That night, after Mother had gone upstairs with the kind of pointed normality that meant she was deliberately leaving us space without wanting either of us to acknowledge the favour, the house settled into its older sounds.

The boiler clicked in the wall. Rain moved lightly against the back window. Somewhere upstairs, floorboards answered one another in tired little complaints.

The packet still sat on the coffee table.

We had stacked it neatly, which somehow made it worse. A tidy shape for an untidy future. Beside it lay Maya’s notebook, closed now, her handwriting hidden inside it like a trapdoor I had personally built and then been rude enough to hand her the key to.

I sat on the sofa with my legs tucked under me and a mug cooling between both hands. Maya was in the armchair this time, not because either of us had chosen distance exactly, but because the room had developed that strange carefulness people sometimes brought to grief before deciding whether it was safe to approach directly.

Neither of us had said much since Mother went to bed.

Not from discomfort. From weight.

Twenty-nine years had a way of doing that to a room.

At length I said, “You’ve gone very quiet.”

Maya looked up from her tea.

“That’s a bold accusation from someone who’s spent the last ten minutes staring at one paperback like it insulted her family.”

I glanced at the fantasy novel in my lap.

“I’m considering whether I hate the protagonist.”

“You’ve read three pages.”

“That has never stopped me before.”

That got the faintest movement at the corner of her mouth.

Not a smile. Near enough to count.

Then the quiet came back.

Not empty. Just waiting.

I watched her over the rim of my mug.

She had changed out of the clothes we’d gone out in and into one of the soft jumpers she had already somehow managed to make look like part of the house. One foot tucked under the chair. Hair loosened. Hands wrapped around the mug a little too tightly, which was how I knew she was not nearly as calm as she looked.

There were many terrible things about falling in love with Maya.

One of the worst was how quickly I had learned the fault lines in her composure.

“You’re doing maths,” I said.

That made her blink.

“What?”

“You get that look when you’re trying to make an answer behave like a number.”

Maya lowered her eyes to the tea.

“That is deeply unfair.”

“It’s also true.”

A beat passed.

Then she said, quietly enough that the house had to lean in to hear it too, “Twenty-nine years.”

No decoration. No careful easing into the subject.

Just the number itself, laid down between us.

I looked at her.

“Yes.”

She nodded once, but the motion seemed less aimed at me than at the sentence, as if she were physically testing whether it remained real after being spoken aloud.

“When you said it earlier,” she said, “I understood it in the factual sense. I don’t think I understood it in the human one until after.”

I did not answer at once.

Because I knew what she meant.

The programme liked factual senses. Measurable ones. Elapsed time. Return windows. Subjective duration. Useful, bloodless language for things that were not bloodless at all.

The human sense arrived later.

Always later.

“How are you understanding it now?” I asked.

Maya was quiet for a moment.

Then: “Badly.”

That startled something close to a laugh out of me.

She looked up at once, not offended, only a little surprised.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just a very honest answer.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s the problem.”

I set the book aside properly and leaned back into the sofa cushion.

The lamp by the window had been left on. Soft gold against old wallpaper and rain-dark glass. Between us, the packet and the notebook sat like two versions of the same threat. One technical. One personal.

Maya stared at the coffee table rather than at me when she went on.

“I keep trying to fit it into ordinary scales. How long I’ve known you. How long I’ve worked with you. How long since university. How long a person can be married before it counts as a whole life. And every time I do that, twenty-nine years just...” She made a small helpless motion with one hand. “It doesn’t sit anywhere.”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”

She drew a breath.

“And I know that’s not the point. The point isn’t that the number is large. It’s that it happened to you and then everyone expected you to return and continue.” She finally looked at me fully then, and there was no composure left in the question, only care stripped down to its framework. “I don’t know how to hold that.”

I looked down at my mug. At the faint steam still ghosting from the surface. At my own fingers wrapped around it. At the way even now, after all this time in this body, I could still be caught by the simple rightness of my own hands if I looked too long.

“The secret,” I said, “is that neither do I.”

Maya’s face changed by a degree.

Not relief. Something sadder than that.

I went on before she could decide to apologise for asking.

“People hear years and imagine something coherent. A long, clean line. But it isn’t that. It’s messier. More uneven. There are worlds where ten years blur into weather and roads and trying not to die from local stupidity. There are worlds where one month stays sharper than a decade anywhere else because it happened to cut closer to the bone.”

The house ticked around us.

Maya listened the way she always did when something mattered enough: completely, without trying to improve it while it was still being said.

“That one,” I said, “the twenty-nine-year one... I don’t carry every day of it equally. Nobody could. But it’s there. In layers.”

“In you,” she said.

It was not a correction. Just a better word.

“Yes,” I replied. “In me.”

She was quiet again for a little while.

Then she said, “When you talk about going somewhere new now, I hear it differently.”

I looked at her.

“How?”

Maya turned the mug once between her palms.

“Before today, I thought of the risk mostly in the obvious ways. Physical harm. What comes back. What the company might do with what comes back. What the mission would ask of you.” She lifted her eyes to mine. “Now I hear time in it too. Not metaphorically. Literally. I hear the possibility that you could leave this room and come back having lived half a life where I wasn’t.”

The sentence entered the room gently.

That only made it hit harder.

I looked away first, toward the rain-dark window.

Because yes.

That was exactly what it meant.

Not every time. Not predictably. But yes.

“I know,” I said.

The words came out softer than I intended.

Maya let out a breath through her nose. “I don’t think I wanted that answer.”

“No,” I said. “Most people don’t.”

There was no accusation in it. Only fact. The old, difficult fact that the truth of the crossings was not cinematic enough to feel impossible. It was logistical, intimate, cruel in bureaucratic ways. People did not vanish into fantasy. They got sent. They lived there. They died there. Or came back carrying too much of it in their teeth.

Maya set her mug down at last.

The sound against the saucer was very small.

“When you came back from the twenty-nine-year one,” she asked, “did anyone know what they were looking at?”

I looked at her again.

That question had teeth.

Because it was not about diagnostics or debrief quality or operational follow-up.

It was about whether anyone had recognised the scale of the return in the person carrying it.

“No,” I said after a moment. “Not really.”

Maya’s jaw shifted slightly.

“They knew the duration. On paper. They knew the broad shape. Age at exit. Approximate local years. Recovery metrics. They had all the facts.” I looked down at the packet again, then back at her. “But facts are not the same thing as understanding. They asked the usual questions. Terrain, compounds, social structures, whether the local trade routes had been stable.” A small, humourless laugh. “I remember one man asking if I’d found anything replicable in medicinal practice while I was still getting used to having younger hands again.”

Something in Maya’s face hardened.

Not at me. Around me.

It was, I thought, perhaps the purest expression of love I had yet seen on her.

Ugly in its own way. Furious. Helpless. Exact.

“That,” she said carefully, “makes me want to commit several crimes.”

“Yes,” I said. “That was the general atmosphere.”

A breath of laughter escaped her then despite herself. Brief, incredulous, immediately gone again.

The room softened by half a degree.

Not because anything had improved. Because sometimes the only way to keep a terrible truth from flattening you completely was to let it remain absurd in the corners.

Maya leaned back into the armchair and looked at the ceiling.

“I keep thinking about time here,” she said. “You said it doesn’t map cleanly. That sometimes you’re there for years and only gone from here for hours.”

“Yes.”

“And everyone just keeps... waiting.”

I considered that.

“Not exactly,” I said. “The programme doesn’t wait in a human way. It monitors. Tracks. Prepares recovery. Fills the interval with procedure.” I glanced toward the kitchen, where Mother had left the tea things drying by the sink. “The people who cared did the waiting.”

Maya looked back at me.

“Did anyone?”

Another question with too much accuracy in it.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “Sometimes.”

I thought of med-bay rooms. Quiet hands adjusting blankets. The rare technicians who remembered I was a person before I was a briefing. A younger Maya, once or twice, in the years before either of us had language for why her presence steadied me faster than anything else in recovery ever had.

