Wrench didn't move immediately. She stood looking at the equipment in the corner the way she looked at everything she didn't fully understand yet, like it had personally offended her by existing without her permission.
Then she walked over to it.
She didn't touch anything. Just moved along the edge of the arrangement, her wrist display running its quiet scan, her eyes doing the other half of the work. Dokja watched her face. Wrench's face when she was thinking was one of the more honest things about her. The professional neutrality slipped when the problem was interesting enough.
This problem was interesting enough.
"Most of it is standard surgical support," she said finally. "IV stands, monitoring unit, the light rig. High grade but nothing you couldn't find in an Authority medical bay if you knew where to look." She stopped in front of the tray Dokja had touched. "This isn't."
She pointed at the instrument he'd picked up without touching it herself.
"Divine Essence Extraction Tool," Dokja said. "That's what the system called it."
"The system called it a prototype," Vance said from his corner. "Because it is. There are two in existence. I made both."
Wrench looked at him. "You made it."
"Yes."
"You're a Class 4 healer who maintains evidence in a morgue."
"Among other things," Vance said pleasantly.
Wrench held his gaze for a moment with the expression of someone updating a file. Then she looked back at the tray. "How does it work."
"Carefully," Vance said.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one that matters at this stage." He unfolded his hands and moved toward the equipment for the first time, not hurrying, his steps the same measured, considered pace as everything else he did. He stopped at the edge of the tray. "Divine essence doesn't behave like conventional energy. You can't extract it the way you'd extract a toxin or a foreign substance. It integrates. It finds the existing structure of whatever's carrying it and begins rewriting the architecture." He looked at Dokja. "You've had the Another Star's payload inside you for approximately eighteen hours now. That's long enough for early stage integration to begin."
Dokja felt the thing at the back of his skull. Still there. Still sitting in the place where a word should be.
'Integration,' he thought.
"What does that mean," he said. "Practically."
"It means the window for clean extraction is narrowing," Vance said. "And it means that whatever was stored inside the Another Star is becoming increasingly difficult to separate from what was already there." He tilted his head. "Which is a more complicated problem than it sounds. Because what was already there is a god's residual essence inside a Class 2 body. And what's being added to it is something that was designed to be carried, not kept."
"Designed by who," Riko said.
He was sitting against the wall on the far side of the room, knees pulled up. He hadn't moved toward the equipment. He was watching Vance the way he'd been watching Vance since the plaza, with that flat, patient attention that didn't look like a twelve year old's attention at all.
Vance looked at him.
"That," he said, "is the correct question."
"So answer it," Riko said.
"I don't know," Vance said. He said it simply, without apology or performance. "I know what the carrier fluid was. I know what the vessel was designed to hold. I don't know who designed it or how it ended up in a vending machine on Sub-level 7 in a slot labeled Another Star." He paused. "What I know is that someone built the extraction tool before the carrier existed. Which means someone knew something was going to need extracting before they built the thing to carry it."
The room absorbed that.
Jax, who had been sitting on the bed with his legs stretched out and the quiet, attentive expression of a man following a lecture he found genuinely interesting, raised his hand.
"So someone planned this in a specific order," he said. "First they built the tool to take the thing out. Then they built the bottle to carry it. Then they put the bottle in the machine. Then they waited."
"Yes," Vance said.
"And none of those steps involved telling him," Jax looked at Dokja, "that any of this was happening."
"Apparently not."
"That's rude," Jax said. With complete sincerity.
Dokja looked at the instrument on the tray. Prototype. Unused. Two in existence, both made by the same man who was currently standing in a room he'd built and furnished specifically for the person carrying what it was designed to remove.
'Someone planned this very carefully,' he thought. Again. Always again.
"You said the window for clean extraction is narrowing," he said. "How narrow."
"Three days," Vance said. "After that, the integration reaches a stage where removal becomes significantly more complicated. Not impossible. Just." He paused, considering his phrasing. "Costly."
"Costly how."
Vance looked at him with those white eyes. That full, quiet, cataloguing look.
"You'd survive," he said. "But you wouldn't come back entirely the same."
The room was very quiet.
Dokja looked at the equipment. At the bed with the good pillow. At Vance standing at the edge of the surgical corner like he'd been waiting here, specifically, for this specific conversation, for considerably longer than fourteen months.
'Three days,' he thought.
'To decide whether to let a man I met yesterday cut something out of me that someone I've never met put inside me without my knowledge.'
'And the alternative is keeping it and not knowing what it's doing to the architecture.'
He looked at Riko.
Riko looked back. That flat, certain expression. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. He'd said his piece twice already and the answer hadn't changed.
Dokja looked back at Vance.
"You said you don't know who designed the carrier," he said. "But you know what it was designed to hold."
"Yes."
"What was it designed to hold."
Vance was quiet for a moment. Not hesitating. Deciding how much of the truth was useful at this particular stage.
"Information," he said. "Compressed. Encoded. The kind that can't be transmitted through conventional channels without the Authority detecting it." He paused. "The kind that someone needed to move very carefully across a very long distance, through a system designed specifically to prevent exactly that kind of movement."
"Information about what," Wrench said. She'd stopped pretending to look at the equipment. She was looking at Vance.
"About the Authority," Vance said. "Specifically. About what it is and what it was built on and what it has been doing for a very long time to stay standing." He tilted his head. "The kind of information that would be extremely dangerous in the wrong hands."
"And the right hands," Dokja said.
Vance looked at him.
The small smile came back. Different this time. Less pleasant and more like the first honest expression he'd produced since the plaza.
"Yes," he said. "And the right hands."