The meeting broke without ceremony after that, each of them peeling off toward whatever task the last hour had assigned them, and the ready room, empty again, held nothing but the low hum of the ship and the faint, stale ghost of coffee nobody had yet found the time to clean up properly.
Swan felt the cold first, the way he felt most things first these days, a full half second before his conscious mind caught up to naming what he was actually looking at.
He'd gone to check on Taisen after the meeting broke, not because Taisen had asked him to, but because checking had become, somewhere in the last eleven days, a thing he simply did without being told, the way another man might check a lock twice before bed, or count the exits in a room he'd only just walked into. Taisen's quarters were sparse, even by the Arctic's already spare standards: a narrow bunk, a fold-out desk bolted to the bulkhead, a single locked drawer beneath it, none of the small personal clutter that had, over the last month, begun to accumulate in every other cabin on this ship, as though the man living here had never quite let himself believe he'd be staying long enough to need any of it.
Swan found him alone, seated at the small fold-out desk with his grey hand resting open on the surface in front of him, palm up, studying it under the room's low working light with the particular stillness of a man taking an inventory he did not want to share out loud.
The grey had reached the base of the fourth finger now. All the way to where the hand itself began, a border no longer clean the way a bruise's edge was clean, but soft and creeping, the way frost crept across a window pane from the corner inward, patient and total and entirely without hurry, because it had all the time in the world and Taisen, increasingly, did not.
"You crossed it," Swan said, quiet, and it wasn't a question.
"At the relay," Taisen said. "While the message from Zhang's failsafe was still playing. I felt it happen. A kind of settling, the way ice settles when a lake finishes freezing all the way through rather than just at the surface, a small sound under everything else that only the person standing on it ever actually hears. I didn't say anything because there was nothing useful to say in that particular minute, with a room full of people who needed me thinking about Zhang and not about my own hand, and because you and Camaro asked me to bring you the number the moment it mattered, not the moment it happened, and I've been sitting here for the better part of an hour trying to work out honestly which one this is."
"It's the moment it matters," Swan said, and there was no give in it at all, the particular firmness he only found when the fear underneath a thing had finally organized itself into something worth standing on rather than something worth apologizing for. "Sir. With respect. You don't get to decide that one alone. That was the whole point of what I asked you in sickbay. I wasn't asking permission to manage the information for your comfort. I was asking permission to manage it for the crew's, and this is exactly the kind of thing the crew needs managed, which means it's exactly the kind of thing I need to actually know about."
Taisen looked at him a long moment, and something in his face, tired in a way Swan had not seen it before, not the tiredness of a hard day but the older, deeper tiredness of a man who had been carrying something heavy for considerably longer than a single day could account for, eased.
"No," he agreed. "I don't. Run the scan properly. Tell Camaro what it actually is this time, not the shape of it, not the softened version. I've spent enough of tonight already deciding things alone that weren't mine to decide alone, and I find I don't much like the taste it's left in my mouth."
Swan ran it in silence, the small handheld unit's soft chime the only sound in the room besides the low hum of the Fold sliding past outside the narrow viewport, a sound so constant by now that none of them consciously heard it anymore except in moments like this one, when everything else in the room had gone still enough to notice it filling the silence back in. He read the numbers twice before he set the unit down, turning the display away from Taisen out of some instinct he didn't examine too closely, the way a doctor turns a chart away from a patient he isn't ready to discuss yet.
"It's not accelerating," he said finally. "That's the one thing I can tell you that isn't worse than it was an hour ago. It's climbing at the same rate it's held since the beach. What changed isn't the speed. It's that there's less runway left in front of it than there was yesterday, because it's simply covered more of the same road."
"How much less."
Swan was quiet a moment, weighing, the way Taisen himself weighed most things, plainly and without hurry, the stylus finding its way back into his fingers and turning over once before he set it deliberately down again.
"I don't know where the road ends," he said. "I told you that in sickbay and it's still true. I can tell you it's covered the distance from the second knuckle to here in eleven days. If it holds that same pace, and I have no evidence yet that it won't, either faster or slower, you have weeks, not months. I wish I had a cleaner number for you than that. I don't, and I'd rather tell you honestly that I don't than dress up a guess as a diagnosis, because that's the promise I made you in sickbay and I intend to keep it even when the truth is this thin."
"Weeks," Taisen repeated, and something in the word, said aloud in his own voice rather than turned over silently in his own head, landed differently than it had ten minutes ago, heavier, more finished, the way a sentence sounds different read aloud than read silently, as though the air itself gave it a weight the page never had.