The air split in three places an arms length apart. The ripping cracks that poured through with dimensional energies. They were tinted the same colors as those who made them. Yellow, blue, red and in a split second, the Nekomata sisters were on Oumura. They had arrived in an open area just outside the library. Buildings here had a distinct style that spoke deeply of the Usagizoku desire to build unto the ground. Low roofed structures that were usually little more than a doorway and stairs. The library was the tallest and the trio made their way to the entrance.

Power still ran through the settlement. They could feel the flow of the current singing in the walls. Reliable even with an absent population, the Usagizoku built things to last. A silent gate was reason for concern but the empty settlement put them on alert. The ground litter and lack of upkeep confirmed it had been several arcs since anyone tended to the walkways and gardens. The library was what brought them here and the door was unlocked.

Kika's tails brightened, wisps rising off her in blue and violet curls, more than her idle drift.

"Yes," Mine spoke to her sisters without words. "We all sense it."

They entered and made their way to the security office. They needed no map or names on the doors, no numbers either. Those were for eyes that read walls. They cut the shortest line to what they had come to learn, the energies drawing them through, like following a scent to a trail.

The hallway took on a crimson hue as they neared.

"Yes, Iwa," Mine agreed with her sister, who raised the concern that she sensed something out of place. "Ugly work here. Clouded. Obscured."

As they eased through the next doorway its fields woke as they passed. The lines of current in the walls flaring and fading around them. Kika's wisps thickened. Iwa gave a small nod.

Mine went still. "These energies are not detached," she told her sisters. "They are deactivated." Kika placed her hand against the wall. The three noticed what she did at once and she said: "We are not alone, sisters."

There were presences that had not left. They were being suppressed, held down, hidden. All three came to a single point of alert in the same breath.

Mine closed her fingers on Techū's grip. The bow itself flowed out of the far side of the dimensional fabric and into her hand, ready for action, yellow and certain. She did not aim. She pulled the string and let loose.

The arrow did not cross the room. It arrived at its mark. Something that had not been there was now visible. Sound and form arrived at once. A presence hauled out of its hiding and pinned through the shoulder of its sleek black jacket to a wall behind it. To be struck, here, was to be made real.

The pinned being snarled. A throat that was not feline and had never been for it was Okamijin, and full of contempt. It growled the name his people knew only as legend. "Sanjuumata!"

A female voice broke from above, "Fool to be seen!" its owner abandoning her own concealment. A svelte shape dropping from a high perch and already moving, scampering wide of her pinned companion as though the distraction might split the three of them apart. It did not. Kika went up to meet her, a hop and a kick off the wall, startling and fluid. The blue armored Nekomata closing on prey that had just announced itself.

Iwa was already turned from both of them. Yōgantō buried to the hilt in the wall as she drew the blade sidelong toward a disturbance behind the wall. Searing a third hidden Okamijin out into the open. He came rolling clear of the heat, fortunate to be whole. Scorched out of his stealth into a shape even a plain eye could have caught. Coming to a stop after rolling away from the blazing eminence Iwa allowed her blade to emit. He cursed to no one in particular. "What the ... Ahhrrr!! Vile beast!"

Midair, Kika met the female. A blur of arms, a strike that should not have missed — and beneath it, a feint. Kika sensed an emotion she had not expected from someone she was in combat with: amusement. Curious, bright, real. The Okamijin female moved at near her own speed, near her own precision, and was enjoying it.

Then an inner bloom, the unmistakable arrival of an ancient weapon into their dimension. A kusarigama: glowing sickle in one hand, chain in the other and at its end a sphere of dense spiked energy. Before Kika could answer, the chain had wound her right forearm, both ends in the grip of a grinning Okamijin.

Kika did not pull against it. She turned into it hip first. Her whole body folding the throw taking them both to the floor. The slack of the chain from pulling her opponent closer let her left hand find the nerve. She drove a firm finger-strike into the woman's wrist. Using nothing but fingertips, but placed and weighted so exactly that the hand opened before its owner had decided to let it. The chain dropped from her grip. Kika was on her feet before her opponent was.

