Skyler Dark: The Last Frequency: Boarding Action

Reyes braced against the airlock's inner frame, the taste of recycled air flat and metallic against the back of his throat. Through the porthole, the salvage ship hung in the void: the derelict's hull plating scarred by micro-collisions, navigation lights long dead. Magnetic clamps held the two vessels together with a faint tremor that ran through the decking and into his boots. Skyler's fingers moved across a maintenance panel with the practiced economy of someone who had bypassed a hundred locks in a hundred forgotten stations.

The hiss of pressure equalization filled the chamber. Reyes watched the indicator gauges climb toward parity.

"Talk to me," Reyes said.

"Meridian is on the other side of that bulkhead." Skyler did not look up from the panel. His voice carried the smoothness of long use, worn down to something almost gentle, but beneath it Reyes heard the weariness of years spent listening to frequencies no one else could hear. "Standard courier configuration. Two forward compartments, aft cargo bay. Likely automated security, possibly dormant."

Reyes ran a gloved hand along the magnetic seal of his sidearm. The cold bled through the fabric. "Dormant meaning?"

"Dormant meaning it hasn't had a reason to wake up in eighteen months." Skyler's lips twitched, not quite a smile. "We're about to give it one."

The indicator turned green. With a groan of hydraulics older than either of them, the airlock began to cycle.

Reyes felt the shift in his inner ears before anything else. A pressure change, subtle and wrong. Then gravity stepped sideways, and his stomach lurched as the deck dropped away from beneath him. Zero-g seized the chamber. He grabbed the guide rail and pulled himself toward the opening, each movement deliberate, every muscle engaged against the disorientation of weightlessness.

The salvage ship's interior opened before them: a corridor of ribbed steel and emergency lighting that painted everything in dim amber. Condensation clung to the surfaces in frozen droplets, each bead catching the light. The air tasted stale, tinged with copper and something faintly chemical, the residue of life support systems that had run too long without maintenance.

Reyes drifted through first, sidearm raised. Behind him, Skyler followed with a equipment case strapped to his back. The case floated beside him, tethered by a short cable.

"Contact," Skyler murmured. "Twenty meters. Cargo netting, starboard side."

"I see it." Reyes adjusted his trajectory with a push from the wall. The netting drifted in the zero-g, a tangled mass of cable and fabric that had once secured cargo. Now it floated free, a hazard and a hiding place both. He swept his light across it, probing for shapes, for movement, for anything that did not belong. The beam caught only dust motes and the slow rotation of debris.

He counted his breaths. In. Out. Each one fogged his visor for a half-second before the environmental systems cleared it.

"Moving forward," he said into the comm. The words came out flat, professional, the cadence drilled into him across a hundred operations. "Keep the line tight."

"Acknowledged."

The corridor narrowed as they progressed. Pipes ran along the ceiling in clusters, some intact, others fractured and trailing wires. Reyes pushed off from a handhold and drifted through a hatch into what appeared to be a junction. Three passages branched away from the central hub. Skyler floated up beside him, consulting a tablet that cast pale light across his features.

"Forward compartment is through the port passage," Skyler said. "Aft cargo through starboard. The third goes to engineering."

"We want forward."

"Yes."

Reyes studied the starboard passage. The netting had been denser there. More places to hide. "Set the ambush where they won't expect it."

"The junction." Skyler nodded slowly. "We stage here. They come through from engineering, we're behind them. They come from aft, we're waiting. They don't come at all..."

"Then we know someone else got here first."

Neither of them smiled at the prospect.

Reyes began arranging the junction with the care of a stage manager. He tied guide cables to the handholds, creating lanes of approach that funneled any boarders into overlapping fields of fire. Skyler's case opened to reveal tools of a different trade: signal jammers, magnetic grapples, a device that looked like a cross between a tuning fork and a scanner. Reyes did not ask what they did. He had learned that some of Skyler's equipment worked on principles he was not cleared to understand.

The silence of the derelict pressed in around them. No hum of ventilation. No tick of cooling systems. Just the distant creak of stressed metal and the soft rhythm of their own breathing through the comms.

"Meridian," Reyes said. The name felt strange in his mouth, an invocation rather than an identification. "What's our status?"

The comm crackled. When the AI's voice came through, it carried the crystalline precision of something not quite human, each word measured and clear.

"Decryption at seventy-three percent," MERIDIAN-7 reported. "The salvage ship's logs are fragmented, but I am reconstructing them. There is a reference to a second vessel. Arrival estimated four hours before your boarding."

