The hall had been laid for the house, and the house came to it first.

It was the inner room — kept for counsel and not for show — smaller than its name and the warmer for it, the screens worked end to end with the old hunt. A stylized image recalled the ancient texts: a striped feline beast banked in the gold, spotted ones low in the painted reeds. The mythical creatures on the walls of a home that was proud to believe in a past age where those beasts dominated their realm as well. Past the threshold ran the singing floor, the long boards in every passage through the palace built to ring under any foot — each its own clear note. The boards fitted with tones to resemble the sound of a wind chime, so that nothing crossed toward this room unheard. Tonight the lacquered wood sang its songs of the residents arriving for dinner. A melody of family.

They sat at the low table the same as any other night, which was not in any order anyone had ever set. Yuki settled into the place at Byakko's left and had a skewer off the near dish before she had finished sitting, her chopsticks dropped with a casual disdain for etiquette wherever her hand happened to leave them. Yamaneko lowered himself into the chair that gave him the door without the look of watching it, the wine he would carry the whole chord and not drink already in his hand. Shiro folded down at the right and laid her chopsticks in a clean parallel across the rest before she had taken a bite, much like another person might square a stack of papers. Arashi was already eating; Arashi was always already eating. And Mu, on the cushion at Byakko's side — a small black cat, folded into the one warm patch the lamps threw, observing through his violet eyes.

Byakko sat among her kin. She disliked being queen in the intimacy of her inner circle. She ate little, and between the little she ate she never once set the sticks on the bare wood — the cradle, or the edge of the dish, or across the rim of her glass, the tips always kept off the surface. She personified grace and that was in fact only control worn so long it had stopped needing her to mean it.

They were dressed for the evening already, formal to the last fitting, because the guests would come with the dusk and there would be no time for changing. Formal in dress, and in nothing else. Here, behind the shut doors, the drink went round without ceremony and the small dishes came and went unremarked. A light meal prepared them to give their attention to their guests and not their appetite. The mood was up. The house could simply be the house. The first part of this evening's chord belonged to it.

Byakko had put the question to them before the first pour — Kahvan-Da — left it there and listened instead. It was how she led, and the part of it she did best. She did not gather them to an answer. She let them work through it where she could watch them think. A conclusion arrived at together was owned by everyone who had a different piece of the puzzle, and the summary handed down finished was a more complete picture as a result.

Shiro spoke up first, because she always had the most ready to present, and she set it down in order, each piece flat and in its place. "Twelve turns they kept the hangar breathing. Cargo in under one name, out under another. For all the galaxy to see, Kahvan-Da was an ordinary transfer station." Her glass turned a quarter and did not rise. "The manifests were all false leads. Every one of them legitimate businesses, checked and went nowhere. Every name cleared. I can get back to that but this is the more important issue." Byakko finished her sip and set her glass down, turning her head to see the data Shiro had projected from her tablet. Shiro continued. "The booster came off its cradle by hand. Slow. Someone who could not risk damaging it. And off the floor through a Rip."

Her lack of attention was misleading, "There's the salted ones." Yuki had found the dish she wanted and reached the length of the table for it. With her mouth still half full she added, "I thought I sensed a recent rip in there." She swallowed her tiny nibble and added, "You can't rip something that size with a single weapon."

"No you can't." Shiro had not paused for the skewers and did not pause now. It was not the tearing of the space by the energy of their weapons that held them — space had been ripped at this table's whim more times than any of them could count. It was the math that was the issue. "A single weapon has limits. Those of us with them can take one other but something that size is not possible."

"Three of them." Arashi had not looked up — she had not looked up at anything in a long age, and had stopped needing to; voices showed her everything. She flicked the tip of a chopstick to turn a slice she had no intention of finishing, the hand knowing exactly where the food was without the eye. "Takes more than one weapon to hold a gate that wide. Three of the dread ones will do it." For a moment her attention left the plate — not toward any of them, but toward the cushion, where Mu sat. Her white eyes did not see the curled feline; they had not gazed upon anything in a long age. She stopped leaning over the table and joined the conversation properly. "And three making that link go dormant after. Several turns before they wake. Likely an arc. Which has two readings, and I don't care for either." The table had her attention. "Either it was worth three of his weapons sleeping where he can't reach them," she sipped from a chipped teacup, "or being without those three is no longer something that concerns him."