The Okamijin female rose too, and this time she kept her distance. She held the sickle in her right hand and let the sphere build speed at the chain's end in her left, twirling it, skillfully — and then, with a flick Kika felt before she could have seen it, the grinning woman sent the sphere screaming straight at her. Too fast to slip. So Kika caught it. Both hands, bare. The meeting of two ancient weapons flared white, sparking and pulsing between her palms.

It was Kika who smiled under her mask this time as she yanked the taut chain toward her, still tethered to the Okamijin's hand. It was a strength the woman had not anticipated as she was jolted off the floor and flung across the room and through a wall on the opposite end. It was hard to grin when unconscious.

Across the room, the one Mine had pinned had not stayed immobile. He had slid free of his own coat and dropped low, rolling across the floor to find a place where he could regain his footing. Before he could get to his feet, a second arrow took him. Through the loose of his trousers and into the floor, a breath from anatomy he would have grieved. Mine had not missed. She did not miss. She was making a point.

Cursing out loud he tried to free himself but the shaft would not come free by his hand. Techū's arrows never did. Pulling the handle at his waist free, it swirled to a solid rod in the space of a tic. A jitte, and no common one, the curved hook of it catching a light that had no source. With that hook he pried the arrow from the boards and rose. He tapped the weapon against his palm, wry beneath his anger.

"Oh, isn't this rich. The blind bowman." A grin. "Your shots have been impressive. But your last, I think." He set himself. "Shall we dance?"

On the word 'dance' he sprang right. Mine loosed. The instant the arrow arrived his jitte was there to meet it. Drawn in tight across his body, the bolt wedged between hook and shaft and came apart. It was a deflection that should not have been possible. Mine paused. She did not know which feeling to give the moment. She had never before needed one.

Then she raised the bow again. She let her intent run ahead of the shot — a clean line to the head, declared — and turned her focus inward, as was her nature, and loosed. The Okamijin holding the jitte allowed it to move on its own to parry the incoming shot. Instead, he replied with a shriek of pain and surprise. "MY FOOT! Arrrgh — you mongrel!" He was fixed to the boards through boot and foot both. The arrow had gone nowhere near his head. Mine had fed his weapon a lie and put the truth somewhere else.

Yōgantō was hungry. Iwa melted it back out of the wall and let it drift across her perception, seeking a target that had reverted into a shadowy stealth. As if floating on calm water, Yōgantō moved through the air, side to side, then up, until it found her prey by the heat of his frustration.

He kept his distance but now his cover was broken. Circling slow and careful, wary of the huge, crimson glowing blade. So Iwa gave him a fast cut, certain of it, nearly losing her balance when it met nothing at all. Yōgantō's edge passing clean through the fog of a man who was not standing where he seemed to stand. The real blow landed on her, answered from her blind side. A flat, hard strike to the back of her thigh that dropped her to a knee. When the fog thinned he was crouched low and grinning, off to her side, recovered. The simple stick in his hands having done simple, effective work.

He could not keep clear of the blade's heat even then. He flinched from it, snarling: "By the howl of the pack, that is hot!" — and then, because he was the kind who talked: "Face me with your fury, koneko. You will fall this day."

Iwa had not appreciated being struck. She did not rise angry. She rose decided.

Yōgantō woke. The radiating heat climbed into open flame, and the room itself went a flickering crimson, and the grinning face across from her shifted to a surprised panic. She took the handle in both hands, raised it high and centered, the tip turned down — and drove it into the floor. The force went out in every direction at once. It threw him the length of the room and into the far wall and left him there. The papers scattered in the burst were instantly ashes. Everything that was not already ruined began, gently, to smolder. This fight was over.

A faint stirring, from the far side of a wall that was no longer a barrier, a female voice with the fight gone out of it — capitulated. "Parlay, brave Nekomata?" A moment passed and Mine replied for her sisters as well. "Your words had better be worth our mercies."

