They sat close enough, in that cramped a space, that Lyn could feel Taisen's shoulder shift with every small correction he made to their heading, and close enough that she could hear, underneath the hum of the jets, the particular quality of silence a man kept when he had decided not to talk about something and intended to hold that decision by main force if he had to.
She let it sit for the first two hours. She had learned, since Boettia, exactly how far that patience usually got her.
"You haven't said anything to the crew," she said finally, watching the back of his head rather than his face, which felt, in this silence, like the more honest way to have the conversation. "About Usyk. About the Beluga. They'll want something from their commander besides silence, Taisen."
"They'll get it," he said, "when I have something worth giving them besides my own guilt dressed up as leadership."
"That's not nothing, either. Sometimes the guilt is the leadership."
He didn't answer that, and she let the silence stretch a while longer before she tried the other thing she'd actually come out here planning to say, the thing she'd rehearsed twice in her head before the shuttle even left the Arctic's bay.
"I said something back on the bridge, before we broke off: that you brought us here, that you had some responsibility for what happened. I want to take it back. Not because it wasn't true. It was true. I just needed someone to blame for a few minutes, and you were standing close enough to be useful for it, and that wasn't fair to you, even if the rest was."
"It was fair," Taisen said, quietly. "I've just finished telling myself the same thing, with considerably less kindness than you're managing."
Lyn studied the set of his shoulders and decided, for the moment, that this was as much door as she was going to get open today, and that pushing further would only teach him to shut it faster next time. She turned her attention instead to the small heat signature that had just bloomed on her display, orbiting near the system's one inhabited world, tracking a course that (the longer she watched it) looked less like coincidence and more like intent.
"Something's moving," she said. "Coming from an orbital position near the planet. Heading our way."
Taisen studied the trace for a long moment, his voice going thoughtful rather than alarmed. "Thirty seconds ago that heat signature didn't exist. Whatever it is, it only just started moving."
"They've spotted us."
"Perhaps. Or it's a supply drone on a schedule that predates whoever's watching this system now, and the timing's simple coincidence." He didn't look away from the display. "At this range, on this vector, I can't tell you which. What I can tell you is that we're not getting back to the Arctic before it reaches us either way."
"So what do we do?"
"We came out here to confirm whether this station was the Falmeri's true point of origin," he said. "A direct conversation, if it comes to that, would answer the question considerably faster than a scan ever could."
"Only if whoever's driving that heat signature doesn't shoot us on sight."
"Then we'll find out what kind of day this is," Taisen said, and there was something in the flatness of it that made Lyn look at him properly for the first time since the Beluga died (really look, the way she hadn't let herself since the fireworks bloomed on the tactical display and swallowed a man she'd liked), and wonder, not for the first time, whether she'd climbed into a shuttle this morning with a grieving man or a man actively hoping for a fight to hand his grief to.
She decided, watching the calm set of his jaw, that it was probably both, and that she was going to keep a hand near her sidearm regardless of which one turned out to be steering.
The station itself, when they finally reached it, proved better preserved than either of them expected: several intact docking clusters, a hint of staleness in the recycled air rather than the rot Lyn had braced for, every sign of an evacuation carried out in careful order rather than panic. Taisen led the way through wide, dim corridors with the unhurried certainty of a man who already half-recognized the architecture, tracing his light across alcoves and support struts until it caught, in one side room, the carved outline of an eye rendered in a style Lyn had never seen and Taisen, plainly, had.
"This is the place," he said, and something in his voice (subdued in pace, triumphant underneath it) told her he'd been chasing this particular confirmation across two lifetimes.
"The Falmeri built this?"
"The style's unmistakable. Whether they built it or simply passed through it long enough to leave their mark, I couldn't say yet."
"Funny, calling it a style, for a people who don't use their eyes to see anything," Lyn said, nodding at the carved symbol.
"Third Sight isn't seeing, exactly. Perceiving is closer, though even that's a poor translation for something no human language was ever built to hold." He allowed himself a small, tired flicker of humor. "If it helps, I understand it about as well as you understand my eyepatch."
"If you ever gave me a straight answer about that eyepatch," Lyn said, "I might stop bringing it up. You already told me on the Arctic what the eye does. You never told me how you lost the sight in it in the first place."
"The derelict," he said, simply, after a moment. "The explosion that put me in a recovery pod for four days. I spent more of the current than my body wanted to give, right at the end, and it took the sight from that eye on the way out as payment. I didn't choose which part of me it took. I've simply learned to make use of what's left." He said it without drama, the way he said most things that had genuinely cost him something, and moved on before she could decide whether to press further. "The command center should be this way. That's where the heat signature is most likely to dock."