"She never says what happened," Camaro said, finally, quiet. "Only that she was about to try it."
"No," Taisen said. "She doesn't. Which means either the attempt is why the record stops here and nowhere else, or something interrupted her before she ever got the chance to finish it, and we're standing in the middle of an ending nobody ever actually got to write."
Venemis was quiet a long moment, her third eye still open, her attention fixed somewhere past the dead recorder, past the frozen research notes, toward the great cold shape breathing patiently beyond the viewport.
"I would like to try something," she said finally. "Not what she tried. I want to be plain about that, because I don't yet know enough of my grandmother's rite to attempt anything close to what this woman apparently attempted alone, and I would be lying to all of you if I pretended otherwise. But there is a smaller thing. A listening, not a bonding. My grandmother taught me that much before she died, the part of the rite meant only to open a door partway and see what stands on the other side of it, without ever stepping through. I think, standing this close to something this old, with fragments this close to my own oldest teaching sitting open on this desk, I might actually be able to do it properly for the first time in my life."
Taisen looked at her a long moment, the cold in his own hand settling deeper, patient and unhurried, exactly as it always settled when something in front of him mattered enough to notice.
"What would it cost you," he said.
"I don't fully know," Venemis said, honestly. "That's the truth of it, and I would rather give you that truth plainly than a confidence I haven't earned. I know it will cost me the trance, and the blindness that comes with it, longer perhaps than the small workings I've shown you before. I don't know if it costs more than that. I am telling you regardless, because I think you deserve the choice of whether to let me try it, standing this close to the thing that might actually be able to answer both our questions at once."
"Do it," Taisen said, quiet. "Carefully. And the moment it costs more than you're willing to pay, stop. That's not a request, Venemis. It's the only condition I'm attaching to yes."
"Understood," Venemis said, and settled herself, cross legged, onto the cold, frosted deck plating of Dr. Rosalind Kade's abandoned vault, and closed her outer eyes, and let the black film beneath them slide fully open instead.
Camaro took up a position at the vault's damaged door without needing to be asked, weapon steady, watching the corridor beyond with the same patient, unhurried attention she brought to any threshold she'd decided to hold, and Swan crouched near enough to Venemis to catch her if the trance pulled her over sideways, his own hands trembling faintly, the familiar shake that always arrived once the fear had settled in and there was nothing left to do but work through it anyway.
Taisen knelt across from her, close enough that his own grey hand, uncovered now, rested a careful distance from hers on the cold deck plating between them, and watched her face go still in the particular way it went still only when something in front of her demanded an attention the rest of her could not give it.
For a long while nothing happened at all, the small room holding its breath along with all four of them, the dead holographic model of the Forge still turning its slow, patient circle above the cracked projector housing, the only visible movement in a room that had otherwise gone entirely, unnervingly still.
Then Venemis's breath caught, once, sharply, and her whole body went rigid, her hands curling into fists against her own knees, and when she spoke, her voice had dropped into something that was not quite her own, older, cracked, carrying a weight that seemed too large for the room to properly hold.
"Still open," she said, the words arriving strange and halting, as though she were translating them from somewhere considerably further away than the room she was physically sitting in. "Still bleeding. Still waiting. It does not know how long it has waited. It only knows something was promised and never returned to finish."
"Venemis," Taisen said, quiet, urgent, watching her face for any sign of the moment he'd need to pull her back.
"It is tired," she said, the strange, layered voice deepening further, and something in her closed, blind face had begun, faintly, to tremble. "It has been tired longer than any single life could measure. It does not want to be driven. It never wanted to be driven. It wants only to stop bleeding, and it does not know how, and it has forgotten, mostly, that stopping was ever something it was allowed to want."
Her whole body arched, suddenly, sharply, and Swan's hands were already moving to catch her shoulders before Taisen finished the thought that she was about to fall.
"That's enough," Taisen said, sharp now, the words carrying more command in them than he'd used with her in weeks. "Venemis. Come back. Now."
For one long, terrible second nothing happened at all, her blind eyes still fixed on something none of the rest of them could see, her breath coming in short, ragged pulls that frightened Swan more than anything the trance itself had shown them.
Then, all at once, she gasped, a single sharp intake of breath, and slumped forward into Swan's waiting hands, the black film sliding slowly back down over her third eye, the strange, layered weight gone out of her voice entirely, leaving behind only her own, considerably more human exhaustion.
"I'm here," she said, faint. "I'm back. Give me a moment. Please."
She did not regain her ordinary sight for the better part of an hour, longer than any previous working Taisen had seen cost her, and she sat through the whole of that hour with her back against the cold bulkhead, Swan's own emergency blanket wrapped around her shoulders, saying little, her breathing slowly evening out beneath the particular careful attention of a woman working her way back from somewhere considerably further than the rest of them had traveled.