Chapter Text
Late morning light spills across the Polar North with the deliberate grace of something that remembers older skies. The brightness gathers through the runic glass in patient gradients, each layer deepening by imperceptible degrees, as though the starbase is considering how best to reveal itself. Wards along the promenade shimmer with pale gold, warming and cooling in cycles that feel almost tidal—breathing with the station's own rhythm, exhaling light and inhaling shadow in measures older than written time.
Yō wanders the eastern colonnade after returning from Amerhinn, hands tucked into her jacket pockets, letting the soft hum beneath her feet guide her. The vibration isn't purely mechanical—not in the way normal starships hum, their engines a constant industrial pulse. The Polar North carries the resonance of a monolith shaped across centuries of magical thought, a frequency that lives in both its grandest halls and its quietest corners. The pressure of it settles in her chest like a second heartbeat, a depth of presence so subtle it might be mistaken for her own blood moving through her veins.
The promenade opens into a wide arcade lined with tall windows. From here, the station unfolds like a tapestry drafted across millennia: spiralling walkways traced in patterns that seem to shift depending on the angle of her gaze, suspended terraces floating between anchor-points that don't quite appear solid, narrow bridges draped in vines that soak up light and release it again in different colors. At this hour, the structures glow with a soft, translucent sheen—not the gleam of polished metal, but the luminescence of weathered stone that has learned to hold the sun within its grain.
Wherever she stands, the Polar North feels too vast for a single gaze to hold.
She pauses beside a carved relief embedded in one of the load-bearing beams. Its lines are older than the surrounding architecture—deep grooves worn smooth by generations of hands tracing the same path, each fingertip adding its own small erosion to the whole. A plaque beneath claims the carving dates back two hundred years, from the starbase's inauguration.
Rumor tells gentler versions of this truth. Its name is seldom uttered in full, but everything settles into place when one hears its epithet in whispers: the Philosopher's Polar North.
They say Nilam never truly built this place. They say she spirited fragments of Earth here like collecting seeds—lecture halls copied rune-for-rune from classrooms that no longer exist, archways salvaged from fortress-academies buried beneath mountains whose names have been forgotten, libraries carried bodily out of temples older than recorded history. Courtyards said not to be constructed at all, but lifted whole from soil that once knew real wind and the turning of seasons.
Yō runs her thumb along the carved relief, feeling the smooth dip where countless fingers have passed. The stone is warm. It holds heat differently than she expected.
Built in the twenty-third century. Or brought forward out of something much older?
The Polar North has the temperament of a place that does not care to clarify.
A pair of students jog past her, muttering through half-remembered incantations as they hurry toward their next class. Their footsteps echo upward along the vaulted corridor, the sound softened and diffused by the slow sweep of the arched ceiling, as though the architecture itself is teaching them how to move gently through the world. When they vanish around a corner, the quiet folds itself back into place with practiced ease, as though they were never there at all—or perhaps as though the station has simply absorbed them into its memory.
The Polar North accepts people readily. Not as guests, temporary and separate. As additions. Students leave impressions in its stone—their mistakes and triumphs settling like thin layers of sediment, building up across decades and centuries until the building itself becomes an archive of everyone who has ever walked these corridors. Even Kohaku has begun to leave a faint signature in the wards, tiny fluctuations that bloom where her projection moves most often, like footprints in snow that melt just slowly enough to be noticed.
And Yoshiko—for the fallen angel, this station feels less like a home rediscovered and more like a place that had been holding its breath for her return.
Somewhere deeper in the spire, Yoshiko's unmistakable cackle ricochets through stairwells, bright as struck bells. The sound curves through the architecture in unexpected ways, carried and amplified by spaces designed to resonate with magic, absorbed eventually into the vast frame of the station like water into stone. Yō hears it and smiles despite herself—but the smile fades as her next breath carries her attention elsewhere, into a quieter weather. The feeling that comes after a cloud shifts and light reasserts itself: cool, breezy, lingering only at the edges of perception.
She passes an alcove containing an old stained-glass panel whose colors have aged into something softer than brilliance. The inscription beneath has worn smooth with time, the letters blurred into abstraction. As she walks, the panel catches the filtered morning light and refracts it across the corridor—deep blues, muted saffrons, a faint swathe of rose that illuminates a constellation of motes suspended in the air like tiny planets in miniature sky. She watches them drift and settle, each one catching light before falling into shadow again.
Every corridor feels like a chapter she has opened in the middle of the story.
She rounds another bend in the promenade, letting her fingertips skim along the polished rail. The wood is warm—surprisingly warm, pulsing faintly with a rhythm that suggests connection to something deeper, something living. The Polar North exists at the boundary between architecture and organism, between constructed and grown. It is too immense to be merely engineering, too precise to be myth. It exists in the space where intellect and arcane intent have shaped stone across so many centuries that the boundary between intention and nature has blurred beyond recognition.
Yō draws another slow breath.
