledger for what I spend deliberately. I've never once seen it charge me for simply being afraid."
"Maybe it isn't the fear," Alita said, carefully. "Maybe it's memory. Maybe this place counts as something you're spending, whether you meant to or not, just by being close enough to remember it properly for the first time in two lifetimes."
Taisen said nothing to that, because he had no answer for it that wouldn't have required examining a possibility he wasn't ready, yet, standing on the bridge of a ship with a hundred lives depending on his composure, to examine in front of anyone at all.
They held at a cautious high orbit for the better part of an hour, sensors sweeping the surface for any sign of the welcome Malkor's message had promised, and found, at first, almost nothing: scattered ruins along one temperate coastline, old enough and overgrown enough that Vessyr's archive placed the last recorded habitation there at somewhere north of two decades gone, a handful of automated weather stations still faithfully logging data nobody had collected in years, and, at the center of it all, a single structure Taisen recognized before Alita had even finished reading its coordinates aloud.
It was a low, curved building of pale stone, half swallowed by the encroaching green of two decades of unchecked growth, its long axis oriented, with a precision that could not possibly have been accidental, toward the exact hillside where a boy named Bora Shrie had once knelt beside three bodies that used to be his family and hadn't yet learned that grief was a thing you were required to survive.
"That structure wasn't there," Taisen said, very quietly, to no one in particular, his eyes fixed on the display. "Not the last time I was here. There was nothing on that hillside but the hillside."
"Someone built it," Lyn said, reading the same scan he was reading. "Recently, by the look of the growth pattern around the foundation. Recently enough that it hasn't had time to weather the way the rest of these ruins have."
"Someone built it there," Taisen said, "on that exact hillside, facing that exact direction, and I do not believe for one moment that whoever built it did so by accident."
Swan, at the sensor station, ran the resolution up as high as the scan would allow, and the image that resolved on the main display, sharpened now to the edge of what the Arctic's instruments could manage from orbit, showed a structure kept, tended, its stonework clean of the moss and creeping vine that choked every other ruin on that coastline, its approach path clear and level and swept, as though someone came there often, and cared, in some careful and deliberate way, that it never be allowed to fall into the same quiet ruin as everything around it.