Chapter 239: Returning to The Halcyon Span
The transit back toward the Halcyon Span took the better part of nine days aboard the Rustwake, considerably longer than the outward journey to Kestrel’s Hollow had required, owing mostly to Corven’s insistence on running a wider, more cautious loop around the numbered system’s outer belt rather than risking a direct route that might carry them within easy sensor range of whatever still watched over the Ashford Survey Station’s silent halls.
"Not taking chances twice in one trip," he’d said, plotting the longer course with the same careful, deliberate precision he’d applied to every decision since the moment they’d fled that pulsing, resonant corridor. "Whatever that thing actually is, I’d rather it forget we exist entirely than remember we’re still poking around its general neighbourhood."
Rohan hadn’t argued. The extra days gave him time he genuinely needed — time to sit with everything they’d witnessed, to work through the tangle of hope and dread the fracture had left lodged somewhere behind his ribs, to plan, with the same methodical patience Bren had once drilled into him, exactly what questions he most needed answered before he dared approach that door again.
He spent long hours at the Rustwake’s modest secondary console, compiling everything he could recall from the survey team’s final logs into a single, organised record — dates, observed phenomena, the specific language Dr. Marr had used to describe the fracture’s escalating instability, every detail he thought might matter to whoever, if anyone, actually understood this kind of thing better than a stranded traveller and a fringe salvage pilot.
Contradictions. Resonance. A boundary between universes that’s been slowly failing for four years, watched over by something that already knows my name. He turned the pieces over again and again, searching for a shape that made sense of them, and found, each time, only more questions waiting beneath the ones he’d already answered.
Corven, for his part, spent much of the transit unusually quiet, the easy dry humour that had characterised their earlier journey replaced by something more contemplative, more careful. Rohan caught him, more than once, simply staring out the cockpit’s viewport at the passing stars with an expression that suggested his thoughts had wandered somewhere considerably darker than idle stargazing.
"You alright?" Rohan finally asked, on the transit’s fifth day, finding Corven exactly where he usually found him during off-shift hours — hunched over the cockpit console, nursing a drink he’d been nursing, by Rohan’s count, for the better part of an hour without actually finishing it.
"Thinking," Corven said, not looking up. "About that voice. About what it said, back in the crawlway. The wound must close. One way, or another." He finally glanced over, expression grave in the low cockpit lighting. "I’ve turned that phrase over more times than I care to admit these past few days, and I keep landing on the same uncomfortable read of it. Whatever that thing is, it didn’t sound like it much cared which way the wound closed. Just that it did."
Rohan felt the same cold unease settle back into his chest that he’d been trying, with limited success, to keep at arm’s length since they’d fled the outpost.
"I’ve thought about that too," he admitted. "I don’t know if it meant the fracture sealing shut on its own, or something else. Something more direct."
"Something more direct," Corven repeated slowly. "Like a person. Like the specific contradiction currently sitting across from me in this cockpit, carrying two universes’ worth of tangled status inside him."
Rohan said nothing, because he had no honest reassurance to offer, and Corven, to his credit, didn’t press the silence further than it needed to go.
They dropped back into the Halcyon Span’s crowded, familiar traffic lanes on the ninth day of transit, and Rohan felt something in his chest loosen at the sight of it — not relief, exactly, given everything still unresolved waiting for them here, but the particular, grounding comfort of returning somewhere he’d already learned to navigate, after weeks spent in territory that had tested every instinct he’d developed since his Awakening.
"Berth’s cheaper on the lower ring these days," Corven noted, guiding the Rustwake in toward Threshold Anchorage’s docking approach with the ease of long familiarity. "Assuming your data broker friend hasn’t already found us somewhere better to squat while we figure out our next move."
"She might have opinions about that," Rohan said. "She usually does."
Renna Voss, it turned out, had considerably more than opinions waiting for them.
She met Rohan at her storefront’s counter within minutes of his arrival, having apparently been informed of the Rustwake’s docking the moment its transponder registered with the Anchorage’s traffic control — a fact Rohan found simultaneously reassuring and faintly unsettling, evidence of exactly how thoroughly Renna’s information network apparently extended across this entire crossroads system.
"You look like a man who found considerably more than he bargained for," she said, studying him with her usual sharp, assessing gaze. "Sit. Tell me everything, and don’t leave out the parts that are going to make me regret ever pointing you toward Ashcombe’s ship in the first place."
Rohan told her everything — the outpost, the fracture, the echoes, the research logs, the voice in the crawlway that had somehow known his name. Renna listened in near-total silence throughout, her expression shifting gradually from professional curiosity into something considerably graver, occasionally glancing toward Corven for confirmation on details that clearly strained even her considerable capacity for believing strange, unlikely things.
"Well," she said finally, once he’d finished. "I’ve dealt in a great many strange stories over the years. That’s a new tier of strange, even by my standards." She leaned back, arms crossed, weighing something behind her sharp, calculating eyes. "You understand what you’re describing, don’t you? A genuine, physical breach between universes, actively degrading, apparently under some form of active observation from whatever exists on the other side of it. That’s not just personally significant to you. That’s the kind of discovery that reshapes entire fields of study, assuming anyone credible ever confirms it."
"I don’t care about reshaping fields of study," Rohan said. "I care about getting through it safely. I need to understand what I’m dealing with before I try."
Rohan wanted to scoff internally. He wasn’t planning on sticking around in this universe after all, so participating in any form of research about it was the last thing on his bucket list. ’Not to mention it comes with the risk of alerting the other gods who might take a liking to me and start poking and prodding me, as I’m the only living being that crossed over...’
"Then you need considerably more than a data broker’s star charts," Renna said. "You need someone who’s actually studied this kind of phenomenon properly, assuming such a person exists anywhere in this stretch of the universe." She was quiet a moment, drumming her fingers against the counter, working through something. "There’s someone. A name I’ve heard mentioned, carefully, by people who don’t usually discuss such things carefully at all. A former consortium researcher, exiled from proper academic circles some years back over theories nobody wanted officially associated with. Lives quietly on one of the Span’s stations these days, from what I understand, doing consulting work for people willing to pay for expertise nobody else will publicly claim to possess."
"You think they’d know something about this?"
"I think," Renna said carefully, "that if anyone in this entire system has genuinely studied spatial fractures and boundary anomalies, it’s her. Whether she’ll actually talk to you is a different question entirely."