The Flame That Burns Backwards

The rifle had been a good rifle at four hundred rounds. At eleven hundred it grouped like a thrown rock, and Harken had stopped calling her shots and started calling her area.

She lay in the pump gallery with the muzzle across a broken feeder flange and watched the northeast berm through a gap in the concrete the width of two fingers. The gap was cold. Everything was cold. She did the arithmetic again, because the arithmetic was the only machinery in the building that still functioned.

Nineteen people, six days ago.

Six now.

Thirty-four rounds of eight-millimetre across four weapons. One of the four had no firing pin. She had taken it off a dead man on day two and had not said so, so it sat in Merrit Sova's hands and gave him something to hold and a reason to face the water gate. Call it three usable weapons. Call it thirty-four rounds, which sounded like a number until you set it beside two Karrn-class frames — fifteen point two metres, forty-one tonnes dry, laminate hull rated to eat shipboard autocannon at forty degrees off normal. Eight-millimetre off a Karrn's chest plate did not scratch the primer. It made a noise. That was the whole tactical value of thirty-four rounds: it made a noise, and the noise gave a bearing.

Water they had. That was the joke of the place. Kessler Flats Aquifer Station Four sat on nine hundred million litres and could not lift one of them, because the Dominion had cut the feeder trunk on day one with a single shaped charge, competently placed, and had then left the settling tank alone on purpose. Nine hundred litres in the tank, untreated, tasting of iron and the inside of a coin. Enough to keep six people alive a long time.

Food, none, four days.

Medical: one autoinjector at half charge, and Ilsa Pryn's opinion, which was that Dio Fennick's leg had gone past the point where an opinion changed anything.

Distance to the nearest friendly cell: three hundred and forty kilometres to Bracken Rill, across open flats where the tallest cover was a survey stake. Nine days on foot for a fit adult with boots and water. Fennick could not stand. Tam Oruk could not lift his right arm above the shoulder. Sova was sixty-eight and his hands had started to fail him around day three.

So: nobody was walking out, and nobody was coming in, and the two frames on the berm understood both of those facts better than she did.

Harken had buried three cells. Not lost — buried, with her own hands, in three different soils. Ferrow Cut, where she learned that forty people could be reduced to a smell in under an hour. Ansel Mill, where she learned the reduction did not have to be fast. Delph, where she learned that if you were the one who kept walking out, people started to look at you a particular way, and you had to decide early whether to mind.

She had decided not to mind. She was fifty-something, hard through the middle, with a scar running from the left eye socket into the hairline where a canopy strut had let go over Ferrow. She had not cried at any of the three burials. She thought about that less often than people seemed to assume.

What she thought about was the loop.

The mast was forty watts on the tank gantry, and the recorded distress packet went out every ninety seconds with a hand-entered survivor count in the header. She had changed the count six times in six days. Nineteen. Fifteen. Eleven. Nine. Seven. Six.

It had said six for nineteen hours.

That was the part that would not sit still. Nineteen hours was not mercy. Nineteen hours was somebody's shift pattern.

"They acknowledged again," she said, coming down the ladder into the gallery. "Hollowmark. Twenty minutes out from the ridge, then they hold for dark."

Tam Oruk was nineteen. He had a face that had not finished arranging itself, and a field dressing on his shoulder gone the colour of tea, and he looked up at her the way a dog looks at a door.

"Twenty minutes," he said.

"They hold for dark. So it's dark plus. Don't sit there counting."

"I won't."

He would. He had been counting for three days, since she first told him about Hollowmark, and Hollowmark did not exist. She had read it off the pump housing eight centimetres from her elbow, where a foundry in some other century had cast HOLLOWMARK PUMPS & FLOW into the iron in letters as tall as her thumb. She had needed a name in the half-second before he asked, and there it was.

She was not proud of it and not ashamed of it. It was a load-bearing lie. He had stopped shaking after she told it, and a boy who is not shaking can hold a corner for four hours, and she had needed the corner held.

Lance-Sergeant Ashe Lorrigan met her eye across the gallery and said nothing, which was Lorrigan entire. Before the war Lorrigan had been Sworn of the Watch, which had meant a sash with silver frogging and a place at the top of a staircase twice a year while old men made speeches about vigilance and everybody applauded and went in to dinner. Now she had a bolt gun with a cracked stock and she had killed eleven people with it, and she still stood the way she had been taught to stand on that staircase.

"Fennick's fever's up," Lorrigan said.

"How far up."

"Pryn says she'd rather not put a number on it."

"Tell Pryn I want the number."

"Thirty-nine six." Lorrigan's mouth did something that was not a smile. "She wanted you to hear it from her."

Harken went back up to the flange gap.

They were changing over. That was the thing she wanted somebody, someday, to write down properly, because she thought it was the whole war in one image and nobody who had not lain in a pumphouse and watched it happen would take it seriously.

The Dominion was not in a hurry.

At the top of the sixth day a support crawler came up the access road at forty kilometres an hour. A comfortable speed. The speed of a vehicle nobody is shooting at. It parked eight hundred metres out, on the hardstanding, nose to the road, because you park nose to the road when you intend to leave in your own time.

Two pilots came down out of the Karrns on winch lines. Two others went up. The relieved pair stood by the crawler's flank a while in the cold, and one of them did a thing with his arms that Harken recognised through the optic as a man loosening his shoulders after eleven hours in a harness. Then they went inside, and a vent on the crawler's roof began to steam, and she understood she was watching two men eat something hot.

The new pair ran their diagnostics. The port Karrn cycled its knee actuators twice through full flexion, the way you do when a joint has been reporting soft, and she heard the whine of it come across eight hundred metres of flat ground four seconds after she saw it. Then they took position — one at the northeast berm, one at the water gate — and went still.

That was it. That was the assault.

They did not need to come in. They had worked that out on day three, after the first two attempts cost them a sensor mast and one dismount with his throat opened by Bekk Talleran, who died of it four minutes later in a way Harken was going to be carrying for the rest of her life. After that the Dominion simply stopped. Cut the trunk. Ringed the compound at eight hundred metres. Let the arithmetic work. Every eleven hours the crawler came up the road at a comfortable speed and swapped the shift.

They had not even jammed the loop.

That was the detail she kept returning to, lying there with a rifle she could no longer aim. Every Karrn carried a jammer. Forty watts off a tank gantry would take a competent signals officer ninety seconds to kill.

They left it running.

Because a distress loop counting down for six days is not a distress loop from the outside. It is an advertisement. It says: here are six people who will not be here much longer, and here is precisely where, and anyone who loves them enough to come will have to cross four hundred metres of open ground in front of two frames who have had six days to range it.

We're not under siege, Harken thought. We're bait, and they're waiting to see what smells us.

Which was the one honest reason to feel anything but tired. Nobody was going to come, so nobody was going to be caught. That was the shape of the last useful thing she could do. Keep six people breathing. Keep the loop honest. And at the twelfth changeover she would put Lorrigan out through the drain culvert with the cell log in a sleeve, and then go up on the gantry with the last four rounds and give the incoming pair something to fill out a form about.

She had it more or less planned. She had checked the culvert twice, and cut the grating free, and packed the gap with rag so it would not ring.

"You've written it out longhand," Lorrigan said, later, without inflection.

"Slate's dead."

"That's not what I asked you."

"You didn't ask me anything."

"No, ma'am," Lorrigan agreed, and went back to her corner, and did not mention it again, and did not sleep.

Nineteen hours the loop had said six.

At nineteen hours and forty minutes, the loop stopped.

She did not notice it as a sound. She noticed it in her back teeth, because the mast transformer had a whine at the top edge of hearing and it had been there six days and now it was not.

"Mast's down," Lorrigan said from below.

"Power?"

"Power's fine. Handset's dead too."

Harken came off the flange, dropped the ladder, took the handset out of Lorrigan's hand.

Dead radio hisses. That is what dead radio does. There is a floor of noise in any receiver — thermal, cosmic, the universe muttering to itself — and every soldier alive knows the sound of an open channel with nobody on it, because you spend a career listening to it in the dark.

The handset made nothing.

Not silence with texture. Not a low hiss. Nothing, the way a cut wire makes nothing, except the wire was not cut and the charge lamp was green and when she thumbed the squelch off the nothing did not change.

"Slate," she said.

"Slate's been dead four days."

"Try it."

Pryn tried it. It came up, which it had not done in four days, showed a carrier error in three languages, and went down again.

Harken stood in the middle of the pump gallery with the handset in her fist.

That is not a jammer. A jammer you hear. A jammer is a wall of dirty noise and the whole point of it is that you know. This was the opposite. This was somebody taking the air out of the room.

"Ma'am." Tam, at the water-gate slit. His voice had gone thin and careful, the voice of a man who does not want to be told he is wrong. "Ma'am, there's a light."

She went to him.

Kessler Flats at that hour was a grey-brown plate under a sky the colour of dishwater, and the two Karrns stood in it like furniture, and above the northern horizon there was a light.

It was green.

Not the green of a running lamp or a marker flare or a drive plume — white going blue if it was Dominion, white going amber if it was anything the Reach still had. This was saturated, with a hard white core, and it was too clean. Flares smear. Plumes bloom and trail off. This had a boundary, like a hole punched in the sky, and the boundary did not flicker.

"That's not ours," Tam said.

"No."

"Is it a—"

"Quiet."

It moved.

Harken had spent thirty-one years around aircraft, orbital insertion and every class of frame in the catalogue, and there were three ways a thing crossed a sky: ballistic, powered on a curve, or falling. This did none of them. It came down out of the north on a straight line at something over Mach four in dense air — her estimate, and she knew it was bad — and then it was not on that line, it was on another one, and there was no arc joining them.

No burn. No plume. No bang.

Nothing turns like that. Mass has to be persuaded, and the persuading costs time and energy and shows itself as fire out the back of something. There was no fire out the back of it. There was only the green, which had begun to trail — not exhaust, a wake, a line of bright particulate shed slowly behind it, and the shed stuff hung in the air and did not disperse.

Tam was saying something with the word please in it. She put her hand flat on his chest and pushed him below the sill without looking away.

The northeast Karrn moved for the first time in nineteen hours.

Its sensor mast swung north. The shoulder autocannon came up off its rest. Forty-one tonnes rocked back a half-step into a firing brace, which was a thing she had watched Karrns do a hundred times and had never once been pleased about. Its muzzle flash started. Thirty-millimetre on a high cyclic rate is not a series of flashes; it is one orange tongue about two metres long, and its sound takes two and a half seconds to cross eight hundred metres of cold air.

The sound had not arrived when the frame came apart.

She did not see how.

She was looking directly at it. Her eye was on it. There was a moment — she went back over it for years and never got it closer than this — a moment in which the air between the green thing and the berm went white in one line, perfectly straight, about a metre thick, present all at once along its whole length the way lightning is present all at once. Then it was gone. Where the frame's upper body had been there was sky.

No explosion. That was what her hands would not accept. The legs and pelvis stayed standing perhaps two seconds, braced, hips still holding a firing stance for a torso that had ceased to exist, and the cut face of it glowed a dull cherry and shed no smoke, because nothing was left that could burn. It had gone from armour to vapour without passing through fire.

Then the legs fell sideways.

Then the sound came.

It arrived in the wrong order and in too many parts. First a crack, single, enormous, flat as a plank hitting water — the air along the beam line collapsing back into the space the beam had made. Then the ground shock, up through her elbows. Then, third and last, two and a half seconds of autocannon fire, arriving punctually from a man who had been dead since the middle of his own burst.

Harken had done this her entire adult life. She had a word for everything.

She had a word for the second Karrn, too, right up until it went.

It was running. It had turned off the water gate and was making west with its beam-halberd deployed and its shoulder gun stowed, doing the only correct thing, which was to break the firing solution and reach broken ground. It was doing eighty kilometres an hour. Karrns are fast. That is what they are for.

She did not see the second one die either. There was a green flare above and left of the compound, at an angle no aircraft could have reached in the time available, and the running frame's left leg was gone at the hip. Then, before it had finished falling, before the leg had touched, something crossed the whole length of its back that she registered as a stitching — four points, evenly spaced, faster than she could count and she counted them anyway — and forty-one tonnes came apart into pieces the size of doors and slid a hundred metres on its face inside a wall of dust.

Silence.

Then, late, all of that noise, in a lump.

Somebody in the gallery was making a sound. It might have been Sova. Harken found she had crushed the handset casing, and that the nothing in it had not changed.

"Ma'am," Lorrigan said. Only that. She was standing at the slit with her mouth slightly open and her bolt gun hanging off the end of her arm like an object somebody had handed her at a party.

The green came down into the compound.

It landed the way a person steps off a low wall.

That was the obscenity of it. Nineteen point eight metres — she was decent at estimating and she stood by the figure — coming out of a descent she could not measure, and it put one foot on the apron and then the other, and the dust came up to the knee and no higher, and the concrete did not crack.

Forty-one tonnes of Karrn made the settling tank ring when it walked. This thing was bigger and it made almost no sound going down.

Then it straightened, and stood, and the first thing Harken's brain offered her was that it was the wrong shape.

Everything in the Reach that walked was a box on legs. You built a frame from what a frame must have — reactor housing, cockpit block, four limbs, sensor cluster — and you put armour over the necessary volumes and you were finished, and the result looked like plant machinery because it was plant machinery.

This had been drawn by somebody with opinions.

White, mostly, and the white was not paint. It was a laminate with depth in it, layered, and where the compound's one surviving floodlight crossed the chest the surface gave back a faint pearl shift, like the inside of a shell. Blue at the intakes. Hard grey at the joints. The torso tapered. The waist was narrow — criminally narrow, structurally absurd — and after a moment she understood that it was narrow because whatever ran through it was not a driveshaft and did not need section.

It had a head. Not a sensor cluster. A head, with a crest, and a slot across the face lit from behind by a green so pale it was nearly white.

Along the spine, folded down and clamped tight against the shoulder blades, were two long assemblies she had no name for. Wings was the word that came, and she rejected it, and it came back. They were furled. They lay against the machine the way a folded blade lies in a sheath, and four smaller units were racked between them, and every one of those had a slit in its casing leaking that same green, slowly, drifting down and pooling around the feet before it faded.

The heat crossed the compound about four seconds behind it.

She felt it on her face through the slit at forty metres. Not the punch of a fire. A broad, dry, even radiance, like standing at an open kiln door. With it came the smell: ozone, scorched dust, and under that something metallic and nearly sweet that she had smelled exactly once, in a Directorate test bay, behind a blast screen, while a man three metres away told her that if the board went red she was to walk, not run, to the door.

The machine ticked.

Standing still, it ticked, all over — a slow irregular pinging as the laminate cooled and the plates found their tolerances — and under the ticking there was a hum at the bottom of hearing that came up through the concrete into her knees and made a filling in her back molar ache.

The air above its shoulders shimmered and would not stop.

And Harken, kneeling in a pumphouse on the worst afternoon of a bad two years, looked at the way the shoulder joint was made. At the double chamfer where the pauldron met the arm. At the coolant vanes set in a descending fan so the hot air off the upper bank never crossed the lower. At the sloped knee that let a leg fold flat against a thigh without a bulge, which was an elegance no armourer in the Reach had ever bothered with, because no armourer in the Reach had ever cared what a machine looked like folding.

She said it out loud, into a room with five other people in it.

"Aria."

Lorrigan turned her head. "Ma'am?"

"Aria Zadkiel." Her voice came out wrong. She had not said the name in two years and it no longer fitted her mouth. "That's his shoulder. I ran cable through that shoulder when I was twenty-four."

"He's dead, ma'am."

"I know he's dead."

A seam opened in the chest of it.

It did not hinge. It parted, along a line that had not been there until it parted, and a section of torso lifted and slid back, and vapour rolled down the front of the machine and broke up in the heat. Inside was a red-lit space far too small for the outside of the thing to justify.

A man came out, rode a line down, and stood on the apron. The machine went on ticking above him.

Harken had prepared herself for something. She had watched two frames deleted from the world in under four seconds, and some part of her had built a figure to match.

He was young.

Twenty-five, twenty-six. Tall, and thin in a way that was not build but budget — the narrowness of somebody who eats when it occurs to him. A flight suit that had been white once and was grey to the elbows with dried coolant. Black hair flattened on one side by a helmet liner. A scab through one eyebrow, a plum-coloured bruise along the jaw, and shadows under his eyes deep enough to read as damage rather than tiredness.

His left hand was shaking.

Not adrenaline. She knew that one intimately. This was fine and continuous and mechanical, four or five cycles a second, and it did not stop, and he did not look at it, and he made no attempt at all to hide it, which she disliked more than if he had.

He crossed forty metres of apron and stopped ten short of the gallery door and waited, hands loose, while six people came out of the building into the heat of his machine.

Sova was crying. Fennick was carried. Tam had his good hand up against the radiance, staring, and Harken watched a nineteen-year-old who had been dying for six days simply forget to be frightened.

Beside her, Lorrigan began to lower herself onto one knee.

She stopped halfway. She looked at Harken. Nobody had told her whether this was that sort of occasion, and no standing order in the world covered it, so she straightened and came to attention instead, and her ears went red. Twice a year, in a hall with a marble floor, old men had knelt and said the words while the caterers waited. Harken had been to eleven of them. She had thought them charming.

She stepped forward.

"Commander Vael Harken. Order of the Concord, Kessler cell. I don't know what you are."

"Six," he said.

"What?"

"Your loop said six." Flat and quick, and he did not do her the courtesy of a name. "It's said six for nineteen hours. That's either stable or stale and I need to know which. How many did you start with?"

"Nineteen."

"Alive now."

"Six. All six are on this apron."

"Bodies."

"Nine recovered. Four in the settling gallery, five in the culvert, because we ran out of anywhere. Four more we know are dead and could not reach. Inside the ring, north side, where the crawler parks."

"Nineteen minus six is thirteen. You have nine and you can point at four."

"Yes."

"Good." He nodded once, and it was not approval; it was a man closing a column. "Names."

Harken looked at him.

"Say again?"

"The names." The tremor went through his left hand and he shifted his weight, and it was the first thing he had done that looked like a person doing it. "The nine you have. The four you can't reach. The six standing here. Full names where you have them, and what they were actually called if the full name isn't what anyone used. If you don't know a name, say you don't know it. Don't skip it."

"For what?"

"It isn't—" He stopped. He appeared to consider several answers and discard all of them. "It's not for a report."

"Then what is it for?"

"It's owed."

Behind him the machine ticked and shed its slow green, and something inside it cycled with a long descending sigh, like a large animal changing position in its sleep.

Harken gave him the names.

She never afterwards had a good reason for doing it there, standing in the open, with Dominion recovery flights presumably already vectoring on the position. She gave him the nine in the order they had died, because that was the order they were in her head. Bekk Talleran. Corporal Vey Anders. Hoy Dessen. Marta Dessen, his sister, who they had not been able to put next to him because of the culvert. Ordell Rask. A woman everyone had called Pin, whose registered name Harken had never learned, and she said so. Sworn Eda Marchetti. Two brothers out of Sallow Bend named Kuyo and Tem Abadi.

He wrote nothing down.

At the four they could not reach he stopped her once, at Nerissa Vaunt, and said, "Spell it." She spelled it. He nodded and she went on.

Then the six on the apron. Fennick. Pryn. Sova. Lorrigan. Oruk. Herself.

"Tam Oruk," he said. "Nineteen."

"Yes."

"All right."

And then, in exactly the same voice:

"Do you have names for the two pilots?"

"Whose pilots?"

"Theirs."

Pryn made a small sound. Nobody else moved.

"Nobody has that," Harken said. "The Dominion doesn't publish crews. We don't recover their dead. In two years I have never had a name off the other side."

"No," he said. "I didn't think you would."

"Then why ask me?"

"So I can say I asked."

He looked past her, at the two black smears on the compound floor. "Crawler's at eight hundred metres. The shift log's aboard. If the log's wiped the maintenance schedule isn't — nobody signs out a coolant load without a name on the line. Forty minutes."

He said it the way a man says he will look at the boiler on his way past.

Then he turned his head slightly. "Anything heavy in your logs this month. Twelve hundred metres, dorsal spine, running the anchorage lane out of Tallis. Trenched along the top, if you saw it side on."

Fennick, grey on his stretcher, said no.

"All right," Leon Zadkiel said, and dropped it, and did not explain, and walked off across the flats toward the crawler without asking anybody's permission or telling anybody to wait.

She made herself have a professional opinion, standing in the kiln-heat off nineteen point eight metres of white laminate, because thirty-one years had taught her that the moment you stop assessing is the moment you become somebody's weather.

Here it was.

This was not a resistance asset.

A resistance asset was a thing you could lose. That was the definition. You lost it and grieved it and rebuilt around the hole, and the movement went on, because the movement was distributed and stupid and stubborn and nothing in it mattered very much. She had run cells on that principle for two years and buried three of them and the principle had held every time.

This was a strategic weapon. Two Karrn-class frames removed in under four seconds, at a range she could not determine, with no hit taken and no reduction in speed. It had then landed in a compound and stood radiating like an open furnace, and as far as she could tell it was undamaged and not even warm by its own standards.

And there was a person inside it.

One. Twenty-six years old. Two hours of sleep in him at the outside, a hand that would not stop, and a set of priorities that had gone in ninety seconds from casualty arithmetic to the given names of enemy pilots without passing through anything she recognised as command judgment.

The Order had spent two years building something that could survive losing its head. Now it was going to have one head, that one, and everything the Order became from this afternoon on would be shaped by whatever went on behind those eyes.

He is the end of the occupation or the beginning of the next one.

She did not know which. She was honest enough to know she did not know, and honest enough to know she would board the transport anyway, and that every person on this apron would follow that machine anywhere it went, starting today, and that her opinion had stopped being a factor somewhere around the time the second Karrn slid a hundred metres on its face.

She had no intention of saying any of it aloud.

He came back at 1651 with grease to the elbows and a slip of yellow maintenance film folded in his shaking hand.

"Sub-Lieutenant Havard Onn," he said. "Kestin Mor, senior pilot, forty-one. He signed out three hundred and eighty litres of coolant this morning and initialled it twice. The first one smudged."

Nobody answered him.

He put the film in a chest pocket and buttoned it.

The transport came in from the south at 1658, a converted ore lifter rated for two hundred and ten tonnes, with the Order's crossed keys sprayed on the flank by somebody working from a bad stencil. Harken stood at the ramp and counted her people aboard.

Tam Oruk went up third, Pryn under his good arm, both feet working. At the top he stopped and looked back at the compound, and Harken saw him decide not to ask about Hollowmark.

Unit-02 lifted at 1706. It did not crouch first and it made no more noise going than it had made coming down, and the green went out of Kessler Flats in a straight line and then in a different straight line, and what it shed hung over the apron a long time after.

On the compound floor there were two shallow black scars where the frames had stood.

No debris worth the name.

Nothing left to bury.

The ramp from the crew spine down to hangar deck two was twenty-two metres long and rose at eleven degrees, and Eliana had measured both figures herself, off the Anselm's original ore-hauler schematics, three days before anybody thought to tell her there was going to be a ceremony.

She had measured them because she measured everything now. It was the only form of ownership left to her.

The galley threshold: four centimetres, with a lip. Her bunk to the head: nine metres, doable in the mornings if she went along the wall. The habitation ring ran its gravity plating at 0.86 standard, because the Anselm's reactor was a hundred and forty-one years old and the Order was hoarding every megawatt for the drives. At 0.86, twenty-seven point six kilograms weighed twenty-three point seven.

It did not help. She had checked.

"No," she said.

"I haven't said anything yet."

"You've been in my doorway for eleven seconds doing your face."

Leon came in. Two hours of sleep in him — she knew, because she had heard him in the passage at 0340 and again at 0420 — and he had shaved, which he only did when he was going to be looked at. The left hand was in his pocket. It lived there in company now.

"There's a chair," he said.

"There is not a chair."

"There is a chair. Rennick found it in a med locker on the Ostrich, it's thirty-one kilos dry, it's got a geared crank on the right arm so you can drive it yourself without—"

"It's a wheelchair."

"It's a mobility platform," he said. "Which is a phrase I have practised eight times in the last hour and which I want you to know I hate."

She looked at the deck.

Pip lifted off the shelf above her bunk and came down to hover at her shoulder. Three rising tones, pause, three rising tones. Her saturation had gone under ninety-two while she was busy being angry. She reached up without looking and turned the cannula flow from 2.0 to 2.4 litres a minute and heard the concentrator on the trolley change note — and under the note, the hitch in the fan bearing that had started six days ago and that she had mentioned to nobody.

"Twenty-two metres," she said. "Eleven degrees. Then forty metres of flat deck to the mark. That's the problem. Say the problem out loud so we can stop dancing round it."

"Ellie."

"Say it."

He sat down on the end of the bunk, which put his eyes below hers. He did it on purpose. She let him have it.

"You can't do the ramp," he said.

"I can do the ramp."

"You can do the ramp once."

There it was. That was the sentence, and he had found it, and it was worse than the chair.

Because he was right. She could do it. Twenty-two metres at eleven degrees on her own feet in front of eleven hundred people, four minutes, maybe four and a half. At the bottom she would be grey and unable to speak, and she would spend two days in the bunk with the light off, and eleven hundred people would have watched her spend her body like a coin on a gesture.

"The chair," she said.

"The chair."

"A chair is worse."

"I know."

"You don't know. You think you know." She stopped, because her voice had gone somewhere she had not authorised. She waited. Started again, flat. "A chair is a throne. You put a small sick girl in a chair at the top of a ramp and roll her down in front of an army and you have made an image. You've made a poster. I've had enough of being a poster to last me the rest of my very short—"

"Don't."

"—the rest of my life," she said. "And I have watched what happens when people build a picture of me and then arrange themselves around it. I'm not doing it again on purpose, in a hangar, with music."

"There isn't music."

"There is absolutely music. I've heard them practising. It's four horns and a drum and it's dreadful."

He laughed. A real one. It cost him something to produce and she saw the cost, which spoiled it.

They sat with that.

"Then walk," he said. "Truly. I'll take the flow bottle, Garren takes the trolley, we go slow. Nobody says a word about it. If you stop, we stop. If you stop for a minute, then eleven hundred people learn to be patient for a minute."

She considered it seriously. That was the trap of Leon. He made you consider things.

"How long would we stand there?"

"As long as you want."

"No. How long. You've done the number. You always do the number, you did it before you came in here." She turned the signet on her thumb until the sunburst sat on the back of her hand, which was what her hands did by themselves when she wanted them to stop being visible. "How long do eleven hundred people watch a woman fail to walk before it's the only thing that happened today?"

He didn't answer.

"Forty seconds," she said. "It's forty seconds. After forty seconds they aren't watching a Zadkiel, they're watching a deathbed, and every one of them starts privately doing sums about how much good this is going to do them."

"That's not—"

"It's what people do. I've watched them do it. Over a table. With me at the table." She let the signet go. "So. Not the ramp on my feet. Not the chair. What's third?"

He looked at her.

Oh.

"No," she said.

"Ellie—"

"No."

"Eleven seconds," he said. "Top of the ramp to the bottom. I've timed it at a walk with sixty kilos of ballast in a kitbag. Then I put you down and you do the flat forty on your own, and you can do the flat forty. We both know you can do the flat forty."

"In front of everyone."

"Yes."

"You would carry me," she said. "In front of everyone."

"Yes."

Her eyes had gone. She could feel it happen the way you feel a room get cold — the violet going down into indigo, which she had never in twenty-three years been able to stop, which announced her like a flare, and which as a child she had tried to fix by holding her breath until somebody made her stop.

"Get out," she said.

He got out.

He came back forty minutes later with tea she wouldn't drink, put it on the shelf, and did not sit down.

"There's a fourth option," he said. "I hadn't thought of it. Garren thought of it."

