They left without the cages open. Alita's father refused again, gently and completely, when she asked once more (passage, not soldiers, that is the whole of what we will accept), and Taisen held his tongue about it the entire walk back through the tunnel, which Alita noticed, and did not thank him for, because it wasn't the kind of silence that needed thanking.
"He's still wrong," Taisen said finally, once they'd cleared the tree line and the Hermes's running lights had come back into view through the bare branches.
"Maybe," Alita said. "But he wasn't wrong back there. Not for those five seconds. You'll give him that much, at least."
"I'll give him that much," Taisen said, and meant it, though it cost him something small and specific to say it out loud: a cost he chalked up next to the numbness still fading out of his fingertips and did not examine any further that night.
"You keep saying strength is the only thing that's ever kept anyone alive," Alita pressed, unwilling to let the point go now that she finally had one worth pressing. "Explain to me, then, what your strength would have bought us in that room, if that machine had decided to fire before you'd finished being impressive."
"A very short, very bad afternoon."
"So the only reason the four of us walked out of there is a man you called a coward five minutes earlier."
He didn't answer that one at all, which she noticed, and which she decided, privately, counted for rather more than an answer would have.
Four hours out from Avaros, hurtling through the smear of white light that the Fold always made of the sky, Link found Colonel Lyn in the aft compartment with a look on the human half of his face that made her stomach drop before he'd said a single word.
"Colonel. We have a problem."
"Which kind."
"The kind with a traitor in it." He set his handheld on the crate between them, screen already lit. "I ran a full sweep on the comm logs after the Krell attack: I wanted to know how they found us, out in the middle of nowhere, with no beacon active. I found deletions. Six-hour intervals, going back weeks, every one of them scrubbed clean enough that a casual audit would never catch it. Someone with real clearance has been feeding our position out, on a schedule, since before we ever reached Kharsat."
Lyn sat down hard on the crate across from him. "And the antenna?"
"Repaired by the Sahir. Beautifully, actually: I've never seen field work that clean. Except for one line, cut by hand, after the repair was finished. Someone undid a piece of their work on purpose, once it was already fixed." He turned the handheld toward her. "Whoever it is, they don't want us calling home. Not now. Not about whatever's coming."
"Masako," Lyn said, and heard her own voice go thin around the name. "Now this. Twice, Link. Twice someone's put a hand on this crew from the inside and I still don't know who it was the first time."
"I don't have a name for you yet," Link said. "I have a fragment. A corrupted security capture, recovered off the drive the antenna cut was meant to bury. It's still decrypting."
They sat with that a while, the ship humming around them, neither of them saying the obvious thing: that of the five souls aboard, one of them had opened the ship's own throat to the dark and let it stay open. Lyn found herself running the short list anyway, against her own better judgment: Frank, who'd flown for her for six years and had never once given her a reason to doubt the inside of his own skull; Alita, young enough that betrayal still seemed like something that happened to other people, though the same could have been said of Masako once, before it wasn't; Taisen, who'd known things about them all from the first hour that no honest man had any business knowing, and who admitted as much himself without apparent shame. She hated that his name sat on the list at all. She hated more that she couldn't take it off with anything better than a feeling.
"You're doing the thing where you suspect everyone equally so you don't have to suspect anyone specifically," Link said, not unkindly, watching her face rather than his handheld for once.
"Is it working?"
"No. It never does. But I understand the impulse."
Link's handheld chimed. He read the screen, and whatever colour a half-mechanical face had left in it, drained out of it entirely.
"Colonel. You need to see this."
She looked. It took her a moment to understand what she was looking at: not a face, not a name, not the clean confirmation of a traitor she'd already half-decided she was owed. A thermal ghost, blurred and enormous, folded into the crawlspace above the reactor housing. Too many limbs. No outline a human body could account for.
"That's not a person," she said.
"No," Link said. "It is not."
"Then who deleted the." She stopped herself, and shelved the question, too tired to carry two separate kinds of dread in her chest at once. "Get Frank. Get Taisen. We're not alone on this ship, and I don't think it's the traitor I need to be worried about tonight."
"You want me to do what to my own ship," Frank said, in the tone of a man who has heard a great many bad ideas over a great many years and is nonetheless impressed by the ambition of this particular one.
"Power down. Full stop. Reactor, gravity, running lights, all of it."
"Colonel, I love you like a sister, but that request is going to need a better reason than a bad feeling."
"Something's living in your ship, Frank. Feeding off the reactor core. We think it's the reason our antenna keeps failing."
Frank's grin didn't waver, but something behind his eyes did, just for a second: the specific, private math of a man doing sums about his wife and his kid and the distance still standing between him and both of them. "Well," he said, "if there's a monster in the walls, at least it picked a ship with decent insurance." He reached for the console, hands steady despite the joke, or maybe because of it. "You know what my girl's going to say when I tell her about this. She's going to ask if I remembered to feed it."