The transport kept moving.

Caleb watched the message fade on the comms-chip screen and turn itself off.

He took Hassek.

The black tunnel walls scrolled past the tinted glass at a speed neither of them was driving. Whoever ran the vehicle ran it from somewhere else. The wheel up front was still moving on its own.

She kept her hand on his thigh.

He let it stay there.

"Who is he," Caleb said.

She didn’t answer for a long time.

The transport took a long curve. The interior darkened for half a second as the tunnel lights thinned out between sectors. When the lights came back, she was looking at the floor between his boots, not at him.

"He was the only one left who saw it," she said.

"Saw what."

"The thing they buried with the rest of them."

Caleb waited.

"They put him in the ground," she said. Her voice had gone quiet in a way it didn’t usually go. "He didn’t stay. I’ve been listening for him for eleven years and I never heard a clean signal. Then a month ago the static cleaned up. Last week I heard him breathing."

"And tonight?"

"Tonight he reached for me."

She lifted her free hand and showed him a small white square. The napkin. Folded the way it had been folded when it reached him on the photo platform. She had collected it. She had been carrying it.

He didn’t ask when.

He didn’t need to.

"He told you not to approach him," Caleb said.

"He told me I wouldn’t have to."

The transport hit a longer straight section. The acceleration pressed them gently back into the seat.

Her hand on his thigh tensed, then relaxed.

She inhaled through her nose, slow.

Then she went very still.

"What."

"Move."

She sat up off the seat in one clean motion, peeled the dark fabric of her dress back from her left ribs, and pressed two fingers against the closed cut from earlier.

The wound had stopped bleeding.

Something else under the skin had not stopped doing what it was doing.

A faint pulse moved beneath the surface. Once. Twice. The rhythm of a small device synced to a heartbeat that wasn’t hers.

She let out a single quiet sound that wasn’t a word.

"It wasn’t a cut," Caleb said.

"It was a delivery."

"How long."

"Active since I crossed the foyer."

He had questions. They didn’t matter.

He pulled the slim phase-dagger from the inside pocket of his jacket where Elara’s wired tailor had installed it for him, four hours ago, on the way to a gala neither of them had thought he’d live through.

He turned the blade so the heel of the grip faced her.

She took it without a word.

The transport was still moving. The angle was bad. The light inside the cabin was civilian-grade and low.

She pressed the tip of the phase-dagger into the closed line of the cut, and her breath caught once on the inhale and didn’t catch again.

Caleb put his free hand flat against the side of her ribs to brace her body against the motion of the vehicle.

She worked the blade.

His palm registered every shift in her muscle, every clamp of her jaw, every breath she didn’t let escape.

Forty seconds.

A small black bead came out of her side on the tip of the phase-dagger, slick with the orchid scent of her blood.

She held it up between two fingers in the low cabin light.

It was the size of a grain of rice.

A single white pinpoint at its center pulsed steady.

"Drop it," Caleb said.

"Not yet."

She rolled it onto the cushion between them, peeled a strip of her ruined dress hem, and bound the reopened cut tight against her ribs with the same brisk efficiency she had used in the maintenance alcove to do nothing.

Then she picked the bead back up.

The bead came up close to her mouth.

"Hello, sister," she said.

The pulse on the white pinpoint flickered.

She set the bead down on the cushion, took the phase-dagger by the grip, and brought the heel down once.

The pinpoint went dark.

"Out," she said.

The transport was already braking. Whoever ran the vehicle ran it well. The hatch popped open onto a service ledge in a sector-two access tunnel Caleb didn’t recognize. The vehicle didn’t wait for them to be clear. The door sealed behind them and the transport rolled on into the dark, carrying its own corpse of a tracking signal further down the line than they were going.

She wiped the phase-dagger on the inside of her sleeve and handed it back.

"Walk," she said.

The service tunnel ran narrow, pipe-lined, lit at quarter power.

She moved ahead of him.

The bound ribs under the dress made her shorter on the left side, almost imperceptible, but he saw it.

He didn’t ask her to slow down.

She wouldn’t have.

"Who’s the sister," Caleb said after the first hundred yards.

"Not literal."

"I know."

"Then don’t ask."

They walked another hundred.

The orchid scent had faded under the smell of the access tunnel: cold metal, mineral water, dust. Her breath was steady. The bound wound was holding.

"He’s been listening too," she said eventually. "For eleven years. The same way I have. He doesn’t know yet that I’m the one on the other end."

"Why not."

"Because if he did, he’d run again."

She stopped at a recessed maintenance door, pulled a chip the size of a fingernail from inside the bodice of her dress, and pressed it to a panel that did not have a reader anyone else would have seen.

The door clicked. She didn’t go through it yet.

She turned her head a quarter toward him without looking at him directly.

"What I told you on the balcony," she said. "About the eleven years. That was the first time I have said it out loud to a person who could hear it."

"I know."

"I’m not going to say it again tonight."

"I know."

She pushed the door open and went through.

The safehouse was a service apartment, two rooms, lit at minimum.

A kettle sat on a small countertop. A folded jacket hung over a chair back. A pair of empty teacups stood beside the sink, one still half full, the surface skinned over from sitting cold.

She stopped just inside the door.

The teacups had not been there yesterday.

She didn’t have to say it. He could see it in the angle of her shoulders.

Someone had been here.

He drew the phase-dagger.

She drew a small civilian sidearm from a holster he hadn’t seen under her dress.

Together they cleared the second room.

It was empty.

On the small desk against the far wall sat a single folded slip of paper, weighted under a clean coffee spoon.

She crossed to it.

She did not touch it.

She read it from a foot away, in the low safehouse light, with her sidearm still down at her thigh.

Then she lifted her eyes to Caleb.

"He’s been here," she said. "Tonight. Before us."

Caleb stepped to the desk and read it himself.

Two lines.

[I borrowed your kettle. Tell your runner his father said hello.]