Tu'Shan's response was immediate.
He was in the corridor within minutes of Ha'ken's report, armor on, expression set and eyes sharp. He took in the empty corridor, the side passage the figure had come from, and the floor where the light had spread, and he looked at all of it for exactly as long as he needed to before turning to the Salamanders already assembling behind him.
"Full search," he said. "Every corridor, every chamber, every external approach. She may still be within the fortress or the surrounding grounds. Move now."
They moved.
The fortress shifted into a different mode — not the lockdown of the briefing room incident, but something more active and more urgent. Boots on every level, Librarians extending their senses through the walls and the stone, and Apothecaries on standby. Tu'Shan moved to the command station in the central hall and coordinated the search with focused efficiency.
Ha'ken searched corridor seven himself. Then the side passage. Then the three corridors branching from it and the chambers attached to those. He went through each one and found nothing.
No trace. No mark. No sign that the light had left anything behind.
He came back to the central hall and gave his report and Tu'Shan listened and his expression didn't change but something behind it settled into a harder set.
"The Librarians?" Tu'Shan said.
"Nothing psychic," the senior Librarian said from across the room. "No Warp residue. No dimensional breach signature. Whatever took her didn't use the Warp to do it." A pause. "Or it used something we don't have instruments for."
Tu'Shan was quiet.
"If she's still on Nocturne we'll find her," he said. "Continue the search."
Four hours passed.
The search covered Prometheus from the top level to the deepest foundational chambers. It covered the landing aprons and the shuttle bay and the outer approaches across the ashfield. Librarians swept the surrounding area for any psychic disturbance, any anomaly, any thread to follow.
They found nothing.
At the four hour mark Tu'Shan called the active search to a halt and stood in the central hall with Ha'ken and the senior Librarian.
"She's not here," the Librarian said quietly.
"No," Tu'Shan said.
"The figure that came out of the passage," Ha'ken said. "It reached for her and called out. It wasn't trying to take her. It was trying to stop whatever was taking her."
"And went with her," Tu'Shan said.
"Yes."
The three of them stood with that.
Ha'ken thought about the cyan eyes in the briefing room corner. I will watch over her. Whatever thou dost. He thought about the figure leaping from shadow and the single urgent word before the light took them both.
No.
It is not the word of something attacking. The word of something trying to prevent.
He held onto that thought because it was the only thing close to useful that he had.
Then he thought about Eve.
The thought arrived and sat in his chest with the weight of something he didn't want to do and had to do regardless. He knew how the twins existed with each other and he'd watched it for months on Armageddon and on the ship and here in Prometheus. Eve without Lilith was a different creature from Eve with Lilith and he'd seen what that difference looked like.
Now Lilith was gone and he had to walk into a room and say it.
"I'll inform them," Ha'ken said. "Eve and Lysander."
Tu'Shan looked at him. "I'll come with you," he said.
Ha'ken nodded. "Yes, my lord."
He knocked once and opened the door.
Eve was on the edge of her bed exactly where he'd last seen her, back straight and eyes on the door, hands folded in her lap. She looked at Ha'ken's face when he entered and something in her expression changed immediately. A small shift in her eyes and her jaw — the look of someone reading an answer from a face before a word was spoken.
Lysander looked up from his book.
"Where's Lilith?" Eve said as her eyes darted as if she's automatically seeking her.
Ha'ken came into the room and Tu'Shan came in behind him and Ha'ken crouched down to their level.
"Something happened in the corridor," he said, steady and direct. "There was a light. It appeared beneath Lilith and it took her and she's gone. We've searched the fortress and the surrounding grounds for four hours and we haven't found her."
Silence.
Lysander's book slid off his knee and he didn't catch it. He stared at Ha'ken with his mouth slightly open and his face pale and his eyes bright and immediate. "Gone where?" he said. Almost a whisper.
"We don't know," Ha'ken said. "We don't know where she is right now."
Lysander looked at the door. Then at the floor where the book had fallen. His lip pressed between his teeth hard and his hands gripped his knees and he sat very still and very quiet, breathing in careful measured pulls, holding everything together with visible and deliberate effort. Clearly, Lysander doesn't know how to react at that.
