"Cael Athis," she said slowly. "I know the name, vaguely. Backwater ash-world, isn’t it? Merchant consortium territory, minimal independent traffic, the kind of place that shows up on cargo manifests and nowhere else." She glanced up at him. "You’re a long way from home, whatever home actually means for someone like you."
"You have no idea," Rohan said, with a weight of feeling he hadn’t intended to let slip into his voice.
Renna studied him a moment longer, then set the packet down and reached beneath her counter, drawing out a slim data slate of her own.
"I’ll run an authentication check. If this is genuine, and if it’s worth what I suspect it might be worth to the right buyer eventually, I can extend you a working credit against it — enough for the chart you’re asking for, and a little besides. If it’s worthless, or forged, we’re done here and you can find your map somewhere else." She tapped the slate. "Understood?"
"Understood."
The authentication took the better part of twenty minutes, during which Renna said almost nothing, occasionally murmuring to herself as data scrolled across her slate’s surface, while Rohan stood in careful, deliberate patience, trying not to let his hope show too plainly on his face.
Finally, she looked up.
"Well," she said. "It’s genuine. And considerably more substantial than I expected from someone dressed like they crawled out of a cargo hold. Salvage rights on an unregistered wreck designation, expedition-verified contribution records, a standing endorsement from what looks like a settlement elder with actual legal weight behind her signature." She raised an eyebrow at him. "You’ve been busy, wherever Cael Athis actually is."
"You could say that."
Renna tapped a few final commands into her slate, and a soft chime confirmed something had transferred.
"Working credit, established," she said. "Not a fortune, but enough to get you the chart you asked for, with a little left over for a proper meal and somewhere better to sleep than wherever you’ve been hiding, if the state of your clothes is any indication." She pulled a fresh data core from the shelf behind her, tapping a series of commands into it before sliding it across the counter. "This is the most current regional survey I’ve got — full cartographic detail on the Halcyon Span, the major trade corridors radiating out from it, and every registered system within roughly forty light-years in every direction. Human territorial spread, colonisation dates, population estimates, the works. It’s not perfect — there are gaps out toward the fringe where nobody’s bothered surveying properly, and unregistered systems obviously won’t show at all — but it’s the best publicly available data anywhere on this station."
Rohan picked up the data core with careful, deliberate reverence, turning it once in his fingers the way he might have turned Liora’s charm.
"Thank you."
"Don’t thank me yet." Renna’s expression sharpened slightly. "Whatever you’re looking for out there, Cael Athis to here isn’t a short hop, and if your search takes you further than the Span’s own borders, you’re going to need more than a map. You’re going to need transport, and transport costs considerably more than a working credit against one settlement’s salvage record." She studied him a moment longer. "Come back when you know where you’re actually headed. I deal in more than maps, if the price is right."
Rohan nodded, tucking the data core carefully into the same inner pocket that held Liora’s charm and Jorren’s shield token, and turned to go.
"One more thing," Renna said, just as he reached the door.
He paused, glancing back.
"Whatever it is you’re chasing," she said, "I hope it’s worth what it’s clearly already cost you. Not many people walk into my shop looking the way you do and still manage to sound that certain about anything."
Rohan considered that for a moment, thinking of Veyrhold, of the ash squalls, of Liora’s hand brushing his as she pressed her father’s charm into his palm.
"It is," he said simply, and stepped back out into the Anchorage’s crowded concourse.
He found a small, cheap lodging room in one of the Anchorage’s lower residential rings that evening — barely more than a bunk and a washroom, but private, lockable, and blessedly quiet after two days of sleeping in alcoves and doorways — and spread the contents of Renna’s data core across the room’s single fold-out data surface with the same careful, methodical patience he’d once used to study Tavin’s sketches of the Gilded Heron’s layout.
The map that unfolded before him was, even accounting for its gaps and imperfections, considerably more information than he’d had access to in his entire seven months in this universe combined.
Human territory, it turned out, did not spread evenly across the galaxy the way Rohan had vaguely imagined it might. It clustered instead into distinct regions — dense webs of settled systems connected by well-travelled trade corridors, radiating outward from what the map labelled, in careful, ancient-looking script, as the Cradle Reach, presumably humanity’s point of origin in this universe, though the exact location sat frustratingly outside the survey’s borders. Beyond the dense inner clusters, settlement thinned rapidly into scattered, isolated outposts — backwater systems like Cael Athis, connected to the wider network by only the thinnest, most infrequent threads of merchant traffic.
The Halcyon Span sat almost exactly at the boundary between the two — the last true crossroads before territory began thinning toward the fringe, which explained, Rohan realised, exactly why it carried the traffic it did. Every ship heading from the dense inner clusters toward the scattered outer settlements, and every ship heading back, passed through it as a matter of geographic necessity.
Cael Athis, when he finally located it on the map’s outer edge, sat considerably further out than he’d expected — a lonely marker in a stretch of near-empty space, connected to the Span by a single long transit corridor that took, according to the annotation, the better part of three weeks at standard merchant cruising speed.
Three weeks. That’s how far I’ve actually come. No wonder the pull changed so much.
Rohan stared at the two marked points for a long time, mentally overlaying his memory of the sensation as he’d felt it on Cael Athis — constant, directionless, present but faint, like a sound heard from the next room over — against the sharper, closer pull he’d noticed only the night before, huddled in an alcove three levels below where he now sat.
’If the pull is stronger here than it was there, then whatever direction I travelled in getting from Cael Athis to the Halcyon Span brought me closer, on balance, to the anchor point. That doesn’t tell me the exact bearing. But it tells me something.’
He drew a stylus from the data surface’s small tool tray and, with the same careful hand he’d once used to help Bryan mark salvage routes across Veyrhold’s crude survival maps, began sketching a rough vector between the two known points — Cael Athis at one end, the Halcyon Span at the other, a single straight line connecting them across the vast gulf of surveyed space between.
’If I model this properly — treat the pull like a signal strength, weaker at greater distance, stronger at lesser distance, the way heat fades the further you get from a fire — then the anchor point has to sit somewhere generally along the extension of this line, past the Span, rather than back toward Cael Athis or off at some random angle to the path I actually travelled.’
It wasn’t perfect logic. He knew that even as he traced it. A straight line between two points said nothing about whether his actual transit route had curved, whether the pull’s strength scaled linearly with distance or by some more complicated relationship he had no way of measuring, whether the anchor point sat directly along that extended vector at all rather than some distance off to either side.
But it was a start. A real, concrete, testable start — the first genuine lead he’d had since Hestia had first told him, seven months ago, that somewhere beyond an impossible boundary, a way home might still exist.
He extended the line across the map’s surface, past the Halcyon Span, out toward the thinning edge of surveyed human territory, and watched it pass through — not precisely, not with any certainty he’d have staked his life on, but close enough to feel like more than coincidence — a scattered handful of systems marked only with the barest cartographic detail, names he didn’t recognise, populations listed as sparse or unconfirmed, the very edge of what this map, or perhaps anyone, actually knew about this stretch of the universe.
[Great System Note: Directional analysis in progress.]
[Cross-referencing signal strength differential against known transit vector.]
[Preliminary Result: Anchor point likely situated along extended bearing, beyond current surveyed boundary.]
[Confidence: Moderate. Additional data points strongly recommended to refine estimate.]
[Quest Updated: The Halcyon Span]
[New Objective: Gather additional resonance readings from varied locations to refine anchor point bearing.]
[New Objective: Identify feasible transport toward estimated search region.]