There are places she has traveled where the air feels thin even inside a ship's hull, where silence is a pressure emanating from the void beyond the walls. But here, silence feels different—vast rather than empty, present rather than waiting. It is the silence of a space large enough that a single person can stand within it without feeling the pressure of being observed. A silence that holds rather than watches.
Yet for all that expansiveness, the quiet leaves her slightly untethered. She feels like a small figure moving through a story that has been unfolding long before her arrival and will continue long after her departure. She is reading it even as it writes itself around her.
The Polar North decides where she is meant to go. Yō simply walks, guided by shifting paths of filtered light across the stone, carried along the steady curves of a fortress grander and older than anyone quite dares to claim aloud.
A place built from old stones.
A place built to remember.
A place built to hold those who inscribe in its pages.
Yō steps into the next archway as though she has simply been waiting for the architecture to show her the way.
The first indication that something is unusual arrives as a thinning of quiet—a subtle irregularity in phase noise brushing through Kohaku's internal systems as she moves along the central promenade. It is faint, far too soft to resemble a ward error, but persistent enough to stand apart from the ordinary background fluctuation. The Polar North's daytime harmonics typically flow steady and patient as magionic flux through living stone, but beneath that confident rhythm something else stirs. A small unevenness tugging at her attention like a thread snagged on cloth, insistent without being urgent.
Kohaku slows, easing her projection into a more receptive state as she samples the corridor's field profile. The building breathes its usual layers back at her—old magic settled into the stone like sediment, warm runic architecture glowing with afternoon light, a scattering of student signatures moving through the halls like schools of fish navigating familiar waters. But below these familiar tones, the same drifting pattern persists. Diffused and uncertain, the kind of imprint left by someone walking without anchoring their steps to intention. A footprint made of hesitation.
It is Yō.
Kohaku has mapped her captain's flux behavior closely enough to recognize the shape of it. The broad, gentle waves of resonance that speak of routine, of muscle-memory navigation through familiar spaces. The faint scatter across intersections where her attention fragments, suggests wandering thought, the small inconsistencies that emerge only when Yō moves through silence so deep that even she cannot parse it. Solitude reveals itself in this dissolution of vector, in the way intention scatters like light through a prism. The Polar North cannot fully smooth the drift, so instead it carries it, holds it, lets it diffuse through the corridors like a gentle current.
She continues forward, and the promenade transitions into older architectural segments. Each curve is shadowed by memory-glass panels shimmering faintly with stored field traces from eras that predate even Kohaku's earliest operational memories. Etched diagrams of systems long obsolete, sector charts drawn by hands that have turned to dust, flux maps notated in languages no longer spoken—each one catches the filtered midday light and refracts it in intricate geometry, diffusing into soft webs across the polished stone like captured spider silk.
Yō's imprint drifts across these remnants in light strokes, never lingering long enough to disturb anything, yet present enough to leave muted disruptions in the field. Subtle flux drift in the corners of shelving units, a brush of resonance against a suspended crystal slab, the faint echo of her passage written in disturbances so delicate they might fade within minutes. Kohaku registers them clinically, yet beneath that clinical observation stirs something else—a faint undercurrent of recognition. Not emotional, structural. Like identifying the recurrence of a minor fault in a system she has studied for years, the way a musician recognizes the same wrong note played twice.
The trail carries her into the Archive Wing, where the Polar North arranges a scatter of magical expedition records without chronological concern. Stone tablets and crystalline cylinders hold topological diagrams of nebulae long since collapsed into legend. Shelves contain harmonic logs kept by early mage-crews who drifted through uncharted sectors, their observations dense with wonder and terror. Half-faded field sketches capture outlines of anomalies once studied and never revisited, phenomena that history has chosen to forget. The architecture does not file these fragments so much as allow them to settle, trusting its own resonance to arrange what memory demands.
Here, the disturbance deepens.
Yō's presence leaves faint, wide arcs of drift among the relics—as though she stepped through without knowing what weight the space carries, what accumulated significance settles in this wing like dust. But beneath that layer, beneath the very surface of the ambient field, another signature rests with a drawn-out persistence that catches Kohaku's attention like a hand on her shoulder. A harmonic outline so coherent her systems hesitate for a full moment before attempting to categorize it.
It is familiar.
Not in any way her active memory can name. Not in any pattern her accessible sectors hold intact. More like the echo of a word once spoken, the footprint of an old protocol buried beneath layers of overwritten data, the half-remembered resonance of something she once knew with certainty but can no longer quite grasp. A presence that shaped these halls in some previous configuration, lingering with the clarity of a tone that refuses to fully fade.
Kohaku's projection dims as she recalibrates around that faint echo. It is too stable to be noise, too delicate to be environmental drift, too close to something once catalogued to dismiss entirely. Yet the connection lies beyond her current indexing, caught in the boundaries of memory she cannot fully access. A locked door with no key visible.
She moves forward, carrying the sensation like a ghost threaded through her processors, a question without language.
As she departs the Archive Wing, a new harmonic pattern begins to coalesce. Sharper at the edges, more controlled, drawing the ambient field into alignment through sheer force of intention. The drift she had followed from the promenade loosens and shifts as it meets this second presence, as though being gently encouraged into coherence by a hand she cannot see.