Maya saw enough of that in my face, apparently, because she did not press further.

Instead she asked, “Do you ever miss them?”

The worlds.

Not the programme. Not the mission profiles. Not the company.

Them.

I looked back toward the window again.

Rain silvering the glass. My reflection faintly ghosted in it. Pale hair, fine-boned face, ears still too storybook to feel entirely legal in suburban London.

“Yes,” I said.

No point lying.

“Not all of them. Some can burn. But some, yes. In strange ways. I miss roads sometimes. Or weather. Or a market that only existed in one city in one world twenty years ago by its calendar and none by ours. I miss people who would not recognise my real name and rooms that are gone the second I come back.”

Maya listened without moving.

“That sounds like grief,” she said.

“It is grief.”

The house held still around that too.

Because once spoken plainly, some things refused to go back to behaving like abstractions.

Maya got up from the armchair then.

Not quickly, and not with the air of a decision dramatically reached. Just a quiet movement from one piece of furniture to another until she sat on the sofa beside me, close enough that the cushion shifted under our combined weight.

She did not touch me immediately.

Another one of the terrible things about her. The way she could make not touching feel as deliberate and intimate as contact.

Then, after a second, she laid her hand lightly over mine where it rested against the mug.

“I’m not asking you not to go,” she said.

I turned my head and looked at her.

She held my gaze.

“I know.”

“I’m asking that when the time comes, we stop talking about risk as though it ends at whether you survive the crossing.”

That was the actual heart of it.

Not don’t go. Not choose me instead. Not even be careful.

Only this. See the cost in full. Name all of it. Do not let them compress the danger into the parts they know how to file.

My fingers tightened once under hers.

“Yes,” I said.

Maya’s thumb moved slightly against my knuckles.

“Twenty-nine years,” she said, almost to herself now.

I leaned my head back against the sofa and closed my eyes for a second.

“Yes.”

When I opened them again, she was still watching me with that same fierce, impossible steadiness.

And because there was no gentle way out of the truth once we had reached it, I said quietly, “The shortest was forty-three minutes.”

Maya’s expression did something pained and startled all over again.

I almost regretted it.

Almost.

Then she asked, because she was Maya and therefore incapable of taking only half the truth if the whole was on offer, “And the longest was the twenty-nine years?”

“Yes.”

“How old were you there?”

“Fifty-three.”

The number hung there.

Not dramatic. Just exact.

Maya drew in a slow breath.

“I don’t know what to do with that.”

“That makes two of us. Though it was partly my own fault for missing out on something that was once every ten years, twice.”

A small, helpless smile touched her mouth and vanished again.

Then she said, “When they talk about sending you somewhere new, part of what you’re hearing is not simply what happens there. It’s how long it gets to keep you.”

That one hit hard enough I could only look at her.

Because yes.

That was it, wasn’t it. The real shape of the threat beneath all the packet language and board appetite and mission architecture. Not only death. Not only damage. Duration. A world’s claim on me measured in years no one here would visibly lose and I would never stop having lived.

I let out a slow breath.

“Yes.”

The room went quiet again after that.

Rain. Old house. Her hand over mine.

And somewhere upstairs, a drawer with her clothes in it. Which was absurdly comforting in a moment otherwise arranged around temporal horror.

I laughed once under my breath.

Maya looked at me. “What?”

“It’s just occurring to me that this is a wildly inconvenient evening.”

“That seems fair.”

I turned my hand under hers and laced our fingers together properly.

“Good,” I said.

She blinked.

“That’s all.”

A beat.

Then the corner of her mouth moved.

“That word again.”

“Yes.”

This time when the quiet settled over us, it felt less like something waiting to break and more like something that had finally been given its correct name.

I looked at her and said, because there was no softer way left to put it, “So yes. When they talk about sending me somewhere new, part of what I’m hearing is a question about whether I’ll be gone for an hour, or a decade, and what version of me comes back if I am.”

Maya held my gaze.

She did not look away or soften it into something easier.

For a second I thought she was still working out how to carry the answer without dropping it somewhere between fear and anger.

Then she said, very quietly, “That frightens me.”

There was no use pretending otherwise, so I nodded once.

“I know.”

“But it doesn’t change anything.”

I frowned slightly. “That sounds suspiciously vague.”

Maya’s fingers tightened around mine.

“It changes what I understand,” she said. “It changes how carefully I’ll listen when they start talking about risk. It changes the questions I’m going to ask.” Her mouth tightened for half a second, then steadied. “It does not change how I feel about you.”

The sentence landed cleanly.

No flourish. No trembling declaration. Just truth, set down with both hands.

I looked at her.

She went on before I could decide how to survive that.

“I’m allowed to be frightened by what this means. I’m even allowed to hate parts of it.” A tiny breath. “I am not going to start loving you less because time has been cruel to you in complicated directions.”

That hit somewhere under the sternum and stayed there.

For a second I had nothing remotely dignified to say in return.

So naturally I said, “That was obscenely competent.”

Maya’s mouth twitched.

“Yes,” she said. “I know.”

I laughed once, shakily enough to annoy myself, and looked down at our joined hands because they were easier to survive than her face.

“You make it very hard to maintain my usual standards of emotional avoidance.”

“That is, in fairness, one of my better qualities.”

I looked back at her then.

At the woman beside me on the sofa, steady as the weather and twice as dangerous.

“And you’re sure,” I asked quietly, “that this doesn’t make you want to run screaming into a simpler life with a quieter girlfriend and significantly fewer dimensions.”

Maya did not even blink.

“No.”

“Concerning.”

“Yes.”

A beat passed.

Then, softer, “Tali.”

That alone was enough to still me.

She shifted a little closer on the sofa, not crowding, only closing the last polite distance the conversation no longer needed.

“I can’t promise I’ll be graceful about all of this,” she said. “I can promise I’m here. I can promise I’m not stepping back because the truth got larger.” Her thumb moved once against my knuckles. “And I can promise that the next time someone talks about sending you anywhere, they will be doing it in a room where I am very difficult to ignore.”

That did it.

Not dramatically. No tears, no collapse, no operatic surrender to love and temporality and soft furnishings.

Just the quiet, devastating certainty of being chosen by someone who had now seen a little more of the scale of me and had not flinched back from it.

I let out the breath I’d been holding and said, “That remains one of the most romantic threats I’ve ever received.”

“It wasn’t a threat.”

“No,” I said. “That’s what makes it worse.”

Maya’s expression softened then, not into pity, never that, but into something warmer and more private than the room had held until now.

“We should go upstairs,” she said.

I blinked. “That sounded dangerously sensible.”

“You’re tired.”

“That is slander.”

“You’re carrying three mugs’ worth of existential crisis in one evening.”

“That,” I said, “is unfortunately harder to dispute.”

She stood first, still holding my hand, and for one stupid second I was struck by how natural it felt. Not theatrical. Not newly invented. Just right in the old, impossible way I was beginning to recognise as the signature of all the most dangerous truths in my life.

Maya looked down at me from where I still sat on the sofa.

“Come on,” she said.

I let her pull me to my feet.

The packet stayed on the coffee table. The notebook stayed beside it. The rain kept moving at the window. The house creaked around us like it had seen stranger things and intended to remain standing through this one too.

Maya did not let go of my hand as she led me upstairs.

Not hurriedly. Not with any grand implication. Just with the steady, unshowy certainty of someone who had decided that being beside me tonight mattered more than pretending sleep arrangements were still an abstract administrative category.

At the spare-room door she paused and looked back at me once, as if offering me one final chance to make a joke sharp enough to hide behind.

I was tempted.

Deeply.

Instead I said, “You realise this is perilously close to tenderness.”

“Yes,” she replied. “Try to endure it.”

That startled a laugh out of me.

Then we went in.

The room was dim except for the bedside lamp, the floral curtains drawn against the rain-dark night. Her half-filled drawer still sat slightly open from earlier, one sleeve visible near the top like evidence left at the scene of a domestic crime.

Maya let go of my hand only long enough to turn down the blanket.

