They arrived. They did not travel — there was no road left to Oumura, and a thing that arrives leaves no record of having come. One tic, piercing the air as three radiant pinpoints and cracking instantly to open the air with seams of yellow, blue and red — one for each of them; the next, the three of them standing in the open under a sky no one had watched in arcs — the relay station a low scatter of buildings against nothing, set far from anyone on purpose.

Power still moved in it. They felt the current singing in the walls — patient, redundant, Usagi-built to outlast its own keepers — and that was the first wrong thing. Twenty should have been here. What they felt instead were twenty absences shaped like people, the staleness of three arcs without a hand to tend the place, debris gone soft with neglect. A station built to watch the roads, and no one left to watch them. The Gate dark, and the lights still on. And threaded under all of it, through the singing current like a wound that would not close — the place where the dark had touched our dimension.

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

"Yes," Mine said, for all of them. "We all sense it."

They went in. They needed no map, no names on the doors, no numbers — those were for eyes that read walls. They cut the shortest line to what they had come to read, the energies drawing them on the way a scent draws — toward the disturbance, toward the wound.

The hallway took on a crimson hue as they neared.

"Yes, Iwa," Mine murmured — answering the thing Iwa had no voice to say, the thing her blade said for her. "Ugly work here. Clouded. Obscured."

They eased through the next doorway. Its fields woke as they passed, the lines of current flaring and fading around them. Kika's wisps thickened. Iwa gave a small nod.

Mine went still. "These energies are not detached," she said. "They are deactivated."

The presences had not left. They had been suppressed — held down, hidden, kept. All three came to a single point of alert in the same breath.

Mine's hand closed on Techū's grip, and the bow came up into it out of the far side of the dimensional fabric, yellow and certain. She did not aim. She loosed.

The arrow did not cross the room. It arrived — and where it arrived, something that had not been there was: sound and form at once, a presence hauled out of its own hiding and pinned through the shoulder of its coat to a supply cabinet. To be struck, here, was to be made real.

The pinned thing snarled. A throat that was not feline, that had never been — but lupine, and full of contempt.

"Sanjuumata."

"Fool to be seen!"

A second voice broke from above, female, 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 distance 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, closing on prey that had just announced itself.

And Iwa was already turned from both of them, Yōgantō buried to the hilt in the wall, drawing the blade sidelong through a disturbance on the far side of it — searing a third hidden thing out into the open. He came rolling clear of the heat, fortunate to be whole, all his hiding burned off him at last, into a shape even a plain eye could have caught.

"What the — ahhrrr — vile beast!"

Midair, Kika met the female.

A blur of arms, a strike that should not have missed — and beneath it, faint, she sensed a thing she had not expected from someone she had come to put down: amusement. Curious, bright, real. The Lycan 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 our dimension. A kusarigama: a glowing sickle in one hand, the chain in the other, a sphere of dense energy turning at its end. Before Kika could answer, the chain had wound her right forearm, both ends in the grip of a grinning Lycan.

Kika did not pull against it. She turned into it — hip first, her whole body folding the throw — and took them both to the floor, and in the slack of the chain her left hand found the nerve and drove a firm finger-strike into the Lycan's wrist — 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 Lycan rose too, and this time she did not close. She set the sickle in her right hand and let the sphere build at the chain's end in her left, twirling it, casual — and then, with a flick Kika felt before she could have seen it, 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 and pulsing between her palms.

Then she pulled.

The chain was still the Lycan's tether, and the jolt of it lifted her off her feet — the amusement gone now, alarm in its place — and flung her the length of the room and through the wall, to come to rest at last against a desk the fight had left standing.

Across the room, the one Mine had pinned had not stayed pinned. He had slid free of his own coat and dropped low, rolling for a place where he could stand and think — and before he could get to his feet, a second arrow took him there, through the loose of his trousers and into the floor, a breath from anatomy he would have grieved. Mine had not missed. Mine did not miss. She was making a point.

The bolt would not come free in his hand — Techū's never did. So the handle at his waist 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 was not light — and with that hook he prised 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 he sprang right. Mine loosed — and the instant the arrow arrived, the jitte was there to meet it, drawn in tight across his body; the bolt wedged between hook and shaft and came apart in 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 she always had, and loosed.

