Inside Shiro's office was brighter than the rest of the palace. A soft hum of data projections was constant under the shuffle of the regular business conducted there. She kept her seat as Byakko joined her, taking the closest seat at her side. Everything they discussed the night before was clearly noted in the three dimensional light that looked more like miniatures of the worlds they represented. The most common use of compacted photons and no one could say how old the tech was.

"What do we have that the table did not." Byakko started asking as soon as she sat down.

"Two silences and some bad reporting." Shiro turned the map a quarter without touching it. "Leerma went quiet the better part of an arc ago — not the three turns the dispatch log claims. Someone reached into the archive and moved the date, quickly, more worried about the record than about being caught having touched it. And Oumura went dark behind it, along the same line." She let it settle. "The Leerma gate came back a few chords ago. Only Oumura is still dark. The Risuzoku have sent an agriculture team to Leerma and not an intel team. Whatever was done there, we learn it by going — or we do not learn it at all. Same for Oumura."

"Then we go to both. We cannot choose between which answers we want more." Byakko looked at the two burning points. "Something else is happening here, more than what is in the reports. Have someone contact the Risuzoku and inform them a representative of ours will be coming to assist their recovery. I think we all know who goes to Oumura."

The three twin-tailed Nekomata entered the room as one motion, no one leading and no one led. Hands do not lead their fingers. Three glazed cat-masks showed the light in muted reflection, each its own color, each bound in navy cloth wound several times around. The yellow mask wrapped across the eyes, the blue across the ears, and the red across the mouth. A lesson the old empire had carved a hundred ways, worn here instead of spoken, turned inside out. Behind each binding was not a closed sense but an open one, the dimensional energy poured into the place a sense should have been and filling it past the brim. They had been born so, never wounded, the bindings ceremony and never a covering for any loss.

Twin-tailed, all three — auburn, blonde, jet-black — the Nekomata mutation the galaxy allows perhaps once in a long age. The birth of three siblings was an event no record accounted for, and Byakko had long since learned to leave the mystery alone.

Arashi was already in the room seated in the chair nearest the wall, her chipped tea cup nowhere in sight. Her double-bladed tanto, Kaze, was equally hidden, in the folds of her kimono. She had come to work. Her blind face turned a few degrees as they passed. She had rescued all three off a burning world when they were small enough to carry at once, and in all the ages since she had thought of them as her own. No one thought otherwise.

"They are ready," she said, to no one. Not quite a report. Not quite a blessing.

"They are always ready," Byakko said. "I am deciding where to place that readiness."

The voice behind the yellow mask was beautifully ethereal. Mine always spoke, the only one of the three with a voice that went outward. The other two's scattered speech bent inward and only she could listen. She turned to look at the map she could not see, and she read it anyway.

"Four," she said. "Not two."

Shiro's head came up a fraction.

"One is dark and one is dim — Oumura, Leerma, you have those. Two more are only steps, further along the same line, where the signal still answers the questions a little wrong." She did not point; she had no need to look to know where the data was on the image projected above the table. "Whoever walks this line did not begin at Leerma, and has not ended at Oumura."

"A search, good." Yamaneko said as he walked in. No one saw him arrive. "We knew this at the table. She is confirming the locations." Arashi turned her chair toward those gathering in the room. "Thank you, Yama, for telling us what we knew four beats ago. You are late for a man who only drank water last night." Yuki stumbled in next and sat at the table, immediately burying her head in her folded arms with a mournful groan. "And someone who drank quite a bit more. Good morning, Princess." Arashi's tone did not spare the scold.

Beside Mine, her sister with the blue mask had gone still in her unique way. Kika was no longer only in this dimension. Wisps of energy rose off her tails. Not just the idle drift she always carried but a brightening. That was the trade off the three paid. They could not speak their words, but everyone knew that they shared them. Only her sisters heard what was inside. Kika tilted her head, gathering something deeper in the data only she could read.

"One operator," Mine said. "Kika has the edited records — all of them, she says she can feel the shadow of the missing data, the whole line — and they are one hand. Not the same orders. The same hand. Two credentials inside our own archive, one person behind both." A pause, listening past the first of it. "She has been hearing him a long while. She says he is tired."