No seduction in it. No charged pause. Only care, quiet and plain.

I sat on the edge of the bed and looked up at her.

The day had somehow contained unknown worlds, corporate greed, old wounds, fresh truths, public princess allegations, my mother reorganising our relationship through household storage, and now this. Maya, here, choosing not urgency or fear or distance, but simply to come to bed with me because the night had become too heavy to carry separately.

“You’re very lovely, do you know that,” I said, “in a way that is frankly terrible for my long-term stability.”

Maya gave me a look as she took off her cardigan and folded it over the chair.

“That sounds like a you problem.”

“It is,” I admitted. “That’s the tragedy.”

She climbed in beside me a second later, and when the mattress shifted under our weight, something in me went quiet that had been braced for hours.

No kiss. No rush. Only her beside me in the small pool of lamplight, one arm folding around me with such simple certainty that I nearly came apart from the gentleness of it.

I turned into her on instinct.

My head found her shoulder. Her hand settled at my back. My ears, mortifyingly alert to everything, caught the soft rhythm of her breathing before anything else.

For a while neither of us spoke.

The rain touched lightly at the window. The house settled. The future remained exactly as complicated as before.

But Maya was here.

And when her fingers moved once, slowly, between my shoulder blades, I understood with a sharp, almost painful clarity that this was what she had meant.

Not that she wasn’t afraid. Not that time had become less cruel. Only that none of it had altered the fact of where she wanted to be tonight.

After a long while, her voice came quiet against my hair.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

I closed my eyes.

“I know,” I said.

And this time, wrapped in her warmth with the packet downstairs and the rain outside and the rest of the world held off until morning, I believed it enough to sleep.

Morning arrived grey, damp, and far too interested in consequences.

For a few seconds after waking, I had the brief, treacherous disorientation of feeling warm before I remembered why.

Maya.

Still there. Still asleep. Still with one arm loosely around my waist as if the night had made a decision and her body had simply agreed to keep enforcing it until morning.

The spare room was pale with early light. Rain marked the window in fine silver lines. The floral curtains Mother had never replaced because they were “perfectly serviceable” had taken on the washed-out dignity of fabrics forced to witness emotional developments against their will.

I lay still.

Not because I was trying to preserve the moment in amber. More because my life had acquired a disconcerting number of moments lately that became less survivable the instant I moved too quickly and let irony catch up.

Maya shifted first.

Not properly awake. Just enough to tuck me a little closer by instinct before her breathing changed and she opened her eyes into my shoulder.

There are few things more dangerous than being looked at by someone who wakes up and, before memory or caution can fully return, is briefly just glad you’re still there.

She blinked once. Then twice.

Then said, voice rough with sleep, “You’re staring.”

“That is a deeply unfair accusation.”

“No,” she murmured. “It’s observational.”

I smiled into the pillow.

“Good morning.”

“That depends,” she said.

“On what?”

“Whether your father has sent more material before tea.”

I thought about that.

Then sighed.

“That is offensively plausible.”

Maya lifted her head enough to look at me properly.

The quiet from last night had not vanished. It had only changed shape. Less sharp now. Less like impact. More like something both of us had picked up and decided, with varying degrees of grace, to carry.

“Still here,” I said softly.

It was not really a question.

Her expression warmed by half a degree.

“Yes.”

That was enough to get me out of bed.

By the time we came downstairs, Mother was already in the kitchen, making toast with the demeanour of a woman who had no intention of commenting on anything she could instead imply with superior timing.

She looked up once. Then at Maya. Then at me. Then back to the toast.

“Well,” she said.

I pointed at her with immediate moral authority. “That word should be licensed.”

“It is,” she replied. “I hold it privately.”

Maya, who had paused just inside the doorway in one of my old jumpers and with the sort of slightly softened expression that should probably have been illegal before coffee, went to put the kettle on before either of us could become worse.

The house, for one brief and fragile stretch of time, managed to be only a house.

Toast. Tea. Rain. My mother asking whether I wanted orange marmalade or something less evangelical. Maya leaning against the counter with one hand around her mug.

Then my phone buzzed.

Three heads turned toward it with the immediate synchrony of a household already developing habits it would later deny under oath.

I looked at the screen.

Secure request. Father.

Of course.

“I’d say I’m shocked,” I said, “but that would insult everybody involved.”

Mother buttered toast with increased aggression. “Speaker or sulking?”

“Those are not the only available options.”

“They are the useful ones.”

Maya set her mug down and looked at me.

No push. No caution. Only the same steady question as always.

What do you want.

I looked at the phone. Then at the kitchen. Then at the packet waiting downstairs. Then back at Maya, who had sat with temporal horror in the dark and not moved away from me for an inch of it.

“Speaker,” I said.

Mother made a sound of approval so dry it ought to have been bottled.

We moved to the sitting room without ceremony. Packet on the coffee table. Notebook beside it. Three mugs redistributed into a triangle that looked, alarmingly, like preparation.

I answered and put the call through the secure speaker.

Father’s voice came first.

“Tali.”

“Yes.”

A beat.

“Is this an acceptable time?”

Mother mouthed growth over her mug.

I refused to dignify that with attention.

“It is,” I said. “Provided you’re not about to use it badly.”

That got the slightest pause.

Not offended. Not surprised. Only recalibrating, perhaps.

“No,” he said. “I’ve sent the expanded materials. They should be in your inbox now.”

Maya had already reached for the tablet on the side table before he finished the sentence.

Of course she had.

She handed it to me without comment. I opened the secure attachment and found exactly what I’d expected: more pages, more graphs, one additional modelling set, and the sort of preliminary mission architecture people built when they desperately wanted the unknown to become logistics.

I skimmed the first two pages in silence.

Then said, “You’ve formalised the entry sequence.”

“Yes.”

“That was not approval.”

“I know.”

Good.

I kept reading.

Transfer envelope estimates. Subjective persistence modelling with ranges so wide they were nearly satire. Environmental tolerance assumptions. A ranked list of initial objectives written in that bloodless programme diction which always made murder sound adjacent to housekeeping.

My jaw tightened.

Maya saw it. Mother saw Maya seeing it.

I looked at the top page again and said, “You’ve got a first-pass mission profile.”

“Preliminary,” Father said.

“That word is doing optimistic work.”

“It’s meant to be revised.”

“Good,” I said. “Because at present it reads like someone tried to disguise colonial appetite as risk assessment and then got bored halfway through.”

Silence on the line.

Mother, bless her, looked almost proud.

Father said, after a moment, “Which section?”

I let out a breath through my nose.

Not defensive, then. Useful.

“All of it, in different ways. Objective one, confirm survivability of arrival environment. Fine. Objective two, assess immediate terrain and hazard profile. Also fine.” I flicked to the next line. “Objective three, identify and catalogue ore-linked anomalies and recover sample material if practicable. No.”

Father did not interrupt.

Maya, beside me on the sofa, had already opened the notebook.

Good woman.

“Explain,” he said.

“Gladly. If this world is as unknown as your packet claims, then if practicable is meaningless. Practicable to whom. Under what conditions. At what cost in exposure, contact, delay, or return risk. You don’t get to smuggle collection priority into a first-pass survival brief just because the board likes samples.”

“They will argue it’s central to the reason-”

“Yes,” I said. “I know why they’ll argue it. I’m saying it’s still bad mission design.”

Father was quiet just long enough for me to know he was actually considering it.

I went on.

“Entry one has to be survival, orientation, and confirmation. Nothing else. No collection priority above staying alive and determining whether the environment itself invalidates the rest of the plan.” I flicked another page open. “You’ve also buried temporal uncertainty in an appendix. That comes forward.”

This time Father answered at once.

“I expected you’d say that.”

“Good. Then stop writing as if elapsed subjective duration is a footnote to transit.”

Maya wrote something without looking up.

Time is not a secondary risk variable.

That sent something warm and painful through me in equal measure.

Father said, “The temporal model remains too unstable to treat as predictive.”