"Which is?"

"We don't go."

She looked up.

"We just don't go. I send Harken a message. We're honoured, we decline, the House of Zadkiel is two people and a machine and doesn't require a ceremony to keep working. They kneel to an empty deck or they don't kneel at all. Nobody carries anybody. Nobody sees anything."

And she saw the shape of it, laid out neat, the way he laid things out when he had already decided and wanted her to arrive there on her own two feet, which was itself a joke he would never make.

"You'd let them do that," she said.

"If you want."

"Eleven hundred people crossed four systems to be here. On hulls that shouldn't hold pressure. Through an occupation. Because they decided they were an institution again."

"Yes."

"And you'd have them find out on the day that we couldn't be bothered."

"I'd have them find out that my sister said no," he said. "Which is a thing she's permitted to say. That's the entire point of a house you'd be kneeling to. If it can't say no, it isn't a house. It's a flag."

She sat there and hated him with a completeness that was almost restful.

Because now she could not not go. He had made not-going into a real, available, dignified thing, and by making it real he had handed her the entire weight of choosing, and there would be nobody to be angry at afterwards except herself. He had done all of that in forty minutes. With tea.

"You're very good at this," she said.

"I know."

"It's an unpleasant quality."

"I've been told. Twice today."

She looked at the trolley. At the concentrator with the hitch in the fan. At Pip's charge indicator, which read sixty-one percent and had read sixty-one percent for four hours, because the cells had stopped taking the last third of a charge two weeks ago and she had not mentioned that either.

"Eleven seconds," she said.

He went very still.

"Eleven seconds. Then you put me down and you let go of me completely. Both hands. No hovering. No hand at my back. Nothing. If I go over, I go over on my own, and you stand there and let it happen."

"Ellie."

"Those are the terms. You'll find them expensive. I found mine expensive."

He took a breath and let it out through his nose.

"All right," he said.

"And I want it on the record that I lost this."

"Noted."

"Written down somewhere."

"I'll have it carved."

"And—" She stopped. It came out anyway, because it always came out. It was the only piece of the future either of them still handled without gloves. "When I have a coat, Leon."

"I know."

"A real one. Wool. Lining. Buttons that were made for it, and that fits—"

"I know."

"—then we can have a conversation about whether I'm an adult who gets to decide how she enters a room."

"You'll have the coat," he said, which is what he had said on Veridus-9 in the rain outside the requisition office, and in the corridor outside the vault on Meridian-7, and eleven or twelve times in between.

"Mm," she said.

The Order of the Concord was nine hundred and six years old and until fourteen months ago had been, in every functional sense, a catering arrangement.

Eliana knew, because she had been to three of its galas.

At thirteen: the Emberfall, in the Hall of Quiet Waters, where she had counted the arms on the central chandelier — ninety-six — eaten seventeen of the small cakes with the candied violet on top, and then been sick in a service corridor while two footmen practised not existing. At sixteen: the Founding, where a Knight-Warden of the Third Reach had presented a medal on a cushion to a man who had project-managed a canal. At nineteen: the last one anyone ever held, eight months before the Ring, where her mother wore grey and the applause after the rite was the specific applause of people who want to get back to the shrimp.

The ranks were costume. Knight-Warden. Lance-Sergeant. Sworn of the Watch. There were six colours of sash, because a civilisation with nothing to fight had spent nine hundred years inventing gradations, and there had been a standing argument in the society pages about whether the plum outranked the slate.

The rite was called the Kneeling. Twice a year. Nine old men went down on parquet in front of whichever Zadkiel was available, said forty words, were helped up again, and afterwards everyone said how charming it was that they still did it.

She remembered thinking: what an enormous amount of trouble for a thing that means nothing.

She had been nineteen, and correct, and wrong, and both of those were true at once now.

Hangar deck two of the Anselm was three hundred and ten metres by forty, twelve-millimetre structural plate over frame at two-metre centres, rated for four tonnes a square metre because ore comes in blocks. That was the first thing she noticed from the top of the ramp — not the people. The deck.

Somebody had swept it. Then washed it. Twelve thousand square metres of ore-hauler plate under gantry light, and there were still wet streaks near the number-three cargo sump where it hadn't dried, and someone had spent hours doing that, on their knees, with a brush, for her.

The second thing she noticed was the clothes.

There were three sashes on the whole deck. One was authentic, plum, on a man in his eighties near the front who had brought it in a tube from Colvane and who was already crying — she clocked him and filed him and decided not to look again. The rest of it was mining coveralls. Directorate flight jackets with the crests cut off and re-sewn crooked. Freighter slops. A block of forty or fifty near the port bulkhead in the orange of the Tallis grain lighters, standing close together the way people stand when the group is the only thing they brought.

And all of them knew the words.

That was the part she had not prepared for and could not have prepared for. Because every child in the Reach learned the Kneeling at eleven. It was a school thing. You did it in the spring, in a hall that smelled of floor polish, with a cardboard sash and a wooden sword nobody was allowed to hold properly, and there was always a boy who was Sworn of the Watch and always forgot the second response.

Leon had been that boy. He had been eleven. He had dropped the line, and their mother had laughed so hard she had to leave the hall.

Eleven hundred people. A thousand cardboard sashes, twenty and thirty and fifty years ago, in a thousand halls that smelled of polish.

Nobody had needed to teach them anything. They had been carrying it the whole time.

Garren was at the head of the ramp with the trolley, one hand on the frame, breathing the way he breathed when he had come up two decks. He looked at the hangar, and at her, and at the hangar again.

"You want the flow at two-four or three," he said.

"Two-four."

"Right."

"You disagree."

"I've got no view," said Garren, and did not have a view, out loud, for the entire eleven seconds that followed.

Leon picked her up at the top of the ramp.

Fast, before she could arrange her face. One arm under her knees, one across her back, and he did not do it gently. That was the mercy, and she understood it as it happened: he handled her like cargo he was fond of. No care in it. No nurse. From the deck you saw a man lift someone small, not someone dying, and there was nothing in the motion for anyone to read.

Except her. She was against his chest and she could read all of it.

His left hand sat under her ribs. She had timed the tremor in the vault six weeks ago at a little over three cycles a second. She timed it again on the way down, because she was her mother's daughter and could not help it.

Four. Four and a bit.

Half a hertz in six weeks, and he had never mentioned it, and never would.

He had said eleven seconds. It was nine.

He set her down on the wet-streaked plate at the bottom, let go with both hands, and stepped back with his arms at his sides.

She stood.

Forty metres of flat deck. She had this. She lifted the cannula line over her shoulder so it wouldn't drag on the plate, and Garren came off the ramp behind her with the trolley at exactly her pace — not faster, never faster — and she walked.

She heard the sneakers on the wet part.

That was all there was to hear. Eleven hundred people, a hangar the length of a street, and the only sound in it was one pair of white sneakers going tack, tack, tack across a deck somebody had washed.

Commander Vael Harken was waiting at the mark.

Eliana had met her twice. Fifty-something to look at and considerably older in the file, with a burn scar taking the left side of the jaw and going down under the collar. A lieutenant in the Directorate when Aria Zadkiel commanded it. Three cells buried in fourteen months. She had the flat, unbothered manner of a woman who does all her crying in a locked compartment on a schedule.

Six days ago she had argued with Leon for two hours about fuel allocation and won. In neither meeting had she once looked at Eliana's cannula.

"Lady Eliana."

"Commander."

"This takes four minutes. If you need it to take longer, it takes longer."

"It will take four minutes," Eliana said.

Harken nodded once, turned, and faced the deck.

Eliana watched the back of her head and thought, with the part of her brain that never stopped working: she isn't going to do it. She'll say the words and nod. She's not a woman who kneels.

Harken knelt.

She did it the way you set down a crate. Right knee, then left. Then she put her right hand flat on the plate in front of her, which was not part of the rite as performed at the Emberfall Gala, which Eliana had never seen anyone do, and which she understood at once was not ceremony at all. It was what a woman with a bad back does to make sure she gets all the way down.

That was the thing that broke the room.

Because everyone on that deck knew Harken. They knew she had no use for pageantry. They knew what she had done at Colvane Transit to a man who wanted a gesture. She was the least sentimental object in the fleet, and she put her palm on a washed ore-deck and went down on both knees in front of a girl in a secondhand cardigan.

Behind her, eleven hundred people knelt.

It was not one sound. Eliana had assumed it would be one sound — a crack, a unison, the way it goes in a recording. It wasn't. It came apart across the deck like rain arriving. The front two ranks nearly together, a flat clatter of kneecaps on steel. Then it spread backwards in a ragged wave and took about four seconds to reach the far bulkhead, and inside those four seconds there was everything.

Boot toes scraping for purchase. A canteen swinging on a belt and hitting plate. A man three rows in who did not bend at the left knee at all and went down sideways with a hand on the shoulder of the woman beside him, and the woman took his weight without turning her head. A rolled jacket put down for somebody's knees, then thought better of, then picked up again so they could kneel on the bare steel.

An oxygen bottle — not hers, somebody else's, a small green two-litre, three rows back — set down on the plate very carefully so it would not go over.

Then it stopped, and it wasn't finished.

One man at the very back was still standing. She could see him over eleven hundred heads because he was standing. He had a crate in his arms: flat grey Directorate ration twelve-packs, four of them stacked. He had been carrying them through to the galley and had walked into this and stopped where he was.

He put the crate down. It took him a moment to do it properly, going into a crouch with it so it would not drop, and the tins settled against each other when it met the deck. A small chink. In that hangar you could hear it perfectly.

Then he knelt.

Then it was quiet, and in three hundred and ten metres of steel the only thing still making noise was the concentrator on the trolley behind her, cycling, with the hitch in the fan.

"By the Concord and its keeping," Harken said.

Eleven hundred voices. "I set my hand under the House that keeps it."

"Hand under."

"And shoulder under, and back under."

"Till the weight is carried—"

"—or I am."

She read the deck while they were down.

She could not help it. She had been doing it since she was six, since the first state dinner, when her mother leaned over and said tell me who in this room is frightened, and she got eleven out of twelve and had not been able to stop since. It was not a gift. It was a window that would not shut.

So she read them, and found what she already knew was there.

Fourth rank, left of centre: a man of about forty in Tallis lighter orange who had gone down half a beat behind everyone and had not lifted his head, and whose lips had not moved on or I am.

Second rank: a woman with grey at the temple who had knelt first and fastest and was staring at Eliana with a wide, fixed, unblinking attention. People mistake that for devotion. It is very often the face of somebody making sure they are seen doing something.

Portside, at the edge of the orange block: a woman in a coat.

An actual coat. Charcoal wool, double-breasted, the collar mended with a strip of the wrong grey. A good coat, kept for years, the sort of garment you carry through four evacuations because it is the only thing you own that says you once had a house. Eliana's whole body wanted it, and the wanting arrived before shame could get in front of it.

And the woman in the coat could not look at her. Not once, not through the whole rite. She looked at the plate, and at the middle distance, and at the back of the head in front of her, and her jaw was set like somebody waiting out a dentist.

Eleven months ago you were in a room somewhere, Eliana thought, and you said it out loud.

She did not know that. She knew it.

Because it had happened in front of her four times that she had personally sat through. Veridus-9. The requisition queue. The co-operative hall at Bright Fen. The ration line, where a woman with two boys said she'd be a queen, wouldn't she, it's not as if they'd hurt her to another woman while Eliana stood eighteen inches away holding a bag of dried peas. And in ten thousand rooms she had not been in.

Amnesty. Cessation of punitive operations. The corridors reopened. Grain moving again into the outer ring. Against one girl who was going to die anyway.

She had done the sum herself. Nobody knew that — not Leon, not Garren. She had sat with it in the dark on Veridus-9 with a calculator she had built out of the ration allocation tables, and she had got their answer, and she had never once found the error in the working. The only reason she had not walked in on her own was the second part, which she had worked out alone and told no one: that Vantalar did not want her. He wanted the Reach to hand her over. A people who sell a girl for grain do not stand up again afterwards.

So she knew what the woman in the coat had said. She knew the woman had not been a monster when she said it. And the woman was now on both knees on cold plate with her jaw set, waiting to be looked at by the thing she had priced.

Be gracious at every single one of them. And mean it. They weren't wrong, and I cannot afford for them to know that I know.

She was twenty-three years old and weighed twenty-seven point six kilograms, and she looked out over eleven hundred people kneeling on a deck they had washed for her, and for eight full seconds she was tired enough to consider lying down on it.

She had not intended to speak.

It was Leon's. All of it was Leon's. They had come for the pilot, for the machine, for the man who put nineteen hulls into the dark over Ceres Anchorage in forty minutes. The plan as agreed at 0500 was: Harken speaks, the rite, Leon says the short thing Garren wrote, everyone goes and eats.

She looked at him.

Four metres to her right. His hands were at his sides because she had made him leave them there, and the left one was going, openly, in front of the entire Order, four cycles a second where anyone could see. He had not put it in his pocket, because she had said both hands, and he was keeping his word like a lunatic.

And he had nothing. She could see it. She had been watching that face since she was old enough to focus, and she knew every arrangement it made, and this was the one from the cellar on Veridus-9 in month nine. The closed one. The one where nothing came out for two days.

He was standing in front of eleven hundred kneeling people with a speech in his mouth he was not going to be able to say.

So she walked five steps forward, which she had not budgeted for, and said:

"Stand up. Please. Now, if you don't mind — there are at least three hundred of you who should not be on a knee at all, and I can see every one of you, and it's making me anxious."

The noise of eleven hundred people getting up is much worse than the other one. She waited it out.

"I'm not going to tell you we're going to win. I don't know that. You'd hear it in my voice.

"Here's what I do know, because I asked Quartermaster Rennick this morning and he was rude enough to answer honestly, which is the highest compliment currently available. Eleven weeks of protein at present strength. Two functioning slipdrives across five hulls. One machine. One pilot for it, who sleeps two hours a night — which I want on the record, because he will never put it there himself.

"My father built a machine and it killed him. My mother stood in a doorway. Neither of those is a story about heroes. They're both arithmetic, and in both cases the arithmetic was bad, and I would like ours to be better.

"You've just knelt to a house. There isn't one. There's a hangar, and my brother, and me, and I weigh less than your kit.

"I'm told the rite requires me to receive your service in a garment appropriate to my station." She raised her left elbow and turned it so the gantry light went through the hole. "So I suggest we lower our standards together and get on with the afternoon.

"One promise, and it's the only one I have. I will learn your names. All of them. I'm good at names; it is the single marketable skill I have ever possessed. If you are going to be spent on this, then somebody in this fleet is going to know exactly what was spent.

"That's everything. Go and eat something."

The corridor behind the number-three sump was two metres wide, unlit except for the running strip, and smelled of ore dust that ninety years of scrubbers had never got out of the plate.

She made eleven metres before her legs stopped negotiating.

She went down against the bulkhead in stages — hand, hip, shoulder — and sat with her legs straight out in front of her like a doll, and the shaking came up through her from somewhere under the floor. Not cold. It was never cold. It came in waves at about one every three seconds, through the ribs and out, and there was nothing to do but sit and count them.

Pip came down to eye level. Three rising tones, pause, three rising tones. Then again.

"I know," she said. "Yes. I know."

She put the flow to 3.0, which was more than she was allowed and which she would pay for in the night, and rested her head on the bulkhead, and the concentrator ran and hitched and ran.

The cough came at ninety seconds. She had known it was coming from the moment she took the fifth step forward on the deck. She had bought it with those five steps and she had known the price when she paid it. She got the handkerchief up in time. That was the only part that mattered.

It was bright, not dark.

She folded it. Half, half again, wet part inside. Pocket. She smoothed the pocket flat with two fingers.

Leon came round the corner.

Six metres. Nothing between them.

She did not stop smoothing the pocket, because stopping would have been an admission, and he did not stop walking, because stopping would have been the same. So the two of them finished the motions they were already inside, and arrived at the same place, and looked at each other for slightly less than a second.

He saw. She saw him see. He knew she had seen him see it. All three happened inside that second and none of them got out.

He crouched down opposite her, back against the far bulkhead, forearms on his knees.

"Four horns and a drum," he said.

"I told you."

"You did tell me. You were right, it was appalling. The drum was flat. I don't know how you make a drum flat. And Harken's face during it—"

"I couldn't see her face."

"It was the face of a woman filing a report."

Eliana laughed, which hurt, in the particular place under the right shoulder blade that had started hurting in the spring. "She put her hand on the deck."

"I saw."

"That's not in the rite. At the Emberfall they just—" she made a small vague motion "—dipped. A curtsey with extra steps. Nobody ever put a hand down."

"Bad back," Leon said. "She was making sure of the landing."

"I know. That's why."

He nodded slowly and looked at the running strip instead of at her, which was a kindness, and she let him have it, and left her hand resting on the pocket of the cardigan. Neither of them said one word about the four seconds that had just gone past.

This was the arrangement. It had just been signed.

"Your speech was better than mine," he said.

"You didn't give one."

"That's what I'm saying. Mine was four hundred words, Garren wrote most of them, and one of them was 'unbowed'."

"Unbowed."

"I know."

"Garren wrote 'unbowed'?"

"He'll deny it."

"He'll deny it badly," she said. "He can't lie, he goes quiet and looks at a wall—"

Then she had to stop and breathe for a while, and Leon waited without offering her anything, exactly as instructed, for as long as it took.

She was still on the deck when the girl came through.

She came at speed from the sump end, headset round her neck, slate under one arm, mug in her free hand, in a Directorate signals jacket four sizes too big with the cuffs turned back three times, talking to somebody who wasn't there.

"—no, because if the offset were in the header we'd have caught it in the first hundred blocks, wouldn't we, so it's not in the header, it's — oh. Hello."

She had stopped in front of them. Twenty, maybe. Round-faced. Hair cut short by somebody in a hurry. A smear of thermal paste along her jaw.

"Hello," said Eliana.

"You're on the floor."

"I am."

"Fair enough. Long day." She looked at Leon, then back at Eliana, and did not look at the cannula, or the trolley, or the wrists. "I've missed the whole thing, apparently. Everyone's coming out and they've gone weird and quiet, and Ovin is crying into the protein vats, which is frankly a hygiene issue. Was it good? Someone said horns."

"Four horns."

"I'm gutted. Wren Callas, signals. I know who you both are, obviously, the whole ship's got your faces on the—" She stopped. One honest flicker went across her face — oh no, not that, not the silos — and she went straight through it without apologising, which Eliana would remember for the rest of her life. "Anyway. Sorry. Can I ask you something completely selfish?"

Leon said, "She's—"

"Yes," said Eliana.

"Right. So." Wren crouched, set the mug on the plate, and turned the slate round so the strip light caught the screen. "We pulled two hundred and forty hours of Dominion fleet traffic off a relay at Corvane four days ago. Most of it's rubbish. Laundry rosters. A yard requisition at Kestrel for nine hundred tonnes of niobium-tin superconductor and eleven cryo plants, which I'm sure is fine and normal and nobody should think about at all. But underneath that there's an archive stack they captured from us. Pre-war Reach naval. They've been sitting on it eleven months, because they can't open it either."

"Why can't they open it?"

"The index is in Old Astraian," Wren said, "and the machine dictionary we've got is garbage — it was built off a liturgical corpus, so it thinks every third word is a hymn. Six days. Nowhere. I am going quietly out of my mind. And this morning Harken says to me, offhand, like it's nothing—" she flipped the slate back round and jabbed at it "—ask the Lady, she reads it."

Eliana looked at the screen.

Four columns of it in the old orthography, the long consonant ligatures her mother had drilled her on at a kitchen table for two hours every Fifthday from the age of five, while Leon sat opposite failing to get his tongue round a single syllable. Naval index headers. Berth allocations. Somebody's filing convention from sixty years before she was born.

"No pressure at all, obviously," Wren said, "and you're clearly busy being important today, but if you had an hour this week — honestly, twenty minutes, just to tell me whether column three is a date field, because if column three is a date field then I've been—"

"Yes."

It came out before the sentence finished. Fast, flat, slightly too loud. It bounced once off the bulkhead and she heard herself do it.

Nobody had ever asked her to do a job.

Not once, in twenty-three years. She had been asked to be well, and to be seen, and to be somewhere else, and to be brave, and to be handed over. She had been a price on a wall two metres tall above a display of turnips. She had been an item on an agenda. She had been carried down a ramp nine minutes ago in front of eleven hundred people.

Can I ask you something completely selfish.

"Yes," she said again, in a more reasonable voice, and could not get her face to do anything sensible at all. "Yes. Column three isn't a date, it's a berth-class prefix — they only look like dates because the old yards numbered by keel-week. Give me the slate."

The ritual had rules. Leon had written none of them down and could have recited all of them in order at any hour, because that was the shape of his head and always had been.

Rule one: he came straight from the frame. Not from the showers, not from debrief, not from Harken's table with its cold tea and its casualty board. From the frame. Whatever he had on him, he brought.

Rule two: he did not sit until she told him to sit.

Rule three: he said the names in the order he had them and he did not sort them into a shape.

Rule four: if he had missed one, he said I missed one, out loud, and then what he had tried, and how it had failed, and she wrote that down too.

Rule five was the one he had made himself and never told her about. No slate in the room. He carried them in his head, every time, all of them, and he said them out of his head, because a man reading a list is doing a job and a man saying a list is doing something else, and he had decided early which of those he was going to be.

Unit-02 came in from Kessler at 0417 fleet time.

Burn scar down the left shoulder pauldron where a disruptor field had spoiled his own beam back across his own armour and taken ninety square centimetres of ablative down to the substrate. Coolant loop at four hundred and six. Eleven minutes of GN reserve on the port tank, nine on the starboard, and a differential the flight engineer was going to shout about for an hour.

The hangar crew got the umbilicals on before the drives finished spinning down. Vapour came off the knee joints in sheets.

Leon took the winch line out of the cockpit hatch instead of the ladder, because the ladder was forty seconds and the winch was nine.

His left hand shook. It had shaken since Meridian-7. It would shake for the rest of it.

He walked to the analysis bay in a flight suit that stank of scorched polymer and his own sweat, and he had nine names.

She had the bay lights at a quarter because the overheads gave her headaches now. Four displays. A pen.

An actual pen. Weighted brass, secondhand, from a stationer on Meridian-7 who had thrown it in free with a ream of paper because he could not stop looking at her and wanted to be a good man about it.

"Sit down," Eliana said, without turning.

He sat.

"Kessler."

"Kessler."

"Nine?"

"Nine."

She turned the chair around. Twenty-eight kilos of her, in the cardigan with the hole in the left elbow, mask hooked over one ear and hanging at her jaw so she could talk. Pip asleep in her lap with its charge light doing the slow amber thing it had started four weeks ago and which neither of them had mentioned.

"Go," she said.

He went.

"Ours. Ansel Rho, twenty-nine, Lance-Sergeant, Ossuary cell. Fragment through the neck seal at eleven minutes. Dead before the suit finished reporting it. Deval Kiirn, thirty-four, gunner, same cell, decompression, four to six seconds. He would have known. Marta Ospry, sixty-one. Not ours. Harbourmaster's clerk. Already dead when we came through the west arm, three days, maybe four. They left her where she fell outside the pump room and the cold kept her."

Eliana wrote. The nib made a dry sound on the paper.

"Ours who lived," he said. "Twelve of fifteen. You want those?"

"You know I want those."

"Wren's fine. Wren shot at a wall for six minutes because the wall was making noise."

"The wall was making noise," Eliana said. "I heard the wall. Go on."

He gave her the twelve. Then he stopped, and she looked up, because she could hear a stop.

"Theirs," he said.

"Theirs."

"Sergeant-of-Ordnance Baht Drusk, forty-four. Pilot-Cadet Ilyen Fahr, nineteen. Deck-Officer Wen Corvath, fifty-one. Signal-Rate Ysolde Maerc, twenty-two. Gunner Ovic Trell, thirty-eight. Ensign of the Fourth, Rasp Vantine, twenty-six."

Her pen kept going after he stopped. She wrote slower than he spoke. She never asked him to slow down and she never missed one.

"Ages," she said. "You got ages."

"I got the registry."

"How."

"I went and got the registry."

She set the pen down flat, parallel to the edge of the paper. That was the thing she did when she was choosing not to ask the next question yet.

"Nine," she said. "Thank you."

"Eliana—"

"Nine."

She picked the pen back up. He stood. She coughed twice into her sleeve at the very end, turning her body so the sleeve was on the far side of her from him.

He saw it.

He said nothing.

Here is how he got the registry, because the how is the whole of it.

A Kaelic line vessel carried its personnel manifest in three places. The purser's core, the medical core, and a hardened casualty block bolted to the frame spar behind the reactor shield, because the Dominion paid death benefits and did not intend to pay them twice.

The block was armoured to eight centimetres of laminate, rated to survive the loss of the ship. Which meant that when the ship was gone, the block was still there, hanging in the field at whatever velocity the last event had given it, chirping a locator ping every ninety seconds on a frequency the Dominion recovery service listened for and nobody else bothered with.

Leon bothered with it.

Month three. Bellamy Drift. The engagement had ended forty minutes earlier and there were still active elements at eighty thousand kilometres. Unit-02 sat against the ventral hull of a Kaelic escort called the Hemlock Ardent with GN output throttled to nine percent so the particle bloom would not paint him on anyone's plot.

He went out of the cockpit himself. That was the part Garren would have hit him for.

Vacuum suit, Order issue, four hours twenty of consumables, mag boots rated for structural steel that did not love Kaelic hull ceramic. He got about sixty percent hold on the deck plate and had to walk like a man on wet stone.

The Hemlock Ardent had been opened from frame nine to frame twenty-two by his own beam ninety minutes before. He walked in through the wound.

Two hundred and eleven kelvin and falling. Everything very slightly turning, because the ship was turning, one revolution every four minutes eleven seconds, and the loose contents of the corridor turned with it. A clipboard. A boot. A cook's ladle, going end over end down the length of the passage at walking pace, unhurried, on its way somewhere.

There were people in there. He did not look at them longer than he had to and he did not look away, either, because looking away was a decision and he had stopped making that one.

His helmet lamp found the frame spar. Then the block. Grey, unlovely, stencilled in Kaelic characters he could not read and had memorised the shape of anyway.

He got the spike into the port on the second try. His left hand shook, so he did the fine work with the right and braced with the left, and that cost eleven seconds every single time and would keep costing it.

The slate lit. Transfer began. Nine thousand four hundred records at whatever the block's ancient bus would give him, which was four minutes and twenty seconds of standing in a dead ship holding a slate.

He read while it copied. He always read while it copied.

Sub-Ordinate Halbrek Voss, 31, Ordnance. Dependents: 0.

Rate Mira Solund, 24, Environmental. Dependents: 1.

Deckmaster Yorin Ashe, 47, Damage Control. Dependents: 3.

His hand stopped on that one. Not the shaking hand. The other one.

Three. A number with a shape in it now. A cellar on Veridus-9, a man's face, and a name he had not said out loud in front of his sister and did not intend to.

He kept copying.

Outside, at forty-one thousand kilometres, the Order's second element was losing a fight it had been told to lose for eleven minutes so the first element could get around behind. He could hear it in his helmet. Wren's voice on the cell channel, cheerful and much too fast, calling vectors. Harken under her, slower, cutting.

He had six minutes of margin. He spent four minutes twenty of it on nine thousand four hundred names, six thousand of whom were alive and posted elsewhere and irrelevant, and three thousand four hundred of whom had been aboard.

Then he pulled the spike, walked back out through the wound, and killed the second element's problem in ninety seconds with a beam that took the coolant loop to four hundred and forty and made the left arm actuator sing at a frequency he could feel in his teeth.

Garren met him on the deck.

"You went EVA."

"I stretched my legs."

