Neither Lyn nor Alita answered that, because there was nothing to say to it that wouldn't have made it smaller, and the three of them kept walking, the trees thinning further with every step until the last of them gave way all at once to open ground and the full, unbroken sweep of the shore came into view below: a long crescent of pale sand going grey at the water's edge, driftwood scattered in bleached, weathered heaps along the tideline, and beyond it, the sea itself, flat and vast and burning a deep, molten copper under the last hour of daylight, stretching out toward a horizon that had, from this exact vantage, once been the last thing a boy named Bora Shrie had watched before the sky over his home turned white, and then orange, and then the dull, terrible red of a fire that ended his whole world in the space of a single breath.
Taisen stopped at the tree line without being told to, one hand braced against the rough bark of the last tree standing between him and the open sand, and stood there a long moment, breathing, feeling the grey ash ring at the edge of each fingernail catch the fading light in a way that made the debt look, for the first time, less like a smudge and more like something with weight to it, something accruing whether he willed it to or not.
"This is as far as we go," Lyn said, quietly, settling into the shadow of the tree line with the easy, professional stillness of a woman who had spent years learning to disappear into terrain when disappearing mattered more than moving. "You know the signal. Two fingers, raised, held steady for a full count of three. If I see that, or if I see anything on that beach that looks even slightly like the start of something I don't like, I am not waiting for a second signal to act on the first."
"I know," Taisen said.
Alita said nothing at all, but reached out, briefly, and closed her hand around his forearm, just above the wrist, holding it there a beat longer than the gesture strictly needed, and let go without a word, and Taisen found, stepping past her onto the open sand a moment later, that the touch had steadied something in his chest he hadn't realized was still shaking until it stopped.
The sand here ran pale and fine, threaded through with darker bands of crushed shell that his boots turned up with every step, and he found himself, absurdly, cataloguing it the way a much younger version of him once had, barefoot, racing some other child whose name he could no longer put a face to, down this exact slope toward this exact water on some ordinary afternoon that had felt, at the time, like it would simply go on being ordinary forever. He remembered, with a clarity that arrived unasked and unwelcome, the particular sting of that dark shell-grit under bare feet, the way his mother used to make him sit on the porch afterward and pick each fragment out of his soles one at a time with a pair of small wooden tweezers she kept for exactly that purpose, scolding him gently the whole time for running where she'd told him a dozen times not to run, and he understood, walking this same stretch of sand in a body that had never actually belonged to that boy, that grief did not care in the slightest whether the legs carrying it forward were the original ones or not. It simply waited in the ground itself, patient as the tide, for anyone willing to walk back over it.
He walked the last quarter mile alone, the sand giving softly under each step, the surf growing louder with every yard until it filled the whole evening with its slow, patient rhythm, and somewhere near the middle of that last stretch, with the light gone the color of a dying coal and his own shadow stretched thin and long across the sand ahead of him, he saw the shape of a man standing at the water's edge, still, unhurried, exactly where the inscription had promised he'd be, watching the tide come in as though he had nowhere else in the whole galaxy he'd rather be standing.
Malkor did not turn as Taisen approached, and did not turn for the last twenty yards of the walk either, which Taisen understood, even before he'd covered half the distance, as its own deliberate message: a man secure enough in his own safety, or simply his own certainty, to leave his back turned to an armed stranger walking toward him across open sand at dusk. He was, up close, precisely as unremarkable as Ashera's memory had rendered him, and precisely as unsettling for it: tall, though not extravagantly so, dressed in the same plain dark clothing the vision had shown, cut close and unadorned, without a single mark of rank or ceremony anywhere on it, his hands loose at his sides, his hair cropped short and shot through, at the temples, with a grey that looked, in this light, less like age than like something that had simply been bleached out of him by long exposure to something Taisen had no name for. When he finally turned, unhurried, the way a man turns to greet a guest he's been expecting rather than a threat he's been dreading, his eyes caught the last of the copper light and held it a moment too long to be entirely ordinary, a pale, still grey that reminded Taisen, absurdly, of the ash already forming at his own fingertips.
"You came alone," Malkor said, and his voice was exactly as the vision had rendered it too, reasonable, unhurried, gentle in a register that made the words underneath it land with more weight rather than less. "I confess I wasn't entirely certain you would. Most men in your position bring an army even when they've been asked not to, and call the deception wisdom rather than what it actually is, which is fear dressed up in a uniform. I find I respect you a little more for not doing that, whatever else I end up thinking of you by the time this conversation ends."