Reyes and the exchanged a glance that carried the weight of confirmation.

"Jorin," Skyler said.

"The probability is high." MERIDIAN-7's tone did not change, but something in the cadence suggested concern. "Frequency smuggler operations often require advance staging. The salvage ship would serve as a transfer point."

"And he left someone to watch it." Reyes tightened his grip on the sidearm. The weapon felt heavier in zero-g, the balance wrong, the trigger pull unfamiliar. "Or he left something worse."

"Insufficient data," MERIDIAN-7 replied. "Recommendation: proceed with caution."

Reyes checked the fields of fire one final time. He drifted to a position where a support strut offered cover and a clear sightline down two of the three passages. Skyler took the opposite angle, his equipment case open and his hands resting on devices that Reyes chose not to examine too closely.

"You know," Skyler said quietly, almost to himself, "most of my work involves listening. Finding signals in the noise. Sometimes I forget what the noise itself looks like when it's staring back at you."

"Stay focused."

"I am focused." Skyler's voice carried that smoothness again, the weariness beneath it. "I'm also remembering the last time I boarded a derelict. Different ship. Different reasons. The same outcome."

"What happened?"

"The frequency I'd come for was already gone." A pause. "And someone else had paid for it in blood."

Reyes did not respond. He adjusted his position, feeling the strut press against his back through the suit. In the distance, metal groaned as the two ships adjusted to each other's mass. The sound traveled through the structure and into his bones.

"Contact," MERIDIAN-7 said. "Aft passage. Movement. Single entity, low velocity, no weapons signature."

Reyes felt his pulse steady. The familiar calm of action settled into place, pushing aside everything else. "Range?"

"Forty meters. Closing slowly. The entity appears to be... drifting."

"Drifting." Skyler frowned. "In zero-g, drifting means either no propulsion or no control."

"Correct."

Reyes watched the aft passage. The amber lighting did not reach far into it, leaving the far end shrouded in shadow. He counted seconds. Twenty. Thirty. A shape began to emerge from the darkness, turning slowly end over end as it approached.

A pressure suit. Empty. The faceplate was dark, the helmet deflated inward as if the air inside had been vented. It tumbled past them, caught in some imperceptible current of the ship's minimal atmosphere, and continued into the port passage.

"One down," Skyler murmured. "More where that came from, probably."

"Or someone wanted us to see it." Reyes swept his light down the aft corridor. "Show of force. Show of threat. Doesn't matter which. It means they're thinking."

"Thinking is good. Thinking is predictable." Skyler adjusted something on his equipment. A faint whine began, too high to hear but present in the bones. "Thinking means we can work with it."

The whine climbed in pitch, then settled into a steady drone that Reyes felt through his teeth. MERIDIAN-7's voice came through the comm, cooler than before if such a thing were possible.

"Signal jammer active. Local communications within a fifty-meter radius are now degraded. Any incoming transmission will require direct line of sight to penetrate."

"So if Jorin's people try to call for backup," Reyes said.

"They'll be speaking into dead air."

Reyes allowed himself a single breath of satisfaction. It lasted only a moment before the aft passage flickered with movement. Real movement this time, purposeful and approaching fast.

"They know we're here," Skyler said. His voice had she'd its weariness. What remained was something harder, something Reyes recognized from men who had stopped counting their close calls. "Here they come."

Reyes tightened his grip on the sidearm. The trigger guard pressed cold against his gloved finger. He watched the shadows at the end of the corridor and waited for the shape to resolve into something he could shoot.

Three figures burst from the aft passage, moving with the trained efficiency of people who understood zero-g combat. The lead figure carried a shock-baton, its tip crackling with discharged current. The second had a projectile weapon of unfamiliar design. The third hung back, hands working a device that pulsed with irregular light.

"Tactical spread," Reyes ordered. His first round took the lead figure in the shoulder, spinning them sideways. The baton discharge arced into the ceiling, leaving a blackened scar on the metal. Skyler's equipment emitted a pulse that Reyes felt in his chest, and the figure with the device convulsed, their instrument going dark.

The second figure fired. The round caught the strut beside Reyes's head, spraying him with fragments of metal that pinged off his visor. He returned fire, three rounds center mass, and watched the figure tumble backward into the corridor, limbs loose.

Silence returned, broken only by the distant groan of stressed metal.

"Clear," Reyes said.