"In a live engagement. In a wreck. On a spinning hull. Alone. For four and a half minutes." Garren coughed once, into a fist, and waited it out. "To steal a phone book."

"It's not a phone book. It's got ages in it."

Garren looked at him for a while. Two hundred and seventeen years of face and no hurry anywhere in it.

"Your father used to explain himself," he said.

"Did it help?"

"No."

"Well then."

Garren went and had two measures and stopped, and did not mention it again.

Three weeks later Leon found a suit-mounted spike in his locker. Unlabelled. Hardened bus adaptor, a shim board someone had cut by hand, transfer rate rewired to run four times faster. Neither of them said a word about that either.

Four minutes twenty became one minute five.

Leon started boarding two wrecks a sortie.

Month three: forty-one names.

Eleven minutes to say. She wrote for fourteen, because she was slower than he was now, and she made him wait at the end of each block, and he waited.

Month four: a hundred and six.

That was the Tarn Belt, and a hundred and six was not one battle, it was three days of them. By the end he was giving her names off ships he had not personally killed, because he had started pulling casualty blocks from vessels the Order had killed too, on the grounds that if the promise meant anything it did not contain an exception for the ones somebody else shot.

She stopped him once, mid-list.

"Say that one again."

"Rate Ysolde Maerc, twenty-two, Signals."

"No. She was at Kessler."

He checked. Not the slate. His head.

"She was at Kessler," he agreed. "She survived Kessler. Reposted to the Grave Astern on the ninth."

Eliana looked at the page. Then she drew a small line from one entry to the other, across two months of paper, and wrote something beside it in Old Astraian.

"What's that say?"

"Sel a' rhenna vaith."

"Say it slower."

"Sel — a' — rhen—"

"Sella renner vayth."

"That's not it."

"That's close."

"That's a shipping company," Eliana said. "You have just said the name of a shipping company. They do bulk grain."

"What does it mean?"

"It means she went twice." She put the pen down and looked at nothing for eight or nine seconds. Then she picked it back up. "Go on."

The thing nobody outside the analysis bay understood was that his sister was winning the war.

Not decoratively. Not in the way the Order's broadsheets meant it when they put her face on things, which they did, which she loathed with a purity he found almost restful.

She was the best analyst the Order of the Concord had. It was not close and the gap was not going to be closed by anybody else in the fleet.

Kaelic operational traffic ran on a rolling substitution cipher keyed off ephemeris data — ship positions, orbital elements, the actual physical arrangement of the sky. Breaking it required the key schedule or a very good idea of where everything was. The Order's decryption stack was two racks of surplus commercial hardware in the Ardent Widow's number three hold. It averaged nineteen hours per intercept and it was wrong eleven percent of the time.

Eliana averaged four hours. Then two. By month four she was reading command-level traffic in under fifty minutes and she was wrong less than one percent of the time, and when she was wrong she said so first, before anyone asked, in the flat voice of a woman reading out a stock number.

She did it by not trying to break the cipher. She read the shape. She held four hundred ship positions in her head the way other people held a tune, and when a packet came in she did not decrypt it — she looked at what the sky had to have been for that packet to be that length, and worked backward.

Harken watched her do it once, all the way through, and then went and sat somewhere else for a while.

He saw her work live exactly twice. The second time was Sable Crossing.

He was nine minutes out with the extraction team's beacon in his left plot and a Kaelic picket line thickening across his approach, and her voice came up on the command channel, unhurried, with the mask hiss under it like weather.

"Leon. Don't take the gap at two-two-zero."

"There's a gap at two-two-zero."

"There's a hole. The hole is a tender with its emitters cold. They have put a cold tender in a gap and they are hoping. Come round the far side of the moon and take the picket at one-eight-five, the one that looks worse."

"It looks a great deal worse."

"It's a supply hull with a gun bolted to it and a crew of nineteen and they've been at station forty-one days and their reactor's been running hot since Tuesday. I've got their coolant requisitions." A pause. Two breaths. "One-eight-five, please."

He took one-eight-five. It cost him four minutes and a hundred and ten degrees on the loop and the extraction came out whole, all eleven of the Concord signals staff who had been scheduled for public sentencing in six days, one of them carried.

The gap at two-two-zero closed forty seconds after he did not fly through it.

Month three, she found the rotation.

Kaelic pickets in the occupied Reach rotated on a fourteen-day cycle. Everybody knew it. It was in every briefing. Eliana found that they did not — they rotated on a fourteen-day cycle modulated by a two hundred and ninety-one day maintenance cadence out of Tallis Anchorage, which meant that every forty-one days, for about nine hours, one arc of the line was held by hulls straight out of yard that had not yet re-synced their disruptor emitters to the local grid.

Nine hours. Every forty-one days. A hole you could take a fleet through.

Four operations went through it. Bellamy Drift: six hundred and forty tonnes of medical stock into a system nine months under interdiction. Sable Crossing. The Ossuary run. The Tarn Belt interdiction, which cost the Dominion two destroyers and a fleet oiler, and cost the Order eleven dead, which he named to her the same night, standing up, all eleven.

Harken said it out loud in front of forty people at the Tarn Belt debrief, which was the most reckless thing Leon ever saw the woman do.

"Understand what happened here. Unit-02 did not do this. Unit-02 did the last four minutes." Harken did not raise her voice and did not look at Eliana. "The other seventy-one hours were done by an analyst who is twenty-three and weighs less than the flight helmet on that table. If any of you have got the idea she's our mascot, lose it in the next six seconds."

Nobody clapped. Harken would have hated that. There was only a movement through the room, forty people adjusting how they were standing.

Eliana went scarlet to the collarbones and said, to the floor, "The oiler was an accident."

"No it wasn't," said Wren Callas, from the back. "You circled it. On the plot. Twice. I have the plot."

"Wren."

"I photographed the plot—"

"Wren, I will end you."

Wren Callas, twenty, signals, loud as a dropped tray. She adored Eliana openly and without agenda and called her by her first name, because Eliana had asked her to once, in a corridor, in a voice that went strange halfway through the sentence, because nobody outside the family had ever needed permission before.

Leon watched his sister laugh at something Wren said and then stop laughing, carefully, in stages, because laughing cost her. He watched her hide the stopping inside reaching for her mask. He watched Wren not notice.

He stayed by the door and let it happen.

Month four, day nineteen, a Dominion open-band broadcast came through on the civil relay at 1130, and Eliana had it on the bay speakers because she processed everything and made exceptions for nothing.

Vantalar's voice. Warm. Unhurried. A man reading out a rota.

"—the Household Requisition remains open. It has no expiry. I am asked frequently whether the terms have hardened; they have not, and they will not. Cessation of punitive operations, unconditional amnesty, restoration of civil administration, the outer-ring corridors reopened within nine days of arrival. The Lady's own words on the value of a single life were, I think, the finest thing said in this war by anyone. I merely take her at it."

Eliana did not stop typing.

"He's put the corridor figure up," she said. "Fourteen days last time. Nine now."

"Turn it off."

"No. He does his sums in public, it's the most useful thing about him." She tabbed to another window. "Nine days means the corridor stock is already forward-positioned. Which means there's a depot inside two jumps of Halloway that wasn't there in month two. Which is a target."

"Eliana."

"He is buying me with a warehouse," she said. "The least I can do is find the warehouse."

She found the warehouse. It went up eleven days later with four thousand tonnes of grain in it, and there was a week where the broadsheets in three systems ran her face beside the word famine, and she read all of them, and did not mention it, and worked nineteen hours the day after.

She lied about all of it. Constantly, and well.

Lie one. Month three, day nine.

"How long have you been up?"

"Six hours." She did not look up. "Slept from twenty-two to five."

Pip's charge cycle ran ninety-four minutes on the failing cells and announced the start of each one — three rising tones, pause, three rising tones. Pip had been in Leon's ear on an open channel he had keyed in the bay for exactly this purpose since the night he flew Kessler.

Pip had chimed at 2211. 2345. 0119. 0253. 0427. 0601.

Every cycle since 2211 had drawn at rates consistent with active telemetry monitoring. Sleep mode drew forty percent less. She had not been in sleep mode since the previous morning.

Twenty-eight hours. She said six.

He said, "Right."

Lie two. Month four, day two.

"Sats?"

"Ninety-four."

The wall unit behind her left shoulder had a repeater display. Over three weeks she had walked her chair four degrees off square from the desk, a fraction at a time, so that her body sat between the repeater and the door. It was clever. It was gradual enough that it should not have been noticeable.

He had the original angle. He had every original angle in the room, down to the cable runs, from the first day.

From the doorway, at a hundred and eighty-five centimetres, he could see the top eleven millimetres of the repeater over her hair. Enough for the first digit.

Eight. Eight point something. It had not been a nine at rest in nineteen days.

He said, "Good."

Lie three. Month four, day twenty-six. This was the one where she went to the trouble.

Order clinical software, standard package. Automatic ingest from the mask and the wrist band. Manual entry for weight and intake.

He read it every second night at 0300 from his own quarters, on a viewer permission she did not know he had, which he had not asked for and had simply taken.

Weight logged: 27.4 kilograms. That was a lie of about six hundred grams and he could live with six hundred grams.

Intake logged: eleven hundred kilocalories, time-stamped 1902.

The galley's dispensing record was a separate system in a separate hold, kept by a bored quartermaster's mate who logged everything because he had nothing else to do. Tray drawn 1847. Tray returned 1911. Weighed on return, because everything was weighed on return, because they were running a war out of six converted freighters.

Difference: one hundred and ninety grams of a nine-hundred-gram tray.

She had eaten a fifth of it. Then she had opened the clinical package and typed eleven hundred kilocalories. Then, eleven minutes later, she had gone back and edited it down to nine hundred and forty.

Because eleven hundred was too good. Because she knew it was too good. Because she was managing the plausibility of her own falsified log.

She was better at this than most intelligence officers he had worked with, and she was doing it to a brother who counted things, and who was going to say nothing.

Here was the reasoning. He had it worked to the last term, because he had done nothing else with the inside of his head for four months.

If he said it, she would stop. She was not stupid and she was not stubborn about the wrong things. Lay it out — the Pip cycles, the four-degree chair, the return scale, the eleven-minute edit — and she would look at him for a second and say all right, and stop.

And then everything after that would be managed. Every hour she worked would be an hour someone had allowed her. Every meal observed. The mask a decision other people made about her body. She would be a patient in a room where people did jobs around her, which was what she had been for nineteen of her twenty-three years, and which she had escaped for four months, and the escape had cost her half her remaining mass.

She had one thing. Not health; she had never had that. Not a future. Not safety — the galaxy had been invited to trade her for grain and had thought about it seriously in front of her, at a table, with her sitting at it.

She had the authorship. The deciding what she spent herself on. The lying about the rate. The locked door.

He could take that and buy weeks. Weeks in a chair by a window, being kind to.

He knew exactly how bad it was. That was the worst feature of it. He had examined the flaw from every side and found the alternative also unforgivable, and had then chosen the unforgivable that let him keep coming into the room.

You are doing what he did, he thought once, at 0300, with the falsified log open. You are doing exactly what he did, with better words.

He closed the log. He slept two hours and eleven minutes. He flew at 0600.

He almost said it once.

Month four, day thirty-one. 0240 by the bay clock. He had come back off Sable Crossing with the right leg actuator locked at eleven degrees and a hundred and six names, and he had given her the hundred and six, and it had taken twenty-two minutes.

At the end she put the pen down and left her hand flat on the paper, because her hand was not steady enough to lift cleanly and she wanted that disguised.

He stood up to go. Then he did not go.

"Eliana."

"Mm."

"How many hours today?"

"Nine."

"Right." He looked at the four displays. At the tray on the side table with the film still sealed over it. At the mask, hooked at her jaw, off, because she took it off when she heard his boots in the corridor. It cost her eleven seconds. She had been doing it since the end of month two.

"I need to say something to you," he said, "and I need you to let me get to the end of it, because I have been not saying it for about four months and I don't think I can carry it a fifth."

She looked up.

Her eyes went. Pale violet at the centre and indigo coming in from the outside of the iris, and she understood the whole thing before he had finished the sentence, ahead of him, complete.

Then she smiled. Fast, bright, entirely deliberate.

"Is it about the coat?"

He stopped.

"Because I want to be clear," Eliana said, "that if this is the coat conversation, I am prepared. I have been preparing for fourteen months. I have notes."

"Eliana."

"You promised me a coat on Veridus-9. Month nine. You said, and I quote, because one of us in this family has the memory and it is not the one who thinks he does—" she put on a voice, a flat terrible approximation of his "—next month, when the salvage clears, I'm getting you a coat that fits."

"The salvage did not clear."

"The salvage did not clear," she agreed. "Not on Veridus-9. Not on Halloway. Not in the fourteen months since, during which you have acquired: a stolen war machine, a mobile fleet, a knighthood from an organisation that used to hand out ribbons at flower shows, and the personal attention of a head of state. But not a coat."

"It's a very specific size."

"It's a child's size, Leon. You can buy it in a toy shop."

"That's not funny."

"It's a bit funny." Still smiling. Her eyes were wrong. "And until it arrives, we have an arrangement. Say the arrangement."

He did not say the arrangement.

"When I have real clothes," she said, "and a coat that fits, then we will consider treating me like an adult. Those are the terms. You wrote them. You were nineteen and you thought you were being hilarious. I am currently wearing a cardigan two sizes wrong with a hole in the elbow, so I am not an adult, and you cannot have a serious conversation with me. That's the rule. You made it. I've kept the minutes."

An exit, cut to size, held open for him.

He took it.

"Fine," he said. "But when the coat comes, you're getting the conversation. Both barrels. Bullet points. There'll be a slide deck."

"When the coat comes," she said, "I'll sit through anything."

"That's a promise, is it."

"That's a promise."

He went out. Nine metres down the corridor he put his hand flat on the bulkhead and stood there a while with his eyes shut.

The numbers, across those months, flatly, because flat was the only way he could hold them.

Month two, day one. Mask fourteen hours a day. Weight 28.1. She walked the ramp from the analysis bay to the mess, nine metres at eleven degrees, once a day, slowly, alone, and was insufferable about it.

Month two, day nineteen. Mask fifteen. Weight 27.9. Coughed blood on the fourteenth, the seventeenth and the eighteenth. Logged none of it. Pip logged all three, because Pip was a machine and did not love her, and Leon read Pip's raw buffer at 0300 like the coward he was.

Month three, day six. Mask sixteen. Weight 27.6. Ramp twice a week.

Month three, day twenty-two. Mask seventeen and a half. Weight 27.2. She did the Tarn Belt rotation in a fifty-one hour block with two sleeps in it, and was right about all of it, and eleven people came home who would not have.

Month four, day four. She stopped managing the ramp.

There was no scene. She did not go to the mess that day, or the next. On the third day Wren started bringing trays down, loudly, as if it had always been the arrangement. On the fifth day Leon carried her up to the observation blister to look at a nebula. She put her arms around his neck the way she had when she was six. She did not speak the whole way and she kept her face where he could not see it.

Month four, day eleven. He came into the bay at 0530 and there was a chair.

Not her chair. Her chair was a rolling office seat off a freighter's cargo office and it had been quietly wrecking her spine for three months.

This was a cut-down pilot's acceleration couch. Ordnance-grade padding, rated to eight g. Someone had taken forty centimetres out of the back and re-stitched the cover by hand, badly, in the wrong colour thread. Four M10 bolts through a fabricated steel foot into the deck plate. A rail on the left side at the right height for an oxygen bottle. A shallow lip across the front of the seat pan, so a body that had stopped being able to hold itself in place would not slide forward across an eighteen-hour shift.

It was set at exactly the right distance from the desk.

Somebody had measured.

Harken never mentioned it. Leon stood in the door of the commander's compartment that evening and Harken looked up from a casualty board and said, "Yes?"

"Nothing."

"Good," Harken said, and went back to the board.

Eliana never mentioned it either. She sat in it. She said once, to Wren, "the new chair's better for my back," in the voice of a woman discussing office furniture, and Wren said "oh good," and the two of them went back to arguing about a chess position Wren was losing catastrophically.

Month five, day two. Mask nineteen hours. Weight 26.4.

Month five, day eight, he brought her two hundred and thirty-eight.

The Dominion had stopped duelling him. That was the change. It had happened between one sortie and the next.

Twelve units on twelve vectors, with a screen of eight obsolete hulls flown by people who had been told to be in the way and were in the way. A disruptor field off a picket tender at the centre of it, spoiling GN coherence across a four-thousand-kilometre bubble, degrading fin funnel response by 0.041 seconds. Which sounds like nothing, until nine beams have to arrive inside a shrinking window and the window has moved before the funnels have finished agreeing to be where they were put.

He killed all twelve. It took nineteen minutes instead of two.

The screen hulls were forty-year-old Sabre patterns with no GN capacity, two thrusters each, and a top rate of turn that meant none of them could have avoided anything. He hit six of them because they were between him and the window. Coolant loop peaked at four hundred and sixty-two, past the yellow. Something in the left knee actuator made a noise on the way home that he did not report.

Sync at peak: 90.2.

The casualty block he pulled off the tender — one minute five seconds, hardened spike, thank you Garren — had two hundred and thirty-eight names in it, and a routing packet with no business being in a personnel core, addressed to a yard slip at Tallis Anchorage, referencing an assembly designated LANCE, CRIMSON, and a power budget.

He read the budget in the cockpit on the way back and did the arithmetic twice and did not like the answer either time.

He gave her the packet first, before the names, because she was the analyst and that was the professional order of things.

She read it for ninety seconds.

"They're building a beam," she said.

"They're building a beam."

"Off Mother's fragments. Dreadnought-mounted, fed off the main plant, so no psycho-frame, so no pilot, so they don't need anyone at sixty-one point four or anywhere near it." She scrolled. "Output's a third of you. A quarter sustained."

"That's what I got."

"It doesn't have to match you." She set the slate down. "Leon. It doesn't have to match you. It only has to hurt you once."

"Yes."

"They've stopped trying to win the fight. They're making it cost." She looked at the packet again. "That's a patient man's weapon."

"Vantalar."

"No. Vantalar is theatrical, Vantalar quotes me back at myself on the civil relay at half eleven in the morning. This is the Overlord. This is a man who thinks conquest is a heat engine." She rubbed her eyes with the back of her wrist, and the signet turned on her thumb, and she pushed it back around so the sunburst sat on the back of her hand where it belonged. "I'll write it up properly for Harken in the morning."

"It is the morning."

"Then I'll write it up properly for Harken this afternoon, which is a completely different thing and you know it." She squared her paper. "Names."

"There are two hundred and thirty-eight."

"I know. I heard the traffic."

"It'll take a while."

"Then it'll take a while. Sit down."

He sat down.

He started at 0512.

He gave them in the order the block had them, which was by frame section. The engineering rates came in a block of forty. Ordnance in a block of thirty-one. There was a run of nine near the middle who had all been in one compartment and had all been nineteen or twenty. He did not group them and he did not comment and he did not skip the run of nine.

He said theirs too. Fourteen. He said them in the middle, where they came, and not at the start where they would have been an accusation and not at the end where they would have been a conclusion.

At one point he said: "I missed some. The Fen Ardor went up whole. Block was inside the reactor breach, nothing on the frequency when I swept. That's about a hundred and ninety I can't name. I looked for eleven minutes. I couldn't get them. I'm telling you I couldn't get them."

"Thank you," Eliana said, and wrote something, and he did not ask what.

He finished at 0602.

Fifty minutes. He had not stopped except when she asked him to wait, which she did nine times. He had not sorted them. He had not given any of it a shape.

She wrote every one by hand. She had refused a slate in month two — a slate is not the same, Leon, a slate is a list, this is a ledger — and had never revisited it. There were four bound volumes on the shelf above the desk with dates on the spines in her small neat hand. She had started a fifth that week.

At 0602 she was still writing. He waited. She finished the last name, drew the small horizontal rule she drew at the end of every list, and wrote the date under it.

Leon looked at the page.

The letters leaned. About six degrees, and consistently, which meant it was not fatigue at the end of a session. It was the whole session.

The ascenders had a tremor in them. Three or four oscillations per stroke. He counted them.

Every eleventh or twelfth character the pen had lifted and come back down a fraction out of place.

Month three it had been one in forty. He knew, because he had read every page of all four volumes at 0300, more than once.

One in forty. One in twenty-two. One in eleven.

Doubling.

"What," Eliana said, without looking up.

"Nothing."

"You went quiet. You never go quiet. It's your worst feature, that you never go quiet."

"I was doing arithmetic."

"About?"

"About whether two hundred and thirty-eight in fifty minutes is a personal record." He stood, and put his left hand in his pocket, which was a tell, which she had clocked eleven weeks ago and had also said nothing about. "It is. Previous best was a hundred and six in twenty-two, which is a better rate, so technically I've regressed."

"You're getting old."

"I'm twenty-six."

"You're getting old and slow, and one day soon a nineteen-year-old in a cheap suit is going to shoot you down, and I will have to stand up in front of the Order and explain that my brother died because he wouldn't do his stretches."

"When you have a coat," Leon said, "we'll talk about my stretches."

"When I have a coat," she said, "we'll talk about a great many things."

She capped the pen and laid it parallel to the edge of the page. She put the mask back on, which she only did in front of him now when she was too tired to spend the eleven seconds.

Pip woke in her lap and chimed. Three rising tones, pause, three rising tones, and the last of the second three came out flat, a semitone under, the way it had for nine days.

"Go and sleep," she said, through the mask.

"Two hours."

"Two hours isn't sleep. It's a rumour of sleep."

"Says the woman who slept six last night."

"I did sleep six last night."

She had slept two hours forty, in the bolted chair, between 0140 and 0420. Pip's buffer had it. So did he.

"Right," said Leon. "Good."

He turned the bay lights down another notch on his way out, which she preferred and never asked for. In the corridor he stood with his back to the door and did the only arithmetic that had ever frightened him.

Nine. Forty-one. A hundred and six. Two hundred and thirty-eight.

One night you are going to stand in that room reading five figures off a slate, he thought. And she is going to write them down. And she is going to insist.

He slept for two hours and eleven minutes and flew at 0600.

The Nereid corridor took nine minutes and four seconds, and six of those were spent arriving.

The blockade was textbook, and the textbook was correct. Two Kaelic light cruisers at the corridor mouth. Seventeen picket craft in a shallow bowl behind them. Four hundred and twelve tethered kinetic drones strung across the throat on monofilament at ninety-metre spacing, so that nothing larger than a lifeboat could pass through without touching one.

Behind the net, nine civilian hulls. One hundred and sixty thousand tonnes of grain, medical stock and water reclaimers. Six weeks at anchor. The crews had gone to half rations in week three and to a third in week five, and Leon had the ration logs, and had read them twice on the way in because reading was something to do with the part of his head that was not flying.

He came in above the ecliptic on stored charge with the drives cold, frame at sixty-two percent authority. At sixty-two the coupling was a hand on the back of his neck.

He opened it to eighty-one. The hand became the whole body.

The fin funnels released at four seconds. Twelve of them, one hundred and four kilograms apiece, condenser and vane and a station-keeping thruster the size of a fist, and they did not fly so much as arrive at having already gone. He did not aim them. Aiming was a thing done with a reticle. He wanted the net gone.

Four hundred and twelve tethers cut at the anchor eyes in fourteen seconds. Not one warhead initiated. Four hundred and twelve kinetic drones went inert and began the long slow drift out of the shipping lane, because detonating them in the throat would have salted it with debris for thirty years and the Reach had exactly this one corridor into the outer ring.

That was the part nobody counted. Everybody counted the cruisers.

The cruisers took eighteen seconds. He put the Buster Rifle through the first one's dorsal spine at forty percent charge, which opened the keel eleven frames back and did not reach the magazine, and then he waited. Nine seconds. The boats came off clean, four of them, in good order, because Kaelic damage-control crews were well drilled and their captain was not an idiot.

The second cruiser tried to close. He let it. At four hundred metres he brought the Anti-Ship Cleaver round in a flat lateral arc and took the drive block off at the mounts, and the ship went on in a straight line forever, which is what a ship does when you remove the part of it that argues with physics.

The pickets ran. He let them run.

Nine minutes, four seconds. Peak coolant four hundred and eleven Kelvin in the left shoulder bus against a bulk tolerance of four thirty. Sync held between 89.1 and 90.3. Sixty-one percent charge remaining.

He drifted out past the corridor mouth at idle and watched nine hulls light their engines for the first time in six weeks, one after another, the way a street wakes up.

The tremor in his left hand was bad enough that he sat on it.

The names that night were:

Eleven off the first cruiser, recovered from a boat by the freighter Bellhorn and logged by the Order's medical section. Ivo Dresk. Yannen Kol. Marta Sivviq. Then eight more, read off the manifest in the order the manifest gave them, because reordering them would have been a decision and he had stopped making decisions about the order.

Four dead in the second cruiser's drive block.

"Four, and I couldn't get the names," he said. "I ran the wreck registry twice. The hull's registered to a leasing consortium and the crew list is with the consortium and the consortium is on the other side of the line. That's not going to change. That's four with no names, permanently."

Eliana wrote four and then a short line in Old Astraian after it that he could not read.

Two of the Order's own. Sworn of the Watch Tem Baruso, twenty-nine, who had signed on eight weeks after his home district was requisitioned. Lance-Sergeant Illa Vench, forty-four, twenty-two years an agricultural surveyor and seven months a soldier.

And nine hundred and forty on the civilian hulls who did not die, which was not a name and not a thing she had asked for, and he gave it to her anyway, and she let him have it.

She sat with her back to the bulkhead of the signals bay with a blanket over her legs and Pip on her knee, and wrote every name by hand in a bound notebook Wren Callas had found in a salvage crate and cleaned with alcohol wipes before presenting it like a decoration. Her mother's signet had turned on her thumb again. She pushed the sunburst back to the top of her hand with her chin, because her other hand was busy.

"Sivviq is spelled with the double letter," she said. "Or it is a different family."

"Double letter."

"Then he was from the Loess Belt." Her hand shook. Everything about her shook now, a fine constant tremble at a frequency he had lost the ability to un-hear. "There is an entire province of Sivviqs. They make a bad cheese and they are proud of it."

"Is that relevant."

"No. It is a thing I know about him." She did not look up. "You gave me nine letters. I am adding to them."

He heard himself about to say something warm. He heard the shape of it forming, the exact pitch, the small laugh he would put under it. He had been doing that voice for four months.

He drank his water instead.

The relays went in one night, and that was the one that got him the name.

Sector Seven ran fleet coordination through forty-one hardened comm relays in a six-way redundant mesh. Dominion doctrine held that a mesh at that density could not be pushed below eighty percent function by anything short of a fleet action lasting days. The doctrine was written by people who had correctly assumed an enemy could kill four or five in a raid.

Leon did thirty-eight in eleven hours.

Not with the rifle. The rifle was a signature; a full-yield discharge told everything inside four light-minutes exactly what had happened and who had done it. He used funnels at minimum yield, one condenser burst each, into the phase-lock housing. A relay is a very large antenna wrapped around a very small clock. Kill the clock and the antenna is scrap on a decaying orbit.

Eight thousand metres per second of accumulated delta-v. Forty-one course corrections. Two thermal soaks where he had to run the reactor down and coast dark for nineteen minutes with the cockpit at three degrees and his breath fogging the canopy from the inside. He ate nothing. He drank four hundred millilitres of electrolyte. Sync never went below 87, because below 87 the funnel latency stopped being negligible and became noticeable, and noticeable was how you left a relay half-dead.

He left three alive. Those three carried civilian medical traffic on their secondary bands. He checked twice.

By 0600 the Seventh Expeditionary Group was operating on line-of-sight laser and courier drones. A fleet that had concentrated in forty minutes now needed nine hours. It never entirely recovered. Three weeks later the Order took the Vessen Yards with two hundred people and no air cover, because the relief squadron heard about it after it was over.

