Marcus drove.
He'd had the car since his second year — family money, though he didn't bring it up unless someone asked — and he drove the way he did most things, with more calm than the situation required and occasional commentary about the situation.
"Are we early?" he asked, pulling out of the campus gate.
"No." Ethan looked out the window. "We're right on time."
The city moved past them. Old Earth cities had this quality Ethan had thought about sometimes — the old and the new sitting directly against each other, stone towers from six hundred years ago visible through the gaps between glass buildings, the ancient and the current sharing the same skyline without particularly resolving the contradiction. He'd grown up here. He'd stopped seeing it a long time ago.
Today he saw it.
"I'll miss this," Marcus said, quietly, not really to Ethan.
"When you're on New Moon," Ethan said, "come back whenever you want. It'll still be here."
"That's not what I mean."
Ethan knew that wasn't what he meant.
The gingko trees along the main boulevard had gone fully gold — not the pale yellow of early fall but the dense, particular gold of late October, the kind that looked less like changing leaves and more like the trees had simply decided to make a statement before winter arrived. Between the gingko, red maple in full color. Both at once. The effect was almost too much.
Marcus didn't say anything else for a while. Neither did Ethan.
---
The gathering was outside the city.
Kevin had said the venue was a villa complex in the hills — rented for the evening, large enough for everyone, good view of the city. He hadn't mentioned the landing pads.
There were two of them at the top of the hill, both occupied. The vehicles parked there were silver, low-profile, with the smooth uninterrupted curves of something designed without visible seams. New Star manufacture. You couldn't buy them on Old Earth.
Marcus pulled in next to a perfectly ordinary sedan and sat for a moment looking at the silver craft.
"Right," he said.
"You're going to New Moon," Ethan said. "You'll be looking down at all of this."
"I know." Marcus got out of the car. "I'm fine. I'm just recalibrating."
Sophie Su was crossing the lawn when they arrived — off-shoulder dress, long legs, moving with the energy of someone who had decided tonight was going to be good and was making it happen through sheer momentum. She stopped when she saw them.
"Ward." She looked at him with the direct appraisal that was her baseline register. "You look exactly the same as you did this morning, which is impressive given that your entire life is apparently restructuring itself."
"Hello, Sophie."
"I'm serious. How are you not more visibly stressed about all of this?"
"Ask me in a year."
She laughed — the genuine kind, not the defensive kind — and fell into step with them toward the main lawn. Clara Li was a few meters behind her, quieter, carrying two drinks she hadn't touched yet.
"You said we were alien species," Clara said, without particular accusation.
"I said you were from another star," Ethan said. "Which is technically accurate."
"My family has been on Old Earth for nine generations."
"And yet." He gestured at the landing pads.
Clara looked at the silver craft for a moment. Then: "Fair point." She handed him one of her drinks.
---
The main lawn was set up for a long evening — long tables with food along one side, a bar at the far end, portable heat lamps already on against the October chill. About forty people. Everyone knew everyone. The New Star students who'd spent two years in the program, the Old Earth students who'd spent four years alongside them, the selected ones who were leaving in four days, the ones who weren't.
Ethan moved through the crowd and ended up near the students who were staying — a cluster of eight or nine, most of them quieter than they would have been at any previous gathering. They'd been waiting on the final list for weeks. Still waiting.
"They took our blood," one of them said. His name was Ren. He'd been one of the better students in the program — consistent practice, real results. "When we had the physicals at the end of second year. The samples went to New Star for analysis. I only found out two weeks ago."
Ethan had not known this.
He kept his expression neutral and let the information settle. Physical examination at the end of second year — standard, they'd all had them. He'd assumed it was routine. If New Star had analyzed the samples against criteria that had nothing to do with *cai qi* practice, then the selection wasn't about practice at all. Or not only about practice.
He thought about Victor Ling. About who would have had the information to intervene in a process that involved blood analysis sent to New Star for criteria no one on Old Earth was told about.
"Did anyone find out what they were testing for?" he asked.
Ren shook his head. "Just that it happened. The tech who ran the processing on the Old Earth side let it slip. She thought we already knew."
"We didn't know," someone else said. Flat. Resigned.
Marcus appeared at Ethan's shoulder with two drinks and the expression of someone who had been listening from three meters away.
"You know what," Marcus said, "if we can't touch the supernatural, we can at least own the companies that study it. I'm personally going to become extremely wealthy and then hire all of you as consultants." He pressed a drink into Ethan's hand. "Starting now. You're all on retainer."