"Because they didn't want a record." Yuki reached for an answer. Shiro considered the angle Yuki was working. Yamaneko joined the thought. "A Rip doesn't file. Nothing logs."

"Right, it's just gone," Shiro agreed, half a beat behind him.

The table held that one. The second reading was the one nobody wanted, and the first was bad enough. Yamaneko's thumb moved slowly around the rim of his glass.

"He's afraid of us," Yuki said into the pause, already past convincing herself. "You don't spend like that on someone you're not —"

"He's not afraid." Arashi, flat, not unkind, not looking up.

Yuki's tail thumped the cushion once behind her, a common event when Arashi scolded her, and she opened her mouth to take it further — chopsticks lifting toward Arashi to make the point.

"We were never the quarry." Byakko, before her sister could debate Arashi. Her feline ears found an angle. "We were meant to see everything there." She set it down without weight. "The ambush made us think we stopped something. The thing was already done. The data was the trap. The engine was the errand."

"You were expected," Shiro said. "The trap was never built to take you. Only to cost us this time it has taken determining the why."

"Rex." Despite all her self-control Byakko could not disguise the contempt she held for the one who owned that name. Staring into her glass as if it could provide answers, she framed the bigger question speaking to all of them, and to no one. "What are you playing at this time?"

Yamaneko had not stopped picking at the sweet meats. He sat where he always sat, turning the wine he never drank. "When your enemy begins to make his moves seen he is preparing you to believe his deception." Yamaneko was not a practitioner of espionage. His was the way of the sword. You stood before your foe and displayed your honor. Victory was expected and he delivered it consistently. "Why spend so much to rip something away in that manner when a Fold-Gate's cost is a permit and fuel?" A server bent down to remove the empty dishes and another refilled the container of water Yamaneko emptied just moments ago then eased back out the entrance in a smooth exchange. "You can do this unseen with coin in the proper greedy hands. He needed it in place quickly."

"There's more." The almost-smile arrived, and as ever declined to finish. Shiro laid the last piece flat. "The manifests were still there and it is good you collected them." She nodded toward Byakko. "Someone could have deleted them but didn't; however, they tried to make it look like a failed attempt to wipe the record." She let the implications settle in with them. "A crew that lifts an engine out by hand to spare it a scratch does not forget to wipe its records. They were left. Every Nekozoku trader within reach of that system, named — every name real connected to false transactions — set down for us to find, wearing the face of carelessness."

"Rex seeks to make us move against our own," Byakko said. Not a question.

"He cannot break us from outside. So he hands us the reason to destabilize us from within, and lets our own machinery do the cutting." Shiro's voice did not rise. It never did. "The list is the bait. What we would do with it is the trap."

"There is more, and it sits worse with me than the hangar." The rest of it was Shiro's to carry. "Systems do not go dark anymore. Not in longer than I have held the post — a Fold-Gate is built to outlast an era, and the roads we travel are stable. The dead ones are all old. Outer Kesshari went dark three hundred ages ago and it was a natural event. A stellar collapse in that system. The rest older still with reasons just as valid. Nothing maintained goes quiet." A pause. "Leerma went quiet the better part of an arc ago. A small frontier seat, nothing the galaxy would miss. I marked it anyway."

"I'd miss it." Yuki reached across the table, snatching the skewer. "For the peppers."

"Yuki." Arashi, to her plate, without heat — the reflex again, the body saying it before the mind was asked.

"They smoke them," Yuki told the wine, mournful, to no one. "Nobody else does it like —" Arashi turned her head toward Yuki who admired the blue peppers on the grilled stick in her hand. The princess rolled her eyes at the rebuff and slid one off with her teeth.

"Yes. As I was saying." Shiro went on over the pepper grief without a wasted breath. "And it did not stop at Leerma, an arc later a connecting gate on that line went dark." She set the name down by itself. "Oumura. Outer Usagizoku territory — institutions, colonies, a library of real weight in dimensional scholarship." A pause. "And that is the whole of what I can give you on that. A system does not simply fall quiet, not anymore, and these are two on a commerce line. What was done there, I cannot tell you. No one has reached either. That is the part that will have to be answered on the ground."