"Tired?" said Byakko. "That sounds interesting, Kika. Are you able to be more specific?"

The wisps came again, folding back on themselves, and Mine's head followed them. "A careful hand stays careful. A tired one repeats itself — and he is repeating himself. He has not found the thing he was sent for, and he is beginning to fear what is done to those who do not find it." The wisps turned a color that the eye strained to define, and Mine went quiet a moment. "There is more, and I cannot carry it. Only — that she is not entirely kind about him." She let it go, unfinished. "It does not always come, she drifts inside. I am sorry, my Queen."

No one filled the silence. They had all watched Mine fail to carry her sister before. It was not a thing you helped with.

A red hue marked the room in faint pulses. Iwa motioned with a hand becoming a fist and her other wrapping around it. Her weapon, Yōgantō, reacted as her thoughts went to her sisters. The deep red glow of it seeping through the scabbard on her back, a heat that leaned into the room without rising — and Mine put the words to it without softening them. "Iwa says a frightened hand is the most dangerous kind. It stops being careful before it stops being able." She paused, listened. "She suggests we reach him before the fear does."

"Then we will not give him the time to rest." Byakko turned to the map. "The pepper, Shiro. Plainly, in order."

"It was never the prize." Shiro drew a breath before giving a briefing. "Leerma, and the small farming combine that had been its only reason to exist. The Blue Pepper of Leerma carries a resonance in its stabilization chemistry — a signature older than the colony, a thing it grew naturally, the mathematics of the genetics. A biologist analyzing the strings saw a pattern by chance and was curious enough to pull the thread, and found a match to similar code styles in ancient data cubes." Byakko followed Shiro's logic. "The pepper is the breadcrumb. It is how we found the trail at all. It is not the pepper they seek." Byakko put the pieces together and saw where they were leading. "Rex is following a scent the pepper happened to carry — to Oumura, where the key can find the lock on the shelves of the Usagizoku Library."

"Hakase Ren," Yuki said from the chair at Byakko's left, where she had been listening with an unusual quiet.

"Hakase Ren," Byakko agreed. "Who sat at my table last evening, a comfortable guest, and gracious. Unaware of the danger behind the unanswered mail."

Byakko stood, reaching out a calming hand as the rest began to rise with her.

"We are presented with two questions, two dark systems and the same locked door at each. No road runs in, and no ship will carry us in time. We cannot take support teams. The tasks fall to those of us with bound weapons. We rip to our destinations. This is not new ground for us, and perhaps smaller, quicker teams will work in our favor. Even the economy of the mission is acceptable." She let it sit. "That is not where the price is."

It was Arashi who named the price. "How few of us there are to send. That is what he makes us spend when he darkens a road — not strength, but number. A dark system can be reached by eight beings in our realm, and they are all sitting in this room. He is cutting us into pieces." Her blind head tilted. "He cannot beat the few of you in any one place. So he is seeing to it that the few of you are never all in one place again." Arashi turned her chipped tea cup on its saucer slightly before picking it up to sip it quietly, then setting it back in place without it making the slightest sound. "Be thorough in your search for answers but don't ignore the risks that could be by design."

Byakko set the plan down plainly. "Oumura will need a deeper insight that only three of us can read. Whatever was done at the library, the manner of it needs to be investigated from within the dimensions. Yama will go with the Nekomata, they can read it in the walls. Investigate the downed Gate as well." She turned. "Yuki, Shiro, and I take Leerma. That colony went dark first. If the trail has a root, what better place than a farm to lead us to the seed."

"And the missing engine?" Yamaneko asked. "Kahvan-Da?"

"Waits." The word had an edge to it. "It is the thing we know least about. We are still looking for leads to start there. We have people researching it and I will not send half a team chasing a mystery while two systems sit dark and a wolf stalks our frontier."

Mu had been sleeping in his typical curled slumber the entire meeting, nestled in the cushion by the head of the table. An ear turned toward an invisible sound. One violet eye opened wide as he lifted his head toward the door, both eyes alert and fixed, a few flicks of a tail before the sound came.

The door opened, and it was Kit Kiko, steward of the household, the MajoDomo.