The group laughed — not the hollow kind. The kind that meant *you're annoying but we needed that.*
---
Night came down gradually. The city below lit up in stages — first the main boulevards, then the commercial district, then the residential neighborhoods spreading outward, until the whole basin was full of light. Above it, a clear October sky with more stars than you usually saw this close to the city.
Ethan sat on the edge of the upper terrace with a drink he'd been holding for an hour. Somewhere behind him, the gathering had gotten louder. People were drunk. People were happy. A few people were both and had started singing something that may or may not have been a school anthem.
He heard the door open, followed by footsteps, followed by someone sitting down in the empty chair to his left without asking.
He turned.
Cole Kong. Mid-length hair, strong face, eyes that were always more focused than the situation called for. He was carrying a glass of something clear and had the careful posture of a person who had drunk more than usual and was compensating through deliberate movement.
"Marcus," Cole said.
"He went inside," Ethan said.
Cole nodded. He looked at the city below.
"I told one of the staff to bring something out," he said. "Figured a private sendoff was better than a speech in front of forty people."
A few minutes later, a staff member appeared with a tray — two dishes under covers, a third plate of thinly-sliced meat arranged with the kind of care that indicated someone had put actual thought into it.
"*Jiaoyu*," Cole said, lifting the first cover. "Deep-sea. New Star coastal waters — they migrate about eight hundred kilometers each year, they're only catchable for six weeks. These were shipped over two days ago." He lifted the second cover. "Snow-ox. High-altitude grazing, north range. The cut matters — this is the specific section that's actually worth eating, not the commodity grade they export. Old-money families in New Star serve this raw, sliced thin. It works."
He served Ethan without making a production of it and sat back.
Marcus reappeared in the doorway, took in the scene, and — to his considerable credit — simply walked over and sat down in the third chair without commentary.
Cole looked at him.
"The呼伦贝尔thing," Marcus said. "I stand by it as a concept."
Cole blinked. Then, slowly, the expression of a man confronted with something he cannot classify: "The *what* thing?"
"Earlier. I said I eat snow-ox by chasing it across the grassland at dawn and biting directly—"
"He's joking," Ethan said.
"I *was* joking," Marcus said. "I wanted to see what you'd do." He picked up a piece of snow-ox and ate it. "This is actually excellent."
Cole stared at him for another few seconds, then turned back to Ethan with the look of a man who had decided to simply continue as if Marcus was a weather event rather than a person.
"I heard you're staying for the job," he said.
"A few more days. Then I move out."
Cole turned his glass slowly. "When I came here, you were — already in a relationship. I took that personally. I was twenty and I took it very personally." He paused. "I spent the rest of the time acting like I hadn't. Which I'm told is not a strategy."
Ethan said nothing. He waited.
"What I mean is, I wasted four years not getting to know you properly because I was annoyed about something that wasn't your fault." Cole looked at his drink. "That's a stupid way to spend four years."
"It wasn't nothing," Ethan said. "But it's also done."
Cole raised his glass. "Then let it be done."
They drank.
From inside came the sound of a door opening, a wave of laughter from the main gathering, then quiet again as the door closed.
Sophie appeared at the window, saw the three of them, started to say something, thought better of it, and made the kind of face that meant *I am respecting this moment but I'm also filing it away.*
Cole refilled the glasses. "You'll come to New Star," he said. It wasn't a question.
"Eventually," Ethan said.
"Not eventually. Soon." Cole looked at him with the directness that was his most consistent quality. "Whatever they test for — whatever it was in the blood that they were looking at — you're the one person in that program who actually *did* the thing they were supposedly studying. If the path goes somewhere, you're the one who'll find out where." He paused. "I don't know why they cut you. I've thought about it. I don't understand it."
Ethan didn't say anything.
"Anyway," Cole said. He stood, steadied himself slightly, and straightened his jacket. "I'll look for you when you arrive." He looked at Marcus. "You too, New Moon. Don't get lost up there."
"I'll send coordinates," Marcus said.
Cole left. They listened to his footsteps fade back toward the main gathering.
Marcus was quiet for a moment, looking at the city below.
"He's right, you know," he said. "About the blood test thing. Whoever cut you from that list knew something the test showed and decided it was a reason to exclude you. Which means—"
"I know what it means," Ethan said.
"—which means the exclusion wasn't random, it was specific, and whoever ordered it *knew what you'd done* and decided that was dangerous." Marcus turned to look at him. "That's not nothing."
"No," Ethan said. "It's not nothing."
They sat with that for a while.
Behind them, from the direction of the gathering, someone called Ethan's name.
He turned.
Marcus had already gone very still.
In the warm light spilling from the villa's open doors, Serena Zhao was walking toward them across the lawn.