"Then thank you." Sigh. "You're working on deactivating the implants, too?"

"They think they have it but they'd rather not test it just yet, if they're wrong you'd die - and you have a baby -"

"That's probably a good decision. I like not being dead. And not getting babies killed, those both seem like positive things." Sigh. "At least the baby won't have an implant. Even if everything goes terribly, at least it won't have that to worry about."

"We'll be in Endorë when they make contact, so the Alteri won't be able to get to either of you. ...Melkor will. But - it's been quiet lately."

"I guess we can't have everything. It really is silly to expect to be safe from everything, in a situation like this. I just - I hope we get to fix some stuff before anyone gets around to obliterating us. Or, like, gets around to obliterating me. I'm gonna go ahead and hope that you make it out of this mess, actually."

"The Valar will get me back eventually, whatever happens. Some very terrible things could happen in the meantime, I suppose, but - that's the end, no matter what."

"That's good." This is actually somehow a very comforting thought.

"Yes. It's the one thing they do at least mostly right. There's a perfectly nice place where you'll eventually wake up if you die, and it'll be about the same. It doesn't change much."

"Good for the Valar, then. ...What happens if I die in the next year or so? Not, uh, in terms of anything happening to me, I'll just be done, but like, with the baby?"

Also, like, with the entire future of all the Liars in existence, but hopefully someone will get on that without her having to be alive to remind them.

"We'll still get him to his dad as soon as we find him."

"Right. Good. That works then."

She can't decide whether completely avoiding thinking about this is more or less healthy than the alternative, but she still really doesn't want to think about it.

"We wouldn't be sending you to Endorë if we didn't think it was safer. I promise."

"I know. Thank you. You've been really great and I know you're trying, and I am mostly willing to trust that your leaders are also trying the best they can."

"I don't know if it makes sense for you to trust that, but it's true."

"I guess not. But I don't think I have very much to gain from not trusting you, at this point. You're like the nicest person I've ever met, and you trust your leaders, so - I think I'm willing to trust that they're trying, yeah. Anyway, trying not to be paranoid is working out pretty well so far! Nobody's killed me in my sleep yet after exhausting my supply of obviously useful alien intel."

...she really needs to stop casually saying things like that at some point.

He does look rather unhappy. "Were you worried about that?"

"Only at first! After a while I decided that the Alteri couldn't be this nice to me even if really important things depended on it, which seemed like a good sign in terms of, like - if you were able to be really good to people for extended periods of time, then at least that meant you knew how. And you kept being good, so I kept rounding down the probability that you were all secretly evil until I decided that it was probably just actually not worth worrying about. You, uh, didn't do anything wrong or anything, I would probably have worried about it for a little while no matter what."

"We were worried you were Sauron for a little while, too. But - still, I don't want anyone to be wondering if they'll wake up when they fall asleep, that's - awful."

"That seems fair? Everyone would have been pretty suspicious if an almost-Liar alien had randomly showed up in Earth orbit, and we didn't even have a Sauron to worry about. But I'm not worried now. I am pretty sure that nobody here is particularly planning to kill me in the near future."

"I certainly wouldn't let them."

"Oh. Well. Thank you."

She should probably not be this happy about someone telling her that they're not going to let people murder her, that seems like the kind of thing you should maybe just expect your friends not to be OK with, but she's very happy anyway. 

Ettelië hugs her. "Thank you for your patience. We will get it figured out."

She hugs him back. "Thank you. That means a lot."

They only have one lightleaper, which makes contact with the Alteri higher-stakes than it would be anyway. People occasionally sigh and mumble about how it would be nice if they'd left several in salvageable condition but they don't do so in Curufin's hearing. 

They select a star system from the ones Imrainai mapped. It's called Savaek. It has two major populated planets, Savaek Nas and Savaek Sov. It's ~14-15 years from the nearest in-network star, Maela (she's sure about this because she knows which star it is). She thinks Savaek is one that used to be part of the network and which got the scorched-earth treatment after being taken by the Carthons, but that would've been a really long time ago and she's only like 50% sure she's not confusing it with another system anyway. They have more spaceships than most places because they're one of the few colony systems with multiple major terraformed planets, and they need to be able to transport people between them. It's a major colony system, which she's pretty sure means more than a billion people, and she's pretty sure out-of-network planets can't support more than ~20 billion people at the really large end, so somewhere in there population-wise.

They check very thoroughly that whatever methods the Alteri use to communicate with their slaves' chips they won't be able to adapt to attack Elves. They check more thoroughly, because Maedhros is paranoid. They stumble upon a moderately promising avenue of research for remotely destroying chips but it'd take thirty years to refine into anything useful. (They start working on that; it could be helpful for orcs.) They satisfy themselves that the Alteri would not find it straightforward.

They arrange for the ship to be destroyed should the Alteri attempt to capture it and the judgment of its captain be that the risks are unacceptable. They pick a crew.

Ettelië eventually informs Imrainai that they're going to Endorë. "They'll need this ship."