“You are sure of this?”
“Completely sure. Eventually you won't notice any imagined divide.”
She didn't believe him, but she thanked him for his reassurance with a squeeze of his forearm.
Despite all their precautions and delays, she half-expected the Refuge to be a cloud of dust and shattered rock when they arrived, a Concordance fleet lying in wait for them with primed weaponry. But the lone asteroid was as they'd left it: seemingly an inconsequential lump of misshapen rock tumbling through the void in the outer reaches of the galaxy. It gave off no electromagnetic signatures, no clue at all that it was hollowed out and occupied. They approached from the dark side, the planetoid visible only as a silhouette blotting out the blaze of the galaxy. The proximity of the Radiant Dragon awoke close-range sensors and the Refuge's space doors slid back, its energy wall powering down to grant them access.
She left him to his studies and retreated to her own quarters. The Dragon was a large enough ship compared to the lander, but she and Ondo still bumped into each other constantly, and she longed for some time on her own. The arrangement appeared to suit Ondo, too. During her convalescence, days had gone by without them seeing each other. In the Refuge they could almost live separate lives if they preferred.
She returned to the question of whether she could really trust him. As he'd admitted, he might be under control of Concordance, or at least monitored by them, without even knowing. She could scan him, sift through the folds and membranes of his tissues for some sign of tampering, but she knew she wouldn't find anything. He'd given her all her enhanced abilities, built the artificial half of her body, meaning she might be compromised too. She could only trust her natural side: her human senses, her intellect, her intuition. And what was that saying? That she wanted to trust him, sure, but that she didn't do so yet, not completely.
She'd watch him, and she'd watch herself as well. Unexpected or puzzling behaviour from either of them might mean something odd was going on.
Her augmentations recorded everything she saw and felt, capturing input from her biological and artificial senses with complete fidelity, and she spent a lot of time replaying events on the ice. Maybe it was an unhealthy thing to do, but she did it anyway. She lingered over her father, studying him, watching the way he cowered and looked constantly to the Void Walker to see if he had done wrong. She wished she'd known who and what he really was when she was growing up, wished they could have sat down together and talked about his secrets. She wondered how much of the truth her mother had known.
She studied the Walker, too, imagining herself taking her revenge on him, the two of them facing each other without an energy wall to protect him. It could never be – the nuke blasts had consumed him – but those who had given him his orders were still out there. They would pay for what they had done.
The Refuge had a large store of telemetry harvested from across the galaxy, thanks to Ondo's nanosensors monitoring worlds where Concordance was known to be active. She also scanned those archives looking for some other glimpse of the Walker they'd encountered, seeking some explanation of why he'd done what he'd done, who had directed him. She knew it was futile, that he was simply a tool of Concordance, but she did it anyway.
She soon found a match to his facial features: images from four years previously, a time when she was living her peaceful life on Maes Far, largely oblivious to wider events. The Walker had been on a planet called Ossian – Oscend IV – where there'd been an attempted overthrow of the Concordance-backed Empress Gersell.
The planet had erupted into open revolt, with coordinated attacks on government buildings in all major conurbations. There was clearly a significant amount of coordination among disparate opposition groups. Concordance scrambled to react but looked rattled, local troops under Cathedral ship control unable to keep a lid on events. Perhaps Concordance hadn't been paying close enough attention to events on the ground. With the revolt in full swing, they sent in a phalanx of Void Walkers to suppress the uprising. They arrived in ground-attack ships that the locals' weaponry was powerless to damage. The ships swept backwards and forwards above crowds of demonstrators and rioters, unleashing wide blasts of beam-weapon death.
She watched a scene involving the Walker from the ice. Smoke drifted across a wide square flanked by tall, honey-coloured walls. Three of the gunships hovered over the scene, brute and menacing, their weaponry trained on the ground. Below, in the square, a portion of the local populace had been rounded up. The adults, maybe a hundred of them, had been separated from their children, many of whom were too young to understand what was happening. Sobbing and wailing, they tried to reach their parents but were pushed back each time by the local troops under command of the Walkers.
The one who had killed her father was apparently in charge. Ondo's nanosensors had captured his address to the crowd. She heard one of the other Walkers refer to him by his name.
Kane.
“The House of Gerl has been restored to its rightful position. All across the planet, rebels and those who harboured them are paying the price for what has been done. You turned your faces from the light of Concordance and by doing so threatened everyone and everything. Now you, too, must be punished.”
Weaponry on the landers twitched and swivelled, picking out targets. Couples among the adults clutched each other, as if the flesh and bone of