The name turned up in intercept four days later. Wren read it out in the signals bay with her boots on the console.

"Okay. So they've started calling you something."

"No."

"You don't even know what it is."

"I know it's going to be embarrassing."

"The Ghost of Sector Seven." She said it in an announcer voice and then made a noise like wind in a chimney. "That's a real dispatch. That's a real Praetor typing that into a real report for a real Overlord."

"That's terrible."

"That's magnificent."

"It's a name for a folk song about a man who drowned in a canal." He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. "Ghosts don't do anything. Ghosts stand in a corner and make you sad. I did eleven hours of orbital mechanics and a lot of arithmetic about clocks."

From the corner, without looking up from the notebook: "Yshara ne kalleth."

"Don't."

"It means the same thing." Eliana turned a page. "It sounds better."

"You can't just say things in a dead language and win."

"I can," she said. "I did. There is no appeal process, the appeal court is also me, and I have already ruled."

Wren laughed so hard she went off the console sideways and took a headset with her.

Arcas Station was three weeks after that.

The situation as it came in: four hundred and sixty Dominion garrison troops holding a civilian transfer wheel in the Arcas cluster. Two point four kilometres across, spun at 0.4g, laid down in 812 and patched every decade since. Eleven thousand two hundred and six civilians aboard — transit workers, their families, and about nine hundred Ring refugees who had got exactly that far and no further.

The garrison had mined all four main docking spines. They had also put their command post inside the same pressure block as the primary life-support plant, which was either clever or lazy, and it did not matter which.

Tactical section put a plan on the table: two-day siege, negotiated corridor, estimated civilian loss four hundred to eleven hundred.

Harken read it for a long time and did not sit down.

"Or," Leon said.

"Say it."

"I go in."

"You go in."

"The suit goes in. Number-three cargo spine — it's rated for hull sections, the frame fits with two metres of clearance if I fold the binders. The spine feeds the primary cargo gallery on deck four. Twenty-six metres wide, fourteen high, built for container trains. It runs the full circumference." He put his hand flat on the table. "Everything else is branch corridors at six metres. I can reach into those. I can't walk into them."

"Reach into them," Harken said.

"Yes."

Garren had not spoken in eleven minutes. He said: "No rifle."

"No rifle."

"No butterfly."

"Moonlight Butterfly is a saturating GN field. It doesn't cut, it desynchronises at molecular scale. It would end four hundred and sixty Kaelic soldiers in about eleven seconds." Leon kept it level. "It would also end every atmosphere processor, every reclaimer, every thermal exchanger, every pacemaker, every powered chair and every incubator inside two kilometres. Then eleven thousand two hundred and six people are alive in a tin can with eight minutes of air. It's the correct weapon for the target and the wrong weapon for the room."

"So it's the cleaver," Harken said.

"It's the cleaver."

"Which is eleven metres long."

"Eleven point four."

"Indoors."

"Yes."

She did not ask if he was sure. She had buried three cells and had stopped asking people that years ago.

"How long."

"Two hours," Leon said, "if it goes well."

It took four hours and eleven minutes.

*

Here is what four hours and eleven minutes is, physically.

The Anti-Ship Cleaver massed nine point eight tonnes. It was not a sword. It was a mass driver with an edge, designed to be swung once, at a capital ship's frame member, at four hundred metres per second of closing velocity. In a gallery fourteen metres high, at a walking pace of one point one metres per second, in an eighteen point six metre frame held permanently in a half-crouch that ran asymmetric load through both hip actuators, it was a crowbar being used as a scalpel.

No thrusters. Thrust in a pressurised space is a blowtorch aimed at whatever is behind you, and there were civilians behind everything.

No funnels above eight percent yield indoors, and at eight percent a funnel is a very expensive torch.

No head vulcans. A twenty-millimetre round that misses goes through nine bulkheads and finds someone in a laundry.

So he used the cleaver, and the flat of it, and his hands.

The first block took forty minutes. Twenty-two hostiles, two light garrison suits, and a pressure door that had to come off its runners without breaking the seal on the far side, which meant getting three fingers into a gap and pulling at two centimetres per second while the load telemetry filed torsional warnings on the left wrist at a rate of one every four seconds.

The garrison suits went fast. He put the cleaver through the first one from above at sixty degrees, so the follow-through buried in deck plating instead of continuing through the far bulkhead into a residential block. The second he took by the head and pushed up through the ceiling into the void space above deck four, and then reached in after it and crushed the reactor housing, so that when it let go it let go into vacuum.

The soldiers were the difficult part, because the soldiers were small.

A Kaelic infantryman in full kit masses a hundred and forty kilos. Unit-02's hand closes on that the way a person's hand closes on a wasp. There is no version of this that is elegant, and there is no version of it that is not, at the level of the actual mechanics, eighty-one tonnes of machine ending people who are made of water.

He used the flat of the blade, mostly. The outside edge of the left forearm. Twice, a downward press of the palm.

One hundred and forty-eight times across four hours he made a decision about angle and follow-through whose entire purpose was to stop the energy continuing past the target into a wall with families behind it. He kept count as he went, because he was going to have to say the number in a room later.

The frame's structural microphones picked up the deck. That was the part he had not planned for. Through eighteen metres of armour and four hundred millimetres of decking, sound arrives as vibration in the hull and the frame converts it back into audio because the frame was built for a battlefield where knowing which way the plating is failing keeps you alive. So he heard it all. Boots. A dropped rifle bouncing twice. A helmet lamp rolling in a slow arc, still lit, still on its charge.

At the ninety-minute mark, primary loop coolant was four hundred and forty-one Kelvin and climbing at three degrees a minute. A psycho-frame at eighty-eight percent authority makes as much waste heat standing still as it does at full burn, and he had no vacuum to dump it into. So he dumped into the station itself — knelt, put both palms flat on the deck plating, and used the wheel's own thermal mass as a radiator. It raised the ambient on deck four by six degrees over the next hour. It made eleven thousand people extremely uncomfortable. It killed none of them.

At two hours his vision went monochrome and he had to stop for ninety seconds. That is a coupling symptom. Colour is expensive.

At two hours twenty, the surrenders started.

They started because word ran ahead of him down the gallery faster than one point one metres per second, and because of what the deck sounded like from the other side of a bulkhead. Three hundred and twelve of the four hundred and sixty put their weapons on the floor and their hands on their heads and sat down in the middle of the cargo gallery in the open, in the dark, and waited for something eighteen metres tall to walk past them without deciding otherwise.

He walked past them. It took him one minute and forty seconds to cover that section, and he counted the seconds.

At two hours forty, in a branch corridor he could only reach into, a Kaelic sergeant got within nine metres of the left knee joint with a shaped charge. Leon caught the charge in his left hand and closed the fingers and let it go off inside the fist. The laminate held. The index actuator did not; it sat eleven degrees off true for the rest of the operation and he worked around it.

At three hours ten he found the first civilians.

Four hundred of them in a cargo hold with the lights off to save power. The frame's floods came up, and four hundred faces turned toward eighteen metres of white and gold with a nine-tonne blade in one hand and the chest condenser glowing the colour of a stove element.

Nobody screamed. He thought about that afterward, for weeks.

An old woman near the front stood up. She had to be helped up, by a man in a transit authority coverall who kept one hand on her elbow the whole time.

Leon put the external speaker on and checked the volume twice, because at combat setting it would have deafened them.

"Stay here. I'm not finished. Ninety minutes." He watched the man's grip on her elbow. "Don't open this door for anyone who isn't wearing what I'm wearing."

She said something. He could not hear it. The frame knelt — eighty-one tonnes lowering at a controlled rate, hip actuators complaining in the log — and put the audio pickup near her.

"Is it true you're the Ghost?"

Oh, for —

"No," Leon said. "Ninety minutes."

*

The last block was the life-support plant, and there he could use nothing at all.

Nine hostiles inside, among fourteen atmosphere processors. Each processor a two-storey column of catalytic beds and fans. Each one breathing for about eight hundred people. The garrison commander had wired the number-six column and was standing beside it with his thumb on a pressure plate.

The plant door was one point two metres wide.

So Leon opened the cockpit hatch at eighty-eight percent coupling, with the frame's outer hull at four hundred and sixty Kelvin, and climbed down it in a flight suit with a sidearm.

Six minutes.

He came out with a broken right index finger, a burn along the left forearm from an exchanger housing, and nine names.

Four hours and eleven minutes.

Eleven thousand two hundred and six aboard at the start. Eleven thousand two hundred and six at the end.

The cost got stated once, in the medical bay, by a woman who did not enjoy stating it.

"Four hours in the frame at that coupling," the Order's neuro tech said, reading a slate she visibly wished said something else, "did more structural damage than a twenty-second Buster Rifle discharge at full yield. Substantially more. Demyelination markers are —" she stopped and chose a different word "— elevated. Left-hand tremor amplitude is up eleven percent against your month-three baseline. Your REM architecture has essentially stopped occurring. If you hold this operating profile I can give you numbers, but you won't like them."

"I know."

"You knew before you went in."

"Yes."

She waited. He did not add anything, because there was nothing to add. The sum had been done in eleven seconds in a briefing room and it had come out the way it always came out. Four hours of him against eleven thousand of them. That had never once been a hard sum.

Garren was in the doorway with his coat over his arm and two measures of something amber in a plastic cup, which was his allotment. He had drunk one of them.

"So the summary," Garren said, "is you declined the button that ends it in twenty seconds, and instead did four hours of manual handling with a nine-tonne kitchen implement, and the invoice comes out of the inside of your head."

"That's the summary."

Garren drank the second measure and looked into the cup as though it had short-changed him.

"Your mother would have used the button."

"I know."

"I'm not saying she'd have been wrong."

"I know that too."

Garren pushed off the frame of the door. He stopped there, and did not turn round, and said it in the exact tone of a man reading out a shipping manifest.

"For what it's worth, and I'd deny saying it, that's the best day's work I've seen anyone do in two hundred years. I've seen your father's."

He was gone before Leon could arrange his face.

*

The garrison roster survived, because it was on paper in a magistrate's cabinet.

So there were no gaps. He read a hundred and forty-eight names in the signals bay, and it took eleven minutes, and she wrote all of them.

Halfway through she stopped him and asked how to render a Kaelic patronymic in Old Astraian orthography, and he said he didn't know, and she said she would decide and be consistent, and did.

When it was finished she put the pen down and flexed her fingers one at a time.

"And eleven thousand two hundred and six," she said.

"Yes."

"Say it as a number and not as a rescue."

"Eleven thousand two hundred and six."

Eliana closed the notebook. "Good."

The Dominion learned in month six, and they learned properly, which was the thing nobody in the Order had let themselves expect.

The first sign was a Praetorial escort action over Sennet Deep. Nothing remarkable: four destroyers and a wing of forty suits around a troop convoy. Leon went in at eighty-nine and the numbers came apart in his hands.

The Buster Rifle fired and the beam frayed.

He had never seen it. A GN particle beam is coherent by definition; the coherence is the entire point; coherence is why four hundred metres of beam arrives at the target as four hundred metres of beam and not as a warm patch. What left the muzzle over Sennet Deep left correct. At about eleven hundred metres it began to open — not diffuse, fray, splitting into filaments like a rope untwisting under load — and by three thousand metres it was a cone of hot nothing that scorched the destroyer's dorsal paint and did not get through the plate.

Then the funnels lagged.

He put a six-funnel sweep across the convoy's flank. They went where he sent them and they went there late. Not much. Not visible. Enough to feel, the way you feel a stair that is a centimetre lower than the rest of the flight.

"Telemetry," he said, and heard how flat his own voice had come out.

Wren, from the Bellhorn, four light-seconds back: "We see it. There's a field. Whole volume, ninety klicks across, centred on the convoy. Particle density's fine. It's the phase that's wrong. Everything crossing it is decohering."

They worked out what it was afterward from the recordings, and Eliana did most of the working out, because Eliana had spent fourteen months on a poverty planet with nothing to read but her mother's physics.

A GN disruptor field. Emitters in clusters of six, one cluster per destroyer, throwing a broad low-power incoherent wash across a spherical volume. The wash attacked nothing. It simply filled the space with particles at randomised phase, so that any coherent GN structure crossing it had to hold itself together against a constant stochastic shove.

Measured over eleven engagements:

Beam weapons lost between thirty and sixty percent of effective range depending on field density. The Buster Rifle at full yield was still lethal inside nine hundred metres and was, past four thousand, a light show.

Funnel command latency went from a nominal three milliseconds to a mean of forty-three, with a tail out past ninety.

And the reaction path — intent through the psycho-frame to actuator response, the loop he had lived inside for five months, the loop that at 90 sync was functionally instantaneous — picked up about 0.04 seconds.

Forty milliseconds.

He sat in the cockpit after Sennet Deep with the drives at idle and did not open the hatch for eleven minutes, and what he was thinking about was a trainer rig on the Ring when he was fourteen.

Because he had grown up eighty milliseconds behind.

That was the figure. That was what the Academy interface logged for a boy with no formal grafting, running a civilian trainer on a hand-me-down harness with a ninety-millisecond signal path. Eighty milliseconds between wanting and doing, with every other cadet at thirty, and the instructors saying gently that he had marvellous instincts and would make an excellent staff officer.

He had taken those eighty off one at a time across four years. He learned to fire at where a thing was going to be. He learned to begin a movement before deciding on it and then cancel the wrong half. He built an entire way of flying out of being late — and then, at nineteen, in a vault under an observatory, the frame had handed him zero, and zero had felt like taking off a coat he had been wearing since he was a child.

They had just given him back forty of it.

Half of what I already beat. It did not help. The eighty had been his to beat. The forty was theirs to give, and the thing about a gift is that the giver can make it larger.

He flew the next eleven days inside a two-thirds engagement envelope and told nobody why.

The Predator squad found him over Kessic Reach on the nineteenth of month six.

Twelve units. He counted them on the approach, and the count was itself information, because twelve is not a Kaelic number. Kaelic doctrine comes in nines and eighteens. Twelve was a figure somebody had arrived at by testing.

They did not duel him.

That was the first thing and it was the whole thing. Every Kaelic ace he had met in five months had come at him singly, because that is what you do with a monster: you produce a hero. These twelve came from eleven distinct vectors — eleven, not twelve; two of them shared an approach specifically to compress him into a plane where the third from the left had a shot — and the instant he committed to any one of them, that one disengaged.

They had a screen. Eight older-pattern suits, unmanned, on remote, doing nothing but occupying volume between him and the twelve. Disposable. Their entire function was to make his funnels choose. Every funnel spent killing a drone was a funnel not covering his back for four seconds.

And they were patient. Eleven minutes in they had scored nothing and had not tried to. They were reading his recoveries. He watched a pair decline a clean flank shot because taking it would have exposed them to his standard counter-rotation, and the fact that they knew his standard counter-rotation was the most frightening thing that had happened to him in a year.

The field was up the whole time. Forty-three on the funnels. Forty on him.

He won in nineteen minutes and it cost him.

He won by doing the one thing they had not modelled, which was to stop fighting twelve and start fighting the field. He took the frame down onto the escorting destroyer's emitter cluster — straight line, through the screen, eating two beam hits on the way in that he could not dodge because he was forty milliseconds late — and put the cleaver through the housing. The ninety-kilometre bubble collapsed.

For eleven seconds he was himself.

Eleven seconds at zero latency is a long time. Nine of them died inside it. The remaining three broke in three directions. He let two go.

The third he caught against the destroyer's hull.

Cleaver up, closing at six hundred metres per second, the Kaelic suit pinned back to a plate with both arms raised. At three hundred metres the optical feed resolved through the canopy and there was a face in it.

A woman. Thirty, maybe. Dark hair stuck to her forehead. Mouth open. She was not shouting orders and she was not praying. She was doing the thing everyone does, which is look at the object.

Leon hesitated.

A quarter of a second. Two hundred and fifty milliseconds. He knew the exact figure afterward because the recorder logs intent-to-actuator delta, and there it was on the trace: a flat run in the middle of a graph with no other flat runs in it.

In that quarter second she fired a wrist charge at contact range into Unit-02's left shoulder.

The laminate breached. Ninety millimetres of layered composite that had taken a capital-ship autocannon over Iridin and shrugged opened like a lid. The blast went into the shoulder bus, took the number-three secondary thruster off its mount, and cut eleven of the sixteen coolant runs in that arm. One warning tone. Then a great many warning tones. The left side dropped to forty percent authority and stayed there.

He finished it. He is not going to describe that.

Then he coasted out past the dead hull with the arm hanging and coolant venting in a long white feather, and sat with it.

You hesitated.

Not you felt something. Feeling something was allowed. Feeling something was why four hours and eleven minutes at Arcas had been possible at all. Feeling something was equipment, and he was not giving it up; he had seen what people looked like after they gave it up, and one of them had put a ceremonial blade into his mother on a live feed.

But hesitation was not feeling. Hesitation was arithmetic performed twice. He had decided at eight hundred metres. At three hundred he had opened the decision back up and looked at it again, and the looking cost two hundred and fifty milliseconds, which is six times the lag the Dominion had spent an entire research programme inflicting on him.

They gave him forty. He gave himself two hundred and fifty. Free of charge.

If she'd aimed nine centimetres left, that goes into the cockpit block.

And then Eliana is on a converted freighter behind the Meridian screen at twenty-seven kilos, with nobody who can fly Unit-02 and a galaxy that has already agreed in public what she is worth.

He ran it three times to be sure he was not deciding it while angry. He was not angry. Pulse fifty-two.

So don't do it again.

Not try not to. Not be careful. He had eidetic recall, a psycho-frame, and five months of recorder data, and there was a procedural fix, and procedural fixes are the only kind that survive contact.

Close the decision earlier. Commit at range. Do not resolve the optical feed past six magnifications inside four hundred metres.

Do not look in the canopy.

He wrote it into his own pre-flight that night as item eleven, in his own hand, in a notebook nobody else read. He read it back once. He felt nothing about it, and noted, with the flat interest of a man reading a gauge, that feeling nothing about it was itself data.

Eliana found the Crimson Lance three days later, in nine hundred hours of intercepted logistics traffic that four analysts had already cleared as routine.

She found it because she was bored, and because she could not walk to the mess, and because Wren had brought her the raw feed on a slate "in case you want something to be annoyed by," and because Eliana Zadkiel had spent fourteen months on Veridus-9 learning that the interesting thing is never in the message. It is in the shipping.

"Sit down," she said when he came in. "You will be tall at me and I will lose my thread."

He sat on the deck. She was in the corner she had made hers. Blanket. Cardigan with the hole in the left elbow. Oxygen line looped behind her ear and taped at the cheek, because the standard clip left a mark she hated. Pip sat on the crate beside her and went three rising tones, pause, three rising tones, and then did it again nine seconds early, which it had started doing that month.

"Halcyon Yards," she said. "Dominion refit facility, Kael side of the line, capital hulls. In eleven weeks they have taken delivery of four hundred and sixty tonnes of graded thermal superconductor. That is not interesting."

"That's not interesting."

"That is what the analysts said." She turned the slate round. "It becomes interesting when the same yard orders fourteen thousand litres of a cryogenic dielectric that is manufactured on two worlds and used in one thing, which is the containment stack of a large-bore particle accelerator. And it becomes rude when you notice that the dreadnought Vhorn Ascendant went into dry dock at Halcyon nine weeks ago for what the traffic calls a sensor refit, and that a sensor refit does not require keel members, and that they have ordered keel members."

Leon looked at the slate for a while.

"They're mounting something in the spine."

"They are mounting something in the entire ship." She scrolled. "There is also a personnel movement. Eleven physicists out of the Institute at Kaeloth, reassigned in one week, all from the same section. The section is called Applied Coherent Emission." She let it sit exactly as long as it needed. "They have Unit-01's fragments, Leon. They have had them three years. They have been reading them."

"They can't match the output. Not on a hull. Unit-01's plant was a Zadkiel build and they don't have the metallurgy — they'd need a reactor volume of about —"

"They do not need to match it." Her voice did not rise. It never rose. "They need it to hurt you. You are one machine, you have one left shoulder, and it is currently in nine pieces on a hangar floor."

Out in the corridor somebody was laughing about something.

"Named?" he said.

"The traffic uses a project number. But there is a requisition for ceremonial hull paint. Four hundred litres, in a colour designation I had to go and look up." She almost smiled. "It is a red. They are going to paint it red and give it a name, and the name will be very stupid and very dangerous, and I found it, and four men with security clearances did not."

"You found it."

"I found it." She sat back an inch. Pleased — genuinely, unguardedly, in a way she had not been since before the Ring, and it went through him like a spike. "You may say it."

"You found it."

"Louder."

"You found a dreadnought-mounted beam weapon in a cheese order."

"It was a dielectric order —"

Then she coughed.

It came out sideways, folding her over the slate, one hand flat on the deck. Eleven seconds. At the end of it she turned her head away and did something with her wrist.

Pip went three rising tones, pause, three rising tones. Its indicator held amber four seconds longer than it used to.

She came back up with her face already on.

"Dry air on this ship," Eliana said. "It is the recyclers. I have filed a complaint. It is in Old Astraian, so nobody can read it, so it will not be actioned, which is traditional."

There was a spot of red at the corner of her mouth.

Leon said nothing, because saying something would take from her the last thing she owned outright, which was the right to decide what he was allowed to know. He had made that trade in month two. He remade it every time. It had never once got cheaper.

"Your cardigan has a hole in it," he said.

"It has character."

"It has a hole. In the elbow. I can see your elbow."

"My elbow is not classified."

"I'm getting you a coat."

"You have been getting me a coat since Veridus-nine." She adjusted the blanket. "At this point the coat is a theological position. There will be schisms. Somebody will build a small chapel and somebody else will burn it down over a doctrinal matter concerning the lining."

"I mean it this time. There's a market on the Anchorage transit ring. Real clothes. Actual sizes —"

"Leon." She held up the notebook. "Names. You have been in this room four minutes. You have given me a dreadnought and a coat and no names."

He gave her the names.

There were four hundred and six that week.

She wrote every one, in Old Astraian, in a hand that shook so badly toward the end that the last eleven were barely letters. Then she looked at the page for a while and said, in a completely ordinary voice:

"And when the coat happens, and it fits, we can discuss whether I am an adult."

"That's the deal."

"That has been the deal for nine years."

"It's a durable deal."

"It is a fraudulent deal," Eliana said, and closed the notebook, and put both hands flat on the cover so he would not see them shaking.

At 0300 he stood under Unit-02's left shoulder with a work light in his good hand and looked into the breach.

Ninety millimetres of nano-laminate opened like a lid, and under it the bus, eleven cut coolant runs, and a socket where the number-three secondary had been. Nine days to repair. The replacement laminate was salvage, rated at about seventy percent of original.

He did the arithmetic standing there, because he could not not do it. Seventy percent plate. Forty milliseconds of borrowed lag. Twelve-unit squads that improved every time they lost. One dreadnought being painted red on the far side of the line.

The number he got was four.

He turned off the light.

The grain figures came in at 06:40, as they always did, and Praetor Oris Vantalar read them standing, because he had found that sitting made a man generous with numbers.

Fourth quarter, occupied Aetherian Province. Eleven point four million tonnes moved through the outer-ring corridors against a projected nine point eight. Spoilage at four percent — two points better than the Dominion's own core worlds, and achieved by the simple expedient of not requisitioning the refrigeration plant at Bellis and shooting the men who ran it. The previous administration had shot the men who ran it. The previous administration had been the invasion command, and invasion commands were, in his experience, staffed by people who confused a province with a battlefield and then wondered why the battlefield did not pay tax.

He initialled the page. He moved to the next.

Schools. Four hundred and six reopened out of a pre-war six hundred and ninety. The gap was not ideology; it was roofs. He had reopened them under Reach curricula with three deletions — the Concord civics module, the coronation liturgy, and a poem — and he had left the histories alone, including the ones that described the Dominion of Kael as a mercantile pathology with a flag. The Overlord's secretariat had raised this twice. Vantalar had written back twice that a child who is lied to about the last war learns only that adults lie, and that he preferred his subjects accurate rather than affectionate, since accuracy could be built on.

Appeals. Two thousand one hundred and nine heard in the year. Six hundred and forty overturned in favour of the appellant. Thirty point three percent, which was scandalous by Dominion standards and precisely what he wanted, because a court that never found against the state was not a court, it was a stamp, and a stamp did not absorb anger. Courts absorbed anger. That was their function. Anger that went into a docket did not go into a culvert with a shaped charge in it.

Executions. Two hundred and eleven in fourteen months. The invasion command had managed two thousand nine hundred in five.

He did not consider this mercy, and would have been irritated if anyone had called it that. He considered it inventory control. Every execution generated, by his own modelling, between one point four and two point two new insurgents, and the model held across sixteen provinces and four centuries. Killing a man cost you two men. It was not a moral proposition. It was arithmetic, and he had a great deal of respect for arithmetic and none at all for people who used it to decorate a conclusion they had already reached.

At 07:15 his aide brought tea.

"Bellis has queried the refrigeration allocation again, Praetor. The yard master wants to know if the answer has changed."

"The answer has not changed. Tell him I said so pleasantly."

"He'll want it in writing."

"Then put it in writing pleasantly, Ferron." Vantalar tasted the tea. Ninety-one degrees, near enough. "Thank you. This is correct."

Ferron went out. The Praetor drank his tea standing at the sideboard and looked at nothing in particular, which was as close as he came to rest.

At 07:20 he opened the file he had been putting off, because it was the one that would annoy the Overlord, and a report that annoys a sovereign should be written early, while the writer's judgement is still cold.

SUBJECT: SYSTEM-OMEGA UNIT-02. OPERATIONAL ASSESSMENT, MONTH SEVEN.

He did not use adjectives. He had read forty-one field reports on the machine. Thirty-nine of them used adjectives. The two that did not were the only ones worth the storage.

The unit cannot be defeated in engagement, he wrote. I state this without qualification so that the Overlord's staff cannot extract a qualification from it.

Then the substance.

Two hundred and twelve engagements. Dominion losses: four hundred and sixty-eight mobile suits, nineteen escorts, three cruisers, one repair tender. Confirmed damage to Unit-02: eleven instances, none exceeding cosmetic degradation of the fin-funnel racks, all repaired inside forty hours. Nobody had scored on the torso in seven months. Nobody had scored on the torso at all.

The disruptor fields worked, in that they did what physics said they would do. Six emitters, ninety-two tonnes apiece, four hundred and ten megawatts of draw each and a duty cycle of nineteen minutes before the coils went out of tolerance. Inside the envelope, GN particle coherence degraded; beam dispersion widened by a factor of three at range; funnel command latency rose from four milliseconds to forty-one.

Forty-one milliseconds. Four hundredths of a second. Against any other pilot in any other airframe, a rounding error.

Against this one it had moved the exchange ratio from thirty-one to one, to nineteen to one.

He wrote the figure and looked at it for some time.

The Predator doctrine is correct, he wrote. It has produced the only three engagements in which the unit withdrew. I recommend its continued funding, and I recommend that no officer of this administration describe those three withdrawals as victories in writing, because they were resupply decisions and the enemy made them at leisure.

Then the pilot.

He had a very great deal on the pilot. Leon Asher Maximilian Zadkiel, twenty-six, one hundred and eighty-five centimetres. Eidetic recall, confirmed by three independent pre-war academic assessments. Sleeps approximately two hours. Left-hand tremor consistent with neural coupling injury, visible in nine of the eleven captures they had of him outside the cockpit. Makes jokes. Makes them under fire, on open channels, in a register Dominion pilots found infuriating and that the psychological section had spent eleven thousand credits establishing was stress-shedding and not taunting. Vantalar had read that assessment and thought it a waste of the money, having worked it out from the transcripts in an afternoon.