Kit did not come to war rooms. Her purpose was to keep the layers of the palace where they were balanced and rarely was anything of importance to cross that boundary. She crossed it now, with intent and urgency in her voice as she straightened from her bow.

"Forgive the intrusion." She kept her head lowered as she faced her Queen, raising it to make respectful eye contact before she continued. "Two of last evening's guests did not sleep in the rooms prepared for them. Commissioner Feelon called for a private craft only moments after the table broke, citing urgent affairs at his House. He did not leave alone. Hakase Ren went with him. In haste. They have passed through our Fold-Gate and are beyond the system by now. I alerted security on my way here. They are in the process of finding the vessel's exact location now, my Queen."

"I am not surprised that Feelon left with haste but I am somewhat alarmed that Ren went with him. I suspect our nervous banker shared his paranoia with our scholar," was Byakko's reaction to the news.

The Queen looked at the room. Her best people were in front of her and it was time for them to do what they do best. "Yama, take Yuki and retrieve Ren. The sisters will go to Oumura. I will take Shiro and meet with the Risu on Leerma." Each team nodding to confirm their assignments. "Mine, Kika, Iwa, you will need to leave immediately. Yuki and Yama, gather what you need, and be prepared when the location of Feelon's ship is determined. Shiro and I will leave at dawn since the Risu have already been made aware we are arriving."

"Mine, Oumura must be read deeply, and only the three of you can read it. I would not send you into a colony's silence without an anchor if I had one to spare, and I no longer do." Along the wall, the sisters took it without flinching.

The red glow from Iwa's weapon cast a crimson hue against the wall behind her, and Mine voiced it, plain. "Iwa says we were always going in alone. The anchor was a kindness, and a short turn spends its kindnesses first." She did not soften it because that would have put a gentler sister's words in Iwa's mouth. It was not gloom. It was true. And Iwa was the one willing to say it.

"Yama — not Oumura. You go after Ren, you and Yuki both, the two heaviest hands I have. Keeping him from Rex is a matter of reaching him first. We cannot risk Ren being found when he gets wherever Feelon is running off to. Reaching him is done with speed and surprise and nothing more."

"He has a head start," Yamaneko said. An accounting, not an objection.

"Then close it." She turned last to Shiro. "You and I keep Leerma. It started there. We have an investigation with diplomatic overtones. We will ease the Risu and see what a tired, frightened hand leaves behind when it believes no one will ever come to look." A breath. "Three teams. Three questions. The engine waits, and waits longer now, and I have made my peace with none of it."

Yuki stepped next to Byakko as the others stood from the table. She reached out to touch her sister's arm. "You didn't frighten him," Yuki said. "Feelon did."

"Feelon ran because I moved the floor under an innocent man. Ren went with him because by his logic, beside a frightened fool was the safest place left to him." Her voice did not waver. "It does not matter whose hand. He is out, and moving, and the thing hunting him does not need to catch him — only to find him. One person, one rip, and he is gone, to us or to Rex, and whoever finds him first ends it in a breath." She looked at the points on the map that had been, a moment ago, the whole of the problem. "The plan was wrong. It was built for the threat I understood. I have just been shown what I missed." Yuki squeezed Byakko's arm just enough and reminded her. "You missed nothing, and your trust was in all the right places. We can't be right every time and Rex only needs to be right, once. This will all work out fine, Byakko."

The sisters opened their dimensional rips together. Mine's bow and Iwa's blade called the seam up out of the air while Kika needed no blade for it. A mere turn of her hand and the air split along a line that came apart on a thread of dimensional energies. Yellow, blue, red; six tails in their separate times; and then the rip. The place where they had stood, empty. No procession. No threshold walked to. Here — and gone to Oumura.

Yuki and Yamaneko headed out the door and down the singing hallways. Turning left at the first chance toward the Logistics Center to locate Hakase Ren. Byakko left Shiro to plan their investigations and then made her way to her office to prepare the diplomatic niceties of arriving on a frightened world.

Arashi did not rise to see them off. There was nowhere left to see them to. She only turned her blind face to the closing seam where her three had been — the way she had once carried them across one just like it, off a burning world, when they were small enough to carry all at once — and held there a moment after it sealed. Turning to Mu who was stretching out in the one spot of sunlight that shone into the room, Arashi grinned with a slip of a chuckle, "I hope you had a good nap, my friend. There will be much to do soon." Mu licked a paw and sat up straight. He meowed.