Mine said it firmly, and the three sisters moved as one to make the terms real. Kika and Iwa brought their battered opponents' weapons to a desk the fight had spared, and set their inert handles down in no particular order. The sickle handle and its chain, the short length of blunt stick and the grip that once hosted a hooked rod. Each of them going still and unremarkable the moment it left the hand that knew it. Then the Nekomata walked the two mobile Okamijin to where their compatriot was still one with the floor.

The female spoke. The one who no longer had a fight in her voice. The other two angled toward her without being asked. Whoever led them, it was her.

"This'll sound fantastical, I know," she said, "but we're not your enemy today."

The three Nekomata acknowledged one another the way no others could. A single thought arriving in all of them at once, along a thread no one outside their kind would ever feel. Mine answered for her kin.

"You have three of the Dread weapons. How do you reconcile your claim with those in your possession?"

The defeated commander paused only briefly. "Granted. That complicates things." pausing another breath. "But settling it here and now costs us both our missions, I'd wager."

The sisters could feel the tension in the symbiosis they shared with their own weapons. On the desk the three Dread things lay quiet, and the Nekomata's own weapons would not abide the nearness of them. Yōgantō radiated its crimson aura reaching to touch everything as it tinted the room red. Around Kika the wisps of energy thickened until she was very nearly smothered in them, the dimension-light pressing close as a crowd. Mine felt the whole of it as a shout, the old enmity rising inside her, every question wanting the short, clean answer.

Neither Mine nor her sisters gave in to the inner pressures. Kika said the thing they all felt. "These are not the same as the dark ones. They have a new path." It was not a comfort but a curiosity that allowed a dialog instead of an execution.

"We must listen to what she has to say," she said, to her sisters and to the weapons alike. "Be mindful of our intolerance." Then, to the Okamijin: "Speak. Identify yourselves."

"I'm Kage. These are Musu and Yami." A pause, and then the thing that mattered. "We're Lycan Galactic Intelligence — here to find out why this system went dark."

"Pack." The correction came from the floor. Yami, the wound in his foot clearly uncomfortable. "Lycan Galactic Pack, Intelligence Bureau. The whole of it carries importance, when one troubles to carry it." He liked the full title, every word. He took pride in the weight it set down in a room. Even with an arrow's memory still in his boot.

Kage did not turn. "He likes the long version."

"It is the correct version."

Mine consulted her team without a sound.

Mine — "These weapons stand apart." Kika — "They walk a third path." Iwa — "The Okamijin do not deceive, yet this is not the whole of the truth." Kika — "Trust with caution." Mine — "A divide among the Dread is unexpected." Iwa — "We have no time to examine the 'Why'." Kika — "We must confront the situation before us." Mine — "Agreed, the 'Why' must wait." Iwa — "We allow a truce today." Kika — "Yes." Mine — "Yes."

What passed among the three of them no one else could follow. The Lycan saw only the result: Yōgantō's glow, Kika letting her energy out in measured releases — light where there should have been speech. Then Mine, whose bright yellow energies began to subside, spoke for them all.

"We have a truce for this endeavor, and will not confiscate your weapons. They will be accounted for but that is a discussion for our politicians."

Mine's head tilted to an angle a sighted person never finds. "By your data, what was the status of the gate in the arc before this darkness?" Adding before any answer came: "The balance of energy is not correct in this place."

Kage had read the reports. She had known, walking in, that the Nekomata were reckoned half-mystical. The kind of asset other officers wrote up in careful, hedging language. Reports were one thing; standing before them was another. They were in her, moving through her in ways she had no posture to prevent. She could faintly sense them reading her as easily as she read a room, and it unnerved her to the root. Not the way the DarkPack did — that was a crawling under the skin. She was, for once, glad to be away from that assignment. This was cleaner, and worse. The plain, total certainty that she could not lie to these three and have it hold. So she did the one thing left to an officer who could not deceive. She told the truth, and chose carefully which truths.