“That’s not an excuse. It’s the reason it needs front-page status.”

“Yes.”

Mother lowered her mug. “I’m beginning to enjoy how often that phrase is being used against you, Julian.”

He ignored her with the long-practised skill of a man who had once loved her enough to know exactly how impossible it was to win by answering.

I scrolled further.

“There,” I said. “This is worse.”

Maya leaned closer.

Her shoulder touched mine. Stayed there.

The line read:

If inhabited, establish low-profile observational parameters prior to active engagement.

I stared at it for a full second.

Then said, “No.”

Father exhaled slowly through the speaker.

“That is not an unreasonable opening posture.”

“It is if you think it means what you’re pretending it means.”

This time he did interrupt.

“What am I pretending it means?”

“That observation is neutral.” I looked at the page and felt my voice flatten into the briefing tone again, the one that came from fluorescent rooms and old damage and years spent being the only honest instrument in a dishonest process. “If the world is inhabited, there is no such thing as untouched observation once I’m physically in it. I occupy space. I alter local conditions. I bring language, assumptions, behaviour, risk. Pretending I can function as an invisible sensor because it comforts the board is fantasy.”

Silence.

Working silence.

Maya said quietly, “What are the contact ethics?”

Father’s answer came slower.

“They have not been finalised.”

Maya’s pen stopped.

I looked at the speaker.

“That is obscene.”

Mother’s mouth tightened.

Not because she was surprised. Because she wasn’t.

Father did not defend it.

Good.

“Then finalise them before anybody uses the word mission again. No contact assumptions buried under observation. No collection priority above survival. No concealed objective hierarchy where the board hears ore and everyone else has to pretend that doesn’t change the centre of gravity.”

Maya added another line to the notebook.

Ethical contact framework before mission authorisation.

Then, without lifting her eyes, she said, “What is the maximum subjective elapsed time before return uncertainty becomes ethically non-authorizable at launch?”

The air changed.

Father did not answer at once.

Because that was not how the programme liked to think. It liked windows, thresholds, deterioration risk, signal stability. It did not like saying out loud that there should be a point beyond which a human being had simply been somewhere else too long.

Maya looked up then.

Steady. Unblinking. No room left to step sideways into abstraction.

“What,” she repeated, “is the point at which the temporal uncertainty makes this mission unethical to launch at all.”

I looked at her.

The consequence of last night sat there between us. No plea. No dramatics. Only a better knife.

Father said, finally, “We’ve never formalised a hard subjective-duration disqualification threshold.”

Mother laughed once.

Astonishingly without humour.

“Of course you haven’t.”

Maya’s expression did not move at all.

“Then you need one,” she said.

He started, “Tali’s case history makes fixed duration difficult to-”

“No,” Maya said, and for the first time since the call began her voice sharpened enough that even the rain at the window seemed to listen. “Her case history is the reason you need one.”

The room went still.

I did not move.

Partly because I did not want to break whatever this was. Partly because I was still busy being hit by the exactness of hearing her say it.

Father was quiet again.

Then he said, carefully, “What would you propose?”

Maya did not look at me before answering.

“Not a universal threshold. A tiered response structure. Subjective-duration risk bands tied to psychological reintegration burden as well as biological recovery. Mandatory reassessment at each tier. And if the uncertainty is too wide to model responsibly, then the uncertainty itself should count against launch authorisation.”

I could have kissed her on principle.

Mother, I think, came very close to offering to adopt her formally on the spot.

Father said, after a pause, “That is reasonable.”

Maya nodded once and wrote as if the line had already become law.

Then she frowned at one of the old margin notes and tapped it.

“They keep calling it extraction.”

I looked at the draft and let out a short breath through my nose.

“Yes.”

“But that isn’t what it is.”

“No.” I took the notebook from her, looked at the line again, and handed it back. “It’s what they call it when they want ethics to sound funded.”

Maya’s eyes lifted to mine.

I went on. “They can’t pull me out once I’m there. Not reliably. Not really at all. If I come back, it’s because the crossing resolves, or the world kills me in the correct direction, or whatever rules govern return decide to remember me. The lab doesn’t get a rope around my waist.”

Mother went very still.

Maya said, “Then what do they mean when they write extraction framework?”

“They mean post-return recovery if I make it back. They mean launch conditions they’d like to imagine count as control. They mean a word that sounds more responsible than we sent her through a wound and waited at the far end to see what came back.”

Maya was quiet for a moment.

Then she crossed out the old heading and wrote:

Return and recovery plan, if return occurs.

I looked at the amended line and said, “Better.”

“Blunter,” Maya said.

“Yes,” I replied. “That’s usually how truth behaves once it’s stopped being paid to be polite.”

I leaned forward then and set the tablet down on the coffee table beside the packet.

“Good,” I said. “Because we’re done talking about this as if risk ends at pulse and tissue integrity or rescue fantasies.”

Father did not challenge that.

Interesting.

I looked at the notebook. At the pages. At the ugly little architecture of desire and danger trying to become a plan in my living room.

“Here’s the revised order,” I said. “You can tell me whether your board survives hearing it.”

No one interrupted.

“First, proof the world is real and distinct enough to justify further modelling at all. Second, operational definition of reachable that separates anchor viability, transfer survivability, environmental persistence, and recovery feasibility. Third, temporal uncertainty is elevated to primary risk category. Fourth, ethical contact framework and sapience contingencies before any collection language appears in the objectives. Fifth, return and recovery planning is written honestly as post-return management, not rescue fiction. Sixth, ore-related priorities remain subordinate to survival and contact ethics until the world itself is better understood.”

Mother, eyes over the rim of her mug, said, “That sounds like civilisation attempting to defend itself.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m trying something new.”

Father let the silence sit for one beat.

Then: “And if the board refuses that structure?”

I smiled. Not pleasantly.

“Then they can send someone else.”

That landed exactly as hard as it needed to.

Not emotional blackmail.

Not posturing. Only fact.

They wanted the person who had survived. The person who could return. The person who knew how to read unknown worlds without letting corporate language eat the edges first.

And for once, that person was me in a room with my mother, Maya, and the right to say no in complete sentences.

Father’s voice, when it came, had gone flatter.

Not angry. Not cold. More honest than either.

“They won’t and can't send anyone else.”

Mother looked out the window so she could smile privately at the rain.

I said, “Good. Then they can learn.”

A pause.

Then Father said, “Draft it.”

I blinked once.

“What?”

“The charter,” he said. “Your conditions. Maya’s temporal-risk framework. Ethical contact constraints. Draft it in the order you want the board to confront it.” Another beat. “I’ll make them read your version before they see the programme’s.”

The room changed by half a degree. Enough.

Maya looked at me. I looked at her. Mother looked at both of us and very nearly looked hopeful, which was frankly unsettling in daylight.

I picked up the notebook from Maya’s lap and weighed it in my hands for a second.

The paper was warm from her. The lines already half-built. The future, for once, not only waiting to be done to me but apparently asking, with bad grace and worse timing, to be written.

I looked at the speaker.

“You’re giving me the first wording?”

“Yes.”

“That is either growth or desperation.”

Father’s answer came without hesitation.

“Yes.”

That got me.

Not a laugh exactly. But near enough to feel the shape of one.

I opened the notebook to a clean page.

At the top, in my finer, cleaner handwriting, I wrote:

Conditions for First-Pass Authorisation

Then I looked at Maya and said, “You’re helping.”

She met my eyes.

“Yes.”

Mother lifted her tea like a toast to the impending administrative bloodshed.

“Good,” she said.

And because apparently the universe had decided that one acceptable use of power was making powerful men read documents authored by the women they’d underestimated, I bent over the notebook and began.

The car left us at the side entrance again, because apparently once a building had decided you were too politically inconvenient for the lobby, it committed to the bit.

Rain silvered the pavement beneath the service light. The glass beside the door gave back a softened version of the two of us. Maya in dark wool and steady competence. Me in a coat expensive enough to belong to someone who had been sent to catalogue worlds for a living and, annoyingly, now looking like the sort of fantasy heroine airport fiction would accuse of symbolism.

