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“Never gets old,” Bronwen said. “Say it weekly. Standing order.”

“You’re leaving,” I pointed out.

“Then say it to the comm net weekly. We’ll know.” She looked around the table and went quiet. After five years alone on a monster planet, she had a great deal to lose here.

“Someone should say it out loud where the family can hear it. It helps when you’re alone. Ask me how I know.”

Nobody asked. Everybody knew. Zarek’s hand covered hers on the table.

“Destinations,” I said, because if I stopped too long I was not sure I would get through the list. Nobody gave me trouble for it. “Talon.”

“Tamsin and I are taking the Penumbra.” He said it evenly, but his hand rested on the table.

“Out past the mapped lanes. There’s survey work nobody’s flown since before the coup. She wants new stars. I want to fly this ship somewhere it’s never been shot at.”

“The ship’s yours.” It always had been; I’d only ever borrowed the chair. “Zarek.”

“Trouble,” Zarek said.

“He means we’re going to find people who still think the Conclave’s rules apply and correct them,” Bronwen translated, luminous. “There are slaver routes in the Verge nobody’s disrupted properly. We’re going to disrupt them properly. It’s like a honeymoon, but with more screaming.”

“Varrick.”

“Sabine and I bought Parallax.” A ripple around the table; Varrick permitted himself the smallest smile of his career.

“The station where they owned her. We own it now. We’re going to run it clean; honest odds, honest books, mostly. Qeth’s old office is going to be a school. She’s already rewritten the algorithms.” Sabine, not looking up from her slate: “They were sloppy.”

“Brevan.”

“A museum,” Brevan said, with obvious satisfaction.

“A real one. Carys curates; I acquire, through strictly legitimate channels, mostly; and every piece the Conclave looted that we can trace goes home to the world it came from, with ceremony, with provenance. Valerius has offered neutral-space recognition, transport grants, and a hall for the first repatriation ceremony. Apparently, he remembers his debts.” Carys’s hand rested on his arm; Flinx, from the shelf, made a sound of proprietary agreement about the word acquire.

“Kallum.”

“There’s a moon,” Kallum said, and that was nearly all of it, in the Kallum way, but Anhara finished: “Two systems from Torek’s. Good soil, failing farms, nobody teaching anybody anything. We’re going to farm, and take in whoever needs taking in, and Turnip’s going to have the largest wallow in the sector.” The boar, hearing his name, made the landslide sound.

“He knows,” she said. “He’s insufferable about it.”

Ten people turned to Lika and me. Through the bond, I felt Lika’s amusement.

We had talked about it, of course. We’d considered three worlds, a station purchase, and an absurd proposal involving the museum’s security contract. Neither of us wanted to choose a permanent destination yet. We had finally admitted that to each other at 0300 one night.

“We don’t know,” I said.

The room went quiet for a moment. Talon was the first to smile.

“We’re going to travel,” Lika said.

“Slowly. There’s a galaxy out there that neither of us has ever seen as ourselves; I’ve only ever crossed it as a mask, and he’s only ever crossed it as a mission. We’re going to go look at it with our own faces. Where we stop is where we stop.” She turned her hand over on the table, open.

“For six years apiece we always knew what came next. Not knowing feels good. We’ve earned that.”

“To not knowing,” Brevan said. This time the toast survived. Twelve cups rose, with a protein cube for Turnip, and the Penumbra’s last war council became a family dinner.

Late in it, Talon found me at the side table and set something down between us: the command cylinder, the Penumbra’s original, the one I’d carried through the war and formally transferred to him that morning.

“Registry’s done. She’s mine on paper.” He turned the cylinder once.