"We had intel Oumura was in the sights of a DarkPack raid," she said, "but there was not enough confirmed to act on it."

Then she relaxed into a deep breath, and the shape of her changed. She was less an officer giving a report and more someone leaning into a mystery she wanted answered as badly as they did. Iwa stood easy now, and Yōgantō with her, the blade quiet enough to return the soft pale amber hue of the room's easy light. Behind Kage, Musu had crouched to tend his brother's foot. The small, undignified hole Mine had set precisely through it. Yami suffered the fussing in sour silence. Both of them listening to the exchange taking place among them.

Mine gave them the scraps the sisters could share. Not all of them. She let no part of Hakase Ren into the room. Not the name, or the work. Definitely not the knowledge where he had hidden the thing others would tear a system apart to reach. If the Lycan had come to Oumura hunting the same scholar, the question would rise in them of its own accord. The sisters would feel it bloom before it ever became a lie. Let the absence do the asking.

Then there was the timing the sisters had carried in with them. A timeline confirmed by Shiro's people before they ever crossed. The palace's own ears on Oumura had gone deaf three arcs past but the Lycan's had not gone deaf with them. The Lycan Galactic Pack's watch on this system had run on past the Nekozoku's own silence. Whatever had happened here, the Lycan had heard an arc of it the palace never would. It was no small part of why the three of them stood in this room.

Mine presented the gap to Kage plainly. "Your watch outlasted ours over Oumura. We would know what reached you in the arc we had already gone deaf to."

"Your information is disturbingly accurate. It seems some of us are not doing their jobs very well. Yes, we kept the channel about an arc past you, near enough. Then it went to nothing." Kage's account came level. "By then it was a mess, panicked, voices over voices. Whatever happened it was a hurried exodus. It was in that arc the ships began. The place inundated all at once with private transports, Masshulk freighters. The lot of it pouring in from the East Ring. Three turns of that. Then silence." She paused, collecting her theories. "Best guess? They were getting out."

Mine did not let it rest there. "That arc only you could hear — what was said at the end of it? Did any voice name where the ships were bound, or whose word had set them moving?"

Shaking her head, Kage answered. "None that reached us. If an order was given aloud, it never made the air we caught. Automated beacons, gate activations, and then the quiet." Kage turned a palm up. "A whole system emptied into the dark in the space of three turns, and not one word of where to, or why. If it was a raid, it was fast and efficient."

She leaned back against the battered desk, settling half onto the one edge of it that promised anything like comfort. The Nekomata were a thing to witness in person. Captivating, and considerably more so now that they were not trying to kill her. There was no shame in losing to them. The loss had been written before the first arrow left Mine's bow. She understood, sitting here, why the Prime Alpha held the armistice with both hands. The Nekozoku were formidable, honorable and unfailingly respectful, yet would not shed a single tear if the day's accounting required them to remove you from the universe. Best to keep all of that in view at once.

Mine was shaping the next question — something to draw the evacuation theory wider — when the three of them went alert as one.

A fluctuation was rippling the dimensions. The Nekomata felt it arrive before the room had any way to know it. Like lightning before thunder, a pressure folding inward. Then the wide screen along the wall flickered. The one carrying the full status of the Fold-Gate woke and threw its light across all of them. The gate's systems were powering up. Coming online.

"What are you playing at, Lycan?" Mine said it as an accusation and knew it for the wrong one even as it left her. There was nothing in Kage's energy but confusion, a bewilderment as honest as her own.

Kage did not answer. None of them did. They watched the relay screen show it plainly: the Fold-Gate blooming to life, and a vessel no larger than a shuttle, an obsolete class that no one had built in ages. Emerging from the Fold-Gate and sliding into view on a slow glide, it came about gently, arcing back the way it had come. The Fold-Gate gathered itself again. And the nimble little skiff, a hull far too small for the enormous engine slung beneath it, melted into the fold and was gone.

Musu was the first to break the silence. "Ummm… what was that?"

He got no answer, because in the same instant the screens died, every lit panel went black at once. The thing that had just happened left the room in the quiet, where it had come from.