Maya adjusted the folder under her arm and looked at the door.

“Still time to fake a burst pipe.”

“That feels slightly beneath us.”

“I said fake,” she replied. “I’m being restrained.”

That got a breath of laughter out of me, which helped.

The side door clicked before I could answer, and the same receptionist from the previous visit stood waiting just inside.

She had the same immaculate hair, the same badge, and the same expression of a woman trying very hard to be professional about the fact that she had recognised us before the lock disengaged.

“Good morning,” she said. “Dr Vale asked that I take you straight up.”

“Questionable,” I replied. “But morning, yes.”

Her mouth twitched.

She stepped back to let us in. The moment the door shut behind us, her gaze flicked once toward my ears and then away again so quickly it was almost painful to watch.

Not rudeness.

Curiosity under discipline.

Maya saw it too.

Of course she did.

The receptionist led us to the lift, and we stepped inside together. The doors slid shut. For a few seconds there was only the hum of ascent and the particular stillness of corporate buildings trying to smell expensive instead of haunted.

Then Maya leaned very slightly toward me and murmured, low enough that only I could hear, “She’s going to spend the entire ride trying not to ask.”

I glanced sideways.

The receptionist was doing exactly that. Back straight. Hands folded. Eyes fixed heroically on the floor indicator as if numbers alone might preserve her dignity.

“That sounds like a her problem,” I murmured back.

Maya’s mouth moved at the corner.

“You could be kind.”

“That accusation is slander.”

“Mm.”

The lift rose another floor.

Then Maya added, quieter still, “Let her touch one. Briefly.”

I turned to look at her.

“She’ll stop being afraid of the question,” Maya said. “And you’ll get one harmless human moment before the board tries to become architecture again.”

Well.

That was annoyingly good reasoning.

So I looked at the receptionist and said, “You can ask.”

Her head snapped round. “I’m sorry?”

“You’ve been trying not to since the door,” I said. “It’s admirable, but not especially subtle.”

She went pink at once.

“I really am sorry,” she said. “It’s absolutely not my business, I know, I just, they look...” She stopped herself with visible effort. “I’m sorry.”

“They’re sensitive,” I said. “And yes, they’re real.”

The receptionist laughed softly into her embarrassment.

“That was, in fact, one of the questions.”

Maya, without a trace of shame, said, “There’s one more.”

I turned to look at her.

She gave me the calmest expression imaginable.

Absolute menace.

The receptionist looked mortified. “No, no, absolutely not, I wasn’t going to-”

“You were,” Maya said gently. “You were just too polite.”

The lift hummed on upward.

I should have refused on principle.

Instead, because Maya was right and because there was something almost comically human about letting one curious receptionist have a better memory of this building than the board deserved, I sighed and tucked my hair back from one ear.

“Quickly,” I said. “And if you pull, I’ll haunt you professionally.”

The receptionist stared.

Then, with the reverence of someone approaching either a holy relic or an HR violation, lifted her hand.

Her fingertips brushed the edge of the ear so lightly it barely counted.

I still felt it like a wire touched to live current.

The ear twitched at once.

The receptionist made a tiny, involuntary sound of delight and snatched her hand back as if she had been caught stealing from the crown jewels.

“Oh my God,” she whispered.

Maya folded her lips inward to stop a smile.

Coward.

I let my hair fall back into place and said, as regally as possible under the circumstances, “There. You’ve had your illicit fantasy creature experience for the quarter.”

The receptionist laughed, properly this time, and some of the tension in the lift dissolved.

“Thank you,” she said, still pink. “I promise I’ll never mention it to anyone.”

“That seems unlikely,” Maya said.

The receptionist pressed a hand over her heart. “I will phrase it with dignity.”

The lift doors opened before I could answer.

The executive floor was as offensively immaculate as ever.

Soft carpet. Muted art. Glass that cost too much and said nothing. The atmosphere of a place built by people who wanted gravity to feel branded.

The receptionist recovered herself almost instantly as she led us down the corridor.

By the time we reached the boardroom, the moment in the lift had already become something private and ridiculous and human enough to steady me more than I wanted to admit.

The doors stood open.

We entered.

Father was already there near the far end of the table, one hand resting on the back of a chair and his expression arranged into that familiar calm he used when forcing himself not to telegraph how much tension he could already feel in a room. Mercer sat to one side, immaculate as ever, dark suit, composed posture, face unreadable in the way only deeply competent women and seasoned predators ever really managed. Around them were six board members of varying age, expense, and personal conviction that they were history’s more respectable accomplices.

No Dr Arden this time.

Of course not.

Last time Father had at least had the sense, or the guilt, to bring in an external consultant whose whole job was reminding the room that I was a person. Today there was no one like that. No outsider. No human buffer. Just the institution talking to itself in good tailoring.

Father looked at me first.

Then at Maya.

Then, briefly, at the folder she carried.

“Tali,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Dr Anwar.”

Maya inclined her head once.

No one objected to her being there.

Interesting.

Not because it was unremarkable. Because that battle had already happened somewhere else, and Father had apparently won enough of it to bring her in without asking permission in public.

That was useful.

Father gestured toward the table.

“Please.”

Maya and I sat side by side. Not opposite. Not separated. Not pretending.

Across from us, a silver-haired woman with the kind of exquisite stillness that suggested she weaponised silence recreationally folded her hands over the amended charter.

“Tali,” she said, “thank you for coming in.”

I set my copy of the document on the table.

“That depends how the meeting goes.”

A corner of Mercer’s mouth moved.

The silver-haired woman did not smile.

“Fair,” she said. “Then let’s avoid wasting one another’s time.”

Good.

No performance of benevolence. No attempt to swaddle appetite in concern. Just a room full of people acknowledging that everyone present knew exactly where the teeth were.

The meeting went badly almost immediately, which at least meant it was honest.

They accepted more process than I’d expected and less morality than I’d wanted. Temporal uncertainty was elevated. Contact ethics would be formalised. Sample recovery would be subordinated in the first pass, but not prohibited. The board wanted the mission architecture more careful, not gentler.

The fight sharpened when we got to the point that actually mattered.

Not what happened after I came back.

What happened once I was gone and nobody here could see a thing.

Mercer said, “The board’s central concern is that your charter codifies too much field discretion.”

I opened the folder.

“No,” I said. “It codifies where your discretion ends.”

A younger board member in an expensive suit leaned forward.

“That is an ideological phrasing.”

“No,” Maya said calmly. “It’s a practical one.”

Every eye in the room moved to her.

She did not shift.

Once sent, there would be no feed. No oversight channel. No correction layer. No one here guiding my hand from a safe distance.

Everybody in this room knew that. They just preferred language that behaved as if they didn’t.

Maya said, “If she encounters inhabited conditions, ambiguous contact, or ethical instability, there is no distributed judgement. There is only hers. The rest of you are theory at a distance.”

Mercer’s gaze sharpened.

“That is precisely why the board objects to language that appears to legitimise unilateral reinterpretation.”

I leaned forward.

“Then let’s stop phrasing this dishonestly. You are not objecting to reinterpretation. You are objecting to admitting where control actually ends.”

That hit.

Father did not interrupt.

Good.

We went line by line after that.

Not politely. Not warmly.

Like people dividing a live wire with knives.

They refused any language that gave me sole authority to redefine strategic success after return. I made them accept that field ethical reprioritisation would be binding in the moment and reviewable only afterward.

They refused a blanket prohibition on sample recovery. I made them accept that no acquisition objective could supersede survival, conceal ethical contact, or distort first-pass reporting.

They insisted on keeping passive observation. I made them define it so tightly it practically stopped being a comfort phrase at all.

And when the discussion turned to time, the silver-haired woman finally said the truthful part out loud.

“The board cannot operationalise a forced return mechanism it does not possess.”

The truth was out at last.

I nodded once.

“Good. Then stop writing as if return is a function of your will.”

The room did not enjoy that.

Good.