Yoshiko.
Her signature settles the field naturally, imprinting its own rhythm onto the surrounding space with the ease of someone whose magic has always known how to tune the air without thinking about it. The Polar North answers in kind, adjusting its harmonics with something close to instinctive recognition—the way a body recognizes the return of someone it has waited for.
Kohaku tilts her head. This is not where Yoshiko typically teaches. Not part of any routine her logs mark as habitual. Yet the pattern here is unmistakably hers—focused and steady, tracing slow arcs through the corridors like the return to a room that still remembers the shape of her presence, that has kept her place warm in the interim.
Another faint whisper touches Kohaku's sensors. A sliver of the older imprint she sensed in the Archive Wing, lying gently beneath Yoshiko's harmonics like the last fragile remnant of a harmony once shared between this space and someone long departed. The resemblance is not exact—merely suggestive—evoking the familiarity between two chords that share an undertone, that resonate in frequencies close enough to interfere.
Kohaku cannot place it. But curiosity guides her next steps forward.
The corridor narrows toward the west wing, where the air thickens into tuned silence and the light settles into gradients of soft and softer still. Yoshiko's resonance forms measured pulses that ripple quietly through the stillness, patient as a heartbeat, insistent as prayer.
Kohaku stops at the threshold, allowing the layered harmonics to settle into her internal sensors. The older imprint lingers faintly beneath Yoshiko's signature, unresolved and unreachable, yet unmistakably present. And though Kohaku cannot name it, something within her architecture recognizes the shape of it—the way you recognize a person's silhouette in shadow before you see their face.
She steps through the archway without a word, drawn forward by the quiet arrangement of resonance ahead. Unaware of what waits in the suite beyond, she moves toward the source like a compass needle finding polar north, compelled by a pattern her systems should remember but cannot fully grasp.
The west wing of the Polar North sustains a flatter timbre at night. The light here feels older, filtered through layers of stone and memory until it arrives at a softness that approximates twilight even in the deep hours of darkness.
As Yoshiko slips through one of its archways, the air meets her with a cool, listening stillness—a hush that clings to the walls like a spell left to dissipate into the architecture itself. The long hallway stretches ahead, lined with resonance-glass panels that refract starlight in muted streaks, pale silver twisting through carved filigree like fractal ice blooming in stained wood. Even the wards seem to step gently here, their usual thrum reduced to something almost intimate—a heartbeat felt through the floorboards rather than heard through the air.
She doesn't turn on the overhead lights. Her feet know the path, muscle-memory carrying her forward through familiar darkness. The dark suits this place, suits what she has come here to do. Her wings adjust to the narrow corridor with practiced care, feathers brushing softly against her cloak, trailing in slow arcs behind her like the movement of water. Each step produces sound with unusual clarity—the soft soles of her boots against stone amplified by the wing's particular acoustics into a precise, unhurried rhythm. A metronome. A countdown.
Kohaku's projection manifests beside her a moment later, faint enough that her edges blur into the ambient glow, less a presence than a suggestion of one. She walks—or performs the gesture of walking—with the careful grace of someone moving through a space that sleeps. Her gaze traces the lines of etched sigils along the walls, studies the suspended tuning forks resting in their brackets as though they might begin to ring at any moment, notes the wide doors of the harmonic suites cracked open just enough for the remnants of sound to drift outward like the ghosts of chords, like the last exhale of something beautiful.
“You walk this way often,” Kohaku says quietly, observation rather than accusation. “At peculiar hours. Along these specific halls.”
Yoshiko's breath releases in a soft sound that could be acknowledgement or could be nothing at all. Her fingers trail lightly along one of the resonance panels, and the glass answers with a faint shimmer—memory made visible, the touch of mages from years past lingering in its surface like fingerprints that refuse to fade.
“I don't always notice where I'm going,” she replies. “My feet decide before my head does.”
Kohaku inclines her head, and something in the movement speaks of recognition rather than inquiry. A pattern observed across weeks finally settling into familiar shape, like watching a constellation resolve itself in starlight.
“There are echoes here,” she murmurs. “And you listen to them.”
They reach the main harmonic suite—the largest of the rooms in the wing, its door standing half-open. Starlight spills across the threshold in a slanted wash, illuminating chalk-marks and notation strokes left from today's classes. The air tastes heavy with the residue of sound, thick with the lingering vibration of earlier lessons not yet fully dispersed into silence. When Yoshiko steps across the threshold, the floorboards answer with a soft, warm creak—acknowledgment, recognition, the greeting of a space to someone it has been waiting for.
She moves toward the center of the room without speaking. Her wings draw inward, the space itself encouraging a kind of physical quietude. A tuning rod lies abandoned on one of the benches, its metal catching faint light with a cool gleam. She picks it up instinctively, rolling it between her palms, warming it through the friction of her own hands.