Nine gate jumps from Tamashii, in a stretch of the frontier marked as irrelevant, the DarkPack found a convenient home. A dim red giant not long for collapse, spewing stellar dust in masses enough to hide several planets. They had dug into ancient ruins and added their own crude structures. Molded matter formed walls and roofs quickly and crudely. It was an aberration of technology the rest of the galaxy would never trust as a habitat. The lawful peoples built things of beauty that were meant to last where the DarkPack preferred things temporary and had no care for aesthetics. The impermanence was an advantage as they saw it.

The main chamber was large, and built to feel larger. There were screens across two walls running operational feeds, signal maps, the constant information flow of a covert war in full forward motion. The amber-and-red light the DarkPack favored gave everything the quality of perpetual crisis, which was the point. Crisis kept the blood up, a thing you could take advantage of to shape your masses.

Speaker Vox owned the center of it.

One meter tall, the average-proportioned head and hands set on a frame that genetics had cheated of its vertical due. A fact he had never once noticed. His personal convictions filled whatever the bones did not. He stood at the podium with the red cybernetic eye burning in its socket, grown into him by the hand of someone more skilled as a butcher or mechanic than a doctor. The seam where flesh met housing never quite healed and was routinely pasted to the shell that housed the technology in his face. Augmented the way the Pack did everything to a body: molded crudely, like their buildings, the join always showing. A large gathering hall full of DarkPack sycophants faced him like a field of plants toward a poisoned sun. He was not briefing them. He was tuning them.

"They will tell you." Vox began with a low muttering. He always began slowly. "They will tell you that we are a frontier nuisance. A grievance. A pack of mongrels scratching at the edge of the civilized galaxy." A slow pause, letting the anger stir in the crowd. "They have told you that your whole lives. They told your mothers that. They will tell your pups that — if we leave them the breath to do it."

The sound of whispered agreement moved through the room. A building emotion stronger than words.

"They sit in their nine bright capitals and call themselves the order of things. The Nekozoku on their thrones. The Usagizoku in their libraries. Tatsuzoku arrogant in the water worlds. Our own brothers and sisters turning their backs on the hunt. The prey — grown so fat and so certain that they have forgotten they were ever prey at all." His voice began to climb with a steady escalation of animosity. "They have forgotten what the dark is for."

The stirring of the crowd came up a step. Some of them were loosing barks of agreement.

"We are going to remind them. Not raid them. Not bleed them at the edges and call it a war. We are through with the edges." The finger rose, the familiar one, a gesture the whole room waited for. "Every road. Every capital. Every shelf of their precious library, every throne of their precious houses. We will challenge all of it, all at once. There will be no quiet corner left in this galaxy where a prey thing can whisper itself the old lie that it is safe." He let it hang in the air to be savored by the agitated throng before him. "Rex does not want a border moved. Rex wants the map erased!"

He had them. You could feel the instant he had them. The clamor rising to a tipping, the barks growing into growls.

"They put a collar on every one of our blood," his tempo rising, the pitch more fevered as his voice grew louder, angrier. "Our own cousins. They signed the treaties. An Armistice they call it. Submitting to that abomination of royalty that holds our most sacred relic hostage against us. Our blood sat at the prey's table and learned to beg so prettily they forgot they had ever been masters of the hunt at all." The red eye swept the room. "They call that peace. Peace. My kin... we have a truer word for it." A growl moved under the silence. "The leash."

Vox let them burn with rage.

"So I will ask you only once." Vox spread his arms; the red eye blazed. "Are you ready to commit to vengeance?" The howls began. "Are you ready to be more radical than you knew you could be?" The random howls grew in number. "Are you ready to let loose the True Pack?"

The chamber did not answer in words. The DarkPack never did, when it mattered. It answered the way the blood in them answered — every throat in the room opening at once into a single rising howl that climbed the walls and the screens and would not stop, a sound with no language in it and no need of any. Vox stood in the middle of it with his head back and his arms open and drank it in like a fine wine aged perfectly.

At the edge of the light, where the howl thinned, a small group gathered. The hierarchy of the DarkPack did not howl.

