“This doesn’t seem very instructive at all!” Tanya exclaimed, and it was perhaps the most contemptuous, damning thing she had uttered in weeks. She flipped through each page of the recovered tome virtually at her workstation in the medical bay.

To Wildwing’s eye, the book appeared to be more a piece of art than a piece of writing. There were pages that seemed entirely covered in leaf of precious metals. They were embellished in brilliant inks that had decayed somewhat over time, designs that were crude and naïve. Angular geometries entwined and encircled with more and more writing that Tanya shook her head at, occasionally making noises of frustration.

“Why did Wraith have it, then?” Wildwing said, mystified.

“Maybe you stole some light reading,” Tanya shook her head. “It looks like prose. No lists, no formulae, no diagrams, just illustration and pretty words.”

“Wait,” and there was his own face, Winterwing pushing into the conversation, attention apparently piqued by Tanya’s display. “Go back a page.”

Tanya looked to Wildwing for permission, unsure, and he found no reason not to give the slightest of perceptible nods. The page turned back to an illumination that mostly held iconography Wildwing did not know. The central figure was Saurian from the tail, and likely important, just based on the elaborate headdress. There were things that may have been illustrations of foods he did not know, and more than a few wicked blades scattered through the design. The entire page glittered in red and gold, dulled by the scan and age. The text alongside it made sharp geometric patterns across the page, words building up into the larger shapes.

“That’s the legend of Terribus the Bloodthirsty,” Winterwing said, leaning in but making sure to keep appropriate distance from both of them. “He was supposedly the first Saurian Emperor.”

Tanya squinted at the screen, as if it would help. “You can read that?”

“What? No, I don’t think anyone alive can read that,” he shook his head. “It’s Saurian poetry, the arrangement is as important as the actual words.” He pointed to the geometric shapes made up by the writing. “When the Saurians left, they left a lot of written work behind. This-I think this is much older, the artwork is something I’ve never seen, but the structure will always be the same. It’s one of the most common pieces recovered. I’ve seen a translation of that pattern, that’s all.”

He must have caught the incredulous look on Wildwing’s face. “Well, what electives did you take?”

“Accounting,” Wildwing said, flatly.

“Wow. Really?”

“You just happen to be an expert,” Mallory sneered.

“No, I told you, no one’s an expert, not on this. I took a semester of reconstruction literature because I needed credits, and half of that was the Saurian writing system because it’s what ours is based on. That’s it. I barely remember anything from it, but I do remember that,” he looked back to the illumination. “My mother was the one who collected detritus like this.”

“Convenient,” Mallory observed.

“No, convenient would be if she were here instead so I could be sleeping in.”

Tanya cleared her throat to interrupt the circle of accusation and rebuttal. “I have a proposal,” She waited to be sure that their eyes were on her, and continued. “You get me a translation of the poem you know and I’ll try to use it as a starting point for an algorithm to crack the rest.”

Winterwing balked. “I maybe can remember a couple of lines, not a whole oral tradition.”

“You’re really going to trust what he tells you it says?” Mallory interjected.

“Might be enough to start,” Tanya insisted.

“That’s not necessarily true,” Winterwing argued. “You’re looking at it like a math problem where you can just plug things in and get an answer. Math is built on a foundation that builds over time but rarely changes. Language drifts quickly, and poetry is a tradition of metaphor. You can directly translate a word for sun and what it’s supposed to describe the red of a particular sort of sunrise at a certain time of year.”

Tanya made a noise of frustration. “You are being really difficult.”

“I’m sorry, who broke my ribs and then threw me into a room without plumbing?”

“You don’t have to do it because we asked, but maybe you could do it for your friend,” Wildwing suggested.

His copy stared at him for a moment, and then behind the group gathered around the display, to the medicom beds. Two lay empty, still, but Emily had not moved from the third. She was awake now, though still visibly exhausted and miserable, as the people around her tried their best to politely not notice. Wildwing had expected their reunion to be something like what he had witnessed in the Raptor, but no such embrace had happened. They had not said a word to each other.

Instead they stared at each other from ten feet and ten million miles apart, and Winterwing said, with dawning realization, “You knew about this.”

Emily’s face was morose exhaustion. “I don’t know anything about a book.”

“But you’ve been infected for over a year, and you never said a damn thing about it.”

“What was I supposed to say?” she asked.

“Anything. You let me assume that you were just having a rough patch that you didn’t want to talk about.”

“Does this not count as a rough patch?”

“This qualifies as a disaster and you know it.”

“What difference would it have made to you? If I told you exactly what happened, you wouldn’t have believed me.”

“Did you even bother to get a medical scan?”

“Of course I fucking did, I’m sitting on military grade equipment and they still don’t know what it is.”

“That’s it? You just stopped there?”

Emily seemed suddenly aware of how public this argument was, and looked at the floor, humiliated. “If you know something is wrong, really wrong, but you can’t do anything about it and neither can anyone else, would you bother getting a second opinion about it? Or a third one after the second tells you you’re fine?”

“Maybe you could at least tell the people around you that they’re in danger.”

“You knew that, though.”

“I thought you had an ex you were hiding from! You let me think that,” Winterwing said. “You took advantage of my unwillingness to ask. It isn’t even just me. You put my sister in danger, too. I was there that night but it could just have easily been her.”

“You think she didn’t know something was up the whole time?” Emily countered. “You think she doesn’t know what’s up when another girl shows up on her doorstep with literally nothing?”

“She’s a child.”

“No, she isn’t!” Emily shouted at him. “You have a bruise and dirty clothes! Oh, you poor thing! Maybe if it had been your sister, she would find a moment to be supportive instead of freaking out about it!”

“You lived in our home for over a year, exactly how much unconditional support do you need?”

“Hey!” Tank intervened between them. “We’re trying not to die at the moment, you can do whatever this is later.”

Wildwing leaned toward Duke, saying lowly: “Find somewhere to put him.”

“Back in the hole?” Duke offered with a smile.

“Maybe somewhere nicer,” Wildwing said with absolutely none of the cheer Duke had mustered. “Just get him out of here.”

Duke gave a playful salute of acknowledgment, and left the room, looping an arm through Winterwing’s as he walked, brandishing an activated saber in his free hand, his tone congenial and mild. “Hey, buddy, I bet you’ve never seen a laundry facility run on quantum fusion before, it’s the most fuckin’ ridiculous thing, invented by the deranged mind of a genius.”