"Alright," Connor said, moving in the chair. "My turn."
"I still have questions," Ashe said.
"I've told you everything I know."
"I don't think you have."
A trace of exasperation showed, but he kept it in check, deciding patience would get him further. "What I haven't told you is because I genuinely don't know it. The best thing you can do right now, for yourself, is accept that this is the situation and start figuring out how to live in it. That's what everyone does eventually."
Ashe looked at him for a moment. "You spent the last ten minutes being fairly contemptuous of everyone who did exactly that."
Connor opened his mouth to respond, but stopped when he realized he didn't have a solid argument to counter with. He looked at the row of shelves beside him instead as if that had suddenly turned into a safe zone.
"Those capsules," she then said, when she was sure he wouldn't argue his point any longer. "The ones your buddies took from me back at the facility. What were they?"
He exhaled slowly through his nose. "When emergents wake up, most of them come equipped with backup doses already stored in their suits. They are extra reserves built in since… well… since before."
She raised an eyebrow, and Connor understood she expected more than that.
"The substance inside them is called HSM. Out here people call it drip. They extract it from the original doses, dilute it, and sell it off in smaller quantities to stretch the supply."
That term, HSM, she had of course heard it before from Seven, but only now were the contexts all starting to slowly connect to one another. She also remembered the exchange she had witnessed in the market, where a few men had traded it like some sort of forbidden merchandise.
"What is it?" Ashe insisted.
"It's a stabilizer. In the early period after emergence, your body is in a highly reactive state. There's a window of time, different for everyone as far as we've seen, where you're essentially not equipped to sustain yourself in this atmosphere. There's something in the air here that becomes damaging to your body as soon as it's detached from the original system that kept it asleep. Without HSM working against it, your body starts to break down. Rapidly."
He stopped there and looked at her, noting the effect of his words.
"It starts to blacken," Ashe said.
"Yeah," Connor said. "It does."
She thought about it for a moment. Seven had already laid out some of this information too, but hearing it in plain language from someone sitting across from her made it settle differently than words forming on a wall. She looked at her hands where they rested in her lap. The blackening had receded, but she could still trace the faint remnants of it if she looked carefully.
"Back at that place, I didn't have any of those HSM capsules. But there were these… glowing containers out in the open… They were the ones that stopped the blackness from spreading."
"They're called harmonic seeds," Connor said. "They hold natural doses of HSM. As far as I'm concerned, they're one of the greatest mysteries of this world. They're partly mechanical, partly biological in nature and they've somehow found a way to replicate on their own in nature."
He paused briefly, as if appreciating what they were more than words could ever explain.
"I've seen what happens… when the blackness takes over completely," Ashe said after a moment, as the thought of the drift eventually slid into her thoughts.
Connor understood quickly what she meant, especially considering where he had first met her. Places like that were filled with drifts creeping in from all sides, corrupting anything in their path. People here no longer saw them as human, not even the memory of who they had been was enough to change that. Part of her wanted to ask more, hoping to find something meaningful in it, but the other part thought she already understood enough from Seven. And the idea of it only made her head spin more.
"I can't make sense of any of this," she said, reliving in her mind that first brutal encounter with the entity.
"Nobody could, at first. Welcome to everybody's world."
She might have said she was glad to be here, but the reality of it felt too distorted, like something out of a twisted story. She couldn't bring herself to think anything good of it. Not like Cressa and Halen could.
Then something clicked. Ashe looked up at Connor, recalling the words Halen had left her with back when she arrived in Railen.
"Do you know Moira?" she asked.
As soon as the name left her lips, she realized how vague it was on its own. She regretted not asking Halen for something more. A surname, anything that could narrow it down. At the time, though, it hadn't even crossed her mind.
Connor's stance immediately changed upon hearing it.
"Where are you getting all these things from," he asked with a restless and somewhat suspicious edge in his voice.
"Someone mentioned her to me when I reached Railen," Ashe explained, noticing Connor's reaction but not yet understanding what to make of it.
Connor stood. He didn't move far, just off the chair and onto his feet, but the change in his posture was clear. He moved to the window and stood with his back partially to her, looking out at the city and the dark shapes of Lethon beyond it.
"No," he said.
"I don't understand."
"I mean no, as in this is finished." He turned slightly but not fully to where she was. "You knowing Moira's name, you being here, me talking to you… all of it is a problem I didn't account for and I can't afford. I need to stay out of trouble. Everything I have here depends on that."
He gestured toward the room around them, and Ashe followed it with her eyes. The plants, the counter with its rows of jars, the notes on the desk, the workstation units. The entire room was starting to paint a different picture the more she looked at it. She was beginning to understand how this was not a place where he simply lived, there was something more going on here. He was doing some sort of research.
"Moira can't know about any of this," he added. "About you, about me talking to you, about any of it."
Then he looked at her, as if already considering a way out.
"I'll take you somewhere you can stay for a few nights. People there will look after you and won't ask too many questions. After that you're on your own and I'm not involved."
He moved away from the window.
"I'm sorry about what happened when we met. Those men had no reason to do what they did, but I can't undo it and this is too important to get sidetracked now."
Ashe looked at him for a long moment, judging his words and everything he was showing her through them.
"So you think that settles it then. You left me out there to die."
Connor couldn't answer. He simply stood in the middle of the room fighting inside of his thoughts, something that was already lost to begin with. And she could see it in him, that division between two things pulling in opposite directions, neither of which was willing to give ground easily. Guilt on one side, and on the other something she didn't quite understand yet.
"What are you working on here?" she asked, looking at the desk again.
"That's not your concern."
"Alright. Then I'll have to work with what I have. Moira is my only lead besides you, so if you won't help me, I'll go to her instead and see what she can tell me. That's your call to make."
Connor looked at her with an expression she couldn't fully classify. She might have thought it was anger at first, but it wasn't. Somewhere deep inside, she could have sworn there was some sort of old exhaustion, masked by apparent strength.
"What exactly is it that you want from me," Connor said after a brief pause. "I can't undo what happened. I can't change the fact that you emerged up here the way you did. You're the same as the rest of us, that's just the reality of it. You can't hold me responsible for that."
"I want to go to Threnos."
Connor scoffed. He didn't even bother to hide it. To him, the idea was simply ludicrous. People had tried it before, people with far more experience, and it had ended badly nonetheless. What chance did someone like her have, barely emerged into the world?
But the ludicrous girl just kept insisting nonetheless.
"You've seen maps to get there, you said it yourself. And something tells me you know more about it than you've let on too."
He said nothing for a long moment, then: "Wonderful."