When she taps it gently against her palm, the resulting tone spreads delicately through the room—a clear line of sound that finds its way into every corner, settling into the dust like something released after long containment. Beneath it, so faint she nearly doubts its existence, a secondary shimmer answers. Not a new note, something far more fragile: the memory of one, arriving a fraction of a second after the first, as though greeting the present moment with the shape of something irrevocably past.
Kohaku doesn't ask what it is. Her projection brightens only slightly, a flicker of comprehension passing through her faint-blue form—a moment of understanding that requires no translation.
“She liked the upper resonance registers,” Kohaku says quietly, as though speaking to the empty air rather than to Yoshiko. The tuning rod's resonance seems to absorb the name that goes unspoken, carry it deeper into the room where it settles like sediment. “Her harmonics always lingered longer than anyone else's. The panels would carry them through the night.”
Yoshiko's shoulders shift—a small motion, feather-light, that betrays more than any confession could. She keeps her attention on the tuning rod, on the way the metal vibrates gently against her hand as it reverberates into silence, into nothing, into memory.
“When she was the one to begin,” Kohaku continues, reciting something she has learned only now in this moment, learning it through the architecture itself, “the music would settle differently. Beautifully stable. Strangely persistent. As though time itself held still around the sound.”
Yoshiko presses the rod back onto the table. The sound fades into the rafters, absorbed by the quiet as easily as water into sand. When she speaks, her voice seems to come from a great distance, or perhaps from directly beside you, impossible to locate.
“This place feels too tall at night,” she says, her gaze lifting toward the vaulted ceiling where carved motifs writhe like frozen waves. “Like there's more air than there should be. More space than the walls can properly contain.”
“It means there's room for a second voice,” Kohaku replies.
Yoshiko's grip tightens briefly where her hand rests on her cloak. She turns away from the table, walking deeper into the room toward the far wall where a chalkboard spans the full width like a frozen ocean. Faint notation marks cling to its surface—a descending line of triads, a correction made in careful handwriting, the trailing end of a harmonic progression drawn in a delicate, looping style that belongs to only one person. She rests her fingertips against the board, following the lines without quite touching, as though her fingers might disturb something fragile.
“She would stand exactly there,” Yoshiko exhales, her breath barely disturbing the dust that has accumulated. “Right at the edge of the chalk light, when she corrected phrasing. When she heard something in my work that needed reshaping.”
“And you would have stood on the other side,” Kohaku continues, her gaze softening into something that approximates gentleness. “Within the shadow of her hand, where she could mark your notes directly.”
Yoshiko's wings shift—once, a single movement, feather against feather, the subtle contraction of someone holding their breath in place.
“I didn't think you'd remember that,” she says quietly.
“I did not,” Kohaku admits. “But this room remembers her. The architecture holds what we forget. And when you moved the way you did just now, the pattern resolved itself.”
Yoshiko lets her hand fall from the board. Her fingertips trace one final time across the chalk-dust, leaving marks that will blur and fade with the next breeze, the next stray vibration of the wards.
The moment crystallizes without need for speech or confession. Without tears. Yoshiko stands in a place that held more than sound—it held the shape of someone beloved, preserved in stone and silence and the stubborn refusal of memory to diminish with time.
Kohaku steps closer, standing beside her without touching. Their reflections overlap faintly in the gloss of the tuning panels, one solid and one ephemeral, yet unified in the glass as though the barrier between them has grown transparent.
“You don't come here only to grieve,” Kohaku says, her voice soft but unwavering. “You come because the silence is still tuned for two. Your magic still listens for the second line—the harmonic that should be dancing alongside your own.”
The words land as recognition. Yoshiko offers no answer because none is needed. Instead, the harmonic suite responds for her.
A faint shimmer along the ward-lines.
A ghost-note that echoes for a breath too long.
A space shaped to wait for a missing harmony.
After a time measured in minutes or hours or moments stretched thin as starlight, they turn toward the archway. The starlit threshold draws them back into the corridor, and the harmonic suite settles behind them—its silence less empty now, somehow, for having been witnessed.
A week passes before Connall calls.
Yō is in the Firth’s lounge on a diagnostic flight when the alert pings—a soft, insistent tone that isn’t one of Kohaku’s usual system chimes. The console by the forward bulkhead flashes with a pale orange icon: ‘SECURE COMM – ADMIRAL OWEN CONNALL’.
She sits up from her slouch on the couch, rubbing at the back of her neck.
“Kohaku?”
“I see it,” Kohaku says, already moving toward the console. Her projection brightens slightly. “Encryption signature matches Amerhinn command. One-to-one channel. No intermediaries.”
“Put him through,” Yō says.
The icon blossoms into a short-lived holo static, then resolves into Connall’s upper body. The admiral’s uniform is immaculate as ever, but the man inside it looks frayed around the edges—shadowed eyes, a greying beard that hasn’t seen a razor in a day or two, the top button of his tunic undone as if he unfastened it halfway through a thought and never put it back.
“Hey there, Watanabe,” he says, attempting a smile that lands somewhere between weary and wry. “Hope I’m not waking you.”