"That is Grenriyan, Kika says it folds to Grenriyan." Mine named it with a curious concern. Grenriyan was no easy place to get to. It was one of a handful of stars in the galaxy no weapon bearer could rip to. The overlapping and tearing of dimensions made space too unstable to navigate that way.

The purple and indigo wisps around the blue-masked sister coiled and swirled around her. "Yes, Kika. The taste of it was there." A pause, Mine sharing her sisters' thoughts with the room. The three of them turning some shared thread over between them. "No. No, Kika, you are drifting. The palace hall has no matter here." The Lycan glanced at each other knowing words would not make the sisters easier to understand.

Iwa walked past where the Lycan had gathered. The low warmth that lived at her back, Yōgantō, passed near Yami's face as she went. He flinched from it, the heat finding him even now. Musu cringed a bit as well, crouched down helping Yami slide his boot over the tender ruin of his foot.

"We should investigate the Fold-Gate station itself," Mine said. "There will be fresh data we need." She was not inviting the Lycan so much as informing them that the sisters were leaving.

Mine gestured toward the desk where the Lycan weapons rested. "Your weapons are yours to take. On your honor, you will report them to the arbiters of the armistice." Then she laid down as more fact than condition, "You will enjoy better days if we do not have to come and take them from you."

"We will be unable to synchronize communications with you while on the station." Mine told Kage. "Do as you like, however, should you find where Oumura went we will return to this location after we learn what the Gate chooses to tell us," Mine offered. "You have the thread for it — your own data and timelines will guide your search there. We will take the gate. Whatever the settlement and the Library can reveal will show the way the rest of Oumura went."

And as one the Sanjuumata, the ancient name a prophecy named long ago, faced the three Lycan and bowed, fully. Nothing held back because among the Nekozoku a bow of honor is whole or it is not given, whatever the giver privately feels. The display of honor did not land the same on each of the Lycan. Kage returned it, awkwardly after a breath. Yami could not tell whether he had been honored or mocked and Musu resisted the urge to ignore them, instead having a profoundly new respect for them. Then the sisters tore the dimensions open, and were gone from the room, and stood inside the Fold-Gate.

The Lycan had come to Oumura the only way there was to come now, by Rip and a step. A simple task to examine the silence of a Library. Now there was nothing but silence in that Library to yield an answer. Nothing but empty shelves and abandoned desks. Because the settlement was abandoned and full of conveyances no one would miss, they commandeered a local hauler left standing with its hatch hanging open. It was Musu's idea to explore the relay station that handled the settlement's communications with the Fold-Gate and the outside galaxy. Rising over the crest they now rode into a valley and the last stretch into the port-town. Kage climbed down into a mechanical hum that was still the wrong kind of quiet. The relay station had gone dormant with no one left to hear it run. Doors stood open. A hand-cart sat half-loaded in a lane. An awning luffed in a wind with no one left to cool.

Few places in the galaxy held the serenity of the people who lived here. The Usagizoku, by instinct, built downward. Their architecture did not climb the land, it decorated it and eased into the soil below. Wide sunken courts with dwellings cut into galleries that spiraled down corridors out of the daylight. Deep into a warren farther than the eye could follow. The only tall things they made stood up from the pale ground in efficient numbers, only what was needed. Slender environment cowls. A sparse field of them, reflecting light and breathing air down to the rooms below. Not a hard corner anywhere and never in their long quiet history was there a need for one. Scholars. Keepers of old things.

"Huh." Musu turned a slow circle in the dead market. He had a gift for setting the obvious out in the open where a person could look at it. "Nobody panicked."

He was right, and it did nothing to define the mystery. Kage had seen many places where people fled. Panic leaves a signature, something dropped, a trampled thing, doors wrenched half off because two bodies wanted through it at once. None of that here. The cart in the lane was half-loaded and then set down. The stalls weren't abandoned. They were shuttered. Someone closed the door on the way out. She called out to her team. "Yami, Musu. What are you sensing here? We know what this looks like, but we are missing something." She didn't turn around. "Tell me what this is."