I went on. “If you cannot bring me back, then time is not a rescue framework. It is part of the moral cost of launch. Which means if the uncertainty grows too wide, that uncertainty counts against authorisation before I ever cross.”

Maya added, very calmly, “Projected subjective-duration risk should therefore function as a launch disqualification threshold, not a post hoc regret category.”

Father closed his eyes briefly. Mercer did not move at all.

The younger man looked as though he wanted to object on commerce, ego, and principle simultaneously.

The silver-haired woman said, “That is narrower than the board prefers.”

“Yes,” I said. “Reality often is.”

And then, because this was always coming, the room tried to take something back.

The silver-haired woman closed her folder.

“The board will accept the amended charter language as negotiated,” she said.

Not warmth. Not victory. Only a formal narrowing of hostility into agreement.

Maya wrote Accepted in the notebook beside me.

I did not move.

Because in rooms like this, agreement was never the end of the sentence. Only the place they took a breath before reaching for the knife.

“However,” the woman continued, “authorisation does not imply drift. Current modelling gives us nine days before the target window begins degrading below acceptable confidence. You will therefore be expected in active transition readiness within seven.”

I looked at her.

The hand came back to the throat.

“Expected,” I repeated.

“Yes.”

“That’s a charming word for people who cannot actually make me cross.”

The younger man leaned forward at once, brittle from half an hour of being contradicted by women he had probably entered the room expecting to classify.

“No,” he said, “but there are other forms of pressure available to serious institutions.”

The room changed.

Not gradually.

At once.

Maya went still beside me.

Father’s head turned. Mercer’s too.

The younger man looked not at me, but at Maya.

And said, with the thin, ugly confidence of someone who had mistaken cruelty for leverage often enough that it had become reflex, “While we may be constrained in how directly we handle Tali, you on the other hand-”

He did not finish.

I was on my feet before the sentence found its ending.

The chair legs struck the carpet hard.

And something in the room changed with me.

Not theatrically. No visible fracture in the air. No burst of light.

Just a swift, wrong drop in temperature that touched the skin first and the nerves a second later.

The water glasses nearest me fogged faintly at the edges.

Somewhere above us, a vent gave a thin metallic complaint.

The mark in my palm burned cold.

So did the note behind my sternum.

Not pain.

Presence.

The witness, suddenly attentive.

Nobody moved.

Even the younger man felt it. I saw the exact instant his face stopped arranging itself around menace and remembered, too late, that rooms could turn against a person without raising their voice.

Father half-rose.

Mercer went completely still.

The silver-haired woman’s eyes sharpened for the first time into something almost honest.

I looked at the younger man across the table.

“Don’t,” I said.

My voice came out level enough to frighten me a little.

He stopped.

Not because he had found morality. Because for one second the room itself no longer felt entirely on his side.

I looked at him and felt the cold behind my sternum settle into a hard, listening line.

“If you want to speak to me,” I said, “then speak to me. Do not drag her into a sentence and imagine that counts as strategy.”

The younger man swallowed.

Then, because mediocrity is rarely improved by fear, he reached at once for indignation instead of wisdom.

“I believe you misunderstand-”

“No,” Maya said quietly beside me.

That stopped him again.

She had not stood. Had not sharpened her voice. Had not even lifted her chin much.

But the calm in it was surgical.

“You were perfectly understood.”

Mercer cut across the room before he could try again.

“Enough.”

The word cracked like a ruler on a desk.

Every head turned to her.

She looked first at the younger man.

Not like a colleague. Like a stain.

“That line of argument is over.”

He opened his mouth.

Mercer did not raise her voice.

“Over.”

He shut it again.

Interesting.

Very interesting.

The silver-haired woman folded her hands once more.

“That was not board language,” she said.

Which was not the same thing as calling it wrong. Only unauthorised.

Good enough for now.

I remained standing.

Because sitting down too quickly would have felt like a concession, and I was not yet done being angry.

Father looked at me.

“Tali.”

The tone was careful. Not command. Not quite plea. Something in between.

I did not take my eyes off the younger man.

“If this board wants me in another world,” I said, “then understand something very clearly. You do not get leverage through Maya. You do not get pressure through my home. You do not get to agree to my conditions on paper and then try to recover your pride by reaching for the nearest vulnerable point in the room.”

The younger man made the mistake of muttering, “That depends what one means by vulnerable.”

Mercer shut her eyes briefly. Father went pale by a degree. The silver-haired woman did not move at all.

I smiled at him.

This time with teeth.

“No,” I said softly. “It really doesn’t.”

The room knew it then.

Not in a sentimental way. In the only language it respected.

If they wanted me at all, they had just found the line that would not bend.

Maya stood then.

Not dramatically. Only enough to be beside me instead of below the argument.

Good woman.

The silver-haired woman looked at the younger man for one long second.

Then said, “You will leave.”

He blinked. “Excuse me?”

“You have contributed all the value you are going to.”

For a second I thought he might argue.

Then he saw the absence of support around the table and understood, too late, that he had not only threatened badly but threatened in a way that had damaged the board’s negotiating position.

He stood. Stiffly. Humiliated in the bloodless way people got humiliated in expensive rooms.

His gaze flicked once toward Maya again, as if he could not quite help himself.

I turned my head just enough that he caught my eyes instead.

That cured him.

He left without another word.

The door closed behind him with a sound too soft for how much it changed the room.

For a few seconds no one moved.

Then the silver-haired woman said, “The readiness window remains.”

Of course it did.

I laughed once. Short. Without humour.

“There it is.”

She met my gaze.

“The model does not care about anyone’s temper.”

“No,” I said. “But your schedule still isn’t my consent.”

“Agreed,” she said. “Which is why I phrased it as readiness, not launch.”

That was better crafted than I liked.

Worse in some ways. Because it was smart enough to survive scrutiny.

Mercer picked up the thread before I could decide whether to admire or despise the wording more.

“Within seven days,” she said, “the programme will complete all preparatory modelling, mission revisions, and launch architecture under the amended charter. At that point, the decision will be yours.” Her gaze sharpened slightly. “And only then.”

That mattered.

Not enough. But it mattered.

Father finally sat back down, though he looked as if the room had cost him more than he had budgeted for.

I remained standing for another beat.

Then sat.

Not because I was calmer. Because I wanted them to understand that sitting was chosen too.

The silver-haired woman folded her hands again.

“Then let us say this clearly,” she said. “The board accepts the amended charter, rejects coercive external leverage, maintains the seven-day readiness window, and reserves the right to dissolve the mission if your conditions render the target strategically nonviable.”

There.

Clean. Hostile. Useful.

I nodded once.

“And I reserve the right not to care.”

A flicker at the corner of Mercer’s mouth. Not amusement exactly. Recognition, perhaps.

The silver-haired woman closed the folder.

“Then we are done.”

No handshake. No mutual respect. No theatrical civility stitched over the wound.

Only done.

The corridor outside felt colder than before.

Not physically. In the way air changed after a room had nearly become dangerous.

The receptionist was nowhere in sight now, which was probably for the best. No one needed to witness the expression currently attempting to arrange itself on my face into something less useful to homicide investigations.

Maya walked beside me in silence until we reached the lift.

Only then did she say, very calmly, “I’m fine.”

I looked at her.

“That was not the first thing I was going to ask.”

“I know.”

The lift doors opened.

We stepped inside.

The doors shut.

And only then, contained in steel and mirrored walls and downward motion, did the full force of what had almost happened finally arrive with enough clarity to make my hands shake.

Tiny. Annoying. Visible.

Maya saw at once.

Of course she did.

She took the folder from me without asking and set it on the floor between us. Then she caught my hands in both of hers and held them steady with the kind of practical tenderness that always felt more devastating than anything prettier.

“Tali.”

I looked at her.

The anger was still there. The disgust too. But under it now, something else.

Fear, perhaps. Not for myself. For what would have happened if I had not already known exactly how much the company liked to confuse what it could not control with what it might still damage.

“He shouldn’t have said it,” Maya said.