"A search it is then," Yamaneko said, committed to the idea as he spoke it, setting down his plain cup of water. "Leerma, then Oumura, the Lycan Galactic Pack that Rex rebels against has access to those gates as well. He is moving in the shadows cast by the Armistice — not through Galactic Pack routes, aside them. Near enough to use the roads, clean enough that the Galactic Pack can swear in full honesty it never carried him." He turned the full wine glass. "The Armistice isn't a hindrance to him, it's an opportunity."

"Hakase Ren. Of the Oumura Library." Byakko introduced the name to the equation. "Ren's home is one of the two that have gone dark. I knew him from before the Fahng years, when the Lycan occupied our worlds. He is to sit at my table tonight." She inhaled a steadying breath. "Perhaps he can shed some light on this darkness."

The guests would be arriving soon. Shiro's briefing was complete and everyone had their say. It was Yuki who decided there was something to add. "So it can't be all one thing. Kahvan-Da, the dark gates. They don't line up. He can't be raiding the edges of the frontier and moving on us together." Shiro was quick to point out, "Yes, Yuki, but all the signatures of this are firmly DarkPack, there is only one hand at work here." Yamaneko shared his own summary, "Hands on is the only way we will know for certain. We must gather information from Oumura and Leerma. We are only guessing if we do not." Arashi seemed to pay no mind to any of them. Mu had nudged her elbow and earned a few bits of the sweet meats Yamaneko left on the tray. Byakko put the close on the family gathering. "Tomorrow we will assemble and make a plan for these investigations. Now, we have guests. Tonight is for duty."

She found the cradle, and set her chopsticks down, and rose.

The floor had begun to sing — one note, far off, a foot on the long boards, and another behind it, clear and bright as struck glass. The house, telling itself what it had built itself to be told. The first of them had come. Byakko took her place just inside the doorway to the reception hall, Yuki fidgeting on her right, Yamaneko to her left holding a small wrapped box.

The palace staff moved through the halls with a hurried pace. A sweet tone rang from the floor as a familiar step strayed off the quiet boards well known to them. "Quickly now, the doors are to be open soon. You there, help with the kitchen." The commanding voice sprang from an elegant woman whose three bushy tails trailed behind her in a soft glide. Kit Kiko was the MajoDomo of the House, Kitsunejin and superbly efficient. Yuki raised her eyebrows. "Oh, she is in a mood tonight." Yamaneko replied instantly. "The entire palace would resemble your chambers if not for the woman," causing Byakko to almost repress a grin.

Arashi and Shiro passed behind the three royals en route to their places closer to the table, the spymaster making a slight detour to whisper in the Queen's ear. "My Queen, you wanted me to remind you to address the banking issues this evening." Byakko turned her head to catch Shiro's eye. "Thank you, Shiro, I reviewed the memo on my way here." They shared a nod and continued with the evening.

They arrived as the violet sun set below the horizon, surrendering its warmth to the lightly chilled breezes that came with the night. The song of footsteps announced a woman wearing the insignia of the royal house. She glanced around the large hall that was still a wonder to her since taking her post recently as court physician — a Mangusujin whose people were long known for an ability to heal the body. Isha Riki was warmly greeted by the royal family and she took her place with Arashi and Shiro. The Usagizoku were announced, Ikko Feelon, a banking minister, and the much awaited guest Hakase Ren.

A cordial greeting was given to the minister and Byakko's smile was obvious as she took Ren's hands in hers as he rose from his formal bow. "Hakase Ren. It is wonderful to have you in our home again. It has been far too long." "Your Royal Highness, your generosity is surpassed only by your kindness and neither compares to your beauty." Ren proclaimed with pure sincerity. Yuki was smiling happily as she welcomed the family friend. "Ren, good to see you," breaking all decorum and throwing her arms around him in a firm hug. The surprise of it lifted his ears alert until he stood before his best student. "Ren, my friend, this is for you." Yamaneko handed the gift he held to the Usagijin scholar. "Three volumes of the Gorlak Tomes. You spoke of them often so I bartered with a Nezumijin antiques dealer a full turn to obtain them." "Yama, you did listen to your studies after all. This is a lovely gift, thank you, General," using Yamaneko's rank but remembering only the apt pupil from so many ages ago.