The pilot is a solved problem, he wrote.

He meant it precisely. A solved problem was not a harmless one. A solved problem was one whose behaviour could be predicted to a useful confidence interval, and the pilot's could.

He would take the engagement he could not refuse. He would spend himself before he spent a subordinate — twenty-two documented instances. He would not fire on a hulk with a live reactor within eight kilometres of a populated orbital, which had cost the Dominion nothing so far and would cost it a great deal at the correct moment. He would break off a winning action to cover a withdrawal by an ally worth a fraction of his hull. He would come, always, if the thing being attacked could not defend itself.

There was a curve for him. Vantalar had drawn it, and it fit.

The pilot has exactly one unsolved variable, he wrote, and it is not tactical. He is operating under a private constraint he has not disclosed to his own command. I infer this from three things: a change in his engagement envelope in month four, unremarked in his own signals traffic; his refusal of two operations his commander proposed and that he had every tactical reason to accept; and the fact that he has flown one hundred and eighty-one of two hundred and twelve sorties alone, when his order possesses eleven other competent pilots and a second hull suitable for conversion.

Men do not do that because they are brave. They do it because they are hiding the shape of something.

I do not yet know what it is. When I know, I will write again.

He read the sentence twice, did not soften it, and appended the section on the Crimson Lance.

The dreadnought mount stood at sixty-one percent. Nine thousand four hundred tonnes of cradle, eight hundred metres of spine reinforcement, a bore of four point two metres. The third emitter ring had failed acceptance twice on thermal cycling — cracking at the lattice seams somewhere past the four-hundredth cycle, because the reverse-engineered growth from the Unit-01 fragments did not tolerate the silicate-ester coolant the yard preferred, and the yard preferred it because it cost a ninth of the fluorocarbon. He had ordered them to stop preferring it. Projected output was thirty-eight percent of Unit-02's measured beam yield, and the Overlord's staff had received that as a disappointment.

It is not a disappointment, he wrote. The weapon will not kill Unit-02. It does not need to kill Unit-02. It needs to hurt it once, in front of witnesses, and survive to be repaired. A thing that has never been hurt is a god. A thing that has been hurt is equipment, and equipment can be scheduled against. Please inform the yard, so they stop attempting to build a god-killer and begin building a hammer.

He signed it and flagged it for the Overlord's personal queue.

Darvhen Kael would read it, be irritated for perhaps ninety seconds, and approve every line. That was the thing his enemies could not hold in their heads. The Overlord had never once punished him for accuracy. The Overlord believed conquest was heat moving from a hot body to a cold one, and that peace was rot, and he said so at dinner, and passed the salt.

At 09:00 the room was cleared for the Zadkiel file, and Vantalar opened the other ledger — the one he kept in his own hand, which nobody had ever seen.

Two years of it.

He had studied Eliana Zadkiel the way an underwriter studies a life. Not as a symbol, though she was the most efficient symbol in the galaxy. Not as a prize, though nine separate parties were currently pricing her. As a set of behaviours with a probability attached.

The physical column was short. He had updated it nine days ago from a merchant's still taken at four hundred metres on Kestrel Landing.

One hundred and forty centimetres. Estimated mass twenty-seven point four kilograms, down from thirty-one point two at the date of the Requisition broadcast. Supplemental oxygen visible — cannula, not mask, which meant she was still refusing the mask in public. Carried up a ramp by the older man, Doss. He had ordered that frame enlarged. It was not the face of a woman being helped. It was the face of a woman being filed.

Then the clothing. He had noted it in month three and had not been able to stop noting it since. The same white cardigan in every capture across two years. Two sizes wrong. A hole in the left elbow, grown perhaps a centimetre between the Veridus market image and the Kestrel image. A white pleated skirt. White sneakers, resoled once, badly.

The heir to a house that had held the Aetherian Reach for six centuries had not been bought a coat in two years, in ships and stations where the ambient ran at eleven degrees.

That was not poverty. He had audited the Order's disbursements; there was money. That was a household in which the woman refused, and refused, and refused, and the man let her, because taking the argument would cost him something he could not afford to spend.

Everyone who loved her knew the operative fact about her. None of them had ever said it aloud. Which was why none of them could defend against it.

She will always walk toward the place where she can be useful.

That was the whole of it. He turned the page and found the four instances he had set out in a column, the way one sets out comparable claims.

Veridus-9, month nine of the exile. A collapsed hab-stack. A girl who could not stand for six minutes together went out into the cold with a slate and ran the dig for nine hours, because she could hold the utility grid schematic in her head and nobody else could. Two hundred and four survivors.

The Meridian relay, month one of the Order. She broke a Kaelic fleet-tender cipher in twelve days that had defeated a Concord signals section for four months.

The grain silo. She stood in front of a wall with her own face painted on it and the price written underneath, and she did not run. She asked the crowd questions.

And the Requisition. He had offered cessation of punitive operations, unconditional amnesty, restoration of civil administration, and the reopening of the outer corridors. A genuine offer, made in good faith; he would have honoured every clause, because a signed instrument the signatory breaks is worth less than no instrument at all. The most generous terms any conquering power had offered in four hundred years.

It had failed, and he had spent six months working out why, and the answer had been humiliating in its simplicity.

I asked her to surrender.

He had built an offer in which her only act was to stop. To be handed over. To be taken care of. He had asked the most useful person in the Reach to become an object with a price, and he had done it publicly, and cleverly, and he had quoted her own words back at the galaxy, and underneath the amnesty and the grain she had heard the one word she would die before accepting.

Cargo.

He wrote it in the ledger and underlined it once, neatly.

So he would not ask again. Asking was the error. A bargain has two sides and she would examine both, and she was better at examination than he was.

He would build a situation in which the useful thing and the fatal thing were the same act.

The design took two hours, and he enjoyed it, the way a man enjoys a well-cut joint.

Element one. The bait must be intelligence, not a person. A hostage invites a rescue, a rescue invites the machine, and he did not want the machine — not yet, not there. It must be information she would consider it a moral failure to ignore.

He had it already. TRANSIT SCHEDULE, PROVINCIAL RESETTLEMENT, GROUPS 40 THROUGH 71. Eleven thousand six hundred Reach civilians out of the Ring survivor camps, listed by family, with dates and destinations. The destinations were agricultural districts on Bellis. The resettlement was resettlement, and would improve the lives of most of them.

It did not matter what it was. It mattered what it looked like: eleven thousand six hundred names, moving.

Nobody who had watched eleven million die in ninety minutes leaves a list of names alone.

Element two. The channel. It must come through the fleet-tender cipher — the one she broke herself, the one she was proud of, the one nobody had told her the Dominion had known was compromised for five months. Intelligence arriving through a door you opened yourself does not feel like a gift. It feels like a reward for competence. Competence was the one flattery she could not detect, because nobody but her brother had ever offered it to her.

Element three. The constraint. This was the part he liked. The cipher rekeyed off a rolling seed every thirty-eight minutes. A recorded take was worthless; by the time it reached a decryption cell the tree had walked four times and reconstruction cost twelve days. To read it, you had to sit inside the light-horizon of the transmitting node and follow the rekey live, in your head, holding the whole tree.

There were four people alive who could do that. Three of them worked for him.

At 10:40 he sent for Commodore Tarn Velish, gave him the take, the station, and the sector picture, and told him nothing else.

Velish read for six minutes. "This is real."

"Entirely."

"Then why are we letting it out?"

"Assume we are not letting it out. Assume they have it. What do they do?"

Velish put his thumb on the rekey interval and left it there. "They can't carry it home. They'd have to put a reader on the hull and read it live." He looked up. "Nobody can do that."

"Four people can do that."

"Then they won't go, Praetor. Sensible people don't put a strategic asset on an unpowered hulk nine hours outside their patrol lane."

"They will go."

"Why?"

"Because the alternative is eleven thousand six hundred names going dark," Vantalar said, "and because the person who has to make that argument to them is the asset."

Velish did not answer at once. "I'd like the sector stripped, if we're doing this."

"It is stripped. No pickets, no patrols, nothing inside eleven hours. Their reconnaissance will find exactly that, because it will be true." He took the slate back. "Thank you, Commodore. You have confirmed the plan by arriving at it."

Element four. The insertion: a forward relay tap on the derelict monitoring station at Aubrec Shoal. Unpowered hulk, no garrison, no value. Small team — six, perhaps eight. One shuttle, a hull tap, forty hours on station. Low risk by every metric an operations officer would run.

High value. Short duration. And it had to be her, and every officer in that room would reach the conclusion alone, one at a time, and hate it, and be unable to argue.

He was not exploiting a weakness. He wanted that understood, at least by himself. He had looked for two years and found a body that was failing, a mind that was not, and a will that had bent to nothing.

He was exploiting the best thing about her. That was why it would work.

Element five. The brother. Simultaneous, eleven light-hours displaced: a Predator squad and two disruptor platforms against the ore refineries at Cassen Verge, which produced the Order's structural alloy and which they could not afford to lose. Unit-02 would go. It would win. Six hours to win, nine to return, and by then the shuttle from Aubrec Shoal would be four hours inside a Dominion mooring at Tallis Anchorage.

He wrote the operation name at the head of the sheet. HOUSEHOLD, SECOND INSTRUMENT.

Then, because he was honest in the narrow sense that he wrote down his own reasons, he wrote down his reasons.

He did not desire her. He set it out flatly, for the file, because a file that flatters its author is useless. She was twenty-three, she weighed twenty-seven kilograms, and she was dying; he was fifty-eight, and whatever appetite he had once had was spent decades ago on a marriage he did not revisit. This was not a lecher's operation. He would have found that beneath the dignity of the province.

What he wanted was an instrument.

A marriage. Legal, recorded, witnessed, contracted under both the Kaelic Codes and the surviving Concord civil forms, with the Astraian signet on the register and the rite performed by clergy the Reach recognised. Not a coronation. Not a spectacle. A document — one that would stand in twelve galaxies, in front of the Trade Assembly, the Free Systems, the neutral banks, and the four powers currently selling the Order fuel at a discount because they enjoyed watching the Dominion bleed.

Because on the day that document existed, the war ended as a matter of administrative fact. The Consort-Queen of the Aetherian Reach would be seated at Tallis, legitimately elevated, and the Reach would stop being an occupied territory and become a province joined by marriage. Every neutral power in the galaxy would exhale and begin normalising trade inside a month, because they had wanted an excuse for two years and he would hand them a notarised one.

And the man in the machine would no longer be a liberator.

He would be a private grievance in a family dispute. Attacking his sister's household. Every barrel of fuel sold to him after that date would be intervention in the domestic affairs of a recognised polity, and the banks would stop, and the free ports would stop, and the Order would starve inside a year with the Dominion firing on nothing but wreckage.

He was not buying a woman. He wrote it out in full, and it was true. I am buying the legitimacy. She is the notary's seal, and the seal is the only thing in the Reach I cannot manufacture.

The record from the reception was in the third drawer, on a private slate.

Kestrel Landing. A mediation dinner, before the Requisition, before he knew what she was worth. A girl of twenty-two in a borrowed cardigan had been asked, in front of forty people, for an assurance she would not give. She declined in Old Astraian, which nobody in the room could read, so that the refusal was total and also unquotable.

Four seconds. The signet turning on her thumb.

He had eleven philologists in the province. He had never asked one of them for the passage.

He put the slate back and closed the drawer and washed his hands, because it was nearly noon.

At 12:04 he signed the operational order and passed it to the courier, who did not read it, and who would die of natural causes in nineteen years having never known what he carried.

At 12:11 he signed a pension appeal in favour of a widow in Halloran district, overturning his own finance section, on the grounds that the section had applied a Kaelic residency test to a woman whose residency predated the Kaelic state by four centuries. He wrote two lines of reasoning underneath so the section would get it right next time.

At 12:19 he approved a household requisition. Nine items. Two dresses. Shoes that fit. Gloves, lined, for the upper galleries, which ran cool.

And a coat.

He specified it himself. The tailor's default would be ceremonial, and she could not carry the weight. Light. Warm. It had to close.

He thought that a considerate detail.

At 12:30 Ferron brought lunch, and Vantalar ate a pear and half a plate of cold fish standing at the window of the Praetorial residence, watching the moorings. Fourteen warships. The long grey spine of the anchorage running four kilometres out into the dark, the yard lights coming up in sequence as the shift turned over.

Eleven thousand people down there. Most of them would go home tonight. The schools would open in the morning. The appeals court sat at nine.

"Will you want the residence rooms opened, Praetor? The upper galleries."

"In due course."

"Which rooms?"

Vantalar considered. "The east suite. It gets the yard lights and it is warm." He set his fork down. "Have the stairs surveyed for a lift."

It had been a good day's governing. The grain was moving. The province was quiet.

He rinsed the plate himself, as he always did, and set it on the rack to dry.

She had won on the merits, and four days later she was still taking the win out and turning it over like a coin.

It had taken eleven minutes at the plot table. She had not been allowed to stand — Garren had put a crate down two paces short of the table before she got near it and had not made a thing of it, which was his way of making a thing of it — so she had argued the whole case sitting, with an oxygen line under her nose and her slate propped on her knees and the fleet's senior surviving officers looking down at the top of her head.

"A recorded take," she had said, "is forty-one hours stale by the time a courier boat reaches us. The amber channel's key rotates every nine hours forty. So eleven hours of recording is eleven hours of noise, unless somebody is holding the meter-key in their head while it comes off the trunk."

"Write the key down," said Knight-Warden Fass. "Send the key. Send the machine. Don't send the girl."

"It isn't a number."

"Everything's a number."

"It's a cadence," Eliana said. "It's a nine-beat liturgical line. You can write down what the beats are. You cannot write down how to hear a line that has been deliberately mis-stressed on the fourth beat, because the mis-stress is the whole key, and there are four hundred ways to mis-stress a nine-beat line and only one of them sounds wrong in the right direction." She let that sit for exactly as long as it deserved. "I can teach it. It takes about nine months and you have to start with the verse. Do we have nine months?"

Fass had looked at the plot table for a while.

"Then the decoder goes in the room," Eliana said, "or the tap is a very expensive way of making a hole in somebody's cable."

"Can anyone else do it?" Commander Harken asked. Not gently. Harken did not do gently; it was one of the best things about her.

"No."

"Then she goes."

Leon had not said anything for eleven seconds. She counted them, because she counted everything, and she watched his left hand where it rested on the table edge, the tremor running in it like a wire under load, and she made herself not look away, because he hated being watched and hated being spared worse.

Then: "Say the risk number out loud."

"Twelve to eighteen percent chance of contact at the objective," she said. "If there's contact I'm the slowest thing in the building and I'll probably die there."

"Yes," Leon said. "Alright."

Nobody in the room breathed for a moment, and then everybody did, and Harken moved on to boat assignments.

That was all of it. Not a concession. Not a favour dressed up in a brother's voice. He had agreed because the analysis was correct, and for four days she had carried that around inside her chest like something warm in a pocket.

Garren had walked out beside her, at her pace, which was a very slow pace, and had said nothing for the length of the corridor.

"You disapprove," she said.

"Didn't say anything."

"You said it in the shape of your back."

"My back's two hundred and seventeen years old," Garren said. "It says a lot of things. Don't read all of them."

The boat was an ore lighter with the ore taken out of it, called Cormorant, and it was cold, because the Order's freighters ran environmentals at two-thirds to hold their radiated signature under the local dust background and nobody was making an exception for one passenger.

"You're shivering," said Wren Callas.

"I'm not."

"You are. I can hear your teeth from here. Take the jacket."

"No."

Wren was already halfway out of it. She was twenty, she had a signals officer's terrible posture, and she wore her hair in a knot that failed structurally about once an hour. "It isn't even a nice jacket. It's got somebody's rank tabs still sewn in the collar and I'm fairly sure he died. It's a haunted jacket. You'd be doing me a favour."

"I'm not allowed," Eliana said. "My brother owes me a coat."

Wren stopped with one arm out of the sleeve. "He owes you a coat."

"Since Veridus-9. Fourteen months of exile, seven months of a war, and I'm still sitting here in a cardigan with a hole in the elbow." She lifted the elbow to demonstrate. The hole had been the size of a coin on Veridus-9. It was now the size of a plum, and she had stopped darning it, because darning it made it look worse. "If I take a jacket from you the debt is discharged and he gets away with it. It's a matter of law."

"That's insane."

"It's the only leverage I own."

"What happens when the coat comes?"

"Then we open discussions on whether I can be treated as an adult," Eliana said. "That's the arrangement. Real clothes, adult status. It has been under negotiation for some years."

Wren put the jacket back on with the expression of a woman filing something for later use. "Right. Well. When it arrives I want a viewing. Full showing. Turning around."

"There will be turning around."

"Good." Wren dropped onto the deck plate opposite, legs crossed, and set the magnetic travel board down between them. "Now shut up and lose to me."

The board was a child's set with two pawns replaced by washers. Wren played the way she did everything, at speed and out loud, and she had a theory of chess she had built herself, from first principles, wrongly.

"The horse," she announced, putting a knight on a square where it did nothing whatsoever, "is the best piece."

"It isn't."

"It goes round corners. Nothing else goes round corners."

"It goes round one corner. Very slowly. In a war."

"I've beaten you with the horse."

"You have never beaten me."

"There was a draw."

"You knocked the board over."

"It was a contested position," Wren said, with dignity, "and the collapse of the board was an act of the ship and not of me, and it goes in the record as a draw."

"It goes in the record as forty-one to nothing."

"Forty and a draw." Wren pushed a bishop out into open air. "Also you don't play chess, you do arithmetic at me. There's a difference. Chess is a game of the soul and you sit there being a calculator with hair."

Eliana took the bishop. It had been hanging for two moves and Wren had not noticed, which was, in its way, restful.

"What's horse?"

"Sorry?"

"In your language. The dead one. What's horse?"

"Vesharen."

"Say it again."

"Vesharen. The stress is on the first syllable and the r is further back in your throat than you want it to be."

Wren said it four times, getting worse each time, and then took the stylus and wrote VESH-a-ren across her own palm in signals ink, which does not come off for a week. "Right. Next game I'm announcing my moves in Old Astraian and you're going to have to sit there and take it."

"Nobody in the Dominion reads it," Eliana said. "Nobody in the Reach reads it. There are two of us."

"There's three of us now," Wren said, admiring her hand. "Me, you, and the horse."

Pip drifted down off the strut where it had been charging and settled on Eliana's shoulder like a very small opinionated bird. Three rising tones. A pause. Three rising tones. Then it wanted the finger, and she gave it the finger, and it took the reading and buzzed once, discontented, and she read the number before Wren could and thumbed the display dark.

"What'd it say?"

"That I slept."

"Did you sleep?"

"Six hours," Eliana said, which was a lie she had constructed with care three days ago and had been paying out in instalments ever since. Wren believed it, because Wren believed her about everything, which was the single most extraordinary thing about Wren Callas.

Nobody had ever done that. Not once in twenty-three years. Everyone she had ever met had looked at her and seen the illness or looked at her and seen the face. Wren had somehow managed to look at her and see a colleague — a difficult one, better at the job, who could be argued with about the horse.

Caddy Reeve came aft along the spine with a coil of optical patch over his shoulder and stopped to look at the board.

"She's losing," Eliana said.

"She's always losing," Caddy said. "Ma'am, coupling on the collar. I can promise you point-three-one. If I get greedy I have to put a hand on the amplifier housing, and the housing carries a thermal interlock that trips at four degrees over ambient, and a hand is about six."

"Point-three-one is fine."

"Point-three-one is fine, she says." He was pleased. He had wanted to be told his work was enough. She had learned that about engineers from Garren, who had never in his life said so out loud and had never once needed to be told twice.

The deck hummed. Forward, Fass went through the boarding order for the third time in a voice like gravel in a bucket. Eliana Zadkiel sat in a freezing ore lighter under a haunted jacket she had refused, forty-two to nothing, and was happier than she had been since she was seventeen years old.

She had a list going in her slate. She had started it in the first hour of transit and had told no one.

Names, off the amber traffic. Kaelic clerks sign their frames. Ships' masters countersign. Quartermasters put their own initials on manifest lines because they are frightened of being blamed later.

Nine so far, off the practice take. Faelan Roe, Second Signals, Dessiter. Ulve Marchand, quartermaster's mate, Tallis victualling office. A boy called Konn who had signed a fuel chit with a smear because he had not let the ink set.

Seven months of Leon coming through the hatch grey to the lips with a list in his mouth. Nine, then twenty-two, then a hundred and six. Seven months of him standing in the middle of her cabin saying the enemy's names out loud because she had made him promise, and he had never once broken it, not even the night he had to say I couldn't get them, there were no bodies to get them off.

Seven months of her sitting there with her hands in her lap, receiving.

Today she was going to bring him names.

Leon caught her at the boat.

He looked terrible in the way he now permanently looked terrible, which was smooth. Two hours of sleep did something to his face that made it look ironed.

"Twelve to eighteen," he said.

"Twelve to eighteen."

"I've read Fass's plan. It's a good plan."

"It's a boring plan," Eliana said. "Boring is the compliment."

"Boring is the compliment," he agreed. He looked at the hole in her elbow for slightly too long. "When you're back."

"When I'm back what?"

"The coat," Leon said. "There's a chandler at Bellhaven who owes the Order money and keeps stock. Wool. Actual wool, off an actual animal, not spun out of a reclamation tank. Long enough that you'd have to be careful on stairs."

"I can't do stairs."

"Then long enough to be a hazard on ramps." He almost smiled. "Full length. Weight to it. The sort of thing that makes people assume you're somebody's mother."

"And then?"

"And then," Leon said, "we open discussions."

"Discussions."

"Exploratory. No commitments."

"Seven months," Eliana said, "and I get exploratory."

He put his hand on the top of her head, briefly, the way he had when she was nine, and the tremor went through her scalp, and neither of them said anything about that either. Then a launch officer called something and he was gone up the gantry, and she did not see him again for a hundred and nine days.

Callow Shoal was a dead ore platform in the shadow of a dead moon, and the Dominion had bolted a signals repeater mast to it because the geometry was good and the rock was free.

They came in ballistic with the drive cold for forty-one minutes, tumbling very slightly to spread the thermal, and the hull temperature fell until the condensation on the frames froze and then went straight to vapour and the air got dry enough to crack lips. Eliana sat strapped to a stanchion with the oxygen bottle in her lap and her hands under her arms and counted the tumble period, which was eleven point four seconds, and then counted it again for something to do.

Fass took the platform in ninety-four seconds.

Two Dominion dead at the airlock gallery. Four surrendered in the mess. Three ran into the rock workings and were left there, sealed behind a blown hatch, to be somebody else's problem in six hours.

Teo Hallis carried her up the spine.

He was nineteen and he asked permission first, which was correct, and he carried her the way you carry something you have been told is expensive. She put her arms round his neck and looked over his shoulder at the ladder rungs going by and did the thing she did, which was to be elsewhere for the duration.

Forty-one rungs. She counted them. Twenty-seven point four kilograms in boots and the coat she did not have. He did not breathe hard, and that was the worse part.

Under twenty-eight. That was the number she was not saying to anybody. Five weeks, now.

Today she minded it less than usual, and she noticed herself minding it less, and that was how she knew what kind of day it was.

They set her up in the repeater gallery: crate, folded blanket, bottle strapped to the crate leg, slate on a ration case, Pip magnetised to the console housing at eye level. Caddy did the splice. He did not cut the trunk, because cutting a trunk tells the far end you exist. He clamped an inductive collar round the amplifier housing where the optical spine came out of its jacket and took the bleed off the fringing field. Receive only. No transmit path. Not one milliwatt going the other way.

"Six hundred and forty channels on this mast," Caddy said, watching his own numbers. "Eleven point two terabits. We're going to drink about nine of them through a hose and throw all of it away except yours."

"I only want amber."

"You only want amber," Caddy agreed. "Collar's at point-three-one-four. Housing's running one point one over ambient. It'll hold if nobody leans on it."

"Nobody will lean on it."

"Somebody always leans on it."

Then the take started, and it was good.

It was better than good. It came up as raw ciphered frame and she let it run past her eyes for ninety seconds without touching anything, the way you let a stream run before you drink. Kaelic naval cipher keyed its rotation off a scripture meter, a nine-beat liturgical line the Dominion's cryptographers had chosen nine centuries ago because it was holy and unguessable, and it was unguessable to everyone in the galaxy except a woman who had learned Old Astraian verse at four years old and could hear that the Kaelic nine-beat and the Astraian nine-beat were the same animal in a different coat.

She found the key in two minutes forty.

It was a good key. It was a funny key, in a way she could not have explained to anybody in the room: the salt was drawn from a verse about a lamp kept burning in a window, and she had a moment of pure professional delight at whoever had picked it.

Then the plaintext came up, and she started reading Kaelic aloud, and Wren started writing it down.

"Convoy Sabbath-Nine," Eliana said. "Departing Tallis outer moorings, twelve hulls, four escorts, and the corridor is the Ferric lane, not Ophir. Wren, that's a change. They moved it off Ophir eight days ago and nobody told us."

"Got it."

"Victualling contract, Tallis anchorage, eleven thousand four hundred rations a day for the next quarter. Eleven four."

Wren's stylus stopped. "Harken's been carrying nine thousand for Tallis since spring."

"I know."

"That's two thousand four hundred people we didn't know were there."

"Keep writing."

It went on like that for four hours and ten minutes. Mooring rotations. The Predator squads on a fourteen-day rest cycle and the four stations they rested at. A fuel-oil allocation that told her, by arithmetic she did in her head and did not explain, that two of the fourteen warships at Tallis had not moved in five months and were probably not able to.

Then a magistracy docket: eighty-one Reach civilians held at Tallis under detention orders. Names, ages, home worlds, charge codes. She read them slowly and twice, and Wren wrote every one without saying anything at all, and at the fourteenth one Wren stopped putting her stylus down between names.

And then, in the fourth hour, the yard traffic.

"Stop," Eliana said. "Wren. Stop and start a clean page."

"What?"

"Ferric yards. A requisition against a project the traffic calls the Lance." She leaned in over the slate, which she was not supposed to do, and the oxygen line pulled and she ignored it. "Superconducting bus bar. Eleven hundred metres of it in a single continuous run, no joints, no splices, delivered as one piece on a purpose-built barge. Wren, nothing on a warship needs eleven hundred metres of unbroken bus."

"Unless it's a gun."

"Unless it's a gun." Her hands had gone cold. That happened. "Coolant loop rated for four point one gigajoules per second of waste rejection. Sixteen pumps. Redundancy of two. And a trunnion casting, mass eleven hundred and forty tonnes, tolerance quoted in microns, machined in place because there's no crane in the yard that can lift it twice."

"How big a gun?"

"Not big enough," Eliana said. "That's the point. Four gigajoules a second of waste heat is nothing next to Unit-02. Their whole thermal budget is a rounding error against his. It cannot match him."

She sat back. Pip chirped at her, three rising tones, pause, three rising tones, and she ignored that too.

"They know it can't match him," she said. "They're building it anyway. They've stopped trying to beat him and started trying to hurt him."

Wren looked up. "Is that better or worse?"

"Write it down."

She was going to bring this home. She was going to be carried down forty-one rungs and put in a boat and taken back to the fleet, and she was going to go into her brother's cabin with a slate full of the enemy's plans and eighty-one civilians and the shape of a weapon that did not exist yet, and she was going to hand him names.

The first thing was small, and she nearly let it go.

In four hours and ten minutes of amber traffic there had been no retransmission requests. Not one. No negative acknowledgement, no repeat, no say again my last.