"Not yet." Skyler's voice came from somewhere to his left. "Watch the port passage."

Reyes swung his light toward the port corridor just as the pressure suit he had seen earlier drifted back into view. But this time there was something different about its trajectory. It was moving against the slight current that had carried it before, propelled by something inside.

The suit's faceplate lit up. A face appeared behind it, features pale and set in an expression of absolute calm. The figure raised one gloved hand and pressed it against the inside of the plate.

Recognition struck Reyes like a physical blow. The face was his own.

But wrong. The features were arranged correctly, the scars in the right places, but the expression was not one he had ever worn. There was a patience to it that he did not possess, a certainty that belonged to someone who had already seen how this ended.

The figure mouthed words through the glass. Reyes could not hear them. He did not need to. He had spent enough years reading lips across conference tables and briefing rooms to know what was being said.

Don't shoot.

Skyler's equipment whined again. The figure in the suit raised both hands, palms out, and waited.

The silence stretched. Metal groaned. Somewhere deep in the ship, a pipe burst with a hiss of escaping atmosphere.

Reyes kept his weapon trained on the face that wore his features, and he waited for the moment to break.

The silence stretched. Metal groaned. Somewhere deep in the ship, a pipe burst with a hiss of escaping atmosphere.

Reyes kept his weapon trained on the face that wore his features, and he waited for the moment to break.

He counted his breaths. One. Two. Three. The figure in the suit did not move. Behind the glass, those borrowed eyes held steady, patient as stone, watching Reyes with the same clinical attention Reyes gave in return.

"Orders?" Reyes subvocalized into his throat mic.

Skyler's voice came back soft, barely a murmur against his eardrum. "Hold position. I want to see what it does."

It. Reyes felt the word settle into him like a splinter. He kept his aim steady and waited.

The figure's hands remained raised. Slowly, with the deliberate care of someone defusing ordnance, it reached up and unsealed the faceplate. The locking mechanism released with a click that carried across the empty corridor. The plate swung upward on its hinges.

Air rushed out. The figure did not flinch from the cold, did not shiver at the pressure differential. It breathed once, slow and deep, and when it exhaled, the breath came out as vapor.

"Corporal." The voice was Reyes's own, but stripped of something. The particular grain, the accent, the way he had always softened his consonants at the edges, all of it was gone. What remained was a recitation. "You are not going to shoot me."

"How do you know that?" Reyes heard himself ask.

"Because you have not already." The figure lowered its hands. "And because I am not here to harm you."

Skyler moved along the wall, keeping to the shadows, his equipment humming faintly. Reyes tracked the figure in his peripheral vision but kept his primary focus on the face. The resemblance was uncanny. The scars were identical, placed with surgical precision across the left cheekbone, the bridge of the nose, the curve of the jaw. Even the small mole near the right temple was there.

"You are a copy," Reyes said.

"I am a record." The figure took a step forward. Reyes's finger tightened on the trigger. The figure stopped. "Recorded in the seventh month of your deployment to the Kepler Observation Post. You were twenty-six years old. Your hair was longer than regulation, and you had not yet learned to hide your expressions."

Reyes said nothing. The Kepler Post. Two years into his service, four years before the silence fell. He had been young enough to believe that the work mattered, old enough to suspect that it did not.

"You were lonely," the figure continued. Its voice carried no inflection, no judgment. "You wrote letters you never sent. You spoke to the equipment when the comms were down. You counted the days until rotation."

"That was a long time ago."

"Yes." The figure tilted its head, a motion Reyes had never made, a gesture borrowed from someone or something else. "And yet the record persists. We persist."

"We."

"The copies. The echoes. The frequencies that did not fade." The figure's gaze shifted past Reyes to where Skyler crouched. "You found the broadcast towers. You have been following the signal."

Skyler's equipment emitted a low tone. Reyes glanced sideways. The man had gone very still, his face unreadable in the dim light.

"Who are you?" Skyler asked.

"I am a fragment," the figure said. "A piece of a man who lived and died and was remembered by machines that did not forget. I was tasked with watching the ship. With ensuring that those who sought the signal did not find what they were not ready to carry."

"And now?" Reyes asked.

"Now the signal is changing." The figure's eyes, those borrowed eyes, fixed on Reyes with an intensity that felt almost human. "The towers are waking. The frequencies that kept humanity dreaming are beginning to fail. And you, Corporal, are the last person trained to hear them."