The jitte moved on its own to take the head shot. These weapons did that; it was their nature. It found nothing there.

The scream came from the floor.

"MY foot! Arrrgh — you mongrel!"

He was fixed to the boards through boot and foot both, and the arrow had gone nowhere near his head. She had fed his weapon a lie and put the truth somewhere else.

Yōgantō was hungry. Iwa ripped it back out of the wall and let it drift across her perception — to the side, then up, then along a direction that had no name — until it found her prey by the heat of his frustration.

He kept his distance, this one, circling slow and careful, wary of the banked blade. So Iwa gave him a fast cut, certain of it — and nearly went down when it met nothing at all, her edge passing clean through the fog of a man who was not standing where he seemed to stand. The real blow 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, 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, even so — she rose decided.

Yōgantō woke. The banked heat climbed into open flame, and the room itself went a flickering crimson, and the grinning thing across from her stopped grinning. 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 caught, and everything that was not already ruined began, gently, to smolder.

She ended this fight.

And then, faint, from the far side of a wall that was no longer one, a female voice — the fight gone out of it — capitulated.

"Parlay, brave nekomata?"

"Your words had better be worth our mercies."

Mine said it firmly, and the three of them moved as one to make the terms real. Kika and Iwa brought the battered Lycan to a desk the fight had spared, and there the three set down their weapons — the sickle and its chain, the blunt stick, the hooked rod — each going still and unremarkable the moment it left the hand that knew it. Then the Mata walked their prisoners back to a distance that was safe for everyone, and let the desk keep what should not be held any nearer.

The female spoke. The one the fight had emptied out of her voice; the one the other two angled toward 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 Mata acknowledged one another the way no others could — a single thought arriving in all of them at once, along a thread nothing outside their kind would ever feel. Mine answered for her kin.

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

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

And their three of the Eight answered before the Mata could. On the desk the three Forbidden things lay quiet, and the Mata's own weapons would not abide the nearness of them: Yōgantō woke crimson, its aura reaching to touch everything in the room; around Kika the wisps thickened until she was very nearly smothered in them, the dimension-light pressing close as a crowd; and Mine felt the whole of it as a shout — old enmity rising in the steel, every blade wanting the short, clean answer.

Mine did not give it to them.

"We must listen to what she has to say," she said — to her sisters, to the weapons, to herself alike. "Be mindful of our intolerance." Then, to the Lycan: "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, around the wound in his foot. "Lycan Galactic Pack, Intelligence Bureau. The whole of it carries, when one troubles to carry it." He liked the full title, every word; liked the weight it set down in a room, even a ruined one, 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, and what passed among the three of them passed where no one not born to it 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 spoke for them all.

"We have a truce for this endeavour, and will not confiscate your weapons — however, they will be accounted for, and surely a discussion for our next diplomatic meeting."

Her head tilted to an angle a sighted person seldom rests on. "What was the status in the arc before this darkness?" And, 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 Mata 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, 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, a posting she was, for once, glad to be away from. 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 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 breathed, and the shape of her changed: less an officer giving a report, 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 take the soft white of the room's light and hold it. Behind the Lycan, Musu had crouched to tend his brother's foot — the small, undignified hole Mine had set precisely through it — and Yami suffered the fussing in sour silence; both of them listening, for all of that.

Mine gave them the scraps the Mata carried. Not all of them. She let no part of Hakase Ren into the room — not the name, not the work, not the shelf where he had hidden the thing others would tear a system apart to reach — because if the Lycan had come to Oumura hunting the same scholar, the question would rise in them of its own accord, and she would feel it bloom before it ever became a lie. Let the absence do the asking.

And there was a thing the Mata had carried in with them — set down by Shiro's people before ever they crossed. The palace's own ears on Oumura had gone deaf three arcs past; the Lycan's had not gone deaf with them. The rival Pack's watch on this system had run on a while past the Nekozoku's own silence — and 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 put the gap to its keeper plainly. "Your watch outlasted ours over Oumura. We would know what reached you in the arc we had already gone deaf to."

"We kept the channel about an arc past you — to two arcs gone, near enough — before it went to nothing." Kage's account came level, the way a thing comes when the one saying it has turned it over many times without an answer falling out. "By then it was a mess, panicked, voices over voices. But it was in that arc the ships began. The place swamped all at once — private transports, Masshulk freighters, the lot of it pouring in from the East Ring. A whole arc of that. Then silence." A pause. "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?"