Beta Kijo watched the room come apart at the seams with the fond, proprietary half-smile of someone watching her pups learn to bite. The golden fire at the tip of her blade was the brightest thing on that side of the hall. Thinker Xort stood beside her, arms folded, her own red cybernetic eye on Vox, hers seamed into the skull at a hard angle, a graft that worked and was never once meant to be comfortable. The look she cultivated for things she found useful and disgusting in equal measure. Kage, the assassin, stood a careful half-step apart from both. She was present and attentive, committed to nothing her altered face could be read for.

"He is insufferable," Xort said, beneath the howl.

"He is effective," Kijo said.

"As I keep telling you. Those are not exclusive." Xort reminded her.

It was about then that the sound from their immediate left became impossible to ignore.

The Doctor, Vrach Roak, the Pack's physician. No one used the word physician near him twice. Roak had been focused on what was in front of him and had not looked up for any of it. He sat a little apart from the rest, hunched over the steel tray he carried everywhere, and he was eating. What he was eating was not a thing the others chose to name. It had been alive recently enough that the question of how recently was the part that turned the stomach. He worked through it with the slow, absorbed, joyless precision of a man performing surgery on his own dinner. Remarking to himself while making each separation deliberate, each portion considered. Filling the air with a wet and methodical sound that somehow carried further than the howl. He paused. Selected something. Held it to the light between two fingers, examined it with professional interest, and put it in his mouth with an expression one uses to savor a delicacy.

It was the same precision the ones who had been on his table understood. He brought the living a molecular art that in gentler hands kept the realm's people whole, turned inside out. He did not hurt his subjects out of hatred. Hatred is a relationship, and Roak could not conceive of relationships. He simply watched what a body did, with fascination, and recorded it.

Xort's red eye twitched. "Must you."

"It is the feeding," Roak said. He never spoke of himself in the first person. He had not, in living memory, watched his own hands from inside, only from somewhere a half-step outside them. He prodded the thing on the tray, which apparently, was still deciding whether to be alive or dead. "It does not last. We will watch." He resumed.

Kage, who had stood unflinching through three campaigns and a thing in the rim systems she did not discuss, turned her face away and breathed through her mouth. "I have seen carnage pits that were more appetizing."

"He savors the offal," Kijo said — not a complaint, an observation, proud of her prized doctor's curious habit. The part a butcher discards that even the starving leave; Roak chose it first, and lingered on it. Kijo watched him do it with the unbothered ownership of someone surveying a possession because he was. The others endured Roak. Kijo kept him.

Kijo let her gaze rest on him a moment longer, taking the honest measure of the creature she owned. He cost her nothing and paid dividends of terror, whether the books still balanced or not. The wet sound. The lingering. The half-step of distance every other body in the chamber kept from his tray without being told to.

"…And he keeps the staff healthy," she said at last — the entry, found, that put the ledger right.

Xort did not let it stand. "He keeps the staff afraid of being unhealthy. It is not the same thing, and the difference is what is unsettling." The red eye stayed on the hunched figure. "A wound goes to the field-menders and heals. A wound goes to Roak and it is studied, it is asked questions. It is kept exactly as unwell as is interesting for exactly as long as the interest lasts. The staff would crawl across a planet on a shattered leg before they would let it be examined by... it."

"I know." Kijo said it comfortably, the way you state a thing that was never in question. "It's why I feed him."

Roak, serenely, ate. To the tray, or to the room, or to neither, he said: "The body is honest. Only the body. It tells us where it bleeds most." A pause, the words turning over in him like counted instruments. "We will cut there."

No one asked him what he meant. With Roak the answer was always the same answer, and it was always, eventually, a demonstration.

Kijo had, by then, acquired an admirer.

He was young, and DarkPack to the bone, and the howl had filled him with the particular courage that gets young soldiers exactly as far as it has ever gotten any of them. He had drifted to the edge of the command's circle somewhere in Vox's crescendo and spent the back half of the speech working himself up to her, and now — flushed with the war-cry, certain of his own rising fortunes — he made his approach.

Kijo let him.

