Taisen was quiet a moment, weighing it the way he weighed most things, plainly and without hurry, and found, weighing it, that he did not entirely trust his own instinct to agree.
"I don't like keeping things from people who've earned the right to know them," he said. "I've made that mistake once already this month, with Usyk, and I told this whole crew, standing in that mess hall, that I wouldn't make it twice."
"This isn't the same mistake," Alita said, quietly, from the doorway. "You hid Usyk's death from grief, and from not wanting to say a true thing out loud. This is Swan asking you to manage information, not conceal a fact. The fact that your hand is changing, everyone in this room already knows, and Lyn will know within the hour whether you tell her or she simply looks at you across a table. What Swan's asking permission to withhold is the rate. The exact math. I think that's a different kind of secret, and I think it's the kind a commander is allowed to keep, so long as he keeps it for the crew's sake and not his own comfort."
"And if the rate matters," Taisen said. "If it reaches something before I've told anyone the number was worth telling."
"Then I'll tell you the second it does," Swan said, immediately, without hesitation of any kind, "sir, I promise you that. I'm not asking to hide a fuse from the man holding the bomb. I'm asking not to read the fuse out loud over the ship's comm every hour on the hour while we're trying to work out how to cut it."
Taisen looked at his own hand a long moment, grey climbing steady toward a palm he had not yet let himself imagine fully covered, and nodded, once, slow.
"Keep the number between the three of us," he said. "For now. Not forever, Swan. The moment you think it matters to anyone else, you tell them, and you tell them before you tell me you're going to."
"Understood, sir."
Camaro rewound her own bandage without being asked, methodical, unhurried, and looked at Taisen a long moment before she left, something in her face that had softened, fractionally, from the flat guardedness she'd carried since the betrayal, not trust exactly, not yet, but the particular loosening of a woman deciding that a man willing to sit still and be honestly frightened in front of her, even for thirty seconds, was worth a little more of her patience than she'd been prepared to spend on him that morning.
"For what it's worth," she said, at the door, "I hope it stops."
"So do I," Taisen said. "Considerably more than you know, Ensign."
He sat alone in sickbay a while after they'd all gone, the overhead light still swung down low over the exam table, and turned his own hand slowly under it, watching the grey catch the white light in a way that made it look, for one unguarded moment, almost beautiful, the way frost on a window sometimes looked beautiful in the half second before you remembered what frost actually meant for whatever was growing underneath it. He thought of Boettia, briefly, the way he always thought of it now, sideways, glancing, never quite letting himself look at it straight on for longer than a breath. He thought of a tribunal room he hadn't stood in for longer than a single lifetime and a boy's slope of grass he'd stood on again only days ago, and found, sitting there with his own cold hand held up to a light that asked nothing of him and judged nothing either, that he did not actually know, if the ash reached his palm and kept going the way Venemis's worst version of the story said it might, whether the man who died of it would be paying for something he'd done, or simply for having remembered too clearly a thing he'd spent two lifetimes trying not to.
Maybe it's both, he thought, and did not find the thought as frightening as he'd expected to. Maybe it was always going to be both.
He flexed the hand once, watching the grey shift and settle beneath the skin like sediment disturbed and resettling in still water, and switched off the light, and went to find Lyn, because sitting alone with a thought like that for any longer than he already had would have been, he judged, its own kind of recklessness, and he had already spent enough of that particular currency this month.
The full crew gathered in the ready room two hours later, all five of them for the first time since the shore, and Taisen told them everything he'd promised Lyn on the hillside, told it plainly, in the same unhurried, unadorned register he'd used in the mess hall to talk about Usyk, though he left, deliberately, the exact shape of who Bora Shrie had been before Boettia out of it, offering instead only the bones the crew already half understood: a boy who died on that world, a man who came back wearing another name, a debt Malkor apparently believed the boy still owed and the man had spent two lifetimes trying to pay down without ever once naming, out loud, what the payment actually was.
Camaro noticed the gap in it. Alita watched her notice, watched the small, careful stillness that came over her whenever a story didn't quite finish the way a story should, and understood that whatever trust had crept back into the room over the last hour in sickbay had not extended so far as to make Camaro stop counting the missing pieces of anything, and thought, privately, that this was probably exactly the right instinct for an officer to keep, whatever it cost the room's comfort in the meantime.
But it was the ring, and the oath behind it, and the single sentence about Fleet Command's leak, that took up the greater part of the next hour, because those were the pieces that changed, in ways none of them could yet fully measure, what the rest of this voyage actually was.