Behind her, the uneven sound of a step, and a slower step, the foot Mine had ruined still arguing with the ground. Yami refused to lean on Musu so he leaned on nothing and paid for it at every stride. A grimaced expression staining his vanity, his wounded pride said not one word, which was a vanity of its own. He stopped at the doors of the relay station. Fixed to the glass where none could miss it, Yami eyed the clue Kage knew was missing. He smirked as he read a posted notice at the entrance. "Well, look no further," he said at last. "They have handed us the answer." And then, reading it down: "It was ordered. This isn't a warning. It's an instruction."

Kage stepped closer to read it over his shoulder, her field translator scanning the soft round script into common words. Departure windows. Tiers by district. Which families to which ship, in which chord, bearing what weight. A queue. A timetable for the end of a home.

"They did not flee," Yami said. "They were evacuated. On a schedule. By a voice they obeyed." That was the touch of chill on the back of Kage's neck. Not the empty town but the obedience. A gentle people like the Usagi would never queue politely off the planet for a stranger. Whoever had emptied Oumura, they were trusted enough to fold up lives and leave. Force, she could have read at a glance. This was quieter and organized at a pace that stood out as most remarkable.

They worked the data they could recover from the relay. It was Musu who went quiet, which was how Kage knew he'd found something that mattered.

The Bureau kept a post in the library's translation wing. One Lycan translation scholar drawing the dull straw of a quiet system and a diplomatic posting worth more than it looked. The translator was gone, like all of them, but had done what a good operative does. She leaves a record.

It wasn't long — a few lines scrawled fast on a slate, the flat lit hand-pad every field officer carried, its panel taking her fingertip because the larger systems were already shifting to standby modes.

> — third arc and it continues, the relays go soft. no one can say why. > — the keepers say the deep stacks have begun to sing. they will not explain it. they are afraid of the word. > — the order to leave came clean and calm and from the right desks. too right. filed my doubt where doubts get filed. no one read it. > — ships out of the East Ring, more than the manifest called for. private liners, ragtag masshulks, no markings. logged three. then the counting stopped mattering. > — going out with the last of them. if you're reading this: the contract is the least of what we lost here.

Kage read it twice and was still unsure how to parse it.

"The deep stacks." Yami's voice had lost its ease entirely. "That's the old library, right? Their keepers' whole reason to exist isn't it?" He looked at Kage. "So, what do they mean it sings?"

"I have no idea." Kage answered flatly.

"Somebody emptied this system," she said. "Carefully. Kindly, even. Gave them time, gave them ships and an order they were grateful to obey. This wasn't an abduction covered up. We've been calling this a disaster. It isn't one. It's housekeeping."

Musu had gone very still. "Housekeeping for what?"

It was a question the empty station did not have an answer for, although Kage had a fair idea of who might.

The Nekomata had gone to the fold-gate's orbital station to gather data on whatever those odd ships were doing there. Was this whole world evacuated to keep some deed unwitnessed? The reason itself was far likelier waiting up at the gate than out here among the shuttered stalls. Which meant the answer to her question was held, for now, in the hands of the three she'd traded blows with earlier.

She didn't love any of this but she turned the unit around anyway. "We go back. We wait for the Nekomata." Kage ordered while turning to make her way back to the borrowed transport.

Musu fell in at her shoulder. "You hate waiting."

"True," she agreed, "but I hate half a map even more." The questions were still rising up with each answer they found. "We've got a gentle people talked up out of their own world on a schedule. Our Nekomata 'friends' should have a destination, hopefully, or something if that gate gives up its secrets. Neither half explains any of this on its own." She climbed into the operator's seat and turned her head back the way they'd come. "Yami, up the pace, can you walk?"

"I have BEEN walking," Yami said, with a noticeable grumble and fading dignity, as he limped after them, back toward the transport.