Those who knew her watched for these moments. The young ones never did. Kijo let you. She turned the half-smile on him and let it simmer inside him. She let him say the bold thing, and then the bolder thing. She laughed low at the second one and that made him stand straighter. She let him take the half-step that closed the distance between admiring the Beta and presuming upon her. She let him get all the way there. She let him be sure. She let him believe his own confidence.

"You have a quick mouth," she told him, fondly.

"I have other quick things."

"I believe you," Kijo said, leaning seductively closer to whisper it in his ear. With one swift motion she took him by the very things he had been so proud of and tore them from him entirely. Her hand gripping the whole fistful clear away from his groin in front of the entire hall. His agony-filled howl clear above the celebration of madness happening among the masses.

Near them, the howl faltered.

He looked down at himself with an expression of enormous surprise. They always did. Kijo watched him discover his slow death and savored it with the same fond attention she had given the flirting. She stepped back and let him fold onto the floor in the puddle he was spreading underneath him.

Then she turned, unbothered, and tossed the fistful onto Roak's tray.

Roak made a small, excited croaking sound — the only pleasure that flat and dissociated thing ever showed — and drew the tray closer.

"Anyone else," Kijo inquired pleasantly, to the crowd gone rigid around her, "have other quick things?"

No one did. The howl resumed, elsewhere, louder — eager to be anywhere the Beta was not looking.

From the back of the chamber, a door opened.

The light in the hall turned a brighter crimson. The amber hued illumination pulled back toward the corners as though something at the center were drinking it. What stayed took on a sickening shade. A dying ember glow, corrupted red, bleeding across the walls and floor. The faces and the cooling heap that had so recently been an admirer. Wherever Rex stood became the center of the room. It was not because he claimed it, but because everything else quietly surrendered to him.

Alpha Rex crossed the chamber. The staff did not turn to look at him. They had learned not to.

He passed the cage without slowing, one hand reaching out and closing on the chain at the Usagijin prisoner's throat and lifting, never slowing. His stride unbroken so the captive's feet found the floor only in scrambles. Rex dragged him up onto the dais like a trophy to be displayed. He hooked the end of the chain high on a rack where he could easily reach his captive. A throne behind him was built from compacted skulls fired into a morbid porcelain. It would have been absurd for anyone else but was unmistakably Rex. He took Regret into both hands.

The weapon answered. The corruption along it deepened; the sickly acid-green and dark-red of the thing inside pulsed once, slow, with something that might have been appetite.

"Where is Hakase Ren?" Rex did not raise the voice. He never had to. He looked at the cup a slave had just handed him, not the prisoner. Gulping a mouthful of the acrid brew, pacing back and forth in front of the groaning captive hanging before him. "The next relay station, the one he passed leaving the Oumura library. Where did he go? Begin there."

The Usagijin, dangling, had completed some private accounting and arrived at a peace he could die with. He looked directly at his captor, into the shadowy mist obscuring a red glow. The absence where the left of Rex's skull had been. A void where Regret had come to life in the emptiness created by the weapon, Hope. It was not a wound of the flesh, but a scar in reality.

"Eat glass, Mutt."

He spat into the absence. The faint vapour of it was the only reaction Rex gave.

Regret swung. The Usagi's defiance ended the way defiance ended in that room.

Rex stood in the diminished light with Regret in his hands. The whisper arrived from the inside, from the void his mind used to be: The scholar is the road, and the road has two ends. One ends at what you were sent to find. The other ends at her. Leerma to Oumura. Oumura to Grenriyan. Grenriyan to Tamashii. Your vengeance is waiting for you there.

He recoiled from it. Then he did not. The revulsion and the wanting came together, indistinguishable from each other, indistinguishable from himself, and he sat down on the throne of skulls and let the wrong light hold him.

Across the chamber Vox had climbed back onto his rhetoric like a man remounting a horse mid-gallop, and the howl was rising again to meet him, and over it and under it and through it he found the room's eye one last time and gave them the only word the night still needed.

"Closer," was the single word Vox said.

The whole dark room howled it back — and the road they were howling down ran wild. None of them yet knew it but Rex, and even Rex was not aware that he knew. It went straight to the white palace on Tamashii. To a queen who had, that very evening, ordered the last of her few scattering to the far corners of the galaxy, and kept not one of them home.