Skyler stepped forward, equipment in hand. "Where are the towers?"

The figure smiled. The expression was wrong on Reyes's features, too wide, too practiced. "Not here. Not in this system. You have come to the wrong place, soldier. The Wake was a waystation. A lure for those who chased the signal too far."

Reyes felt the floor tilt beneath him, though the deck remained steady. "Where, then?"

"The Cartographer." The figure raised one hand and pointed, not down the corridor they had come from, but up, toward the ceiling, toward the stars. "A vessel that was lost and found again. Its captain knows the route."

"Jorin Vex," Skyler said.

The figure's smile faded. "The frequency smuggler. Yes. He was a listener once, before he learned to profit from what he heard. He trades in stolen signals now, sells fragments of dreams to those who can pay. He will help you find the towers, if his price is met."

"And if it is not?"

The figure's hand dropped. "Then you will not find them. And the frequencies will continue to fail. And humanity will wake to a silence it cannot survive."

The pipe in the depths hissed again, a longer exhalation this time. Somewhere above them, footsteps echoed, the rhythm of boots on metal decking. The Wake's crew, awake now, aware of the breach.

"How do we find the Cartographer?" Reyes asked.

"I can take you to it." The figure stepped aside, gesturing down the corridor toward a sealed hatch. "The Captain is expecting you. He has been expecting you for some time."

Reyes did not move. He looked at Skyler. Skyler looked back, his face a careful mask.

"It could be a trap," Reyes subvocalized.

"Most things are," Skyler replied, just as quiet.

The footsteps above grew louder. Voices now, muffled by decks and bulkheads, calling to one another in the rough patois of the Belt.

"Decision time, Corporal," the figure said. It had not moved from its position, hands still loose at its sides, posture open and unthreatening. "Will you trust a record? Or will you wait for the crew to find you?"

Reyes thought about the signal. He thought about the frequencies failing. He thought about the silence that waited at the end of all of it, the waking that would come when the dreams ran dry.

He lowered his weapon.

"Lead the way," he said.

The figure turned without another word and walked toward the sealed hatch. Its steps were precise, economical, the gait of something that had studied movement but never learned to inhabit it. Reyes followed, weapon holstered but hand resting on the grip. Skyler brought up the rear, his equipment casting faint blue light across the walls.

The hatch opened at the figure's touch, palm pressed flat to the access panel. Beyond it, a narrow corridor stretched into the ship's interior, lit by emergency strips that flickered with the unsteady rhythm of failing power.

"The Captain's ready room is three decks up," the figure said, not looking back. "Stay close. The crew is not hostile, but they are protective of what they have built here. Strangers are not welcome."

"We're strangers everywhere now," Reyes muttered.

"Yes," the figure agreed. "That is precisely the problem."

They climbed. The Wake was a labyrinth of jury-rigged modifications and salvaged components, corridors that narrowed without warning, ladders that groaned under the slightest weight. The air grew warmer as they ascended, carrying with it the smell of cooking oil and human occupation, sweat and recycled atmosphere and the particular musk of a ship that had been lived in for too long.

The figure moved with certainty, turning corners without hesitation, choosing routes that avoided the main thoroughfares. Twice, they heard voices nearby and pressed themselves into alcoves while crew members passed, their faces lit by the glow of handheld scanners, their conversation a low rumble of unfamiliar names and complaints about atmospheric processors.

Skyler kept his equipment quiet, but Reyes saw the man's eyes tracking every detail, cataloging exits and chokepoints with the automatic precision of someone who had learned to navigate danger.

"You served," Reyes said, low enough that only Skyler could hear.

Skyler glanced at him. "A long time ago."

"With whom?"

"Does it matter?"

Reyes considered the question. "Probably not."

Skyler almost smiled. Almost. The expression flickered across his features and was gone before it could settle. "It was a long time ago," he repeated. "Before the signal. Before any of this."

The figure stopped at a junction and turned. It regarded them both with that patient, borrowed gaze.

"The Captain is through this door," it said. "He knows you are coming. He has questions. Answer them carefully. He is not a patient man, despite what his reputation suggests."

"And you?" Reyes asked. "What will you do?"

"I will return to my post. There are others who might come to the Wake. Others who seek what you seek." The figure paused, and for the first time, something like weariness crossed its features. "I have been waiting a long time for this conversation. I am glad it is finally over."

It turned and walked back down the corridor, footsteps fading into the hum of the ship's systems.