The pair of Usagijin made their way to the table while the remaining three guests were introduced and greeted. Ambassador Bodi of the Lycan Galactic Pack, Envoy Mizuchi of the Tatsuzoku, a water folk who were viewed as mysterious by much of the galaxy. Then, Agriculture Minister Nic Shedo, a Risujin whose people were famed for their skill with anything that grew from the soil.

They went in as the old courtesy kept them — the house following the guests with the Princess at the Queen's hand. The singing floor took the whole company at once, a long bright song rising under the chorus of the footsteps.

The seating arrangements had been settled by the logic Kit was renowned for. Mapped out carefully chords before anyone arrived — the old grievances kept their three seats apart. Ren near the Queen's hand, by the same quiet reasoning, because she had asked for it without asking. Mu on his low cushion at her side. The lamps came down to the warm and private height a long table needed, and the warmth of the reception continued as everyone was receiving the first course.

From the head of the table Byakko kept a careful survey of the various conversations. Mizuchi told a small tale of a treaty undone by a single mistranslated courtesy. He was three lines into it before realizing the Nekozoku were already smiling — the story arrived in the palace long before him, which amused the other guests, and made him laugh at his own telling. The best outcome a diplomat can hope for at any gathering. The Tatsuzoku diplomat was a wonderful speaker and Byakko laughed along with the rest of the table. The kind that reaches the eyes. Mizuchi had never met the Queen and would spend the entire dinner unable to fit the face to the reputation. This alluring young monarch was the most dangerous person in the room, and the two facts simply would not come together in his mind.

It went, for a long and pleasant while, the courses arriving and clearing, the wine going round, the deep-water diplomat and the bright skittering minister finding a rhythm, the whole alliance fed and easy. A server passed behind the chairs and was not noticed. Down the table Yamaneko turned a glass he had still not drunk. It was a good evening among friends.

The smoked blue peppers arrived with the second dish, and Yuki made a sound that turned heads.

"Finally." She had one off the plate before it had fully landed, grabbing her chopsticks from wherever her hand happened to leave them. "Nobody smokes them like Leerma. Nobody. I have tried the others — they are an insult to the pepper."

"Oh — you know the Leerma blue!" Nic Shedo lit up hearing a topic close to her heart, the skittish little Minister of Agriculture forgetting, for the length of a pepper, to be skittish at all. "The cold-smoke cultivar — the one with the resin note, yes? Such a finicky crop, you have no idea, the soil chemistry alone is a small nightmare, you cannot just put it anywhere and —" She caught herself a half-beat in. "Though — enjoy that dish while it lasts, Highness, in honesty. We have not had a Leerma shipment in, oh, two arcs now. The colony and the gate have simply gone quiet on us. No manifests, no harvest filings, nothing at all. Most unlike them. Our farmers are punctual people, when you grow things you live by the calendar." A small rueful Risuzoku shrug; spinning her glass a quarter-turn and back again. "I've three inquiries out and not a word back. I tell myself it's the gates."

Yuki's enjoyment dimmed by exactly one pepper.

At the head of the table Byakko did not look up from the guest she was attending, and heard every word of it.

"The gates have been a trial to all of us this season," she said, warm, to the table at large, giving it the air of a common struggle. "Minister, if the blue peppers are at hazard, I shall consider it a matter of state and have someone look into it personally. It would be a poor Empire that could not keep my sister supplied with her favorite peppers." The table chuckled — a queen being gracious about a vegetable — and Nic beamed, wholly satisfied, and was off into the soil chemistry again.

Byakko turned to her honored guest. "Hakase Ren — has there been any progress translating the pre-ancient data language? I understand you have confirmed its age as older than a trillion ages. Is this so?"

Ren's ears stirred with activity. "Your Highness, our work is ongoing, as you know — progress coming slowly, as it always has. And yes. The age is confirmed. Quite remarkable." He inhaled slowly and cast his head down, keeping his eyes on Byakko. "I confess… it has begun to answer. Only in fragments. A grammar where before we had only shapes. But it has begun to answer." The care in him thinned for a breath, and something underneath showed through that was not pride. "And Highness — I am no longer certain we are the first to be reading it. Some of the fragments we have only lately opened have the feel of a door already opened. As though we follow a hand that went ahead of us and left it warm."

He reached for his cup but did not drink, an Usagijin's nervous unease, separating the lesser trouble from the greater responsibility — because he had decided, somewhere on the journey here, that a choice must be made.

