Maybe it was never going to separate cleanly, he thought. Maybe that's the whole shape of the debt Venemis described. It doesn't care what you meant to spend it on. It only knows something's open, and it keeps bleeding regardless of which door you're walking toward when it happens, regardless of how good your reasons are for walking through it.
He closed his hand slowly into a fist, feeling the cold settle deeper into the fourth finger's base, and switched off the light, and did not go looking for Lyn this time, or for anyone else, because there was nothing left to say tonight that the ship's new heading hadn't already said for him, plainly, without needing his voice added to it.
Somewhere ahead, past a stretch of open Fold and a contested homeworld balanced on the edge of its own quiet war, an old observatory called Calder's Reach sat exactly where it had sat for forty one years, holding whatever it was still holding, waiting, the way old things wait, patient and unbothered by the passage of time, for someone to finally come and ask it the right question.
The Arctic ran on toward it through the long dark, carrying five people and one prisoner who had, for the first time since the beach, all decided, without quite saying so out loud to one another, that they were chasing the same thing, whatever it finally turned out to cost each of them individually to find it.
Nobody yet knew what they'd find there.
Nobody, least of all Taisen, knew whether they'd find it in time.
Nobody, least of all Taisen, knew whether they'd find it in time. He carried that thought with him like a stone in a pocket he kept forgetting to empty, aware of its weight only when he reached for something else and felt it there instead.
The second day of the crossing arrived quietly, the way the first had ended, the Arctic's small systems humming along at the same patient pitch they always held, indifferent to whatever her crew had decided about the four days ahead of them. Ship's dawn was an arbitrary thing aboard a vessel this size, a lighting cycle rather than an actual sunrise, but Taisen had noticed, these last weeks, that his own body still kept some older clock running underneath it, some habit built across two lifetimes of soldiering that woke him a full hour before the corridor strips brightened, whether or not there was anything useful to do with that hour.
This morning he'd spent it in the narrow gym compartment two decks below his own quarters, a room barely large enough for the single mat bolted to its deck plating and the rack of training blades fixed to the bulkhead beside it, the air inside carrying the faint metallic tang every compartment on the Arctic seemed to carry after enough weeks at sea in the Fold, recycled and reused past the point where it entirely stopped tasting of itself. He worked through a drilling pattern he'd run a thousand times in two different bodies, the same opening stance, the same six-count turn, the kind of exercise that asked nothing of the mind and everything of the muscle, precisely because he wanted, for one clean hour, to think about nothing at all: not Zhang, not the three names weighing on a man three relay hops away, not a records officer's tray of soil, not a wound the shape of a debt climbing steadily toward his own palm.
It was in the middle of the pattern, reaching for the training blade's grip on the reverse of a turn he'd made cleanly a hundred times before, that his hand simply didn't close around it.
Not slow. Not stiff. Absent, the fingers curling around empty air a half second after the blade had already left his palm, clattering flat against the deck plating with a sound that seemed, in the small quiet compartment, considerably louder than a dropped training blade had any right to be, the echo of it ringing off bare bulkheads before dying away into the compartment's usual close silence.
He stood very still, looking at his own open hand, grey climbed steady past the fourth knuckle now and creeping, slower but unmistakable, into the width of the palm itself, and felt nothing at all where the blade's grip had been a moment before. No absence of feeling the way a numbed limb reports its own numbness back to you, a dull static warning that something's wrong, the kind of feeling a person could work around, plan for, brace against. Simply nothing. The hand had simply stopped telling him anything about what it was holding, the way a door that's been quietly unhinged stops telling you it's a door at all until the moment you lean on it expecting it to hold and it doesn't, and the floor that had always been there simply isn't, and you're already falling before your mind has finished registering that anything was wrong.
He flexed the fingers, once, slowly, watching them curl and uncurl with a stranger's obedience, following the command well enough, technically, and telling him nothing at all about themselves while they did it. He picked the blade back up with his other hand, turned it over once in the grey light of the compartment's single overhead strip, and set it down deliberately on the rack rather than back into his own palm, and did not run the pattern again that morning.
He stood alone in the small compartment a while longer, listening to the ship's low hum through the deck plating beneath his boots, and thought, distantly, of a man on Boettia who had once believed rage was the only fuel a body needed, and wondered, not for the first time this week, whether that man would have recognized the considerably quieter fear currently sitting in his chest, or whether fear itself had simply worn a different coat in that first life, one Taisen no longer remembered well enough to compare against this one.
Swan found him in sickbay an hour later, having been sent for rather than having come on his own, which told Swan, walking in, more than the summons itself had. Taisen had spent the intervening hour sitting on the edge of the narrow examination bed with his grey hand resting palm up on his own knee, and had not, in all that time, tried the pattern again, and Swan noticed that too, filing it quietly alongside everything else.