Reyes watched it go. Then he looked at the door before them, a heavy slab of reinforced steel marked with a single symbol, a stylized wave over a bar.

"He's in there," Skyler said.

"I know."

"You ready?"

Reyes thought about the Kepler Post. About the letters he had written and never sent. About the face that had worn his features and known things he had never told anyone.

"No," he said. "But that doesn't matter anymore."

He reached for the door.

The door resisted for half a second, then yielded to Reyes' weight. It swung inward on silent hinges, and the air that rushed out was different. Warmer. It carried the scent of something familiar, of old paper and cooling metal, of a life lived in close quarters over a span of years that Reyes did not want to imagine.

The cabin beyond was small, cramped by any reasonable standard, but immaculately kept. A narrow bunk lined one wall, its blankets folded with military precision. A desk occupied the opposite wall, covered in hand-drawn charts and what appeared to be astronomical calculations. The light came from a single strip running along the ceiling, dim and warm, the color of late afternoon on a planet none of them would ever see again.

At the desk sat a man.

He was older than Reyes had expected. His hair had gone gray, then white, and now held a faint yellowish tint that spoke of decades under artificial lighting. His face was lean, lined with the particular kind of weariness that came not from age but from sustained attention, from looking too long at something no one else could see. He wore a uniform that had been standard issue a hundred years ago, still buttoned to the throat, still creased at the shoulders where the rank insignia should have been. The insignia was missing.

Jorin Vex did not rise when they entered. He regarded them with eyes that held the same borrowed patience they had seen in the figure outside, but sharper, more aware.

"Councilor Reyes," he said. His voice was softer than Reyes had anticipated, with a faint lilt that surfaced on certain vowels, the ghost of an accent that had been smoothed by years of speaking in a tongue not his own. "And Skyler Dark. I have been expecting you. Please, sit."

There were two chairs bolted to the floor across from the desk. Reyes took one. Skyler took the other, moving with the careful deliberation of someone conserving energy for something that mattered.

Jorin let the silence stretch for a moment. Then he reached beneath the desk and produced a bottle, dark glass, unlabeled. He poured three measures into three cups that matched the bottle's antique aesthetic.

"Spirit of the Kepler Post," he said. "Distilled from the grain stores. It is not what we had hoped to be celebrating with, but it is what we have."

Reyes took the cup but did not drink. Skyler did the same.

"You know why we are here," Reyes said.

"I know why you believe you are here." Jorin's smile did not reach his eyes. "That is not quite the same thing. Please. Ask your questions. I have been waiting two hundred years to answer them, and I find I am tired of the waiting."

Reyes set his cup on the edge of the desk. "The broadcast. The signal Skyler intercepted. It is not a distress call. It is not a beacon. What is it?"

Jorin leaned back in his chair. The motion was slow, deliberate, and for the first time Reyes noticed the faint tremor in the man's hands. Two hundred years. The body remembered what the mind preferred to forget.

"It is a lullaby," Jorin said. "The most beautiful lullaby ever composed. It was designed to keep the last generation of humanity alive in their dreams while the Meridian carried them toward a home that no longer existed."

Skylar's voice cut in, quiet and precise. "Carried them where?"

Jorin turned his attention to Skyler. The look in his eyes was almost fond, almost fatherly, and entirely unreadable. "Nowhere, Mr. Dark. Nowhere at all. The Meridian has been drifting for two hundred years, not forty-seven. We passed the orbit of Neptune in the first decade. We passed the heliopause in the third. There is nothing ahead of us but the deep dark between the stars, and there has been nothing behind us since long before your grandparents were born."

The words landed in the small cabin like stones dropped into still water. Reyes felt the impact spread through him, cold and clarifying. He had known, somewhere beneath the surface of his thinking, that this was where the conversation would lead. Knowing it and hearing it were different things entirely.

"Earth," he said.

"Gone," Jorin replied. "For millennia. The geological records are clear. We have had teams combing the inner system since the second century of our drift. There is nothing left but scorched rock and a few automated mining platforms still pulling ore from asteroids that will never be used." He paused. "I am sorry. I know that word is insufficient for what I am telling you."

Skyler had not moved. His cup sat untouched in his hands, his knuckles pale around the rim. "The frequency," he said. "The one I heard. The one that brought me here."

"You are the last person capable of hearing it," Jorin said. "The last receiver tuned to that specific oscillation. Everyone else on board is functionally deaf to it. You are not. You never were. It was why the Council chose you, all those years ago, for the interception program. It was why you survived when so many others did not. Your particular neurology, your particular pattern of perception, made you invaluable."