“Core time says no,” Yō replies. “My head says… maybe. What’s up?”
He huffs a soft breath that might be a laugh. “Straight to business. You haven’t changed.”
Kohaku folds her hands neatly in front of her. “Good afternoon, Admiral Connall.”
“Kohaku,” he acknowledges with a nod. “Thanks for taking the call. I, ah, wish I could say I’m just ringing to chat. But.”
“But,” Yō echoes.
He glances down at something off-screen, then back up. “How’s the Polar North treating you?” he asks, as if he needs a second to arrange his thoughts. “Settling in? How’s Professor Tsushima finding her flock?”
“Terrifyingly competent,” Yō says. “The students, I mean. Yoshiko’s happy to scare them.”
“Good.” Connall’s mouth twitches. “She deserves a classroom more than a coffin.”
The moment of levity fades as quickly as it came. He draws a breath, shoulders squaring.
“Look,” he says. “No sense dancing around it. I’m in a bit of a pinch, Yō.”
She leans forward, elbows on her knees. “Prosser?”
“Prosser. Data Governance. The whole damn committee.” He scrubs a hand over his face. “They did not take Rowan tabling Seven-Four as the end of the matter. If anything, it lit a fire under them.”
“I’d be disappointed if it didn’t,” Yō says dryly.
“Yeah, well. They’re drafting contingency trees as if it’s already been adopted,” Connall says. “Legal keeps kicking versions back with red ink, but every day I get another set of simulations on my desk asking: ‘What happens if we lose the Firth? What happens if we lose Kohaku? What happens if—’” He cuts himself off with a flick of his fingers.
He looks at Kohaku then, properly, and there’s no malice in it—just a tired awareness.
“I’ve got captains breathing down my neck,” he says. “Ground commanders who’ve just watched their crews pull bodies out of pods. They want to know we’re not hanging all our hopes on one thread. And the ugly truth is—they’re not wrong to want that.”
“Redundancy is a sensible desire,” Kohaku agrees calmly. “It is the method of achieving it that is in contention.”
“Exactly.” Connall lets out a slow breath. “On the record, I’ve told them I welcome redundancy in principle. I can’t say otherwise with a straight face. Off the record…”
He hesitates, then meets Yō’s eyes squarely.
“Off the record, I am not going to sign my name to a plan that tears you apart, Kohaku,” he says. “Not if I have any choice in the matter.”
A faint flicker crosses Kohaku’s face, something like surprise softened by gratitude. “Thank you, Admiral,” she says quietly.
“But,” Connall continues, “that choice is getting narrower by the day. If Rowan hadn’t stepped in when he did, Seven-Four would already be in the minutes as ‘adopted in principle’. That buys you leverage. It doesn’t make the pressure go away.”
Yō leans back, staring past his projection at nothing in particular. “What did Legal say?”
“They’re… nervous,” Connall says. “They keep using phrases like ‘dangerous territory’ and ‘construct rights implications’. Nobody wants to be the one to authorise a case of legally dubious mind-copying in this long age of enlightened sentience recognition.”
“Good,” Yō mutters.
“Good,” Connall echoes. “But their caution just makes Prosser’s camp push harder. ‘Lives are on the line’, ‘we can’t let theory trump practice’, the usual.”
He pauses, then adds, “Rowan’s the only reason they haven’t tried to steamroll it through some quieter channel. You put him in a position to say no without it looking like a favour, and he took it.”
Something eases in Yō’s chest at that. She didn’t realise how tightly she’d been holding onto the uncertainty until now.
“And Rowan?” she asks. “What’s he doing with it?”
A faint, almost conspiratorial glint appears in Connall’s eyes.
“That’s the part I wanted to talk to you about,” he says. “Day after our session, he calls Legal and Historical Archives into a closed briefing. Asks them to pull something out of deep storage. Protocol Ninety-Eight.”
The number lands with the quiet thud of something that shouldn’t have a sound.
“Protocol… Ninety-Eight,” Yō repeats slowly.
“You’ve heard the name?”
“Only whispered,” she replies. “By a politician who likes their drama.”
Connall snorts. “Well, the archivists didn’t laugh. One of them went the colour of old paper when he realised Rowan was serious. Apparently it was… not a particularly proud chapter.”
Kohaku’s projection brightens by a shade. “I believe it was part of the original construct rights charter,” she says, more to herself than to them. “Oblique references. Heavy redaction.”
“We don’t have the file yet,” Connall says. “Not the full one. But Rowan told me, in so many words, to ‘hold the line’ until the review is finished. His line, not mine.”
He looks tired, but there’s a thread of steel under it.
“So that’s what I’m doing,” he says. “Holding the line. Buying time. Running a task force that’s half in love with your data and half terrified of losing it. And calling you from a very small office on Amerhinn to say: Yō, if you’re going to cut and run, please tell me now so I don’t find out in a mission briefing.”
The corner of her mouth twitches despite herself. “You think I’d give you that much warning?”
“I like to believe you’re kinder than that,” he says. “Even after ten years in the dark.”