"None that reached us. If an order was given aloud, it never made the air we caught — only the leaving, and then the quiet." Kage turned a palm up. "A whole system emptied into the dark in the space of an arc, and not one clean word of where to, or why. That is the piece I have not been able to set down."

She leaned back against the battered desk, settling half onto the one edge of it that promised anything like comfort. The Mata were a thing to witness in person — captivating, in the way of weather you would not want to be caught out in — 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 the string. She understood, sitting here, why the Prime Alpha held the armistice with both hands. The Nekozoku were formidable and honorable and unfailingly respectful — and 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 gathering in the dimensions. The Mata felt it arrive before the room had any way to know it: a pressure folding inward, a seam readying itself. Then the wide screen along the wall — 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, because 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 freighter — small, an obsolete class, the kind no one had built in ages — 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 going to black at once — and the thing that had just happened went back to existing in the dark, where it had come from and seemed to prefer to be.

"That is Grenriyan. It folds to Grenriyan." Mine named it with a curious concern, the way a thing is named that should not be where it is. The skiff's vector still hung in her perception, a line drawn out from this dark place toward the next system along the dark.

"Yes, Kika. The taste of it was there." A pause — the three of them turning some shared thread over between them. "No. No, Kika, you are drifting. The palace hall has no matter here." She did not explain it, and the two who needed no explaining did not ask.

Iwa walked past where the Lycan had gathered. The low warmth that lived always at her hip — Yōgantō, banked but never cold — passed near Yami's face as she went, and he flinched from it, the heat finding him even now, bent as he was 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 Mata were leaving.

She turned to them once more. "Your weapons are yours to take. On your honor, you will report them to the arbiters of the armistice." The last she set down without heat, which made it worse. "You will enjoy better days if we do not have to come and take them from you."

One last thing, set down as a suggestion and weighing as an order. "Find where Oumura went," Mine told the Lycan. "You have the thread for it — the commissioner, the contacts. We will take the gate." A beat, and the last of it landed flat and cold. "Whatever the station recorded will go the way the rest of Oumura went, if no one comes for it in time."

And as one the Sanjuumata faced the three Lycan and bowed — fully, all of it, because among the Nekozoku a bow of honor is whole or it is not given, whatever the giver privately feels. It did not land the same on all three: Kage returned it after a breath; Yami could not tell whether he had been honored or mocked; Musu only blinked. Then they tore the dimensions open, and were gone from the room, and stood at the Fold-Gate.

They had come the only way there was to come to Oumura now — a Rip and a step, the same as the Nekomata had. Then, because the system was dead and full of conveyances no one would miss, they had taken a local hauler left standing with its hatch hanging open and ridden it the last stretch into the port-town. Kage climbed down into the wrong kind of quiet. The relay station had gone quiet the way a machine goes quiet with no one left to hear it run. This was the other kind — the hush a place keeps for a while after it has been full, the shape of a crowd still hanging in the air it left behind. Doors stood open. A hand-cart sat half-loaded in a lane. An awning luffed in a wind with no one left to cool.

The Usagizoku had built downward. The town did not climb the land — it sank into it, tier below tier around a wide sunken court, the dwellings cut back along galleries that spiraled down out of the daylight into a warren deeper than the eye could follow. The only tall things the rabbit-folk made stood up from the pale ground in their hundreds: slender wind-cowls, a whole standing field of them, breathing light and air down to the rooms below. Not a hard corner anywhere in it, and never in their long quiet history a need for one. Growers. Keepers of old things. Not runners.

They had run.

"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 was the wrong kind of right. Kage had walked through places people fled, and panic leaves a signature — the dropped thing, the trampled thing, the door 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, level, the way you set a thing down when someone has promised you there is time. The stalls weren't abandoned. They were shuttered. Somebody had locked up on the way out the door of the world.

"Yami. You read order better than either of us." She didn't turn around. "Tell me what this is."

