The Starlight Carriage hummed through the void, its engines a constant low vibration that had become background noise to all of them. The purple expanse outside stretched endlessly, punctuated by drifting debris and the occasional distant light that could have been a star or a ship or nothing at all. The glass before Lucid reflected his own face back at him, the mist that perpetually shrouded his features making him look like a ghost observing its own existence. He sat in the cabin, his hands resting on the controls, his gaze fixed on the path ahead.
The train was heading toward Tyriana.
He had ignored the pendant's messages. Had let it pulse and fade without answering. He had adjusted the course when no one was watching the navigation panel and let the void carry them in the right direction without announcing it.
Frederick stood in the doorway, arms crossed, expression carrying a visible confusion that he was managing with effort. His blue hair was disheveled from the long journey, his uniform rumpled. Ayame was beside him, dark robes pooling around her feet, her gaze fixed on Lucid with the specific quality of attention she used when she was reading something she had not been told.
Valen leaned against the far wall. His golden eyes tracked the scene with quiet amusement, a faint expression at the corners of his mouth that was not quite a smile but functioned like one.
"We are heading somewhere," Frederick said. It was not a question. He had noticed the course adjustment on the panel and was deciding how to raise it.
"We are always heading somewhere," Lucid replied. "That is what trains do."
"The southern route," Frederick said. "You mentioned surveillance. But I checked the panel again and the southern passage does not run in this direction. Not toward Vex. Not toward anything I recognize on the route map."
The silence that followed had weight in it.
Lucid kept his hands on the console.
Ayame's voice came before he had assembled a response. "Your breathing changed when he said that."
"My breathing is fine."
"It changed," she said. "I can hear it."
Lucid turned from the console and looked at both of them. Frederick's expression had moved from confusion to concern, the careful concern of someone who was deciding whether to press or wait. Ayame was looking at him with the same flat unreadable attention she gave everything, her posture unchanged, giving nothing away.
Valen pushed off the wall. "You are terrible at this," he said. "You might as well just say something."
"I have a contact," Lucid said. "Someone I need to reach before we go to the court. Someone with information that will matter when we arrive."
Frederick's brow drew together. "A contact where, exactly?"
"A border territory. Near Ashten."
Frederick looked at the panel. Then at Lucid. "Near Materna's border."
"Adjacent to it."
"And this contact. You have mentioned them before?"
"No."
"In all the time we have been traveling together, you have not mentioned them."
"There are things I have not mentioned. That does not make them less real."
Frederick looked at him for another moment, then looked at Ayame. She was already looking at Lucid. She had not looked away since the conversation started.
"You are hiding something," she said. Her voice carried no accusation. She was reporting an observation the way she reported most things, directly and without decoration.
"I am making a choice," Lucid said.
"You can do both at the same time," she replied.
Lucid felt a pull of irritation move through him, hot and quick, and he pressed it down before it reached his face. He turned back to the console and adjusted a panel that did not need adjusting.
'You are not doing well,' Alice said inside him, her voice carrying its formal precision with a note of something that might have been mild exasperation underneath it. 'Allow me to assist before this deteriorates further.'
She laid the logic out cleanly in the shared space. He pulled from it.
"The contact is someone who was involved in the events that preceded my arrival here," he said. "Not directly. But they have knowledge of those events. Knowledge that will be useful before we walk into a court with no leverage. Going there first gives us something. Going straight to the queen without it gives us nothing."
Frederick processed this. The concern in his expression did not disappear but it shifted shape, becoming the discomfort of someone who had accepted incomplete information and was working out how far to trust it.
"You could have said that from the beginning," he said.
"I know."
"Why did you not?"
Lucid did not answer that.
Frederick looked at him for a long moment, then exhaled and nodded slowly. "Alright. Near Ashten. We go, we meet this contact, and then we continue."
Lucid nodded.
Valen, from the doorway, looked at Lucid with those golden eyes and the expression that meant he had already worked out most of it. "Suit yourself," he said, and walked back into the lounge.
The silence that followed was less pressured than the one before it.
Frederick remained in the doorway. After a moment he said, "We should spar. You look like you have been sitting in this chair for four hours."
"Three," Lucid said.
"Come spar."
Lucid looked at the controls. The train was on autopilot. There was nothing useful he was doing by sitting here.
He stood.
The rear storage compartment had become their default space for movement. Crates pushed to the walls, floor cleared, the metal surface underfoot steady enough for footwork. It smelled of the void and something older underneath it, faint and metallic, from whatever had been stored here before the carriage changed hands.
Ayame followed them in without being invited. She took a seat on one of the lower crates near the wall and folded her arms across her knees. She did not speak.
Frederick produced two practice blades from a crate he had already opened, the flat wooden kind used for drills, and handed one to Lucid. He raised his own and settled into his stance with the ease of long habit. Clean. Grounded. A posture that had been built through enough repetition that it no longer required thought.
They started slow.
Frederick was reading him, establishing what Lucid did by default before applying real pressure. Lucid moved well enough in the early exchanges. He was fast, faster than the stance suggested he would be, and he had a reasonable sense of distance. The first few passes went back and forth without a clear edge either direction.
Then Frederick began to push harder.