Yō exhales slowly.
There it is again, the rush of alternate futures against the back of her teeth. The Firth’s drives spinning up, the Polar North shrinking in the rear display, the Admiralty’s channels filling with static and accusations. The seven faint signatures on Kohaku’s charts pulling at her like gravity wells.
She looks down at her own hands, fingers laced loosely in her lap.
“I’m still here,” she says, quieter than before. “That counts for something, doesn’t it?”
“It counts for a lot,” Connall replies. “I just… need to know what you’re actually fighting me on. Us on.”
He hesitates, then leans a little closer, lowering his voice even though the channel is already secure.
“Yō, I’m going to ask you something I can’t put in a report,” he continues. “And you are going to answer however you can live with. Fair?”
She meets his gaze. “Fair.”
“Is there something in Kohaku’s data,” he asks, “that I’m not seeing? Something that makes Clause Seven-Four specifically unacceptable to you, beyond the very real construct rights issues? Because from where I sit, it looks like we’re finally offering to shoulder some of what we left on you alone for ten years. And you’re pushing that hand away.”
Silence stretches. The faint background hum of the Firth’s life support swells in Yō’s ears.
She could lie. She has been lying by omission since they got back. She could keep the seven buried in encrypted buffers and pretend this is all about principles, about law and ethics and “doing things properly”.
Or she can give him the piece of truth that doesn’t break everything open.
“The most unstable pods,” she says at last, each word feeling like it’s being pulled through mud. “The ones on the edges of the galaxy. The ones with damaged beacons, bad trajectories, decaying signals. They’re my bridge.”
His expression tightens.
She swallows.
“If—when—this all gets triaged by someone who has a spreadsheet and a vessel allocation budget and a hundred other disasters and missions to think about,” she says, “those are the ones that get cut first. I know that. You know that. That’s how these decisions go. When you say you—the Vanguard—are finally offering me help, it isn’t to help me find them. It’s to help me find what the Vanguard wants to find.”
He doesn’t try to deny it. His eyes close briefly.
“And I cannot,” Yō says softly, “hand them over and pretend I don’t know that. I can’t stand to watch their markers turn from ‘pending’ to ‘deprioritised’ because somebody else decided that a damaged pod on the far side of nowhere is an ‘acceptable loss’ compared to easier ones closer to home.”
Connall is very still on the other end of the link.
After a moment, he says, “If you go at it alone, you risk losing them and everyone else. You know that too. Or you wouldn’t still be on this end of the call.”
“I know,” she says. “That’s the part that keeps me awake.”
He lets out a breath that sounds, for a second, like it’s being dragged over gravel.
“I wish I could tell you you’re wrong,” he says. “I can’t. We both know what happens when resources get tight and the easy wins start looking more appealing than the hard fights. It happened to the very ship we’re now trying to recover again.”
He rubs a hand over his face, then drops it, sighing.
“Maybe Protocol Ninety-Eight will give Rowan a way to wall you and Kohaku off,” he continues. “Carve out a little bubble where you can do what you need to do without someone from my office deciding your bridge crew are too difficult and expensive.”
“Or it’ll blow up in his face and we’ll all be dancing in the fallout,” Yō mutters.
Connall’s mouth curls. “Ever the optimist.”
“Learnt from the best.”
He sobers again.
“If Rowan pulls it off,” he says, “if he gives you that room—will you stay in it with us? Or are your engines already halfway to spin-up?”
Yō looks away from his hologram, toward the closed hatch that leads back to the Firth’s bridge. The path is etched into her brain. So is the memory of a magnolia tree in Amerhinn and a line of lanterns rising toward a crystalline dome.
“I don’t know if I can stop wanting to run,” she admits. “But I haven’t yet. That has to count for something too.”
“It does,” Connall says quietly. “For what it’s worth, I’d rather have you in the room arguing with me than out there proving all my risk models right.”
“Flattering,” she says dryly.
“Don’t get used to it.” He glances off-screen, then back. “I should let you get back to… whatever passes for peace and quiet up there. Just—if you hear rumours about Ninety-Eight, remember I called to tell you it’s not aimed at you. It’s aimed at keeping you from being dismantled in the name of helping you.”
“Reassuring,” Yō says. “In a horrifying sort of way.”
“That’s our brand,” he says. “Talk soon, Watanabe.”
“Stay afloat, Connall.”
The holo flickers and collapses, leaving only the faint reflection of Yō’s own face on the darkened console.
Kohaku stands beside her, hands still folded. “He is under considerable strain,” she observes.
“Aren’t we all,” Yō sighs in reply.
“He is still choosing to stand between us and the worst implementations of Seven-Four,” Kohaku says. “That matters.”
Yō pushes herself up from the couch and moves toward the viewport at the far end of the lounge. Beyond the layered glass, one of Norre’s exterior courtyards is visible, a long oval of stone and greenery nested against the bulk of the station under a massive transparent dome. Tiny figures move across it—students in dark uniforms, dots of colour from spell effects flaring and fading as they practice.