There was no air to echo the snap their rips would make. When the Nekomata tore through the dimensions into the Fold-Gate station the energies that lived in their weapons spoke to the armor they wore. Instantly remaking itself, closing over them and sealing each sister in a shell against the hard vacuum that surrounded them.

A delicate frost dusted every surface, every angle of every wall. The gravity held them to the deck regardless; it was built into the bones of the structure and asked nothing of the dormant power. The dark was no hindrance to the sisters. It never had been.

They stood motionless a moment, the room lit only by the low glow of their own weapons. Techū was the brightest of the three, and the irony of it pulled a grin out of Mine. The blind sister carrying the lamp. The yellow of it was wasted on her but not on Kika and Iwa. They took the light Mine could not use and went to work by it. Their hands finding the right controls in the gloom, waking the sequence that would coax power back into the deck.

"This balance is in the mists, sister." It was Iwa, who had no voice to give it. Yōgantō gave it for her, the red waking along the blade as the thought passed through. The energies in this place were wrong, as if hidden behind something, fogged.

"They danced with teacups held high. There are more names here than there should be." Kika stood at a data panel, reading what it held and what had been lifted out of it. Gaps as plain to her as the marks. "There is a shape Mine sees. Tell us, sister. I sense you see it." Kika was always the most mysterious of them. Her readings came sidelong, in images that had meaning much later after they arrived. They would learn what the teacups were another time.

"Take the data clean for the palace." Mine set it among them as the one who remembered first. "The Bakeneko will want it whole." Shiro would sift it grain by grain, Arashi would read the dark roads folded inside it. Neither of them thanked you for bringing incomplete data.

It would have been tedious work for anyone else. They were drawing the files out one at a time on the thin power they had managed to wake. The Nekomata took exactly as long as the work needed and resented not one beat of it.

"The strings are stored, sisters." Kika, satisfied. Whatever the station had set down before it dimmed. They held it now, clean and whole, the way the Bakeneko liked it.

Iwa became aware of the larger mystery in the station. The red glow arising along Yōgantō even as the thought carried through the silent ether between them.

"The air did not leak into the void on its own, sisters." Iwa made it a fact. "Perhaps we should seek the one who let it out."

"No, sister. Not who. We seek where it let out." Kika leaned into the nearest wall. The delicate violet wisps curled up off her twin tails and evaporated into the vacuum around her. Armor was no barrier to those energies that would not be contained. "I see it. I will lead your path. Follow."

The hallway took them in and painted long shadows that moved as they moved. Angles shifting and gliding along the walls as the trio passed. They stepped into a storage hall and Techū's glow spread yellow across a voluminous space and there it was. Dozens of containers piled hard against an open door, holding it open to the emptiness of space.

"It is not stable, sisters, but it can be removed easily." Iwa was certain of it, stepping forward while starting to remove Yōgantō and clear the blockage the short way.

"That cargo could carry value, sister. Careful and do not let any slip out the door." Mine moved in behind her to take the slower method then stopped. Kika had gone still among the stacks.

"They have all been opened." Where Kika's perception passed, the truth of each container surfaced for the others as plainly as speech. Every seal hung broken, every last one of them undone. Not forced, opened each in its turn. The containers were unlocked with a key, not the way a thief works a lock. "The count is wrong. Forty-one." The gaps lined up behind her stillness. "There should be fifty. Nine are simply gone." And then, a revelation. "These seals are old. A make the foundries left off in some age before ours. Whatever waited in these holds, it waited a long while."

Mine looked at what remained, and the value she had cautioned them to spare now mocked her intent. Goods to buy a small fleet sat unbothered in their cradles. Filled with worked metals, sealed medicines, a strongbox no one had troubled to force. Whoever had gone through this hall by hand had stepped over wealth to reach something else.

"It bears the look of purpose with no greed to it," Mine said slowly. "Take this, leave that, take this. Random."