Behind her, the uneven sound of him — a step, and a slower step, the foot Mine had ruined still arguing with the ground. He would not lean on Musu, and he would not lean on the jitte, so he leaned on nothing and paid for it at every stride and said not one word, which was a vanity of its own. He stopped at the doors of the library — the deep house a people of keepers raises before any other, where it sets down its records and posts its notices both — and there, fixed to the nearest door where none could miss it, the thing she had sent him to read. He stood before it a long while.

"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."

She came and read it over his shoulder, her field translator worrying the soft round script into rough sense. 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, and the pomp had gone out of him, because order was the thing he loved and here it was, order bent to a terrible use. "They were evacuated. On a schedule. By a voice they obeyed."

That was the finger of cold on the back of Kage's neck. Not the empty town — the obedience. A gentle people does not queue politely out of its own front doors for a stranger. Whoever had emptied Oumura, the Usagizoku had trusted the one who told them to go — trusted it enough to fold up their lives and stand in line and pull the doors shut behind them. Force, she could have read at a glance. This was quieter than force and worse than it, and she had no name for the thing, and in her trade the nameless thing was the only kind worth fearing.

They worked the town and its library in a widening spiral, the way the Bureau taught, calling findings back across the empty lanes — and it was Musu who went quiet, which was how she knew he'd found something that mattered.

The Bureau kept a post in the library's translation wing: two rooms off the long stacks, a desk, a cot, one Lycan translator drawing the dull straw of a quiet rabbit system and a contract worth more than it looked. The translator was gone, like all of them. But the translator had been theirs, and one of theirs, when the world starts going wrong and she suspects no one will come in time, does 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 failing under her hand:

> — third arc, 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. some of them wrong — small hulls, engines too large, 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. So did the cold finger.

"The deep stacks." Musu's voice had lost its ease entirely. "That's the old library. The keepers' whole reason to exist." He looked at her. "What sings, Kage?"

"Nothing I want to be standing over."

At the doorway Yami had turned to look down the tiers at the port below, where the loading cradles stood open and rust-streaked and exactly as empty as everything above them.

"Small hulls, engines too large," he said, echoing the slate. He had watched one fold away not a chord ago, the same as the rest of them. "We saw one of those."

"We did."

"What is a thing like that doing in an evacuation?"

"I don't know," Kage said, and filed it where she filed the rest of what she didn't know, which was getting to be a crowded drawer.

She stood in the dead translation wing with the slate in her hand and made herself say the shape of it aloud — name the shape even when you cannot name the thing; the Bureau taught that too.

"Somebody emptied this system," she said. "Carefully. Kindly, even. Gave them time, gave them ships, gave them an order they were grateful to obey. You don't take that kind of trouble to hide a slaughter — there's no one left to slaughter, and that's the whole point of it." She set the slate down, level, the way the Usagizoku had set down their cart. "We've been calling this a disaster. It isn't one. It's housekeeping."

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

It was the one question the empty town did not hold an answer to. But Kage had a fair idea of who might.

The Nekomata had gone to the gate — to whatever those odd ships had been folding to and from. If a whole world had been swept empty to keep some deed unwitnessed, the deed itself was far likelier waiting at that end of the thread than out here among the shuttered stalls. Which meant the answer to her question sat, just now, in the hands of the three she'd traded blows with not two chords gone.

She didn't love it. She turned the unit around anyway.

"We go back. We wait for the Nekomata."

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

"I hate a half-map worse." The cold finger had not left the back of her neck, and it did not leave now. "We've got the who and the how — a gentle people talked up out of their own world on a schedule. They've got the what-for, or they will when that gate gives them back. Neither half buys the trip east on its own." She was already moving, back the way they'd come, toward the relay station and the long quiet before the Nekomata returned. "I don't run a thread holding one end of it. Yami — can you walk?"

"I have been walking," Yami said, with enormous dignity, and limped after her, back toward the wait.

There was no air to be singed, no atmosphere to compress to ash, when the Mata tore through into the Fold-Gate station and onto its control deck. Even as their own momentum pressed them back into our dimension, the energies that lived in their weapons spoke to the armor they wore, and the armor answered — closing over them, sealing each sister in a shell against the hard vacuum that was the inside of this place now.

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 dead power. And 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, who took the light Mine could not use and went to work by it, hands finding the right controls in the gloom, waking the long sequence that would coax power back into the deck.