"It is foolish, but the two have tangled in my mind and I cannot quite untangle them. The work began to open — and a short time later Oumura went quiet on us. Letters that should have brought replies. I... I would have sworn they would come within the turn, and they never came at all." A small tilt of the silver head, reaching for the harmless answer. "I tell myself it's only the season. The roads are busy, the gates sulk, and a man who has just taught a dead language to speak will hear a conspiracy in his own empty postbox. It's the likelier thing by far. A breakthrough makes one foolish about coincidences."

Byakko looked at her old friend explaining away the very thing that should have all of them concerned, and did not let her face show what she knew: that it was not the season. The silence was known and would be investigated when the sun rose. The evening was for enjoying company and she would not take it from him.

Nic Shedo heard the exchange as clearly as anyone at the table and had caught trillion ages and gone round-eyed and still, the bright botanist silenced by something far outside her field proving enormous.

Byakko did not let the silence linger.

"A trillion ages is a long time to wait to be read," she said — light, marveling, a queen charmed by a scholar and nothing more. "And you always did have the most patient correspondents, Ren. I am sure their replies will reach you soon — though I will not have you reading omens into a quiet library at my table. My own offices spend half their time chasing silences that come to nothing." A small smile, entirely for him. "Let your messages be tomorrow's worry. Tonight you are a guest, the wine is better than the fretting, and the research will keep."

Ren found a place inside his fear that allowed him a little smile. Nic protested that she would adore the grammar; it got its laugh, and turned the table safely back to itself.

To the room: two old friends, a dead language, a charming evening, blue peppers and faulty machinery. To Byakko and those who knew the events of the day, the cold heart of the whole matter spoke plainly and it confirmed what the evidence showed; someone was behind the loss of contact with those worlds. Shiro's cheerful exchanges quietly taught her who these guests were away from this table. Yamaneko's thumb stopped on the rim of his glass when Nic shared her smile with him. Arashi ate little but held Mizuchi's respect as she shared stories of his own people he never knew from the taught history.

Down the table Bodi, the Lycan Ambassador, asked, with every appearance of polite ignorance, whether a trillion ages was truly possible or simply a scholar's flourish — and Ren answered as though he were teaching class again. Bodi smiled, and gave no sign of having just heard the most valuable sentence spoken in the room that night.

The dinner went on, warm and unhurried, and beneath the warmth of it Byakko had a question for the commissioner. Ikko Feelon had drifted wine-easy into a quiet reckoning of supply lines with Isha, the house physician. She had her own gripes about medical supplies and constant delays. Byakko found the right moment to raise the subject with him.

She set her chopsticks down in their cradle.

"Banking Commissioner Feelon. Of House Ikko. Third Regent to the Royal Emperor of the Usagizoku." She named him whole, down the length of the table — which in her court was courtesy on its face and, beneath it, the gentlest possible notice a guest now had the crown's full attention. The little radius of talk around the commissioner contracted into a careful stillness.

"There was a transfer," she said. "Recent. A considerable one, for repairs to a Fold-Gate. Routed to an engineering concern the Armistice does not permit." The banker set his glass down as the Queen finished her inquiry. "I would understand the shape of it."

Feelon nodded slowly, understanding the transaction she meant. He had done nothing he could be hanged for, and knew in the same instant exactly how it looked — a banker, a barred firm, a great deal of currency, a crisis where gates were going dark. His ears, which had lifted so readily at the wine, sagged with the concern of the moment. He found his voice, and it was steady only because he made it so.

"The work was real," he said. "The Gate needed it. The concern was — the concern was the one recommended to me." A breath. "By Ambassador Bodi."

The word landed in the middle of the table and did not move.

"He recommended the team. He knew the firm. I filed against it, in good faith, and — and the waiver took its time reaching the comptroller for signature, and the permits landed out of their proper order, and I see now how it must read." He had run out of steadiness. "But the name on the recommendation is his."

Every face at the table turned, with great courtesy, toward the Okamijin Bodi.

He did not flinch. He set down his wine and met the Queen's eyes with a practiced ease earned by a man who had learned to expect surprises. She received his calm with patient anticipation that the room could read. A Lycan Ambassador eating from her table was never, for her, only a guest. The Armistice was a fragile affair, fixed on ancient traditions and the Okamizoku idol in her possession. There was a hall similar to this one they dined in, never forgotten and never once spoken of, in which she and his people had learned precisely who she was.