"There is more, sister." Kika, soft and certain. "The sense is in what is not here." She rested a hand on an emptied crate that had held nothing dearer than hand-tools and the dull gear of a working station. "Everything woven through with intelligent mass is gone. So is the thinking matter and power cells. The whole of those things drawn out of the cheapest items in this hall and the dearest alike. The gold left lying where it sat. They did not come for what was precious, sisters." A beat, in a quiet of a different make than the vacuum's. "They came for what could shape and think for itself."

Yōgantō dimmed, and steadied. "Then this was no looting," Iwa said.

"The chime sings, sister," Kika added. "A task to do." She set about working the controls to seal the breach, and Mine joined Iwa, and the two of them cleared the containers back from it. Kika coaxed the control panel back far enough to draw the doors tight and sealed. Iwa set the pressurizing protocols running so air returned to the empty deck. The Fold-Gate station stood ready for the hands that would come to repair it.

They took the data they had been able to pull cleanly. Then they gathered close and summoned the Rip back to Oumura's Library.

The three colored Rips set the sisters back down on the open ground outside the Library's entrance where they had first arrived. Kage and the Lycan waiting for them.

"Good. You are here. We do not have to hunt you." Mine said it in a way that left Kage no doubt at all whose prey they would be or who would have the success in that hunt.

"We've got some answers. What did you turn up?" Kage held out a small data stick. Mine took it and stored it in a recess that opened in her armor and then sealed again as if it had never been there. "They were evacuated — systematically, controlled. We haven't been all the way through it, but there are several things that will interest you."

The Mata took it in as one: Kika reacting in the sudden thickening of the energy-wisps that always moved about her, Iwa bathed a moment in the crimson Yōgantō threw out as her voice, Mine nodding slowly to the air.

"The gate station was emptied to a vacuum. A cargo hold opened from the outside and jammed so it could not shut properly." Mine drew out a data stick of her own and offered it to Kage who took it and slid it into some hidden cache at her waist. "It was not robbed. It was sifted. The treasures were left sitting where they lay. Common things were carried off. Power cells and thinking circuits, everything woven through with intelligent mass. Clothing. Utensils. Hygiene stores. The disposable and the daily. None of the wealth from the hold was taken."

Kika set a hand on Mine's shoulder, the wisps rising off it her way of reminding. "Nine containers are missing entirely," Mine said for her, "and their manifests gone with them."

"The air was let out by intent, not fault." Mine did not soften it. "The wide cargo door had been forced open to the void. The containers half-pushed into the gap and jammed in place. An attempt to cast the cargo out whole, into the dark, where it would never be accounted for. Whether the nine that are gone went out that way or left in other hands, we cannot yet say. But nine is the number missing and confirmed gone from the records. Only our senses tell us they were ever aboard." Mine paused for a moment as the two teams stood in the cool breeze. "You will also find the gate's passage record in the data. It was as much of it as the low power would yield," Mine added. "We have read it only far enough to know it is what we came for. The rest is for the palace."

The Lycan traded a round of looks, already fitting the pieces together behind their eyes. Kage judged the investigation done, for now. "I've included a channel you can reach, should you choose to keep cooperating on this." She said it plainly, the logic ahead of the preference. "Right now this crosses both our borders, and it shows no sign of having started on either side of them. If it is a threat we can answer better together, we would be fools not to weigh the gain." This was her 'Duty to the Pack', set down ahead of whatever her brothers were silently objecting at her back.

"This is acceptable. We have also left an open path for the exchange of knowledge." Mine inclined her head. "Our work here is complete."

Her sisters stepped a pace closer, drawing in for the crossing.

Mine inclined her head a final time. "You carry ancient weapons, Lycan, and carried them well. You yielded to the truth of the moment over your pride. Among my kind that is named strength, not weakness. We will remember it of you."

"Quite the interesting turn — don't you think?" Kage said, then added: "We're for the East Ring, to see what the sea-dragons have to do with any of this. Keep in touch!" — with an auspicious wave and a grin.

"Indeed, Lycan. An interesting turn." Mine said it on behalf of the three, and with the barest thought of travel, the Rip drew them home to the palace.