He found the left side in the third exchange. A gap in Lucid's guard that appeared every time he extended on the right. Frederick did not take it immediately. He noted it and began applying consistent pressure from that direction, leaning on it the way you lean on something to find whether it will hold.
Lucid started to feel it.
Not the pressure from the blade. The other thing. The gap beneath the sparring, the one that had nothing to do with footwork.
Frederick did not know where they were going. He had accepted the explanation about the contact, about the leverage, about the border territory. He had nodded and said alright and followed Lucid into this compartment to spar with him like someone on a shared mission, not like someone who had been redirected to a destination he had never agreed to.
The lie was working. That was the problem. It was working smoothly, and Frederick was here being decent about it, and Lucid could feel the weight of that decency pressing against something in his chest that did not want to sit quietly.
His left side opened again. This time Frederick came through it, not hard, a controlled tap that landed on his guard and pushed it wide.
Lucid absorbed the correction and reset.
Frederick tilted his head slightly. He had noticed the half second where the reset had not been entirely clean. Not a physical thing. Something behind the movement.
"Are you alright?" he asked. His voice was even, carrying no edge.
"Fine," Lucid said.
Frederick held the question open for a moment longer, then let it close. He raised his blade and gave Lucid room to reset properly.
That was the part that made it worse. The patience. The consideration. Frederick choosing not to press because he had noticed something was off and had decided not to make it larger. He did not know what was off. He was responding to the surface of it, to the flatness and the half second of imprecision, with the simple decency of someone who had decided a long time ago that you do not lean on a person who is already carrying something.
The irritation arrived without warning. It had been building since the conversation in the cabin, since the moment Frederick had nodded and said alright, since the moment the lie had landed clean and smooth and Lucid had felt the weight of it settle.
Something moved behind his eyes. The red came up before he had decided to let it.
He came off the left foot.
Fast. Faster than the previous exchanges by a margin that made Frederick react before thinking rather than after. He drove at him from a diagonal, blade moving in a tight arc toward the right shoulder. Frederick caught it and pushed it wide. Lucid was already rotating, coming from the other side, dropping low, driving upward from below the guard.
Frederick moved back. One step. Two. His feet found purchase on the metal floor as he adjusted to the new pace, his form adapting without breaking. He was giving ground but not losing it.
Lucid pressed harder.
He came from the front, pivoted, came from behind, shifted angle, came from the left. The practice blade moved with the momentum the chain sometimes produced without being consciously directed, faster than his formal capability should have allowed. Frederick was deflecting rather than countering now, his blade in motion continuously, absorbing the pressure and redirecting it, each movement compact and efficient.
His form did not break.
That was the difference. Frederick had something built into him that Lucid did not have. A framework underneath every movement that held even when the pace exceeded what was comfortable. Not speed. Not strength. Structure. The way of the sword. Repetition accumulated over years until the discipline itself became load-bearing.
The counter came without announcement.
Frederick planted his back foot and stopped giving ground. He let one of Lucid's strikes come in, caught the blade on the flat of his own, applied a small rotation, and redirected the force downward and to the outside. Lucid's grip did not break but his balance did, his weight shifting onto the wrong foot, and Frederick used that half second to bring his blade in a flat controlled arc against Lucid's wrist.
The practice blade came free. It tumbled across the metal floor and stopped near the far wall with a clean clatter.
Lucid stood. Breathing.
Ayame's voice came from the crate near the wall. She had not moved.
"You fight with emotions," she said. Low and even, carrying no particular emphasis. "Emotions can be good. But they make you reckless. And reckless without technique is just fast falling."
She had not looked up when she said it. Her eyes were on the practice blade on the floor.
Frederick lowered his own blade. He extended his free hand downward, palm open, and looked at Lucid with an expression that held nothing complicated in it.
"Well done," he said. "For someone who does not know the sword."
Lucid looked at the hand. He looked at the blade on the floor. He looked at Frederick's face.
He took the hand.
Frederick pulled him upright without effort and released the grip. He held the practice blade loosely at his side. "The left side," he said. "Every time. Once someone locates it they will keep returning to it."
"I know," Lucid said.
"Do you want to go again?"
"No."
Frederick nodded. He set his blade against the wall and moved toward the door. At the threshold he stopped.
"Whatever it is you are carrying," he said, "it does not have to be heavier than it is."
He left.
Ayame remained on the crate. She was looking at the far wall now, or at nothing in particular. She had not looked at Lucid since she spoke. She showed no interest in following the conversation Frederick had left behind.
Lucid crossed the compartment and picked up the practice blade from the floor. He set it against the wall next to Frederick's. He stood in the middle of the space for a moment, the metal floor under his feet, the hum of the engines running through everything, the void pressing against the hull on all sides.
Alice was quiet.
He walked back toward the cabin. The pendant was on the console where he had left it, dark and silent. He sat down in front of the navigation panel and confirmed the course without touching anything.
Tyriana. On schedule.
He rested his hands on the console and looked at the void.
The purple expanse stretched ahead of him, enormous and indifferent, carrying the train forward toward a destination only he knew they were heading to. Behind him in the lounge, Frederick was probably reading something or sitting in the silence the way he did when he was processing. Ayame was probably still on the crate. Valen was somewhere being quietly aware of everything.
He did not touch the pendant.