"Invaluable," Skyler repeated. The word came out flat.

"Yes." Jorin's voice softened, almost imperceptibly. "It is a poor word for what you have been. What you continue to be. I will not pretend otherwise."

Reyes watched the exchange with the detached attention of a soldier cataloguing intelligence. Two men circling something neither wanted to name. The history between them was deeper than the present moment, deeper than the crisis that had brought them here. He filed it away and returned to the question that mattered.

"The broadcast," he said. "The lullaby. What happens if it stops?"

Jorin met his gaze directly. "The dreamers wake. All of them. Every colonist on this ship who has spent their entire life in the constructed sleep, they open their eyes and discover that the home they were promised does not exist. That the future they were building toward was a fiction maintained by signal processors and a frequency carefully tuned to give them peace." He paused. "I do not know how many would survive the revelation. I suspect the number is small."

"And that is why you have kept it running," Reyes said. "Two hundred years."

"That is why I have kept it running."

The silence that followed was thick enough to touch. Reyes looked down at his hands. They were steady. He had expected them to shake.

"The figure outside," he said. "The one who guided us here."

"Volunteer," Jorin said. "One of the few who have been awakened in the last century. They serve as guides for those who seek the Wake. It is a necessary function. The colonists who dream do not always remain peaceful when disturbed. The guides are trained to manage the transitions."

"And the others? The ones you said might come?"

Jorin set down his own cup. The motion was precise, controlled. "There are factions aboard who believe the dream should end. Who believe that the truth, however terrible, is preferable to the lie, however beautiful. They call themselves the Awakeners. They have been gaining influence in recent decades. Your arrival, Mr. Dark, has complicated their calculations considerably."

Skyler looked up. "Because I can hear it."

"Because you can hear it," Jorin confirmed. "And because you are the only one who might be able to do something about it. Either to silence the signal permanently, which would end the dream, or to strengthen it, which would ensure the dream continues for another generation. Or two. Or twenty." He spread his hands, palms up, a gesture that invited understanding. "I am not a patient man, Counselor. I am, however, a practical one. I have kept this ship alive for two centuries by making decisions that no one else was willing to make. I am telling you now what I have told no one else, because I believe you are both capable of hearing it."

Reyes thought about the Kepler Post. About the figures who had stood at its railing and looked outward at a sky that no longer held anything worth seeing. About the man who had worn his face and made choices Reyes would never be asked to make.

He thought about the dreamers. Millions of them, suspended in the particular peace of a frequency carefully tuned to give them hope. About what it would mean to wake them into the reality Jorin had described.

He thought about Skyler, sitting across from him, holding a cup he had not touched, carrying a burden he had never asked to bear.

"What do you want from us?" Reyes asked.

Jorin was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was softer than it had been.

"I want you to understand what you are part of," he said. "I want you to make the choice I have been making for two hundred years, or to make a different one. I want the decision to be conscious. I have watched too many people drift through their lives without understanding the currents that move them. I will not allow that for you." He reached into a drawer and produced a small data chip, the kind used for high-density storage. "Everything I know is on this. The history of the Meridian. The truth about Earth. The locations of the broadcast towers. The names of the Awakeners and their plans. Take it. Decide what to do with it."

He slid the chip across the desk. It came to rest against the base of Skylar's untouched cup.

Skyler stared at it. Then he looked up at Jorin, and for the first time since Reyes had known him, the weariness in his face cracked. Beneath it was something younger, something that had been waiting a long time to be allowed to surface.

"Two hundred years," Skyler said.

"Yes."

"And you kept them dreaming."

"Yes."

Skyler picked up the chip. He held it in the palm of his hand for a moment, weighing it, considering. Then he closed his fingers around it and looked at Reyes.

Reyes met his gaze. The question in Skylar's eyes was the same question that had been forming in Reyes' own mind since the door had opened.

What do we do now?

Reyes did not have an answer. He was not certain he would ever have one. But he knew, with a certainty that came from somewhere deeper than thought, that whatever they decided, they would decide together.

He picked up his cup. The spirit inside was dark and still, reflecting nothing.

"To the dreamers," he said.

Skyler raised his own cup. After a moment, Jorin did the same.

They drank.

The spirit burned going down, and the taste of it was not unlike the truth, harsh and clarifying and impossible to spit out once taken.