In the recording, she instructed Vela to remember three things if they were separated.
Never sell the case.
Never give it to somebody who refuses to say their name.
And never trust a person who knows the answer before hearing the question.
Vela replayed the final instruction several times.
When Sepha came into the room, the girl closed the screen and asked whether the medicine was poisoned.
Sepha chose her words with care.
Some of it has been changed, she said.
We do not know how much.
Vela asked whether people who had received the real medicine were safe.
Sepha told her that the authorized formula still worked, and that the challenge was finding the altered shipments.
Vela studied the doctor’s face and asked what happened when a doctor did not know the answer.
Sepha remembered a human sitting upright while his death certificate waited unfinished.
A good doctor says so, she replied.
Then a good doctor looks harder.
The girl considered that answer for a long time.
At last she took the data wafer from the case and placed it in Sepha’s open palm.
My mother said you were one of the people who looked harder, she said.
That is why she sent me here.
Sepha activated the wafer in an isolated reader.
A map appeared with twenty-three blinking points scattered across the frontier.
Each point corresponded to a location where antivenom had been delivered, but the labels contained no clinic names.
They were freight docking coordinates.
At the bottom of the map was a single line of text in Vela’s mother’s handwriting.
The medicine is not the cargo they are protecting.
Sepha read the line twice.
Then she looked at the supply routes and realized that all twenty-three docks lay within one jump of a restricted wildlife preserve.
The preserve was the breeding ground of the skithra.
Outside her office window, a transport ship crossed the station’s rotating lights like a dark needle drawn across a wound.
For the first time since Hamish survived his bite, Sepha wondered whether saving lives had also created something dangerous enough to attract people who preferred profit to survival.
She called Hravik back to her office and asked him to lock the antivenom reserves.
He began to ask whether there was evidence of an imminent threat.
She showed him the map.
Then she said the words that would eventually appear in the second paper of her career.