Second. Her own decode had error-corrected somewhere near seven hundred frames, because an inductive collar is a dirty way to listen and point-three-one-four is point-three-one-four. But the trunk itself was clean. Trunks are never perfectly clean. A run this long, through four repeaters, sheds three frames in a thousand, and the far end should have been asking for them back all afternoon.

Third. The clerk signatures. Faelan Roe, Second Signals, aboard Dessiter. Faelan Roe on a frame out of the Tallis victualling office. Faelan Roe on a Ferric yard requisition. One clerk cannot be in three places, and one clerk certainly cannot be in three places and abbreviate tonnage the same wrong way in all three.

Fourth. The padding. Kaelic frames pad to fixed length out of a table of four thousand junk strings, drawn at random. She had logged eleven hundred frames of padding today. Not one string had repeated. You do not take eleven hundred draws out of four thousand without a collision unless you are not drawing. Unless you are generating.

Fifth. The curve. Mundane in the first hour. A convoy in the second. Eighty-one detainees in the third. A secret weapon in the fourth. Nobody's real traffic gets more interesting on a schedule.

Sixth. Three weeks ago she had cracked the amber channel because a repeater at Ophir had run nine minutes in a diagnostic mode that put plaintext beside cipher on the same carrier. Nine minutes. Not two. Not forty. Nine minutes was exactly as long as it takes a competent cryptanalyst to find the seam, and not one second longer than it takes to make a gift look like an accident.

She had thought it was luck. She had been proud of it. She had gone and told Harken about it standing up, and had had to sit down halfway through.

"Wren." Her voice came out level and quiet, and Wren, who had never in seven weeks heard her use that voice, put the stylus down at once. "Read the Ophir repeater's housekeeping. Passive. Don't transmit anything."

Wren's hands moved. "It's — huh. It's in diagnostic."

"Still."

"Still. Twenty-three days." Wren looked up. "Nobody leaves a repeater in diagnostic for twenty-three days."

Eleven seconds, from the retransmissions to here. Eliana knew, because she counted.

She thought about four Dominion signalmen surrendering in the mess with clean boots. She thought about a lamp kept lit in a window, in a verse nobody in the Dominion can read, chosen as a key salt by somebody who had wanted her to smile at it.

They did not fail to close the channel. They opened it, and they have fed me for three weeks to see where the food goes, and today they put the best thing they had on the plate because they wanted me to lean in.

Everyone in this room is going to die because I am good at my job.

"Off the platform," she said. "Everybody. Now. Fass —"

The lights did not go out.

The lights did not go out, which was the worst of it, because it meant she saw everything.

Her console went to noise. Not black. Noise — the collar optics losing coherence all at once as the disruptor field came up through the rock beneath them, every beam path in the gallery scattering, the splice display filling with grey snow that hissed. Caddy Reeve said, "That's a field," in a tone of pure professional offence.

Then the breaching charges. Above and below, on the same half-second.

She knew the sounds. Harken let her read anything she asked for, and she had read the after-action reports of forty boarding actions. A shaped conduit charge goes crack, flat, like a plank dropped on stone. A hull breach goes thump, and round. This was two cracks — one over her head in the mast conduit, one under her feet in the service spine — which meant they had not come in the door, because they had never intended to come in the door.

She stood up.

That was the mistake. Her pulse went from a hundred and four to a figure she never learned, and her legs stopped being addressed. There was no falling in it. There was an interruption in the record, and then she was on the deck on her side with her cheek on cold plate, the crate across her hip, the oxygen line torn out of her nose and lying beside her mouth, hissing.

Get up.

Nothing happened. Her right arm was under her. Her left arm was somewhere. Neither of them was hers.

Blood came out of her nose onto the plate in front of her face and spread along a weld seam. Then the other kind came up her throat. Copper and warm salt. She knew that taste extremely well and it was not even the important thing happening.

An Order carbine opened up. Chatter, high, seven-eighty cyclic, greedy with ammunition. Three Kaelic sidearms answered, and Kaelic sidearms cough — subsonic, suppressed, a low soft sound like a man clearing his throat in the next room. A rebreather whistled two-tone very close and then not close.

Fass shouted for thermite on the tap and she heard the chuff of it going, which meant Caddy had stayed at the console with a field up and a boarding party in the room in order to burn a collar clamp so the Dominion could not learn what the Order had learned.

A magazine hit the deck and skidded. A man said a woman's name. The wet sound, twice.

Somebody dragged her. A hand took her collar and pulled and she went a metre and a half across the plate and under the overhang of the number two console housing, and her hip caught the strut and the bone went, and she made no noise at all, because she had no air with which to make one.

Teo Hallis died by the hatch. She knew it was him because he said "no" first, once, at conversational volume, like a man correcting a mistake on a form.

She counted carbines. Four. Then three. Then three for twelve seconds, which is enormous.

Then one.

Then none.

Wren came down on top of her.

Not shot: she came down on purpose, all elbows, wedging into the gap under the console with her back to the room and both arms over Eliana's head, and she said, close to her ear and completely calmly, "It's fine. I've got you. Stay small." Something took her twice across the back, high, and both of them arrived through her ribs like knocks on a door. Wren said "oh," in the tone of a woman remembering something left on a stove. Then her weight stopped being a person holding a position and became a mass with a centre of gravity, and it settled onto Eliana's shoulder and neck and the side of her face.

Eliana was awake.

She tried her neck. Two centimetres. The weight took it back down.

She tried her right shoulder, to roll. The arm was folded under her ribs and had gone to a dead heaviness that had nothing to do with wanting.

Her left arm moved. Four centimetres across the plate, fingers first. It stopped. It shook. It would not do the fifth.

She measured it afterward against the weld seam. Four.

Wren's hand had come to rest palm-up, near her mouth, close enough to be out of focus. The ink was still on it. VESH-a-ren, in signals stylus, which does not come off for a week.

Blood ran down the side of Eliana's face and into her ear and she could not turn her head out of it.

Move.

She did not move.

She was on the floor for eleven minutes. She knows, because she counted.

Wren cooled from the outside in, shoulder first, then the arm across her head, over some minutes, which is how it goes. The hair over her eyes did not shift, so she looked through it, at the hand, at the ink.

Nobody came to help. Nobody came to finish it.

Somewhere to the left, past the console housing, in the dark under a collapsed cable run, Pip started up.

Three rising tones. A pause. Three rising tones.

The Kaelic troops came in with lights, and they were very careful with her.

That was the thing she had not prepared for. She had prepared, over seven months, for a great many kinds of hands. Not these.

"Here. Under two. She's under two." A rebreather, low, right beside her head. "Sergeant. I have her. I have the lady."

"Don't pull. Don't pull. Lift the console."

They took Wren off her the way people move furniture in a house where somebody is asleep. Four of them, one at each corner. A man kept saying slow, slow, slow in Kaelic. They laid her out along the deck instead of stacking her with the others, and somebody straightened her legs, and somebody else folded her hands, and the ink went under the other hand and out of sight.

Then they came back. A palm went under Eliana's neck and took the weight of her head — supported it properly, at the base of the skull, the way a corpsman does — and another slid under her shoulders and a third under her knees, and she was lifted so gently that the hip barely complained.

"Bring the bottle," a woman's voice said. "Regulator's still charged. Bring the whole rig, don't disconnect anything from her."

"Praetorial order," the sergeant said, to nobody, to the room, in the flat recitation of a man made to memorise something. "Intact. Unmarked. Not a bruise on her. On my authority and my life."

Somebody tried to work the ring off her thumb. She felt the two small tugs and the sunburst turning on the back of her hand. An officer said one word and the fingers went away at once, and after a moment somebody turned the signet round again so it sat right.

A young soldier knelt beside the stretcher with a field cloth. He wet it from his own canteen. Then he cleaned her face: chin first, then her mouth, then round the nose, working upward, tilting his head to see what he was doing, going slowly at the nostril because of the bleeding.

"Almost done, my lady," he said, in Kaelic, in the voice you use in a sickroom. "Almost done. Forgive me."

She understood every word.

What she wanted, with a completeness she had never wanted anything, was for him to hit her. Once. Anywhere. So that one thing in the room would be honest.

He finished. He folded the cloth and put it back in his own pocket, because it was his.

Then somebody laid a coat over her, because the gallery was cold and she was shaking. It was long and heavy and it came up to her chin, and it was still warm from the man who had been wearing it.

They carried her out through the repeater gallery, and Pip went on.

Three rising tones. A pause. Three rising tones. It was under a collapsed cable run about four metres from where she had been, casing cracked, one rotor gone, doing the only thing it knew how to do, which was to announce that its patient's vitals were outside tolerance and it could not reach her.

Its cells had been failing for two months. They were failing now. The interval had stretched, and the third tone had gone flat, and it did not stop.

It did not stop while they lifted her over the sill. It did not stop while they counted the Order dead by the hatch, out loud, in Kaelic — nine — and she heard the number and kept it. It did not stop while two engineers argued about the thermite damage to the collar clamp and whether anything under it was recoverable.

It was still going when the sergeant walked back for it. He stood over the cable run with his light on it, listening, the way a man looks at a smoke alarm.

He put his boot on it and leaned.

It stopped.

She woke because the light changed, and the light changed because someone had drawn a curtain, slowly, with both hands, the way you do when you are trying not to wake a person.

That was the first wrong thing.

For two years she had woken to four sounds in some order: the hull tick of a converted freighter shedding heat, the concentrator compressor cycling every eleven seconds, Garren coughing two bulkheads over, and Leon not sleeping. There had never been a curtain. There had never been a window to hang one on.

The ceiling above her was dressed stone, pale, with a hairline seam running east to west where two slabs met. Someone had aligned the grain across the seam so the eye read it as one piece. She lay and looked at it and thought about how many hours of a person's life that had cost, and what they had been paid.

Then: I am in a bed.

Not a bunk. A bed wide enough that both arms could lie flat without finding an edge, with a mattress that took her weight in stages instead of all at once. The sheets were linen, laundered soft. The cool of them against the backs of her legs was so unfamiliar that her body filed it as a symptom.

She tried to sit up.

Her stomach muscles fired. Her shoulders came off the pillow perhaps four centimetres and her head did not follow, and something low in her back informed her that the transaction was refused. She went back down. The pillow took her skull. She lay and breathed and listened to the fine crackle at the base of her right lung, which had been there six days and had not moved a millimetre.

Second attempt. She got a hand flat on the mattress and pushed.

The hand did not close. She watched it: the fingers came in halfway and stopped, curled, like something drawn by a child who had lost interest partway through. She could feel the weave of the linen perfectly. She simply could not hold it.

All right, she thought. So it's that now.

A doctor on Veridus-9 who charged four credits and smelled of solvent had told her that when the intercostals went, she would notice it first in her voice. He had been right, which had annoyed her then and annoyed her still.

She tried the voice, quietly, on nobody.

"Pip."

It came out at about the volume of a page turning.

Pip heard it, because Pip was built to hear exactly that and nothing else. The drone lifted off the bedside table, crossed ninety centimetres of air, and hovered at her shoulder, and sang.

Three rising tones. A pause. Three rising tones.

Clean. Both sets. No stutter on the fourth note, no flattening on the sixth, no long ugly sag where the cell voltage dropped under 3.4 and the tone generator browned out. She had not heard the whole sequence in fourteen months. She had stopped hearing the gap as a fault. She had started hearing it as Pip's voice.

Somebody had put new cells in her drone.

Eliana lay still and looked at the seam in the stone and felt the thing she was going to have to feel for the rest of however long this took, arriving early and on time.

Oh, she thought. They're going to be kind.

The room had been prepared. That was the accurate word and she made herself use it. Appointed, made ready, comfortable — all of those had a give in them that let you look somewhere else.

A chair by the window, upholstered, low-backed. Beside it a footstool at the height a person with poor circulation would want, which is lower than most people guess. A jug with a lid. A cup with two handles and a straw of the kind you can bite without collapsing. A grab rail running the wall from bed to washroom door at eighty centimetres, which was the height of her hand standing, which she was not going to be doing.

An oxygen line. Not a bottle with a regulator wheel that stuck at two and had to be knocked. A wall line, humidified, four litres a minute through a cannula sized for a face her size, so that the tubing did not saw across her cheekbones. She could tell it was four by the loose feeling at the top of her chest, the one that made her want to laugh and had nothing to do with anything being funny.

On the dresser, laid flat, was her cardigan.

Washed. Blocked. Dried flat, so the shoulders had come back. The hole in the left elbow mended from the inside in matched thread, forty-odd stitches, by someone who knew the work and had understood that she would not want it hidden.

The last time she had seen the left side of that cardigan it had been soaked to the hem with Wren Callas's blood.

Twenty years old. Signals officer. Terrible at chess, loudly, resigning four moves early and shouting about it. She had put herself between Eliana and the breach the way you step over a cable. Afterward, on the deck plate, Eliana could move her right hand ten centimetres and not her head. Wren was forty centimetres away. It took a long time.

Somewhere in this building was a laundry. Somewhere in the laundry was a person who had run cold water through the wool for an hour to lift a protein stain without setting it, and had done a careful job.

Eliana looked at the squared sleeves and did not look away for a while.

Beside the cardigan, on a hanger, was a coat.

Charcoal wool, heavy, close-woven, high collar, lining the colour of skimmed milk. Short in the body, because she was short in the body. The sleeves were not approximately right. They were right — cut for the arm of a person one hundred and forty centimetres tall, which is not a length any shop carries, which meant somebody had measured her while she was unconscious and cut cloth to the figure.

She had been owed a coat for twenty-six months by a man who had never once had the money.

When I have real clothes, we'll consider treating me like an adult.

Funny for a year. A thing they said, after that. Now it was hanging in the room with her, tailored, and it was the most frightening object she had ever been in a room with.

The physician came at what she estimated was mid-morning. She knocked, and waited.

Small, broad-shouldered, about sixty, grey at the temples, a plain grey coat with no rank flash on it anywhere. She came in and did not look at the machines first. She looked at Eliana's face.

"Lady Zadkiel. My name is Yesheva Amur. I'm your physician while you're here." A pause with no performance in it. "Are you in pain right now? Yes or no. Don't spend voice on me."

Eliana considered lying. It was reflex, the way flinching is reflex. She had been lying about this since she was nine and had got good enough that the lie usually arrived first, fully dressed, with a smile attached.

She could not get the smile on.

"Yes."

"Where?"

"Back. Ribs. Hands."

"Hands." Amur wrote it on a slate with a stylus, the way a person writes who has been writing on slates for forty years. "Right. We'll do the boring part and you can hate me afterwards."

The boring part took twenty-two minutes. Amur used her hands, did not hurry, and said what she was about to do half a second before she did it. Every time. Lifting your left arm. Pressing here. This is cold. This is the colder one, sorry. When she rolled Eliana to listen to the back of the chest she did it with a folded sheet and a technique, so that Eliana was moved by fabric rather than by fingers, and set down the way you set down a thing with hinges.

"Two days of haematemesis," Amur said, reading back. "Four episodes logged on the transport. Small volumes. That's oesophageal tearing from the cough, not a bleed proper, and it's the only good news in the file, so hold it while I read you the rest." She scrolled. "Twenty-six point eight kilos. You were twenty-eight point five in the Order's last record eleven days ago. About a third of that loss is water. Resting heart rate one thirty-four. Saturation on room air, eighty-six on arrival. On four litres you're ninety-five."

"Ninety-five," Eliana whispered.

"Ninety-five."

She had not seen ninety-five in two years. Ninety-five was a number from before.

"Your concentrator," Amur said, "was a fixed two-litre unit with a failing sieve bed. Bench test says it was putting out one point four with a duty cycle you could set a watch by. You have been living on two-thirds of the oxygen you needed for at least four months, probably five." She set the slate down on her knee. "Whoever was managing you was managing you with what existed. I'm not making a criticism. I'm telling you the arithmetic your body has been doing."

Eliana closed her eyes.

He heard that compressor every night. He knew what the cycle meant. He couldn't buy a better one, so he stopped sleeping instead, as though that were the same currency.

"There's an infusion," Amur said. "Lattice-stabilising agent, third generation, Sethen Reach manufacture. It cures nothing. Nothing cures this. What it does is slow the rate at which your connective tissue surrenders hydrogen bonds under load — about eleven percent, for roughly six hours, at four millilitres an hour." A beat. "It will make your hands close. Not well. Close."

"Cost," Eliana breathed.

Amur looked at her for a moment longer than she had looked at anything else in the room.

"Two thousand one hundred credits a day," she said. "Which is what you were actually asking, and I'd have thought less of you if you hadn't."

Eliana turned her face toward the window.

Amur went on working. Somewhere in the middle of it she said, not looking up, in the tone of a woman filling a silence for the patient's benefit and pretending it was for her own: "I read your father's monograph. Coherent resonance in living lattices. Four hundred and six pages, twice, when I was thirty-one." A dry sound. "I followed about a fifth. It is the finest piece of physics I have ever failed to understand. There are nine people in twelve galaxies working on Verrine decay and all nine of us are standing on that book."

"Did it help."

"No," Amur said. "It describes the problem completely. Describing a thing completely is not the same as being able to stop it. It isn't even next to it."

I know, Eliana thought. I lived with the man. He described me completely for twenty years and then he flew off and died of it.

The pump primed. She watched the counter: 4.0 mL/hr, 0.2 delivered, 0.3. Eight minutes later the feeling came back into her hands the way it comes back into a limb you have slept on, and she made a fist, an actual closed fist, and held it for three seconds.

She lay with her hand shut and hated everything in the room, herself included.

"You're crying," Amur observed, without alarm.

"No."

"All right," said Amur, and put a cloth into the fist, and did not mention it again.

At the door she stopped.

"I'll say one thing and then not repeat it, because saying it twice would be for me." She addressed the doorframe. "I wasn't posted here. I asked for this posting. In the recorded history of this condition there is one patient who has lived past twenty-two, and she is in this room, and I want to know why. That is a selfish reason to be at your bedside." A pause. "But it means I will not hurt you, and if anyone in this building instructs me to, they will discover what a Tenth Circuit appointment is worth. Which is very little. It isn't nothing. I'll spend all of it."

She went out.

Eliana lay with her fist closed around the cloth and thought that, on balance, she would have preferred to be starved.

Praetor Oris Vantalar came in the afternoon. He knocked, and waited for a permission she could not give, and counted out four seconds before he entered anyway.

Fifty-one. Grey. Unhurried. A plain uniform coat with the collar closed. There was no blade on him.

She had wondered, in the flat storage part of her mind, whether he would wear the Verdict. He had left it somewhere. She understood that this was a courtesy, and that it was also a message, and that he knew she would understand both, and that the rest of the conversation was going to work exactly this way.

He took the chair by the window and moved it himself to a metre and a half from the bed, angled so she could see him without turning her head.

"Lady Eliana. You're awake. Doctor Amur told me not to come before noon and I did as I was told."

She said nothing. Saying nothing was free.

"I'm going to talk for a while, because you can't, and because otherwise you'll spend voice on questions I can answer unasked. Stop me with your hand if I get something wrong." He glanced at the hand on the coverlet and added, in exactly the same tone, "Or your eyes. I'll be watching them."

He folded his hands.

"You are in the Praetorial residence at Tallis Anchorage. You are not a prisoner; there is no charge and no sentence. You are also not free; you cannot leave. I won't spend either of our time pretending those two sit comfortably together."

That's competent, she thought, and disliked how much she preferred it.

"You were taken eleven days ago at the Sarrow transfer. Twenty-two Order personnel were killed. I have the list of names. You may have it whenever you ask, and I'd advise you to take it, because I understand you keep those." He paused for precisely as long as the thing was owed. "A signals officer named Callas died shielding you. She was twenty. Her family are on Halloway Reach and they have been told the truth, which my administration does not usually manage, and I saw to it personally. Telling you so is a small vulgarity. I'm doing it because you would otherwise wonder, and wondering costs you more than listening."

Eliana's throat worked twice before it produced anything.

"Why."

"Why did I take you." He nodded slowly, as though it were a fair question that deserved its full length, which it was. "You'll get the whole of it. Not the version for the feeds."

The light off the anchorage water came up through the window and moved on the ceiling.

"The Ring fell in eleven minutes," he said. "Eleven million dead inside ninety. That was a military success and the worst administrative decision of my life. I made it. I would make it again, for reasons I still hold to be sound. It left me governing eight hundred million people who watched it happen from their kitchens."

He turned back to her.

"I can feed them. I have grain in four systems and hulls to move it. I can restore the civil courts; I have magistrates sitting idle who would be delighted. I can open the outer-ring corridors tomorrow morning — the ships are moored, crewed, and burning money at four hundred thousand a day. What I cannot do is make any of it legitimate. Everything I build comes down the day I'm recalled, because it is mine, and I am the man who did the Ring."

"So take a girl," Eliana whispered.

"Yes," said Vantalar.

No flinch. No softening. She had expected him to reach for a word — union, elevation, protection — and he did not, and that was the first genuinely frightening thing he did.

"Your house is a thousand and six years old and never fought a war, and the Reach loves it in the specific, useless, unreasoning way people love a thing that has always been there. Your father died flying alone at eight hundred and seventy ships. Your mother —" He stopped. He did not look away. "Your mother died in front of you, and I did it, and I won't be calling it anything else in this room or any other."

The oxygen hissed. Somewhere below, a crane took up load and the floor passed it into her spine.

"An instrument bearing your name," he continued, "makes my administration a continuation rather than an occupation. That is not rhetoric. It is a distinction in twelve bodies of law with twelve sets of consequences. With it, the amnesty survives me. Without it, the amnesty is a mood. I am fifty-one years old, Lady Eliana, and everything I have built in the Reach currently has the structural integrity of a mood."

"You want an instrument."

"I want an instrument."

"Not a wife."

"No," Vantalar said.

And she believed him. That was the trouble. She lay there with four litres a minute going up her nose and looked at his face and found nothing in it — no appetite, no evasion, none of the elaborate restraint that appetite usually wears in public. He wanted a signature the way an engineer wants a bolt of a particular grade.

Almost entirely.

Because he had said your mother died and I did it without moving his eyes, and that was honesty, and honesty is cheap in a man who has already won. And he had also had a coat cut for her from measurements taken off an unconscious body. Charcoal wool. A milk-white lining that matched — that matched — a secondhand cardigan he had ordered mended rather than replaced, from the inside, in thread chosen to be visible to her and invisible to everyone else.

A man who wants a bolt does not think about the elbow.

He did not know he had done it. She could see that too. It was the one part of him he had not told the truth to, and he had built it a room and put her in it and drawn the curtain slowly with both hands.

"You'll be treated," Vantalar said. "Amur is the best in the Circuit and she asked to come. You'll have the wall line, a bed, and food you can keep down. Your drone was repaired; I'm told the cells were four years past service and one of them had vented. Your ring was returned to you and cleaned. Nobody in this building has any interest in your property."

He stood, and squared the chair back to where it lived, because that was where it lived.

"And eight hundred million people eat this winter instead of being administered by whoever replaces me, who will be worse, and who is already writing to the Overlord about my softness." He said it without weight. "That is not a threat. It's a personnel forecast."

"And my brother," she whispered.

Vantalar paused at the window.

"Your brother will try to come here. I have made it as easy as I can for him to learn that you are alive and comfortable, because a man who believes that moves more slowly than a man who does not." No pleasure in it at all. "I would prefer he lived. I have no expectation that he'll oblige me."

He went to the door.

"The magistrate comes at six," he said. "I would rather it were next month. It isn't up to me."

The magistrate came at six, and he was not a monster, which she had known he would not be, and that was going to be the whole problem.

Duvallon Sesk. About seventy. Reading lenses on a cord, an ink stain on the right cuff of an otherwise immaculate coat. He brought an assistant, a recorder on a tripod, and a folding table, and he laid his equipment out in an order that had plainly not varied in forty years: recorder, seal block, stylus, the instrument itself in a stiffened folder, and a small brass weight to hold the page flat.

He calibrated the recorder first. It took four minutes. He held a tone card at three hundred millimetres from the pillow and waited for the unit to report the ambient floor, and frowned at the oxygen line, and moved the tripod eleven centimetres closer.

Then he read the instrument aloud in full.

It took nineteen minutes. Every clause. The schedules. The corridors, the courts, the cessation of punitive operations, the restoration of civil administration, the amnesty, unconditional, with no reservation of prosecution for acts committed during the occupation by either party — he read that one in exactly the voice he had used for the definitions section, because to him it was the definitions section.

Then he lowered the folder and looked at her over the lenses with real, unhappy, professional attention.

"Lady Zadkiel. The instrument requires consent on the record. Spoken. Audible to the recorder at not less than forty-eight decibels at three hundred millimetres, followed by mark." He said it the way a man reports a leak in a roof he does not own. "Can you speak at volume?"

"No," she said, at the volume of a page turning.

The recorder did not register it.

Sesk turned to Vantalar.

"That's a problem, Praetor."

"How much of one?"

"Considerable." Sesk took the lenses off and polished them on the stained cuff. "Twelve jurisdictions. Four accept written consent standing alone. Haleth and the Circuit do not. The Circuit requires audible affirmation and has since the Marrow business, two hundred and six years ago, and if the Circuit won't hold it, the rest is a curiosity for collectors."

"Proxy provision."

"There is one." Sesk put the lenses back on and found the page with a thumb that already knew where it was. "Section eleven, subsection four. Where the party is incapable of audible affirmation by reason of infirmity, an attending physician of record may attest capacity, and a designated proxy may affirm aloud on the party's behalf. Provided the party is conscious. Provided capacity is attested. Provided the party makes mark."

"Does it stand?"

"It stands. It's ugly. It has been used for a hundred and sixty years for dying merchants and it has never once been overturned on appeal."

"Then use it."

"Doctor Amur will have to attest."

"Ask her."

"She'll refuse, Praetor. I've met her sort. She'll say the patient is too unwell to be doing this at all, which is a clinical opinion and not the question."

"Then ask her the question the section actually asks," Vantalar said. "Whether the patient is conscious and oriented. She is an honest woman. She will answer it honestly, and she will resent me for a year, and she will be correct to."

They talked over her.

Not around her. Over — the two of them standing either side of the bed, the folder passing above her body, one professional to another. Sesk raised whether the proxy might be a member of the Praetor's own staff, or whether that created an interest. Vantalar said use a magistracy clerk. Sesk said a clerk was cleaner. They agreed a clerk was cleaner and the assistant went to fetch one.

Amur came, and stood at the foot of the bed, and looked at Eliana for eight seconds.

"Is the patient conscious and oriented?" Sesk asked.

"Ask her the date," Amur said.

"My lady, what is the date?"

Eliana told him. She told him the day, and the standard year, and the local anchorage watch, and then, because she was tired and because she was her mother's daughter, she told him the tide.

"She is conscious and oriented," Amur said. "I attest to that and to nothing else on the page, and I want the refusal minuted."

"It will be," said Sesk, and minuted it.

The clerk was about nineteen and had a stammer that got worse under the recorder. She affirmed, aloud, at a calibrated level, on behalf of the Lady Eliana Zadkiel of the Aetherian Reach, that she consented freely and without duress to all terms as read. She had to do it twice. The first attempt came in at forty-four decibels.

The second one registered. The recorder made a small sound like a coin going into a slot.

Nobody in the room was cruel. Nobody raised a voice. Somebody asked whether she was too cold, and she was not.

Then they needed her mark.

The clerk put the stylus into her right hand and the fingers would not close, so the clerk closed them, one at a time, with her own, whispering sorry each time. Then she took hold of the outside of Eliana's hand and lifted the whole arm off the coverlet and carried it to the page. Eliana felt her elbow travel through an arc she had not chosen. The shoulder rotated to accommodate a decision made outside her body, and went where it was sent.

The stylus touched the paper.

And Eliana Zadkiel, who had that morning been physically overmatched by the bedding, discovered she was still the cleverest person in the room.