"It reads exactly as badly as the commissioner fears, and it is exactly as dull as that," the Ambassador said. "The firm is the best in the reach at Fold-Gate work — barred for old reasons, political reasons, that have nothing to do with their hands. A government repair, organized in haste and badly, and a waiver that sat in a signature queue a bit too long. By the time the permits caught up to the payment, the order was wrong, and an honest transaction wore the face of a crooked one." He spread one hand, easy. "I recommended them because they would do the work and do it right. I should have shepherded the paperwork. I did not. The fault, such as it is, is mine, and tedious."

It hung together. It was complete, and plausible, and entirely the kind of thing that is true. It was also exactly what someone would say whether it was true or if they were simply very good at explanations.

The Queen, who had asked for precisely that reason, marked the answer and did not believe it any more than she disbelieved it. She set it where she set such things: unrepeated, unwritten, simply kept.

"Thank you both for sharing your knowledge on this matter — Commissioner, Ambassador." She gave each the same small nod, the same warmth, in the same breath, and the evenness of it was its own quiet message: I have heard you equally, and weighed you equally, and you will both leave my table thinking yourselves equally absolved. "It seems once again our own bureaucracy flares out at us. Infrastructure fails and must be repaired; I see nothing unusual in it, save the rush to resume commerce meeting the usual bottlenecks." She raised her glass to the pair of them. "Let us continue our evening, with our friends and our compatriots."

All of them paused, and turned to her, and drank with her.

The Ambassador raised his glass. In his eye was not the flicker of a man relieved to be believed. He had the smooth, unhurried grace of one accepting a move in a game he had been playing before his footsteps rang the singing floor. Byakko thanked him, and Bodi let himself be thanked, and both of them understood the other perfectly, and neither showed the room a thing.

She could have pressed him. She did not. A curiosity to be enlightened about was acceptable. Accusing an Ambassador over the soup was not. What it wins is never worth what it costs, and tonight the warmth at the table was worth more. An Ambassador backed into a corner will remember and be less forthcoming in the future.

The room took it gratefully. The stillness around the commissioner loosened all at once into the particular pleasure of a table that has helped clear up a small dark thing for the Royal House. Nic Shedo declared she had always found that firm reliable. Mizuchi observed that a signature queue was the one true enemy of every government that had ever drawn breath, and got his laugh. Feelon's color returned by degrees. They had been, for a moment, of use to the crown — and the evening was more festive for the small talk it created.

Across the table the commissioner watched the Queen turn back to her guests, gracious and untroubled. He could not fit it to the woman who had, a breath ago, named him whole and waited for the answer he gave. Her way was unique to royalty, and her people loved her all the more for it.

Her own smile reached her eyes, because she willed it to. She was the only one at the table who did not, entirely, set the matter down.

The dinner ended with a course of fanciful desserts. Yuki embarked on a private mission to sample every one of them. The lamps were drawn low, and the guests rising to be escorted by members of the house as they made their courtesies before exiting the hall. By every measure, it had been a fine evening.

Only Mu, from the low cushion at her side, did not seem to think the evening was over.

He had been still through all of it. Just a cat sleeping on a pillow next to his best friend. Now he lifted his head and looked down the long hall toward the far doorway, where the commissioner had drawn the silver scholar a half-step aside — a hand light at his elbow, speaking low and fast and close, his face too earnest for goodbyes. Mu watched Feelon press the scholar, and watched Ren hesitate, and give in.

They moved toward the door together.

Feelon's steps sang a sad little tune — every one of them, the panicked uneven music of a man who had never learned the floor and could not have walked it quietly even if he willed it. The boards announced him the length of the hall, and only Mu heard the silent lyrics to the song. The ballad of a frightened banker hurrying home.

Ren's stride made no sound at all.

His time in the palace was well remembered. The old paths still known to his feet after all the ages. Even now, being drawn toward a choice he hesitated to make, he walked the hush between the notes the same as he had walked it as a younger man with an armful of books and an argument half-finished. The floor did not sing for him because, once, this had been a place he loved, and the body does not forget a thing the heart knew first.

Mu did not blink.

No one else was looking that way.