After twenty-one seconds exactly they emerged, and the spreading inkstain behind them drew into itself and vanished. They were in a nowhere-in-particular spot in the void, as far as Callie could tell, but the ship said, “Ahh, that’s so much better. I can actually tell where we are. It’s not charted space, but I recognize the constellations, and I have the Anjou’s navigational data to back us up. We’re about fifty light years from our system, very close to the place where the Anjou was captured.”

“So where’s the station?” Callie said.

“There’s nothing at all on our sensors,” Drake said. “The external cameras aren’t registering anything, either. Commencing visual scan.” The ship began to turn, slowly, reaction wheels spinning it counterclockwise. There were no nearby stars to provide light, but the Raven’s exterior lights picked up a faint gleam of something silvery in the corner of the viewport.

“There,” Callie said. “Zoom in?”

When the screen switched to zoom, however, the silver flash vanished entirely.

“It’s not just invisible to radar and our other sensors, it’s invisible to cameras,” Drake said. “How is that possible?”

“The Axiom could do things to light,” Lantern said. “They created the displacement technology I used to trick my way onto your ship. Fooling your cameras isn’t that hard. They could fool your eyes, too, if they wanted.”

“Wait,” Elena said over the comms. “We could see the station just fine on our screens, when we found it. The material was resistant to our sensors, yes, but the station did show up on camera.”

“So what changed?” Callie said.

“Probably a heightened security protocol,” Lantern said. “Maybe the station stopped seeing Doctor Oh’s crew as injured servitors and has reclassified them as dangerous invaders?”

“That’s comforting. Switch back to the transparent view,” Callie said. “Move us in a little closer.”

The ship hummed and crept forward. The shape in space grew, though it was still hard to make out. The bits Callie could glimpse matched Elena’s description, though: immense, organic, basically a smaller, floating version of the bizarre city they’d seen orbiting the ruby Dyson sphere. “The Axiom have a definite design aesthetic.”

“Not much like the Liar style, either,” Drake said. “They like radial symmetry.” He lifted his bifurcated arm. “I mean, usually.”

“The Free don’t build anything that resembles Axiom architecture,” Lantern said. “Would you recreate the cages you were kept in?”

“Probably not.” Callie was gradually starting to believe Lantern’s fantastic story, or to at least consider it more seriously. This place really didn’t seem like anything the Liars would make. There was something brutal and strange about its configurations. “Our scanners are useless, huh?”

“We’re looking at nothing, if you believe the data,” Drake said.

“Ship, you’ve got nothing on Elena’s crew? No signals from their transponders?”

“No, but it may be different once we’re on the inside.”