They wanted a mark. They could have a mark.

The clerk had the heel and the knuckles, because that is where you hold a hand you are steering. Nobody was holding her fingers. Nobody could, and steer as well; there are only so many places to put a grip. The gross movement was theirs. The fine movement was hers.

Fine movement was all a court hand had ever been.

Her mother had taught her the old script at six, at a table by a window, with a real nib and an ink that stained for days, because Elizabeth Zadkiel had considered it a national disgrace that the Reach had let a nine-hundred-year hand die and had decided that at minimum her daughter would not be an accessory. Old Astraian court hand is not a signature style. It is a system. Every letter carries a case marker in the ascender and a house marker in the tail. It is read from the terminals inward. It takes four years and it is comprehensively unreadable to anyone who has not spent them.

As of eleven days ago there were perhaps six living people who could read it.

None of them were in the Dominion of Kael.

One thing, she thought. Let me have one thing.

The clerk drew the arm left to right in a slow assisted arc and Eliana let the arc happen and put the letters inside it. The ascenders went up in the maternal case rather than the personal. The tails carried a house marker that had not been used since the marriage. The line resolved — to anyone who could resolve it — into a name that was not hers.

Elisavet Aurelinne Sarreth.

Her mother's maiden name. The one that was on no document anywhere. The one that had opened a vault door under an observatory because it was the only word in the galaxy nobody could guess.

Ten strokes. Eight seconds.

The signet turned on her thumb as the hand moved, the way it always did, and the sunburst came round to sit on the back of her hand, facing the page.

There, she thought. Both of us. Sign it.

She lifted the tip a millimetre before the clerk lifted the arm, so the terminal stroke ended clean.

Sesk leaned in with a lamp.

"That's a full signature," he said, and there was genuine surprise in it, and something a warmer man might have let be respect. "I expected a cross. Praetor, she has given us a full signature in old court script."

"Is that a difficulty?"

"It's the opposite. A scripted mark is very hard to challenge — it reads as deliberate, and deliberate is the whole question on appeal. A cross gets litigated. This does not."

"Can you read it?"

"No. Nor can anyone; that hand's been dead a century." Sesk was already reaching for the seal block, pleased, a craftsman looking at a neat join. "It isn't the test. Legibility has never been the test. Consistency of hand and attestation of execution — that's the test. We image it at four hundred lines, we seal, we file in all twelve tonight before the Haleth office closes."

He imaged it. He sealed it. The block made a small hot sound and the room smelled briefly of scorched wax and lamp oil.

"Executed," Sesk said, and wrote the time. "Nineteen forty-one."

Vantalar said, "Thank you, Magistrate," and looked down at her, and there was something on his face for a moment that was very close to an apology, and it was genuine, and it changed nothing, and he went out.

Eliana turned her head. It took eleven seconds and most of what she had left.

She watched Duvallon Sesk pack the brass weight and the seal block into their fitted case in the order they had gone in for forty years.

Her face was empty. She kept it that way with the same muscles she had once used for not coughing in front of her brother.

He glanced up, briefly, out of politeness, and saw a dying girl who had been very cooperative.

"Did you say something, my lady?"

"Thank you," she said, at the volume of a page turning.

"Rest well," said Sesk, and went out with the folding table under his arm and a void instrument in his case.

Four hours, she thought. Nine at the outside, before somebody thinks to put the mark in front of a linguist.

She was not going to give them the four hours back.

Night. The anchorage went quiet in stages.

She knew the stages, because she had been counting them for eleven days out of habit and training, and because Wren had taught her the trick cheerfully and without once suggesting she was teaching anything. You don't need eyes, El. You just need to know what a place sounds like when it's bored.

The cranes at the sixth mooring stopped at 2140. The shuttle cycle went from six-minute to twenty-minute at 2200. At 2215 the deck floods on the western quay dropped from full to half and the light on her ceiling seam went from white to the colour of weak tea.

She did the arithmetic.

Eleven thousand four hundred personnel, give or take the day's rotation. Four hundred and six mobile suits in the racks, of which maybe ninety were fuelled and hot at any given hour; the rest took between nineteen and forty minutes to bring up depending on which rack and which crew chief. Fourteen warships at moorings. Seven of those stripped for refit with reactors cold and their crews still aboard, because there was nowhere else on the station to put eight hundred people. A magistracy. A residence. A civilian yard staff of about two thousand, mostly Reach-born, mostly people who had taken the work because the alternative was the winter.

Then the other side.

Her brother's sync figure was somewhere between eighty-nine and ninety. He thought she did not know that. He thought a great many things about what she did not know, and she had let him keep all of them, for the same reason he let her cough into her sleeve and call it dust.

She knew what the frame did, because she had put her hand on it. She knew what it was to be, for forty seconds, entirely well — lungs filling all the way to the bottom, warm fingers, no pain anywhere in her body, none, the complete absence of a thing she had carried since she was six. She knew what it cost afterwards. She had done it more than once anyway and had never told a living soul.

So she knew, better than anyone breathing, what the machine could take out of a person and what it could put into the world.

And she knew her brother.

He would come. That had never been the question. The question was the shape of what arrived with him, and she knew that too, and it was not a feeling. It was closer to a measurement.

He had killed Corrin Vale in a cellar on Veridus-9 in the ninth month. A father of three. He had come up the stairs afterwards and made her the terrible tea and been funny for eleven minutes, and he had never said the name aloud in front of her, not once in seventeen months. She had read it off a manifest three days later and had been carrying it for him ever since, in the place where she kept the things she did not make him hold.

One man had cost him that much.

Eleven thousand four hundred.

And he would count them. That was the part no one else on this station could have understood, the part that would have sounded, said out loud, like a girl being dramatic. He would count them, because she had made him promise, on a converted freighter, in a voice she had believed at the time was strong. Names, not a count. And the ones on the other side, Leon. The ones in the ships.

She had meant it as an anchor. She had meant: stay legible, stay a person, come back each time as someone who has to sit down and look at me and speak.

She had handed a man with an eidetic memory a standing obligation to hold the name of every human being he ever killed. Then she had let herself be taken. Now there were eleven thousand four hundred of them moored in one place with her at the centre of it, pinned there like a specimen card.

She had built the thing that was about to happen. She had built it out of love, over one evening, carefully, with good intentions and excellent reasoning.

Her hands lay open on the coverlet. The infusion had finished at 2100 and the second bag was scheduled for morning, because everything here was scheduled, and correct, and on time.

"Be slow," she whispered, to the seam in the stone, to no god, to nothing that answered. "Be frightened. Be a coward once, for me, and I'll never ask you for anything again."

He won't, she thought. He has never once in his life been late.

The coat hung on the wardrobe door. Charcoal. Warm. Exactly her size.

Pip settled onto the pillow by her ear and sang, three rising tones, a pause, three rising tones, perfect, on new cells.

At 2247 the lights went out.

Not the alarms. The alarms did not sound at all. The floods on the western quay, the corridor strips under her door, the amber standby on the infusion pump, the reading lamp Sesk had left burning — all of it, at once, in one stroke, like a hand laid flat over a candle.

The oxygen kept running. Battery.

In the dark she lay with her open hands on the linen and listened, and for four seconds there was nothing at all, the deepest silence Tallis Anchorage had held in six years.

Then, a long way off, past the moorings, past the outer buoys, out where the sky was, something came apart. A low tearing with no edges to it. It did not stop.

It got closer.

The tooth was the thing.

Lower left, second molar, a hairline fracture that had been polite about itself for six weeks and had recently stopped being polite. Sub-Praetor Meris Dall had an appointment with the anchorage dental service in nine days. Nine days was the soonest they had. There were eleven thousand four hundred and twelve people on the Tallis roster and one surgery with three chairs, and Dall — who allocated things for a living, who understood queues the way other men understood weather — had accepted the nine days without argument and gone back to his desk and written himself a note to buy clove oil from the commissary.

He had not bought the clove oil. He kept forgetting during the day. He kept remembering at 0300, which was when the tooth remembered him.

His office was a four-metre box on Deck Nine of the administrative spine, with a viewport that looked out along the moorings and a chair requisitioned for a man twelve centimetres taller. On the wall behind him: a printed berth map, laminated, annotated in three colours of grease pencil, because the tactical repeater in the ceiling had a refresh fault and nobody had come to fix it in five months. On the desk: a cold cup of the brown thing the canteen called coffee. A stylus with the grip chewed flat. And a flimsy, curling at the corners, of a nine-year-old girl called Ivet holding up a fish.

The fish was the size of her forearm. She had caught it in a stocked reservoir on Kaeloth Secundus, which was not real fishing, and Dall had told her so, and she had told him the fish did not know that.

He thought about that answer more than was reasonable.

He had not spoken to her in eleven days. The relay windows kept landing at 0200 station time, and his wife Renna had a hydrology shift, and the scheduling of a family across four light-years was in the end a berth allocation problem. He was good at those. He was losing this one anyway.

He was not a war criminal. He liked to be clear with himself about that, occasionally, late, when the tooth was awake.

He had never fired anything. He had signed for eleven thousand tonnes of grain last quarter and rewritten the distribution schedule himself so the Reach labour cohort in the lower yard drew the same ration weight as Dominion ratings, because the alternative produced a measurable rise in workplace injury and a measurable fall in throughput, and because it cost almost nothing, and because he had looked at the numbers and not liked their shape. He had lost an argument about barrack heating. He had won an argument about boots. Twice he had quietly downgraded a disciplinary referral to a written warning and filed the paperwork in a way that made it hard to find.

This was not virtue and he knew it. It was competence with a conscience clipped on like a cheap accessory. It was what you did at thirty-six, mid-grade, four hundred light-years behind a line, when the war had happened to other people.

At 0341 he was working on the schedule that was going to ruin his month.

Berths Four through Seven were fouled by a priority tag out of Corvane. The manifest said Lance components, cradle mass four thousand one hundred tonnes, thermal envelope Class Four, priority absolute, no deviation. Priority absolute meant the deep berths with the heavy cranes. That meant the cryogen tender Bellow sat in the queue nine extra days. That meant the reactor top-off for two destroyers slipped, and the catalyst beds in both aged another cycle for nothing, and Dall got to write a letter explaining it to a man who did not read letters.

He typed: Respectfully, the priority tagging protocol as applied does not account for consumable perishability.

He read it back. He deleted it. He typed it again, word for word, and left it.

There was one more item open in the pane beside it. Small. Routine. Flagged for the Praetorial residence on the upper ring. He had approved it twice already this month.

Oxygen concentrate cartridges, medical grade, qty 40. Nasal cannula, paediatric gauge, qty 200. Nutrient formula, low-residue, hepatic-sparing, qty 60 units. Bed, articulated, single, with side rails. Wardrobe, ladies', item count fourteen, tailored, per attached measurements. Coat, ladies', cashmere-blend, white, per attached measurements.

He had opened the attachment once, on the first pass, out of a clerk's reflex, and had thought: that is a very small person. Then he had thought nothing else. The residence was the residence. Somebody up there was ill and was being looked after, and it was good in a general way that somebody was being looked after.

He approved it. Fourth item down. Twelve seconds.

At 0344 the shift bell went, and the corridor outside filled with the noise of eleven hundred people changing places.

Tallis Anchorage was six point two kilometres of spine with fourteen mooring gantries hung off it like ribs, turning slowly against the ochre bulk of the gas giant it was named for, and at 0345 it was, before anything else, a place where people worked.

The canteen on Deck Six served second-shift breakfast at 0350 and the queue was already forty deep at 0346. Hobb ran the hot line and had run it for nine years and had the forearms of a man who had spent nine years lifting trays. He was arguing with a rating about whether the eggs were eggs.

"They've never been eggs," the rating said.

"Under fleet catering standard four-one-one, they're eggs."

"They come out of a bag."

"So do you, eventually," Hobb said, and put two more on the tray, and moved him along.

In the docking control blister, Berth Clerk Ossa Venn was complaining about paperwork.

"Four forms," she said. "Four. To move a crane sixty metres. One to book the crane. One to close the lane. One to certify the closure. And one — I want you to sit with this — one to notify the office that issued the other three."

"You could stop moving cranes," said Kell Arbo, from signals, without looking up.

"I could stop moving cranes."

"Simplifies it."

"It does simplify it. Log the closure on Two, would you, before the shift turns over and it becomes my personality."

In Bay Twelve, four hundred metres down the spine, the night crew was drawing a knee actuator out of a Rakhis-pattern frame with the wrong hoist, because the right hoist had been borrowed and not returned. The hoist was rated to nine tonnes. The actuator massed eleven and a half. They were doing it in stages with packing timber and a great deal of swearing, and the incident report had already been referred to Dall's office, where it was item nineteen in the queue.

Fourteen warships lay at the moorings with their reactors cold.

That was correct. It was doctrine. Tallis was four hundred light-years behind the line; hot-cycling a capital plant to no purpose cost fuel, cost maintenance hours, cost you the working life of a catalyst bed. So the ships slept, and drew shore power through umbilicals as thick as a man's waist, and kept a duty section awake in three compartments while everyone else lay in their racks in the dark. Ashen Covenant, eleven hundred berths, two hundred and six aboard on anchor watch. Thessin. Vorrow. Grey Assizes.

Four hundred mobile suits sat in their cradles at storage charge — cells at eighteen per cent, coolant loops drained to the sumps, cockpit blocks dark.

At 0351 and twenty seconds, Picket Nine missed a check-in.

The pickets were four patrol craft holding station at forty thousand kilometres on the cardinal approaches, and their job was to speak every twenty minutes, and Nine did not. Rating Ilse Corr in the picket cell noted the miss, waited sixty seconds, and queried. Nothing came back. She logged a transponder anomaly, because a transponder anomaly was what this had been eleven times in the past year, and because the form for a transponder anomaly took ninety seconds and the form for anything else took a supervisor.

At 0353, Picket Eleven missed a check-in.

That was two, and two was a Category Three Perimeter Anomaly, and a Category Three required the watch supervisor, who was in the head.

He came back at 0355. He read the log standing up. He asked whether they had tried the secondary channel.

"No, sir."

"Try the secondary channel."

They tried the secondary channel. It took two minutes to raise the handshake, because key rotation had happened at midnight and Nine and Eleven were both still holding the old set until their next scheduled sync, which was 0600.

At 0357 he filed the Category Three. It routed to the Watch-Captain's console with a soft two-tone chime, which is the same chime as an inbound berth request, because Tallis had been commissioned nine hundred years earlier as a civilian yard and nobody had ever recoded the alert set.

Watch-Captain Pell Dessimer read it at 0358.

He was not a fool. He ordered active scan on both bearings. He ordered the ready flight to cockpits. He ordered the two GN disruptor towers to initialise, which was a hundred-and-ten-second cycle, and he reached for the handset that would wake the Praetorial staff.

All of that was correct. All of it was the right decision, made by a competent man, on the information he had. It did not matter. The thing had been inside the picket line for seven minutes and was not on either bearing he had ordered scanned.

Dall knew none of it. Dall was writing his letter about cryogen.

He got as far as Respectfully, the priority tagging protocol as applied does not—

The light came first, and it came through the wall.

Not the viewport. The wall — nine centimetres of laminate, structural foam, hull plate. A sheet of green-white so hard that for a fraction of a second Dall saw the shadow of his own bones inside the hand resting on his desk. He had time to think, calmly, that this was a reactor breach on one of the moored ships, and that his muster station was Deck Seven, Frame 40.

Then the spine rang.

There is no sound in vacuum and there was sound everywhere, because six kilometres of steel is a bell and something had struck it. The note came up through the deck into his heels and into his jaw, and the tooth lit like a struck match, and he would carry that for the remaining twelve minutes of his life and never once think about it. The chair went over. He went with it. The laminated berth map came off the wall and slapped him across the face.

He got to the viewport on his knees.

Men who had never been there would sit in rooms afterward with the recovered plates and try to build a sentence for what had happened at 0359. The sentence they settled on was this: an object of approximately eighteen metres' major axis and roughly ninety tonnes had entered the anchorage volume on a GN-field slingshot terminus, having spent something over four hours on a curve that used the gas giant's mass and its own particle field as a sling, and had arrived at a substantial fraction of light-speed, and had shed that velocity inside the anchorage's own volume in under two seconds.

You cannot do that with reaction mass. You do it by collapsing the field. The field has to go somewhere.

What Dall saw, on his knees, with blood coming out of his nose from the pressure wave through the structure, was a line drawn across the black. Not a ship arriving. A line, already finished, green-white, running from the edge of everything to the middle of his home, and at the near end of it a knot of light with no shape.

Where mooring gantries Two, Three, Four and Five had been, there was nothing.

Not wreckage. Not fire. Four hundred and twelve metres of trussed gantry, two heavy cranes, a fuelling head, eleven hundred tonnes of structure, and the forty-one people working on it at 0359 station time had occupied the volume the line passed through. They had been in the way of an energy budget that had to be discharged. The stubs at either end glowed and ran like wax. Where the middle had been there was a haze, faintly luminous, spreading.

Dall looked at the haze.

I approved the crane move for Four this morning, he thought.

The general alarm started nine seconds later.

The first movement took forty seconds and killed more people than the war had killed at Tallis in three years of occupation.

It came out of the knot of light with its arms low and its shoulders open, and behind it, unfolding, were the wings.

Every plate recovered from Tallis shows the same thing and none of them show it well, because the sensors were saturating and staying saturated. What they show is a twenty-metre frame, white and grey, and behind it a structure of light with no mass and no substance, articulating outward in six planes, until for one and a half seconds the machine had a span of a little under two kilometres.

Then it went down the moored line.

Ashen Covenant was first, at Berth One. Cold iron, umbilical hot, two hundred and six aboard. The wings took her from the bow at about thirty degrees off her long axis. The cut ran diagonally through Compartments One to Fourteen and out through the ventral keel.

Forward berthing on a Kaelic line cruiser is Deck Three, port and starboard, a hundred and forty racks a side.

They were occupied. It was 0359. That is the middle of the sleep cycle.

Nobody in the forward berthing spaces of Ashen Covenant woke up. That is not a mercy. It is a fact, and the report set it down as one. Aft of the cut the ship held some pressure for eleven seconds, and the anchor watch in Engineering Three got the bulkhead dogged and stood there looking at each other in the emergency lumens. Then the second pass came through at forty degrees to the first and took the aft third off, and there was no third group.

Thessin was second. Vorrow third. There was no interval between them, no repositioning, no pause to observe effect. One continuous stroke along a line of parked objects.

Six seconds for the first four ships.

Grey Assizes had a hot plant. She had been cycling for an 0600 departure and her captain, Oleth Ras, who had commanded her two years and was by every account good at it, got a quarter of her batteries up and put twelve rounds into the volume where the thing had been. The rounds went through the volume where the thing had been. Grey Assizes lasted eleven seconds longer than Thessin, and the difference is visible on the plates as a bright fan of tracer going away into the dark. It is the only shot any warship at Tallis fired that morning.

Fourteen ships. Forty seconds.

Dall watched five of them and then stopped watching, because he had a job.

He was a logistics officer. He was not in the fight and would never be in the fight. His station was the muster point at Deck Seven, Frame 40, where he accounted for the eleven people of the berth administration section and moved them to Lifeboat Cluster D. He had run the drill fourteen times. He got off the floor, put a hand on the door frame, and did the first thing the drill told him to do, which was look at the time.

0359 and fifty-one seconds.

He was the only person in his section to look at the time. It bought four of them nine minutes. He never knew that either.

The second movement took the light away.

It went up. That was all. Up off the moorings and out from the spine to a standoff of perhaps eight kilometres, and it stopped there, and opened.

The plates call it a bloom. The survivors call it the butterfly, because that is what the Reach propaganda called it afterwards and because that is unfortunately what it looks like: an expanding double lobe of pale particulate, thin as breath, spreading across the whole width of the anchorage in under four seconds, until Tallis was inside it — all six kilometres, the moorings, the yards, the residence ring, every steel thing swimming in a faint green fog with no temperature and no pressure and no mass worth the word.

Then the fog stopped being neutral.

Every unshielded conductor at Tallis took an induced current at 0400 and eleven seconds. Not a spike. A sustained pull, four hundred milliseconds long, driven by a particle field being collapsed on purpose.

Here is what that does.

It does not blow things up. That is the part nobody expects. There was no rolling fire, no chain of detonations, none of the theatre. The main lighting bus faulted to open and eleven thousand people were standing in the dark. Emergency lumens came on — chemical, not electrical, exactly as designed, the colour of weak tea, sited every twelve metres. In a corridor that is a great deal of dark between them.

Atmosphere handling stopped. Sixty-two main circulators across nine decks stopped inside the same half-second.

That is the sound. Everyone who lived through Tallis says the same thing about the sound and none of them can make it land with anyone who was not there. A station is never quiet. A station is a permanent low hum of moving air, a hundred and ten thousand cubic metres of it pushed through ducting by machines that have been running since before you were posted. You stop hearing it in your first week. It is the floor under every other sound in your life.

It stopped. All of it. At once.

And then Tallis Anchorage was quiet enough that people three compartments apart could hear each other breathing, and into that came the rest of it. Somebody shouting, a long way off. A hatch alarm on battery. A tray of the things that were not eggs going over in the canteen on Deck Six. Somebody praying, badly, from memory, and getting the second half wrong.

In the infirmary on Deck Eight, nine patients were on powered support. The ward's isolation transformer protected, by design and correctly, nothing at all. Senior Medic Sura Tain went bed to bed in the tea-coloured light with a hand bag, squeezing air into a man's chest, and she was still doing it eleven minutes later, and she is the reason there is a first-hand account of the infirmary.

The GN disruptor towers came up at 0400 and forty seconds.

They came up because Dessimer had ordered them at 0358, and the initialisation cycle is one hundred and ten seconds, and the crews ran it in ninety-four. That was better than they had ever run it in drill. The towers worked. That should be said plainly, because the men who died running them are owed it. Coherence across the near volume fell to sixty-one per cent. The intruder's beam scatter widened. Its fin control lagged.

The tactical officer on the surviving plate can be heard saying, with real professional satisfaction, "Disruptors nominal. Target reaction degraded — call it four hundredths."

Four hundredths of a second. Zero point zero four.

At the level the thing outside was working, that is an eternity and it is nothing, and both were true at the same time. Its response time degraded by four hundredths of a second and its rate of killing did not measurably change.

The towers were dead at 0402 and ten seconds. Both. Not shot — cut, one stroke each, and the two strokes arrived from different bearings inside the same tenth of a second, which was the first indication anybody at Tallis had that the funnels were out.

Four hundred mobile suits scrambled into the third movement. The third movement is the one the Dominion staff colleges still teach, in a room with the door shut, under a title that does not use the word Tallis.

They did it right. That is the thing.

Yard doctrine for a rear-area anchorage under attack is disperse-and-swarm. Get the frames off the cradles before the bays become coffins. Form in fours beyond the spine. Converge from multiple bearings so no single arc contains you. The Tallis wings had drilled it hard, because six weeks earlier the Dominion had issued its new anti-Hypernova doctrine after two Predator squads had been fed into a machine like this one and had come apart, and the doctrine said: no duels. No hero passes. Simultaneous vectors. Screen with the cheap frames. Be patient. It will overheat before you run out of men.

Two hundred and eighteen frames got clear of the bays.

That is a genuinely good number — from storage charge, in the dark, on emergency cradle release, with the coolant loops filling as they launched. The men who managed it were good at their jobs. Bay Twelve got nine out in four minutes with a hoist that could not lift what it was lifting.

They came out on eleven bearings and built the standard converging shell, and at 0403 they had the intruder inside a killbox roughly twenty-two kilometres on a side with fire coming from every face of it.

The machine at the centre of the box did not manoeuvre in any way a pilot would recognise as manoeuvring.

Six objects had detached from its back. Each a little over two metres long, each massing perhaps four hundred kilograms, each carrying its own drive and its own emitter and no crew and no name. They went out to eight, eleven, fourteen kilometres, and stopped in places that were, to the men watching from the blister, arbitrary. Three of them held station behind Tallis's own structure with no line of sight to anything.

Then the geometry closed.

Because it was a geometry. That is what the recordings show, and what the survivors cannot stop saying. It was not fighting them. It was a set of solutions being executed in order.

Each funnel fired along a chord. The chords intersected. The intersections were where frames were going to be — not where they were. A funnel eleven kilometres out with no sight line fired into empty space, and one and a half seconds later a Rakhis-pattern frame flew into that point at four hundred metres per second, because it was doing exactly what its doctrine told it to do, and the doctrine was published, and the doctrine was an input.

The killbox was not a trap that failed. It was a shape that had been asked for. Two hundred and eighteen frames converging from eleven bearings is two hundred and eighteen objects on ballistic courses through a known volume, and the entire point of converging fire is that everyone arrives at the same place.

They arrived at the same place.

The plates show it as pruning. Not a battle. No exchange, no back-and-forth. The shell contracts, and as it contracts, sections of it stop being there. Left arc first, because the left arc had the shortest run. Then the high-and-behind element. Then the screen frames — the cheap ones, the ones doctrine said to spend — spent all at once in three seconds and buying nothing.

Fifty-one seconds from the funnels deploying to the moment the shell stopped being a shell.

In that time the machine at the centre moved perhaps two hundred metres.

Dall saw one of them die at close range and did not understand what he was looking at.

He had his eleven people. That was what he had achieved by 0405 and it was not nothing: eleven bodies out of a dark office suite, counted twice, moving aft toward Deck Seven Frame 40, Venn at the back because Venn had a torch, Dall at the front because Dall knew the frame numbers by heart off a map he had looked at every day for four years.

Frame 32 had a viewport. He should have gone past it.

Outside, three hundred metres out — close enough to read the yard number stencilled on the shoulder, close enough to see the scoring where the wrong hoist had scraped it in Bay Twelve — a Rakhis frame was being held.

The white machine had it by the shoulder and the hip. The grip was wrong for a throw. It was wrong for a lock. It was wrong for anything Dall had ever seen in a training reel.

Then it opened it.

That was the only word he had. The chest plate came away and the internal frame came with it, one motion, unhurried, the way you open a cabinet whose catch you know. The cockpit block was exposed for perhaps a third of a second, a small grey box in the middle of a large machine.

Then it was not there.

The white machine let go and was already turning. The turn had started before the letting go had finished. Dall's hand was flat on the viewport frame and he could feel the cold coming through it.

He had seen a man killed twice before, both times in the yards, both times an accident. Both times, everybody in the bay had stopped.

Nothing stopped.

"Sir," said Venn, behind him, in a completely level voice. "Frame Thirty-Four."

"Frame Thirty-Four," Dall agreed, and went.

At 0407 the machine spoke.

It came in on every Kaelic channel at once. Fleet command, yard control, the picket net, the residence household band, the medical net, both civilian labour frequencies, and the open-hail emergency channel that regulation requires be monitored and nobody monitors. It came in over the internal public-address of Tallis Anchorage as well, which should not have been possible, and which the report never explained.

It was a young man's voice. That was the first surprise. Not deep. Not amplified. Slightly hoarse, the way a voice goes at the end of a long night.

It was flat.

"This is a request for information," it said. "I'm looking for Eliana Zadkiel. She's a hundred and forty centimetres. She's twenty-three. She'll be in a medical bed, she'll be on oxygen, and she will tell you she's fine. I need a deck and a compartment number.

"Anyone with that information can transmit it on this channel in clear. There's no procedure. You don't need authorisation and I won't record you.

"I'll be working while I wait."

A pause. Two seconds, maybe three. Long enough for a man in a dark corridor to hear his own pulse in his teeth.

"That's all," the voice said, and stopped.

Dall stood at Frame 34 with eleven people behind him.

Forty cartridges. Two hundred cannulae. Fourteen items of ladies' wardrobe, tailored.

