"Where did that come from?" Koshva said, eyes fixed on the chip sitting in the center of Wrench's console.
"The man in the white coat," Dokja said.
The room went very still. Wrench straightened off the console. Koshva's tired eyes sharpened into something considerably less tired. Jax stopped chewing.
Riko said nothing. He'd said his piece in the plaza.
"Vance," Wrench said. Not a question. A confirmation of something she didn't like confirming.
"He was waiting in the plaza when we came out," Dokja said. "He knew what the Another Star did. He knew about the catalyst, the conversion, the foreign essence. All of it. Before I did."
"He's a morgue technician," Koshva said, with the tone of a man who no longer believed that sentence but wasn't ready to stop saying it.
"He's something that works in a morgue," Dokja said. "That's different."
Wrench picked up the chip with two fingers like it might bite her. She turned it over, ran her thumb along the edge, held it up to the light of her console. "It's clean. No tracking signature, no embedded transmitter." She set it back down. "Which is either reassuring or the most alarming thing about it."
"Alarming," Riko said quietly from the counter.
Everyone looked at him. He looked back with that flat, certain expression.
"He gave it too easily," Riko said. "He wasn't scared of getting caught. He wasn't in a hurry. He just stood there and waited for you to take it." He looked at Dokja. "People who give things that easily already know you're going to use them."
The room sat with that for a moment.
'The kid's not wrong,' Dokja thought. He'd thought the same thing in the plaza and taken the chip anyway. He'd taken it because the alternative was walking away from the only lead he had on what was currently sitting in the back of his skull like a word he still couldn't remember.
'Someone put something in that bottle,' Vance had said. 'Someone planned this very carefully.'
"He said there's an address on it," Dokja said. "A place the Authority's grid doesn't reach."
"He could be leading us somewhere," Koshva said.
"He could be," Dokja agreed.
"That doesn't bother you?"
Dokja considered the question honestly. "It bothers me considerably. I'm going to look at the address anyway."
Koshva put his face in his hands. It was becoming his signature move. "You know, most people who come back from the dead take at least a day off."
"I took six hours," Dokja said. "That's practically a holiday." He looked at Wrench. "Can you read it without plugging it in directly? Remote scan, something that doesn't give it access to your system if it's carrying a payload."
Wrench was already pulling up her interface, fingers moving across the display with the efficient irritation of someone being asked to do something they'd already decided to do. "Obviously. Give me two minutes."
"You have ninety seconds," Dokja said.
"I have two minutes," Wrench said, in a tone that ended the conversation.
She had it in seventy three seconds. Because she was Wrench.
The display populated with a single line of text. No name. No explanation. Just a set of coordinates and below them, four words.
Jax leaned over to read it. The crooked grin faded slightly, replaced by something more careful.
Koshva read it and went quiet.
Riko read it from the counter and his eyes flicked immediately to Dokja's face.
Dokja read it last. He stood there for a moment with the particular stillness of a man whose mind was moving very fast behind a very calm exterior.
The four words were:
You were always coming.
"Well," Jax said, after a moment. "That's unsettling."
"That's a trap," Koshva said.
"That's an invitation," Dokja said.
"Those are the same thing," Koshva said.
"Sometimes," Dokja said. He straightened up, looked at the coordinates, memorized them in the three seconds he'd been looking at them, and stepped back from the console. "But whoever put something inside me went to a great deal of trouble to do it. They didn't do that so they could hand me to the Authority." He looked around the room. "They did it because they want something from me specifically. Which means for the moment, they need me alive."
"For the moment," Wrench repeated flatly.
"It's more than we had this morning," Dokja said. "This morning I was dead."
Nobody had an argument for that.
He picked up the chip, closed his fingers around it, and looked at the coordinates on the display one more time.
'You were always coming,' he thought.
'That's the part that should scare me,' he thought. 'Someone knew I'd end up here before I did. Someone planned for a version of events that included my death and accounted for it.'
'The question isn't whether it's a trap.'
'The question is what they're hunting.'