Achilles took stock of where he stood, and what he found was not encouraging.
Everyone in the Expanse labored under the same directives he now carried. None of them could speak of the thing that had taken them. None of them could share even the simple fact of who their captor was or what it wanted, because the knowledge sat sealed behind something none of them could pry open. A being had been collecting Gilded Lifeforms and Infinite Lifeforms and Source Lifeforms for its own purposes, and the beings it collected could not warn anyone, could not name it, could not so much as point. The whole operation ran on silence enforced at the level of existence itself.