There were no words to carry to one another's ears. There never were. The bond they had been born into was so complete that speech had always been the long way around — the slow tool strangers needed. Between the three of them, knowing simply arrived.

This balance is in the mists, sister. It was Iwa, who had no voice to lend it; Yōgantō lent it for her, the red waking along the blade as the thought passed through. The energies in this place were wrong in a way that would not resolve — 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, harder, what had been lifted out of it — the gaps as plain to her as the marks. There is a thing Mine sees. Tell us, sister. Kika was always the most mysterious of them; her knowings came sidelong, in images that meant their meaning a turn or two after they arrived. The teacups Mine would puzzle out another time.

Take the data clean for the palace. Mine set it among them — not as a leader, for the three had never needed one, but 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, and neither of them thanked you for a thing broken in the carrying.

It would have been tedious work for anyone else — drawing the files out one at a time on the thin power they had managed to wake. The Mata did it the way they did all things: with a patience that unsettled anyone who watched it, taking exactly as long as the work took and resenting not a beat of it.

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

And then Iwa, the red gone fierce along Yōgantō even as it carried in the silent ether between them:

The air did not leak into the void on its own, sisters. A beat. Perhaps we should look for the one who let it out.

No, sister. Not who — where it let out. Kika leaned into the nearest wall, and the delicate violet wisps curled up off her twin tails and traced the line of her spine, paying no mind to the shell of quantum-weave intelligent mass that sheathed both of them; the dimension-light did not recognize armor as a thing that could contain it. I see it. I will lead your path. Follow.

The hallway took them in, suddenly painted with long shadows that moved as they moved — angles shifting and gliding along the walls as the trio passed, the energy in the walls dimming the farther they drew from the coupling they had woken.

When they stepped into the storage hall, 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: a mouth the station could no longer close.

It is not stable, sisters. It can be removed easily. Iwa was certain of it, and stepped forward to end the blockage the short way.

That cargo could carry value, sister. Careful — do not let too many slip out the door. Mine moved in behind her to take the slower method — and stopped, because 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 — the small honest marks that show a container has gone untouched, every last one of them undone. Not forced, though, and not torn: opened each in its turn, the way a clerk works down a list and not the way a thief works a lock. And the count is wrong. Forty-one. The gaps lined up behind her stillness. There should be fifty. Nine are simply gone. And then, quieter — a thing for her sisters and no data stick: 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 — worked metal, 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 wears the look of greed with no sense to it, Mine said slowly. Take this, leave that, take this. Random.

No, sister. Kika, soft and certain, the way she was only when the gaps had finished speaking. 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 — only that. The thinking matter, drawn out of the cheapest thing in this hall and the dearest alike, and 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 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 began drawing the remaining containers back from it — for the work was theirs, and a thing already taken is made no worse by sealing the door it left through. A good chord and a half passed before Kika coaxed the control panel back far enough to draw the doors tight and sealed. Iwa set the repressurization protocols running; half a chord more, and air had returned to the dead deck, and the Fold-Gate station stood — not whole, but no longer bleeding — ready for the hands that would come to repair it.

They took all the data they had been able to draw clean. Then they gathered close, within reach of one another as they always were before a crossing, and summoned the Rip back — back to where they had first come in.

The three colored Rips set the sisters back down on the open ground outside the relay station's entrance — the same spot they had first arrived — to find 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, should it ever come to 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 don't match."

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 the same way your people were — in order, by method, nothing torn." Mine drew out a data stick of her own and offered it across; Kage took it and slid it into some hidden cache at her waist. "It was not robbed. It was moved. The treasures were left sitting where they lay; only the common things were carried off — everything woven through with intelligent mass, and nothing else. Clothing. Utensils. Hygiene stores. The disposable and the daily. None of the wealth from the holds that remained."

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 holds half-pushed through before the rest jammed in the gap and stopped them. 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 — flung loose to drift the void — or left in other hands, we cannot yet say. But nine is the number missing, and nine is exactly the number the altered manifests were made to deny had ever been aboard."

And what the deck still held of itself, they had drawn clean. "The gate's own passage record — as much of it as the dead 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." Duty to the Pack, set down ahead of whatever her brothers were silently objecting at her back.

"This is acceptable. I too have 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 — and then 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 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.