Vael did not respond for eleven days.
Ray had expected that. What he hadn't expected was what eleven days of silence felt like when the person not responding was a Divine-Class entity who had tried to pull the Aphelion Strand out of your body six weeks ago and had failed for the first time in her existence. He had expected the silence to feel like waiting. It felt more like being watched from a very long distance by something that was deciding whether you were interesting enough to continue.
He trained through it. That was the only thing he knew to do with the particular pressure of a situation that had no active resolution put himself somewhere that required immediate physical attention and let the body carry what the mind couldn't process yet.
Ha-Jin noticed, because Ha-Jin noticed everything in the controlled, unannounced way of someone who had spent years turning observation into a discipline. She said nothing about it for three days, which was her version of patience, and on the fourth day during a water break she said, without preamble:
"You're holding tension in the right shoulder that isn't there when you're simply tired. It's there when you're waiting for something."
Ray rolled the shoulder without answering.
"If you wait like that in a real engagement, Warlord and above will sense it before you move. The Aphelion system responds to psychological state. You know this."
"I know."
Ha-Jin was quiet. She picked up the Void Lance and reset her grip.
"I know. Kaspar told me."
"Does everyone know?"
"The people who matter. What did you say to her?"
"Eight words. That we should meet and to tell me where."
Ha-Jin looked at him for a moment with the quality of attention that meant she was running a full assessment and would share the relevant output only.
"Eight words is correct. Anything more would have been bargaining. Anything less would have been a door closed. Eight words is exactly a door open."
She raised the Lance.
"Again."
The response came on the eleventh day, through a channel that did not technically exist in the GDF's communication infrastructure a frequency outside the registered bands, carrying a signal that the citadel's systems registered as background noise until Dr. Yun's team, who had been monitoring for exactly this, pulled it out and ran it through the translation suite.
The message was three words. In Ray's mother's name.
Nana Lexmix's research archive. The coordinates are in the last file she ever submitted. V.
Ray read it three times.
His mother had died in Year 3, two years after Eclipse Day, in the collapse of the Akosombo Relief Station in what had been Ghana. He had been eleven years old. The research archive she'd left behind had been classified and held in GDF records since Year 4, when an intelligence team had connected her name to Project Lazarus. Ray had known the archive existed. He had not been given access to it. He had not, until this moment, been certain he wanted access to it.
Kaspar looked at him. One of those long looks that had come to mean, between them, that Kaspar was deciding not whether to help but how.
"I'll have it cleared by morning."
"Tonight."
Another look. Then:
"Tonight."