“No.”

“He wanted a reaction.”

“He got one.”

A tiny shift in her mouth.

Not a smile. Nothing that bright. Only the acknowledgement of fact.

“Yes,” she said. “He did.”

I let out a breath through my nose and leaned back against the lift wall.

“I hate that they tried it.”

“I know.”

“I hate more that part of me expected it eventually.”

That one sat between us.

Maya did not argue. Did not tell me I was being harsh or cynical or unfair.

Only tightened her hands around mine once.

The lift descended another floor.

Then she said, “I used the word extraction in the draft.”

I looked at her.

“I know.”

“And you let it pass.”

I leaned back against the mirrored wall. “Because that’s the language they trained all of us in.”

Maya’s mouth tightened. “But it isn’t true.”

“No.” I looked down at my marked palm. “They call it extraction because it makes them sound less helpless. What they really mean is that if I come back, they’ll be standing there with towels, sedation, and a theory about how organised that makes them.”

Maya was quiet for a moment.

Then she said, “That is a revolting sentence.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s why they prefer the other one.”

The lift descended another floor.

“You scared him,” she said.

I blinked. “Which one?”

“Both, I think.”

That almost got a laugh out of me.

Almost.

I looked down at our hands.

At the steadiness of hers. At the treacherous tremor still trying to work its way out of mine.

“He looked at you,” I said, because the sentence had to leave my body or start breaking things inside it. “And for one second I thought I was going to climb over the table.”

Maya’s thumbs moved once over my knuckles.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “I know.”

That should have embarrassed me. It didn’t.

Not in the lift. Not after that room. Not with the folder on the floor and the seven-day clock now ticking like a bad joke in the back of my skull.

The lift reached the lower corridor. The doors did not open yet.

Maya looked at me with that same impossible steadiness as the night before, only sharpened now by the fact that she had just been used as a pressure point and was still here anyway.

“Then let them learn from it,” she said. “Use me as leverage once and they lose you.”

I looked at her.

God, she was good.

Not at making anything easier. At making it clearer.

The doors slid open.

Rain-coloured light spilled in from the corridor beyond.

Maya picked up the folder, still holding one of my hands, and said, “Come on.”

It was absurdly similar to the night before.

That helped more than it had any right to.

We walked out together, down the corridor, through the side door, and back into the damp London afternoon where the air smelled of wet concrete and car exhaust and ordinary life continuing in complete ignorance of what had just been negotiated above it.

At the car, I stopped.

Maya turned.

For one second I just looked at her.

At the woman they had tried to place inside a threat and had instead sharpened into a certainty.

“Seven days,” I said.

“Yes.”

“That’s obscene.”

“Yes.”

I breathed in the rain-heavy air.

Then, more quietly, “You’re all right.”

It was not good phrasing. Too small for the thing. But she understood anyway.

Maya stepped closer and touched the side of my face with rain-cool fingers.

“I’m all right,” she said. “And you are not doing this because they pushed.”

I leaned into the touch before I could stop myself.

“No,” I said.

The car waited. The city moved. The window had opened whether I wanted it or not.

But the line still held.

And as Maya opened the door and handed me the folder and looked at me like someone already choosing which battles to load into the next seven days, I had the sharp, exhausted certainty that the board had won only the one thing they could still impose.

Time.

Not the rest.

By the time we got back, the rain had thinned to a fine, persistent mist and the day had settled into that bleakly respectable hour just before lunch, when the world expected productivity and had no patience at all for existential collapse.

Maya let us in before I had fully decided whether I was angry, tired, or merely running on the structural remains of both. The house met us with warmth, old wood, and the smell of onions and garlic softening in oil.

Mother was cooking.

Of course she was.

Apparently some part of her had taken one look at the morning, decided that disaster might reasonably be expected by noon, and pre-emptively started lunch.

She appeared in the kitchen doorway almost as soon as she heard us come in.

Not dramatically. Mother did not waste movement when one look would do.

Her eyes went first to my face.

Then to Maya’s.

Then to the folder in Maya’s hand.

“Well,” she said.

I pointed at her while taking off my coat. “That word remains unregulated.”

“It remains useful.”

Maya, beside me, made the smallest sound through her nose, not quite laughter and not quite not.

Mother took that in and, because she had known me too long to miss atmospheric damage when it crossed her threshold, said, “Kitchen. Both of you. Now.”

The kitchen was bright and warm and offensively ordinary.

Kettle. Chopping board. Tomatoes waiting in a bowl. The wooden spoon resting against the saucepan like it had been here all morning practicing stability on our behalf.

Maya set the folder down on the table. I sat. Mother did not ask immediately. She poured tea first, which was how I knew the answer was bad enough to require ceramic reinforcement.

Only once all three mugs were down did she say, “Start with the part that most deserves homicide.”

I looked into mine for a second.

Then said, “They agreed to more than I expected.”

Her brows lifted.

“That sounds ominously incomplete.”

“It is.” I wrapped both hands around the mug. “They accepted the charter revisions, mostly. Time risk elevated. Ethical contact framework formalised. Ore recovery subordinated in first pass. No concealed objectives.”

Mother leaned one hip against the counter.

“That is more than I expected too.”

“Yes.”

A beat.

Then Maya said, with the dry precision of someone placing the knife exactly where it belonged, “They also imposed a seven-day readiness window.”

Mother’s face changed by half a degree.

Not shock. Not surprise.

Calculation.

“Ah,” she said. “There it is.”

I nodded.

I should have stopped there.

Naturally, I didn’t.

“One of the board members also tried to imply they might have better luck applying pressure through Maya.”

The kitchen changed.

Not loudly. Not with movement.

Just with the sort of stillness that made the room feel briefly older and more dangerous than the people in it.

Mother set her mug down very carefully.

“I see,” she said.

Maya, who had gone calm in the way she always did when something had cut cleanly enough to stop bleeding in public, said, “He’s no longer in the room.”

That got Mother’s attention at once.

“No.”

I looked at Maya. She looked back. Then at Mother.

And because we were home now, and because the executive floor’s thin veneer of civilization no longer needed maintaining, I said, “I may have made that difficult for him.”

Mother looked at me for a long second.

“Define difficult?”

I glanced down at my marked palm.

The skin looked ordinary now. Annoyingly so.

“I stood up,” I said. “He kept talking. The room...” I hesitated.

Maya answered for me.

“It got cold.”

Mother’s eyes moved from Maya to me at once.

Not alarmed. Never that first.

Interested in the way of a woman who had already guessed there were more rooms in the story than anyone else had bothered to show her.

“Cold how?”

I looked at the table rather than either of them.

“Wrong,” I said. “Fast. Like the air noticed before the people did.”

Silence.

Maya’s hand came to rest lightly beside mine on the table.

Not touching. Just there.

“The glasses fogged,” she said quietly. “Tali’s palm went white around the mark. Everybody felt it.”

Mother held very still.

Then, carefully, “And this was not deliberate?”

“No,” I said at once.

That, at least, I knew.

“It wasn’t a performance. It just...” I searched for the shape of it. “Answered.”

No one spoke for a second after that.

The saucepan on the stove filled the gap with soft domestic bubbling, which somehow made the whole thing more surreal rather than less.

At length Mother said, “Right.”

I looked at her.

“That tone means you’ve filed something under later?”

“Yes,” she said. “Because at the moment I am prioritising the board’s attempt to schedule my daughter like a parcel and the idiot who thought threatening Maya was a negotiating tactic. The metaphysical weather event can stand in line.”

That startled a short laugh out of me before I could stop it.

Maya, beside me, went fractionally softer around the mouth.

Mother turned the heat down under the pan and faced us properly.

“Seven days,” she said. “Not launch. Readiness.”

“Yes.”

“Which means they are trying to recover control by making time itself look institutional.”

I looked at her.

“That was alarmingly competent.”

“Yes,” she said. “Living with your father for that long taught me languages I never wanted.”

She reached for the spoon again, stirred the pan once, then added, “It also means they’re worried.”