She recognises one silhouette immediately. Even at this distance, Yoshiko’s wings are unmistakable as she turns on the platform, cloak swirling, gesturing sharply at a misdrawn rune. The cluster of students around her lean in, rapt.
“She looks… at home,” Yō says.
“She is adapting,” Kohaku agrees. “It is… reassuring to see.”
Yō rests her forehead lightly against the cool glass, eyes half-lidded.
“Prosser told me they’re trying, in their own way, to take some of this off my shoulders,” she says. “Connall just told me the same thing. And I’m the one saying no.”
“You are telling them not to break us in order to carry us,” Kohaku says. “That is not the same as rejecting their support.”
“Feels like it,” Yō mutters.
Below, Yoshiko claps her hands once; even from here, Yō can imagine the sound, the way it would startle the nearest students. A circle on the stone flares a clean, steady blue this time instead of sputtering. Yoshiko’s shoulders relax, just a fraction.
“‘Patience,’ she said.” Yō murmurs. “‘The archives are under scrutiny.’”
“Yes,” Kohaku continues. “It is proceeding exactly as she said.”
Yō watches the tiny dark shape of her friend moving against the pale stone, hears Connall’s words echo in her head, and feels the ghost of the Firth’s engines humming under her feet in some imagined future that hasn’t happened yet.
“Let’s hope,” she says, “this is enough time for someone else to hold the line for once.”
Kohaku’s blue reflection meets hers in the glass.
“They are already trying,” she says quietly. “We just have to let them.”
Evening washes over the Polar North with the gradual surrender of light to shadow. The great spires dim their daylight wards one by one, a cascade of dimming that releases the deeper, more ancient colors that had been sleeping beneath brightness—bruised-violet shadows that belong to the star-dome hours, the faint gold glimmer of runes shifting into night-mode, a cascade of subtle illuminations that feel less like electric light and more like the station remembering itself. Somewhere far across the sprawling architecture, the low chime of seventh bell vibrates through the structure, caught and carried by enchantments, transformed into a soft, pulsing hum that settles beneath the ribs like a second heartbeat.
Yō is already halfway across the courtyard when she sees them.
Yoshiko perches illegally on the wide stone railing that borders one of the inner walkways, her legs swinging over a sheer drop in a rhythm that suggests complete indifference to the void below. Her cloak pools around her like a displaced storm cloud, and her wings catch the evening light in deep shades of indigo, their edges glowing faintly with an inner luminescence. A small packet of sweets rests beside her—some illicit offering from a student, no doubt, payment for magical instruction or dramatic stories. Kohaku stands at her side, her projection anchored low enough to suggest companionship rather than observation, hands folded at her back in a posture of such perfect serenity it seems almost staged.
They look at ease.
The kind of ease Yō still hasn't learned how to inhabit.
Yoshiko spots her first, brightening with the abruptness of someone who has been waiting for an arrival.
“Yō-chan!” Her voice rings across the walkway, bright enough to echo off stone. “Come here—we saved you a seat!”
“You saved me a railing,” Yō replies as she approaches, her tone flat in a way that makes the observation land like a joke.
“It's ergonomic,” Yoshiko insists, patting the stone beside her with exaggerated seriousness. “Ancient master stonemasons carved it specifically for existential crises.”
Kohaku's head tilts slightly, her projection shimmering with what might be amusement. “Mrs. Yō does not present as someone currently experiencing existential distress.”
“Not yet,” Yoshiko agrees. “Give it time.”
Yō lets out a soft laugh despite herself and hoists herself onto the railing. The stone is pleasantly cool against her palms, grounding in a way she hadn't anticipated needing. From this vantage point, the courtyard spreads beneath them in soft, irregular geometry: lanterns drifting upward on thermal currents like captured stars, a few lingering students walking along the illuminated pathways below, the shifting shimmer of mana-lamps reflecting across carved walls. The entire space holds a quality of suspension, as though evening has paused to consider itself.
“It's beautiful at night,” Yō murmurs, her voice nearly absorbed by the ambient hum of the station.
“It always was,” Yoshiko answers quietly, her gaze distant. “I just forgot how to see it.”
Kohaku glances between them, her holographic form taking on a warm undertone from the courtyard's reflected light. “The Polar North has adjusted its atmospheric luminosity parameters for evening viewing. Preliminary data suggests a thirty-two percent increase in subjective aesthetic satisfaction among observers.”
Yoshiko sighs with theatrical weight. “Kohaku, my beloved, never change.”
“Was that affection?” Kohaku asks, her words suggesting a teasing undertone under curiosity.
“It was a threat disguised as affection.”
“Understood. I will interpret future similar statements accordingly.”
Yō smiles at both of them—a smile that feels too wide, too soft, too fragile to survive the night intact. Something inside her loosens each time she witnesses them like this, as though the last decade of tension is slowly unthreading itself from her muscles, one fiber at a time.
“You two fit here,” she says before she can think better of it. “Like you've always belonged.”
Yoshiko turns, her wing brushing lightly against Yō's shoulder—a gesture so casual it carries its own weight. “And you don't?”