Eve hadn't moved.
She sat with her back straight and her hands folded and she looked at Ha'ken and her face was completely flat and her eyes were too steady.
"Lilith," she said. "Is gone?"
"We believe so," Ha'ken said. "We have no indication—"
"She's gone?" Eve added not knowing what to say. "Lilith is gone?"
Ha'ken paused. "Yes. Someone took her."
Eve looked at him.
And then her face broke.
She stood up. Her hands slammed down against the stone floor on either side of her, both palms flat and hard, and the sound rang through the small room. She straightened to her full height and her jaw locked and her eyes were bright and wet and wide and furious all at once and she looked at Ha'ken and the air in the room changed.
The Blank field poured out of her.
"Bring her back! Bring Lilith back!" Eve demanded.
It had no sound and no light and no physical force, but it hit everything in the room simultaneously — the walls, the floor, the air, the people standing in it. The inside of Ha'ken's skull went hollow. His chest went wrong. A deep, fundamental wrongness pressed in from every direction at once, not painful but terrible in a place beneath thought, beneath training, beneath every layer of conditioning a Space Marine carried. It pressed against all of it and found the human underneath.
Ha'ken gripped the doorframe. He held on and kept his feet and kept his face.
Tu'Shan took one step back into the doorframe. One involuntary step. His hand found the wall beside him and pressed flat against it.
The luminator on the ceiling flickered.
Lysander made a sound.
Eve heard it.
She turned and looked at him.
Lysander's face was open and pale and frightened and unguarded, and he shook, and his lip was pressed so hard between his teeth it had gone white, and he was trying not to make another sound and mostly succeeding but the effort showed in every line of his small face.
Eve's expression cracked in a different direction.
She dragged the field back inward. A physical effort — both hands pressed flat against her own chest, teeth clenched, shoulders rigid, eyes shut, every visible muscle in her body working against the thing she'd just let out. She reeled it back degree by degree and the hollow wrongness in the room receded and the luminator steadied and the pressure released and Ha'ken let go of the doorframe and Tu'Shan straightened and Lysander took a shaky breath and uncurled his arms.
Eve opened her eyes.
She looked at Lysander. His color was coming back slowly and his breathing had evened out and he looked at her with wet eyes and nodded once, very small, to say he was okay.
Eve looked at her own hands.
They were shaking.
She sat down on the floor. Not on the bed. The floor. Her legs folded under her and she went down and pulled her knees to her chest and pressed her forehead against them and her shoulders shook and her hands gripped the back of her own neck. The sound that came out of her was low and raw and had nothing composed in it — not the careful quiet of her usual crying, not the controlled lines. Just Eve, fully broken open, shaking on the floor of the quarters while the volcanic glow came through the window and Nocturne went on outside not caring about any of it.
Lysander got off the bed.
He sat down on the floor beside her and put his back against the bed frame and pressed his shoulder against hers and put his hand on her knee and left it there. He didn't say it was okay. He didn't say she'd be back soon. His own face was wet and his own eyes were red but he held it and he stayed and he kept his hand exactly where it was and he breathed steadily next to her.
Ha'ken crouched down.
Tu'Shan stayed in the doorway and said nothing.
After a long time Eve lifted her head.
Her face was red and wet and completely open. She looked at Ha'ken from the floor and her hands dropped from her neck and pressed flat against the stone in front of her and she leaned forward slightly.
She opened her mouth.
It took a moment for the word to work.
"Please," she said.
Her voice broke through the middle of it and she kept going.
"Please." Smaller. Her hands pressed harder against the floor. "Please find her. I can't—" She stopped. Her jaw tightened. She pushed through it. "I can't… without her. Please. Please find her."
Ha'ken looked at her.
Then he reached out and put his hand — massive, armored, built for war — very gently on top of hers where it pressed against the floor.
"I give you my word," he said. "We will find her."
Eve looked at his hand on hers.
Then she looked at him and nodded, once, very small, and dropped her forehead back to her knees.
Lysander kept his hand on her knee.
The room stayed quiet around all of them.