Because yes.

That was the shape of it, wasn’t it. The meeting had not ended with confidence. It had ended with pressure. Which meant pressure was all they had left that still felt like authority.

I looked down into my tea.

“Maya said the same thing in the car, only with fewer onions.”

“Mine is the superior version.”

“That remains unproven.”

“It remains obvious.”

The phone on the table rang.

Not buzzed.

Rang.

All three of us looked at it.

Unknown number.

Not the secure programme line. Not Father. Not the hospital. Not the house.

Mother narrowed her eyes at it as if she might be able to bully the caller through the glass on principle alone.

I picked it up.

“Hello.”

There was the faintest pause.

Then the white-haired board director’s voice came through, cool and composed and so impeccably controlled that for a second I thought she might have been generated by the building itself.

“Tali, it’s Vivian March from the board of directors.”

I closed my eyes briefly.

Of course.

“Well,” I said into the phone. “This is already shaping into an exhausting lunch hour.”

Across the table, Mother mouthed speaker.

I ignored her on principle and put it on speaker anyway.

The director continued as if she had not heard me.

“I am calling in a personal capacity.”

Mother made a sound into her tea so dry it ought to have counted as contempt in legal terms.

I said, “That’s a sentence people usually say just before proving they’re lying.”

The director did not rise to it.

“The conduct you encountered in the room was unacceptable in form,” she said. “Even where the underlying strategic concerns were not.”

Well.

That was almost an apology, provided your moral development had been outsourced to a private school and a board seat.

Mother folded her arms.

Maya went very still.

I leaned back slightly in the chair.

“You have an interesting relationship with the word apology.”

“Yes,” the director said. “I imagine I do.”

That, at least, was honest.

She continued before any of us could decide whether to be more offended or impressed.

“I am not retracting the board’s timetable. Nor am I calling to invite further argument about the charter today.” A small pause. “I am calling because the meeting was allowed to become needlessly adversarial in a way that does not serve future cooperation.”

Mother actually laughed once at that.

“Needlessly,” she repeated, to no one in particular. “Splendid.”

I said, “You’re still not apologising.”

“No,” said the director. “I’m attempting repair. It is a different skill.”

There was something so precise and strange about that sentence that it silenced the kitchen for half a beat.

Then she said, “A reservation has been made this evening for two at The Glass Finch.”

Mother’s head came up at once. Maya blinked. I stared at the phone.

“That is obscene.”

The director sounded, infuriatingly, almost amused.

“It is expensive, yes.”

“That was not the criticism.”

“I’m aware.”

The Glass Finch was the sort of place people used for negotiations, affairs, and celebrating financial crimes that had not yet been discovered. White tablecloths. Small portions with excellent lighting. Wine lists long enough to qualify as literature. I had never been there, mostly because although I could certainly afford it, I had never hated myself in quite the correct tone.

“You booked us dinner,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

This time the pause was longer.

When she spoke again, her voice had not softened, exactly. It had only lost a fraction of its polish.

“Because I don’t think the last direct interaction Maya has with this board today should be one in which she was threatened.”

The kitchen went quiet.

Not warm. Not healed.

Just quiet in the face of the sentence.

Maya looked at the phone as if it had briefly started speaking a language she had not expected to hear from it.

I said, “You could simply have said that.”

“I have found,” the director replied, “that people rarely believe simple statements from women in my position. They do, however, tend to believe reservations.”

Mother actually laughed aloud at that.

“Well,” she said, “she’s monstrous, but not dull.”

The director ignored that with the ease of long practice.

“The reservation is at seven-thirty. Your names are on it. Attend or don’t. The gesture remains the same either way.”

Then, after the slightest pause, “Good afternoon, Tali.”

The line clicked dead.

For a few seconds none of us moved.

Rain at the window. Tea on the table. Tomatoes still waiting to be chopped. The ghostly outline of a very expensive dinner now hanging over the kitchen like a particularly well-dressed threat.

Mother was the first to recover.

“The Glass Finch,” she said, with the tone of a woman evaluating a battlefield from higher ground. “That is not a peace offering. That is a silk glove full of knives.”

“Yes,” I said.

Maya looked at me.

“She did mean it,” she said quietly.

Mother turned to her at once.

“Of course she meant it. That’s what makes it dangerous.”

Maya did not flinch from that.

“No,” she said. “I mean she meant the part about what happened in the meeting.”

That one sat differently.

Because yes.

For all the director’s polish, for all the strategic self-awareness and expensive choices and inability to apologise in any language recognised by ordinary humanity, she had at least managed one clean sentence.

I looked down at my mug. Then back at the phone. Then at Maya.

“Well,” I said. “Apparently attempted coercion is out and aggressively funded reconciliation is in.”

Mother picked up the knife again and started chopping basil with unnecessary exactness.

“I hate this place,” she said. “But I do think you should go.”

I looked at her.

“That feels like treason.”

“It’s reconnaissance,” she replied. “With napkins.”

Maya’s mouth twitched.

Then Mother looked from Maya to me and added, “Also, unless The Glass Finch has recently relaxed into knitwear and despair, one of you is going to need something appropriate to wear.”

I looked down at my jumper.

“This feels judgemental.”

“It is.”

Maya said, “I might have something at my flat. I’d need to check.”

Mother nodded once. “Good. Then Maya can go and retrieve whatever elegant, sane option she owns.”

Maya accepted that with the calm of a woman who had wisely chosen not to reveal the specifics of her wardrobe to this family before lunch.

Then Mother’s gaze moved to me.

And sharpened.

“Oh no,” I said.

“Oh yes,” she replied.

She reached across the table, picked up the manga volume from yesterday’s bookshop trip, and held it up beside my face for comparison.

The pale-haired elf girl on the cover stared back at us with the composed elegance of someone who had never once had to panic about formalwear on a deadline.

Mother looked from the cover to me, then back again.

“Well,” she said. “The universe has been offensively clear about the brief.”

“Mum.”

“No, absolutely not,” she said, already warming to her own idea. “If they insist on dragging you into a high-class restaurant with seven days of pressure hanging over your head, then they can suffer the full consequences of having put an elf in eveningwear.”

Maya’s mouth twitched.

I looked at her. “You’re not stopping this?”

“No,” Maya said. “I’m really not.”

Mother set the manga down and pointed the knife at me with the kind of authority usually reserved for queens and women choosing upholstery.

“You need something urgent, expensive-looking, and just this side of outrageous. Something that says refined enough for white tablecloths but also makes everyone who underestimated you quietly regret having eyes.”

“That is a terrifying sentence.”

“It’s also the correct one.”

Maya, with visible effort, kept her face almost straight. “I can collect my dress and meet you back here.”

Mother nodded at once. “Perfect. You go and get something sensible.” Her eyes returned to me with unmistakable purpose. “I’m taking Tali into town and buying her something deeply unfair to the room.”

I stared at both of them.

“This feels less like planning and more like being developed as a visual weapon.”

Mother’s expression went serene.

“Yes,” she said. “Now you’re following.”

That startled a laugh out of Maya before she could stop it.

I looked between them and had the odd, disorienting sense that the next few hours of my life were now going to contain high-class corporate diplomacy, possible metaphysical instability, and my mother weaponizing my new body through tailored fabric.

Which was, frankly, not a combination I felt the universe had earned.

Still, when I looked at Maya and found her looking back at me with that same tired, steady warmth she had somehow kept hold of through the whole day, the shape of it felt less impossible than it should have.

“Fine,” I said at last. “But if they serve anything the size of a postage stamp and call it an experience, I’m stealing cutlery.”

Mother nodded once. “Reasonable.”

Maya’s expression warmed by half a degree.

“That,” she said, “is the first sensible thing anyone has proposed all day.”

And with lunch still unfinished, the board still dangerous, the seven-day pressure already beginning its slow turn of the screws, and a white-haired director buying us dinner instead of saying sorry like a functioning human being, the day finally found the exact sort of footing this life now seemed to prefer.

Not peace.

But movement.