The question catches Yō off-guard. She hesitates, the answer tangling somewhere in her throat. “I… don't know if I fit anywhere that isn't moving.”
Kohaku and Yoshiko exchange a glance—wordless, suffused with understanding. The kind of look that requires no translation, carries no need for elaboration. Years of shared silence speak between them.
The air shifts.
Not the gentle transition when the station's wards cycle into new configurations. Not the simple displacement of breeze when someone walks past. This shift carries intention, a deliberate inhalation of the space itself. Shadows deepen in the archway behind them as though gathering depth. Runelight flickers in a motion that resembles a bow of acknowledgment.
Yoshiko stiffens immediately.
Kohaku's projection brightens into something protective, a baseline of readiness that registers as instinct.
Yō doesn't need to turn to know. She's learned to sense the woman's arrival through the atmosphere itself—the way reality seems to acknowledge her presence before she becomes fully visible.
The woman in violet leans against the stone wall as though it had been sculpted specifically to receive her weight. The star-dome's light catches her hair, transforming the pale strands into something between molten gold and ghost-silver, a gradient that seems to contain its own luminescence. Her expression carries that familiar quiet amusement—never cruel, always knowing, the kind of smile that belongs in the margins of ancient texts alongside warnings and prophecies.
“My,” she says lightly, straightening with the casual grace of someone entirely unconcerned with the laws of balance or gravity. “You're all sitting rather precariously. I'd hate to see anyone fall at such a sentimental hour.”
Yoshiko looks genuinely contemplating the possibility of falling on purpose, simply to spite her. The woman settles onto the railing beside them with impossible poise, crossing her legs one over the other in a configuration that should send her tumbling into the void below, yet clearly won't.
“Do you enjoy materializing out of nowhere?” Yoshiko demands, her irritation genuine but not quite angry. “Is it a hobby? A lifestyle choice? A compulsion you've never examined?”
“It's an art,” the woman replies with serene certainty. “Like any discipline, one must practice consistently to achieve true mastery.”
Kohaku inclines her head in greeting, the gesture formal and measured. “Good evening.”
“And to you,” the woman replies, her gaze carrying that infuriating glint of knowing amusement. “How lovely to see you all assembled. Like a constellation finally aligned to its proper place in the sky.”
Yō narrows her eyes, searching for the trap within the observation. “You always talk like that, or are you simply indulging in extra theatricality because we're balanced on a railing?”
“I would never presume to interfere with a moment,” the woman says, one hand gesturing with deliberate carelessness. “Merely observing what unfolds.”
“Observing what?” Yoshiko presses, irritation giving way to suspicion.
The woman considers them each in turn—her gaze settling first on Yō, then on Yoshiko, finally resting on Kohaku—before answering with a softness that contradicts her usual tone.
“Your trajectory,” she says, the word carrying weight that has nothing to do with physical mass. Heavy as stone. Luminous as warning. Too full of implications to unpack in a single moment.
Before Yoshiko can marshal an argument, before Yō can demand clarification that will almost certainly be denied, Kohaku straightens abruptly.
Her projection flickers—once, sharp as a ringing bell.
“Mrs. Yō,” she says, and her voice carries a new register, something taut and reverberating beneath the surface. “A communiqué has been received. Priority classification. Admiralty General Office.”
Yoshiko freezes.
Yō's breath stutters to a halt.
Even the woman in violet tilts her head, interest sharpening into something that cuts across her usual mystique. Whether the interest is genuine or performed, Yō cannot determine, and this uncertainty troubles her more than direct threat ever could.
Kohaku lifts her hand.
A soft amber hologram blooms above her palm—the unmistakable seal of the Vanguard Admiralty, rendered in light that carries the weight of official authority.
SUMMONS — THIRD SESSION OF THE ESTUARY RECOVERY COUNCIL — ATTENDANCE REQUIRED
The evening air leaves Yō's lungs in one long, quiet exhalation. Time seems to compress, fold, reset itself around this single moment of interruption.
“Well,” she murmurs, her voice soft as ash falling. “There it is.”
The woman in violet smiles—not unkindly, but with an expression that suggests she has been waiting for precisely this moment, that the evening's conversation was merely prologue.
“Indeed,” she says simply. “Gravity always wins, Captain.”
Her weight tips backward with languid inevitability, her violet robes billowing outward as they catch the updrafts rising from the courtyard below. Yoshiko's hand reaches out in a desperate gesture, but the woman never falls. There is no collision with stone or air, no impact or struggle. She simply ceases to be present in the space she occupied, leaving only streaks of vibrant purple fading into scarlet ribbons that dissolve into the evening air like watercolor bleeding into water.
The absence of her presence feels more substantial than her presence ever did.
“Is she always this dramatic?” Yō asks, the disbelief in her voice genuine despite years of accumulated evidence to the contrary.
“It really is an art,” Yoshiko replies simply, her gaze still fixed on the space where the woman had been.
The evening settles back around them, indifferent to interruptions. Patient as always.