A white coat, per attached measurements.

He had approved it in twelve seconds. He had approved it twice.

He did not have time to arrive anywhere with it. That is worth saying, because it would be neater if he had. He held it the way you hold a number somebody has read out to you and you have not yet written down. Then Venn said, "Sir, the hatch," and he turned around and went back to work.

Nobody transmitted a compartment number. Not one person, on any channel, in the remaining four minutes.

The staff report recorded that as evidence of discipline under fire. Dall could have told them the truth, which is that ninety per cent of the anchorage had no idea, and the ten per cent who did were three hundred metres of dead corridor from a working transmitter.

He got them to Lifeboat Cluster D at 0410.

Outer skin, Deck Seven. Six boats, twenty seats each. Four were already gone. One showed a red board. One was open.

Dall did the arithmetic he was, of every man on Tallis, best equipped to do. One boat. Twenty seats. His eleven, and thirty-odd more coming up the ladder from the yards, coughing, some of them burned.

He put his eleven in first because they were his and because they were there. That is not a noble reason. He did it fast and he did it correctly. Venn tried to give her seat to a rating with a broken arm and Dall told her to sit down, because seat allocation was his to make and a broken arm did not change the mass budget, and Venn looked at him for one second and sat down.

Nineteen filled. He stood at the hatch with his hand on the frame, counting out loud — "nineteen, nineteen and the pilot, one more, who's one more, you, in, go" — and the twentieth was one of the young ones off the canteen crew, not Hobb, and she went past him under his arm.

His hand was on the release. The next cluster was Frame 60. Ninety metres. He could do ninety metres.

The hull opened above him and to the left, along a clean line four decks long — a funnel firing a chord through the anchorage at something on the far side, and Deck Seven between. Dall was standing in the middle of the chord. He did not hear it and he did not see it, and the last complete thought he had, at 0410 and forty seconds, with his hand on a lifeboat hatch release, was that he had never bought the clove oil.

FROM THE STATEMENT OF SENIOR MEDIC SURA TAIN, TAKEN ABOARD RELIEF TENDER OSSIAN, THREE DAYS LATER. RECORDED. UNEDITED.

We got off in one of the D-cluster boats. I don't know which one. I was in the aisle with a man on the deck between the seats and I was still bagging him and I did it for the whole burn and he died anyway, about six minutes out. Somebody's hand was flat on my back the entire time and I never found out whose.

The boats don't have viewports in the cabin. There's one plate at the back, above the airlock, about this big. Everybody was looking at it. Nobody talked.

You couldn't see the shape of the station any more. That's what I keep trying to explain to people. Tallis had a shape. You knew it from a thousand approach vectors, the spine and the ribs, it looked like a fish skeleton, we used to call it the fish. There wasn't a fish. There was a long cloud with lights in it. The lights were the emergency lumens on the decks that still had atmosphere, and they were going out one at a time, not fast, just steadily, the way a street goes dark.

It stopped at eleven minutes past four.

I know because the boat clock was right in front of me and I was counting respirations off it. Eleven minutes past four, and it just stopped. No more flashes. Nothing moving.

The numbers came later, off the roster. Eleven thousand four hundred and twelve on the books. One thousand one hundred and six recovered alive, and most of those were off the labour tiers on the underside, which have no windows and which nobody bothered with. Four hundred frames — they say two are unaccounted for and the rest are accounted for. All fourteen ships. Nineteen minutes and forty seconds from the first thing to the last thing, and I've heard men argue about whether you start the clock at the picket or at the gantry, and I don't care, and I'd like them to stop.

But that's not the part.

The part is that it didn't leave.

It came down into the middle of it. Down into the wreck, in among the pieces, and it stopped about two hundred metres off what was left of the spine, and it hung there. Not scanning. Not circling. Still. Arms down.

You could see the shine on it from the fires.

I counted forty seconds. I counted because I was counting respirations anyway and I couldn't make myself stop, and I remember thinking that whatever it was doing, it was taking a long time about it, and that nothing else in the whole nineteen minutes had taken any time at all.

Forty seconds. In the middle of eleven thousand people.

And then it turned toward the residence.

She had four pieces of the rescue and nothing to thread them on.

The first was the door. Not the sound of it — sound had left her by then, or she had left it — but the shape of it stopping being a rectangle. It had been a rectangle for eleven days. Then a diagonal went through it that no door was built to have, and the diagonal glowed, and the glow was the wrong colour for fire, and she remembered thinking, very clearly, that is an expensive way to open a door.

The second was being lifted.

She had weighed nothing for a year and being lifted was an insult she had learned to swallow whole, like a tablet, without water. This was not that. Whoever lifted her did it one-armed and made no adjustment at all. No shift of grip. No small grunt of recalculation, the sound people make when they discover how light she is and then pretend they haven't. Nothing. Like picking a coat off a hook.

The third was the temperature of his hands.

Cold. Not cool — cold, the way a wrench left out overnight on a hangar deck is cold, and they did not warm. She was against his chest for four minutes and they did not warm. She had known those hands her whole life. They had always run hot. He used to put one flat on the back of her neck when the shaking started, because he was warm enough to be useful and he liked being useful at her.

The fourth was the one she kept returning to. In the medical bay. In the dark. With the oxygen making its small even hiss at her cheek and the ceiling doing nothing at all.

He did not speak to her.

Not her name. Not I've got you, which he would have said, in that pitch he used when he was frightened and needed her to think he wasn't. Not a joke, and he would absolutely have made a joke — something bad about the standard of Dominion hospitality, delivered flat, landing wrong, because his jokes always went wrong when he was afraid and she had spent twenty-three years laughing at them anyway.

Four minutes of carrying. He breathed. He moved. He put her into somebody else's arms and let go.

They gave her three days of fluids, a transfusion she declined twice and received anyway, and a lecture about caloric intake delivered by a man who could not look at her collarbones. On the fourth day she made Garren carry her to the briefing.

"They won't want you in there," he said, in the corridor, not slowing.

"Then they can tell me to my face and I'll enjoy watching them try."

"Eliana."

"I'm a strategic asset, Garren. I've been told so repeatedly, generally by people holding a rifle at the time." She worked the cannula out of the groove it had bitten behind her ear. "Assets attend briefings. It's in the literature."

He did not answer. His lungs answered for him — that wet catch on every fourth step, two hundred and seventeen years of them, and she felt it come up through his ribs into her shoulder and said nothing, because they had an arrangement about that and neither of them had ever spoken it aloud.

"Did you watch it?" she said.

"Some."

"How much is some?"

"Enough to know what's on it."

"That isn't a number."

"No," Garren agreed, and turned the corner.

The briefing room aboard the Sennet Grey had been a freighter's crew mess eight months ago. There were still bolt scars in the deck where the tables had been unbolted and sold. Forty-one people, most of them standing, three commissioned officers of a nine-hundred-year-old ceremonial order that had spent its entire existence handing out enamelled medals at galas and now kept a casualty list in five figures and a stack of paper sashes nobody would throw away.

Commander Vael Harken stood at the front with her arms folded and welcomed nobody.

Garren set Eliana into the chair at the back and put the bottle where her hand fell. Pip landed on her shoulder and sounded off — three rising tones, pause, three rising tones — except the last tone came out a semitone under, flat and slightly long, because the cells were failing and there were no parts and there was not going to be a shipment.

"Recovered plate," Harken said. "Two Dominion gun-camera sources, one station optical off a mooring buoy that survived because it was behind a fuel bunker. Assessment only. We are looking at their disruptor envelope, their screening doctrine, and the beam under construction on the Ordinal — the item Signals has been calling the Crimson Lance, which I would like everybody to stop calling that, since naming a thing is halfway to being impressed by it." She let a beat go. "It cannot match our output. It doesn't have to. It has to hurt us once. Watch for the mount geometry at the eleven-minute mark. Nobody speaks until it's done."

Somebody near the front laughed, one short bark, at nothing. Harken did not look at them.

The lights went down.

It opened with a map and a number, and Eliana already had the number.

Eleven thousand personnel. Four hundred mobile suits. Fourteen warships at moorings, six of them fuelled. A magistracy. A Praetorial residence with a service block behind it, and a fourth-floor room on the north face with a window that did not open, and a girl in it who had been entered on a household inventory as line item forty-four, between lamps, standing, brass, two and linen, table, embroidered, sixteen. Nobody had ever touched her. That was the thing nobody would believe afterward. They had been extremely courteous. A man with a clipboard had measured her wrist and her waist and her shoe and had apologised for the cold of the tape, and had said thank you, and had gone away and filed it.

Then the plate footage started and the room went out from under her.

She did not watch it the way soldiers watched it. She knew that even as it happened. The man in front of her was reading fin funnel dispersal aloud like a man calling a race — nine out, eleven, that's twelve, twelve at spread — and somebody two seats over kept saying watch the screen element, watch what they do with the screen element, and Eliana could not have identified a screen element with both hands and a manual.

What she saw was a lifeboat.

It came off the flank of a moored cruiser about ninety seconds in. One of those blunt reliable pods that get built ugly on purpose, and it burned hard for the shadow side of the anchorage, and it was so slow. That was the thing. Everything else on that screen moved like something thrown. The lifeboat moved like a person walking away from an argument.

Good, she thought. Go on. Get out.

A beam crossed the frame at an angle that had nothing to do with it. The pod stopped existing. The beam went on and hit the thing it had been aimed at, which was a mooring clamp, and the clamp let go, and the cruiser began the very slow turn that ships make when nothing is holding them.

Nobody had decided about the lifeboat. It had been in the way of a line.

She watched the residence go. Not the tower — she had expected the tower. The tower came apart in three pieces and the third piece rolled a long way. She watched the low block behind it, the service block, the one she had looked down onto for eleven days, with its roof plant and the washing lines somebody's family had strung between two vent stacks, because people will string washing lines anywhere, in any regime, on any station, for ever.

There was a light on in a window on the second floor. She had it for a second and a half before the frame filled.

And afterward the machine held still.

That was the part. Not the beams. Not fourteen hulls opening along their spines. Afterward — when there was nothing left at Tallis that could shoot back and the fires had gone to that flat oxygen-starved crawl across the plating — Unit-02 stopped in the middle of it. Funnels docked. Arms down. Absolutely still, for eleven seconds by the timestamp in the corner of the plate.

Eliana had seen her brother stand in a doorway like that.

A hundred times. Veridus-9, the room with the damp on the north wall, when he came in from whatever the day had been and stopped just inside the door with his arms down and his weight back and the bag still in his hand, not putting it down, not moving, until she said something stupid and he came back into himself and began being cheerful at her.

Then the machine turned.

And before it turned, it took a half step back onto its left.

She heard herself make a sound. Nobody noticed. Because he did that. He had done it since he was nine and split his shin on the observatory stair on Aurelion — a half step back onto the left before the pivot, every time, carrying a pan out of the kitchen, turning to answer their mother, turning in a doorway with a bag in his hand. Two hundred and forty tonnes of psycho-frame alloy standing over a burning anchorage, and it took her brother's kitchen step.

It was not moving like a machine.

The room cheered.

She had braced for it and it was still not what she had braced for, because it did not start as a roar. It started as one voice. A Lance-Sergeant near the front, a boy of maybe twenty-two who had put a whole cell into the ground at Ithaca Deep with his own hands, said "yes" the way you say it when a splinter finally comes out.

Then it went up.

Somebody hit the bulkhead with the flat of their hand, four times, hard, and other people took the rhythm, and it became a sound with a beat in it. A woman two rows ahead was laughing and crying at the same time and appeared not to know she was doing either. A signals tech Eliana half-recognised said "all of it, all of it, all of it" under his breath, over and over, at the grey screen. Somebody shouted a word in Kaelic and got a laugh, so it was obscene.

She understood every bit of it.

These were people who had been hunted at leisure for two years, by an empire that had done arithmetic on their families and found the answer acceptable and published it. They had learned the Kneeling as children for a pageant, mumbling the words in paper sashes while their mothers took pictures, and now they said it over bodies in cargo holds because it was the only rite anybody could remember all the way through.

If they had been monsters she could have hated the sound.

Harken did not cheer. Harken stood with her arms folded and the light of the grey screen on one side of her face, doing sums — Eliana could see her doing them, the small movement at the jaw — and then she turned her head.

Eliana watched a fifty-year-old woman who had never in her life been impressed by anything remember that there was a girl in the room.

Harken reached over and killed the feed.

Four seconds for the noise to come apart. That is roughly how long it takes.

"That's enough," Harken said. "Sub-commanders, my cabin, ten minutes. Bring the mount geometry."

Too late, and everybody in the compartment knew it, and forty-one people found somewhere else to put their eyes. The silence had a shape in it now, and the shape was a girl at the back in a secondhand white cardigan two sizes wrong with a hole in the left elbow, breathing bottled air, her mother's signet turned so the sunburst sat on the back of her hand.

Harken came down the aisle. She did not crouch and she did not soften her voice.

"I should have cleared you out."

"You should have cleared them out," Eliana said. "I'm the only person in this room who was there."

Harken took that. She did not apologise, which Eliana was grateful for.

"Wren's father was notified on the ninth," Harken said. "By burst. I signed it. I thought you'd want to know it went out under a name and not a form number."

Eliana turned the ring once with her thumb, all the way round.

"Take me to the hangar," she said, to Garren.

"Eliana—"

"Garren. Take me to the hangar, or I'll get there on my hands and knees, and everyone in this corridor will have to watch, and then they'll have to live with having watched."

Bay Four was cold because they kept it cold. Unit-02's number-three condenser stack had come off the Tallis sortie running forty-one degrees over ambient and had shed less than half of that in four days; the loop was still cycling at eleven bar with the emergency bypass open, and the yard crew had rigged two salvaged deck chillers to the return line with hose clamps and hope. There was frost on the rails near the coolant runs. Eliana could see her own breath going sideways in the air handling.

The machine stood in its cradle with the left shoulder cowl off and the inspection lamps throwing long shadows up the gantry. It had been white when they pulled it out of the vault under the Old Observatory. It was still white in most places. In the others the plating had gone a dull bruised gold from heat cycling, and there was a hand's-width of it above the left hip that had gone past gold into grey, and nobody had repainted any of it, because there was no paint and there was not going to be a shipment of that either.

Leon was thirty metres up on the shoulder, alone, torquing a vernier housing by hand.

"Four days," Garren said. "Sleeping in the cockpit. Eating what people leave on the gantry, when he remembers there's a plate."

"Has he talked to you?"

"He's answered me."

Eliana looked at the stairs. Her jaw tightened, which was pointless. Stairs had stopped being a negotiation eight months ago.

"Garren."

"I know."

He picked her up. She let him. Twenty-seven point four kilograms as of the fourth-day scan — she knew the figure because she had read it off the chart upside down while the orderly turned away, and she had made herself look at it twice — and Garren carried her up thirty metres of open steel with his bad lungs and never once changed his pace, and neither of them said one word about any of it.

He set her in the folding chair somebody had left on the shoulder platform. He put the bottle where her hand fell. Pip sounded off, three tones, pause, three tones, the last one flat.

"Bottom of the stairs," Garren said, and went.

Leon did not look up.

"Hello," Eliana said.

"Hello."

He finished the fastener. Quarter turn, quarter turn, check. The tremor in his left hand was worse than she had ever seen it; it went through the wrench and put a small tick against the housing on every pass, and he had adapted to it by bracing the heel of that hand against the frame and driving with the right, which meant he had noticed it and solved it and filed it, the way he did.

"You're not going to look at me?"

He looked at her.

That was worse. His eyes were entirely steady. There was nothing in them refusing her. He was looking at her the way you look at a gauge.

"Are you in pain?" he said.

"No."

"Your left hand is on your ribs."

She moved it. "How many sorties since Tallis?"

"None."

"Have you slept?"

"Sixteen minutes on day two. In the cockpit. It wasn't intentional." He set the wrench down on the mat, aligned with the others, handle out. Everything on that mat was aligned with the others, handle out. "The yard crew's spec for the shoulder verniers is three percent low. They pulled it from a fleet manual written for a hundred-and-ninety-tonne frame. We're two hundred and forty-one wet. If I leave it, the pivot drifts eleven hundredths of a second, and the funnels already lag four hundredths inside a disruptor envelope, and I don't have fifteen hundredths."

"Leon."

"You asked what I've been doing."

"I asked if you'd slept."

"Then no."

Below them somebody dropped a socket. It rang and rolled and went off the edge of something and rang again. He did not react. He used to flinch at the kettle.

"I saw the recording," she said.

"Harken shouldn't have run plate with you aboard."

"She didn't know I was in the room."

"She should have known where you were. That's a procedural failure. I'll raise it."

"Don't you dare raise it." Her voice went up and it cost her; the cough came in underneath and she got it down to two and put the mouthpiece on and got it down to nothing. He watched her do it. He did not move to help and he did not look away, and both of those were new. "Don't you dare turn this into a memo."

"It's how it gets fixed."

"Do you feel bad?"

"About what?"

"Tallis, Leon."

"No," he said.

Not hard. Not defiant. He said it the way you read a serial number off a plate.

"You don't feel anything about it."

"I've looked. I've had four days and no sorties and nothing else to do but look." He wiped his hands on a rag, twice, front and back, and folded the rag into quarters. "There's no guilt there. I keep going back to check, in case it's arrived. It hasn't. I'm telling you because you asked a direct question and I'm not going to start managing you now."

Now. She heard the word land and filed it, the way she filed everything.

"You're managing me right now," she said. "You're doing it by being accurate at me."

He thought about it. Actually thought, with the small pause he took at chess before he moved a piece and lost anyway.

"Yes," he said. "Probably."

"Give me the names," she said.

Something happened in his face. Not much. A settling, the way a mechanism finds its detent.

"Are you sure."

"Don't. Don't hand it back to me." She had to take the bottle for that and she hated it, hated needing punctuation from a machine. "I set the rule. I set it on Meridian-7 with you standing in the doorway pretending you weren't about to cry. Names, not a count. The ones that live. The ones that don't. The ones you find already dead. And the ones on the other side, and if you can't get them you say out loud that you couldn't, instead of not mentioning it."

"I got them," Leon said.

"What?"

"The other side. I boarded four of the wrecks after. Mooring registries survive — they're on isolated cores in the keel, rated for breach and vacuum, they're built to be read after exactly this. The magistracy kept a residents roll. The residence kept a household list including dependents, because the Dominion bills dependents separately for rations." Flat. Complete. "I have the anchorage complement, fourteen ships' rolls, magistracy staff, contractor manifests and the household list. There's a gap of about two hundred on the contractor side because day labour signs in on paper and paper burns. I'll say so when I get there."

Eliana sat very still.

"Do you want ours first?" he said.

"Ours—"

"Order dead. The ambush and Tallis. Thirty-one. I thought you'd want them first."

"Leon—"

"Wren Callas. Twenty. Signals, Sworn of the Watch. Died on the Kestrel Line access ramp, penetrating trauma to the upper chest, not recovered until the second sweep." He did not stop. "Ivo Callas, forty-eight, her father, next of kin, notified by burst on the ninth. Deri Amakh, thirty-four. Onwe Batumi, twenty-six. Beren Sull, nineteen—"

"Stop."

"Fella Odim, fifty-one. Odim, brother of, first name not recorded, because we took him on at Sarn and never processed him and now there's no one to ask—"

"Leon. Stop. Stop —"

"You said don't give it a shape," he said. "Stopping is a shape."

She put her hand over her mouth. Her breath came too fast and too shallow under her own palm, and Pip made a small anxious chirp at her collarbone and pushed her flow up a notch on its own initiative, which it was not supposed to be able to do.

"Dominion," Leon said. "Fourteen thousand two hundred and six."

The number went out into the cold air and stood there.

"Confirmed by registry reconciliation. That excludes two hundred and eleven contractor names I don't have and eighty-four unaccounted rather than confirmed. Eleven thousand four hundred and nine were naval or ground complement. Two thousand seven hundred and ninety-seven were not." He looked at her, level. "Sub-Praetor Halvic Oreth. Forty-one. Logistics, Tallis supply directorate, fuel oil allocation and ration scheduling. He signed the order that closed the outer-ring corridors. He also signed the one that reopened Denhollow for eleven days in winter, which we think put food into somewhere between four and nine hundred people, and nobody knows why he did it, and now nobody will."

"Please—"

"Deck-hand third class Miry Souven, nineteen, of Kael Secundus. Ordinary Rating Tam Ferreth, twenty-two, same intake. Magistracy clerk Isolde Wenn, thirty-six. Kir Wenn, six. Aleth Wenn, four. Household list. Service block, floor two, north face."

She was crying. She had not felt it start.

"Chief Cook Bettan Ophir, fifty-eight. Junior Praetorial Aide Sennet Kaas, twenty-four. Rating Ovo Lantz, thirty—"

"LEON."

Her voice broke into the cough and the cough went on and there was blood in it. A small quantity. Four drops on her palm. She closed her hand and did not let him see, out of two years of habit, and knew that he had seen, because he saw everything and always had, and he did not say a word about it.

He stopped reciting.

"You asked me to bring you the names," he said. "I brought you the names."

"I know."

"I could have skipped the registries. It took three hours. There was a Predator element inbound at eleven minutes and I stayed three hours and cut four keel cores out of a burning ship, because you asked me for names." No accusation in it at all. He was supplying context, the way he'd supply a torque figure. "I'm not angry with you. It was the correct instruction. It's the only instruction anyone has given me in two years that was actually correct."

Eliana wiped her palm on the inside of the cardigan, where the stain wouldn't show, and lifted her head.

"On Veridus," she said. "The blue cup. The one with the chip out of the rim."

He didn't answer.

"There was one cup, because you sold the other one and told me it broke, which was a lie you were extremely proud of. And every single time you handed me that cup you turned it in your hand first so the chip was on the far side. Every time. Fourteen months. You never said anything about it and you never once got it wrong. Not when you had the fever. Not when you'd been up two days. Not the night you came in with your knuckles opened and wouldn't say from what."

The frost ticked on the rail. Thirty metres down, a pump cut in.

"That's who I'm asking after," she said. "Not the pilot. Not the asset. Not whatever Harken's writing in her cabin right now with the mount geometry. The one who turned the cup." Her voice was very level and very small. "Is he in there, Leon? Because if he isn't, tell me where you put him down and I'll go and get him. I know exactly how much use I am. I'll go anyway."

Leon looked at her.

"No," he said.

And then, because he was accurate:

"I looked."

She had planned things to say. Three days in a medical bay building sentences with hinges in them, sentences designed to lever.

She dropped all of it.

"Come here."

"Eliana—"

"I can't stand up." Flat, the way he'd said the number. "That's not a manipulation, it's a specification. I can't get out of this chair alone and I won't have Garren come up here and watch this. So either you stay there being correct at me, and I'll sit here and take it, or you come here."

He stood a moment longer.

Then he came, and crouched, and she got her arms around his neck.

He was filthy. Four days of hangar on him — coolant, hot metal, the flat mineral smell of a frame that has cooked its own primer off — and under that the unwashed warmth of somebody who has stopped counting himself as a thing that requires anything. His hair was stiff. There was dried blood in the creases of his right hand and it was not his.

He was still cold.

She had almost no grip left in her fingers, so she hooked her wrists behind his neck and locked them, the way she had learned to do with railings, and pulled his head down.

She kissed him on the temple. The long press. Three seconds, a hand flat on the back of the head, the way Elizabeth Zadkiel had done it to both of them every night of their childhood in the house on Aurelion.

"Sennah, sennah," Eliana said.

There. There.

His spine gave.

Eighty-one kilograms came forward onto twenty-seven. The chair skidded four centimetres. She planted her feet and locked her wrists and took it.

The sounds were wrong. High, stuck, cutting off. Long gaps where he was not breathing at all and then a dragging rasp that shook the chair. His hands closed in the wool at her back and found the hole in the left elbow and made it bigger. She felt the stitches go.

His face was wet on her neck inside four seconds and kept getting wetter. There was snot on her collar within a minute.

She put her hand flat on the back of his head and held it there.

"All right," she said. "All right."

"I killed a man in a cellar," he said.

His voice came out wrecked and too loud, four words at a time, in the gaps between the breathing.

"On Veridus. Month nine. The cellar under the grain office. His name was Corrin Vale." He dragged air. "Corrin Vale. He had three children. Two boys and a girl. The girl was six. They were in the flat above and I could hear one of them walking about while I did it. He wasn't a soldier. He was an informer, he sold four families on our street to the garrison and one of them was the Tessarys and they took the whole household, and I went down there to talk to him and I didn't talk to him."

"I know his name," Eliana said. "I've known it eleven months. You left the ledger open."

"I never said it in front of you."

"No."

"I've said it in my head about nine thousand times and never once out loud. Not to Garren." The sound got away from him. "Corrin Vale. There. There it is."

"There it is."

"It took four minutes and he asked to say something to his wife and I said yes and then I didn't."

She held on.

He talked. It came out in the wrong order and in pieces, the way water comes out of a bad joint. The eleven days first, because those were nearest — eleven days of knowing exactly which floor she was on and being unable to move, because the Order had eleven hundred people and four hulls and a doctrine of not dying, and Harken saying not yet on days one through six, and him sitting in the cockpit with the frame idling because inside the frame the clock ran differently and waiting was easier there.

Day seven he stopped asking. Day eight he took the suit out unauthorised and turned back at the picket line because he could not solve the disruptor envelope, and came home and logged it as a systems check. Day nine he solved it. Day ten he did not sleep and did the arithmetic that made the solution work: the funnels lag four hundredths inside the envelope, so stop needing the funnels. Go in close. Get inside four hundred metres, where a twelve-unit Predator element cannot fire simultaneous vectors without hitting each other.

"That's why it looks like that," he said into her shoulder. "On the plate. That's why I'm in among them. Everyone thinks it's rage. It's geometry. Their doctrine breaks under four hundred metres."

"I know."

"There was a light on."

"I saw it."

"Service block, north face, second floor. I logged it and I didn't look at it twice. I saw it, I registered it, I put it in the target set, and I did not look at it twice, Eli, that's the whole thing, that's the entire thing—"

"I know."

"Isolde Wenn. Kir Wenn. Aleth Wenn. Four."

"I know. You told me."

"The last time I cried was the cellar on Aurelion. With my hand over your eyes." His fists twisted in the wool. "Two years, four months. I did it silently because they were on the stairs, and I've thought since that I just never turned it back on. Like a breaker. Like I threw it and walked off and left the room dark."

"Leon."

"There's a—"

He stopped.

She felt it happen. A hitch, a whole breath taken and held, the muscles across his back going hard under her forearms, the crying cutting off mid-sound like a feed pulled at the source.

"There's a what," she said.

Two seconds. Three.

"Nothing," he said. "It doesn't matter."

He was lying, and lying badly, worse than the cup, worse than the sold plate, and they both knew it, and she felt his heart going against her collarbone like something trying to get out of a box.

She let him have it.

She never fully worked out why. Possibly because he had just given her fourteen thousand two hundred and six names and asking for one more seemed obscene. Possibly because she had a secret of her own with a shape exactly that size — a girl who had put her bare hand on a psycho-frame conduit three times now and been, for eleven seconds each time, completely well. Full lungs. Warm hands. No pain. And then blood.

Possibly she was a coward. She was willing to hold the thought.

"All right," she said. "Not now, then."

He cried himself out the way a pump runs dry, in stages, with false endings. Twice he got upright and apologised, formally, in a ruined voice, and both times she pulled him back down with her wrists still locked. The second time he laughed — one wet cracked sound — and said, "you can't even do that properly."

"No," she said. "It's humiliating for both of us."

It was the first true thing either of them had said in four days.

Then he was quiet, kneeling on the plating with his head on his sister's shoulder, and the bay ran its pumps around them, and the number-three condenser stack ticked overhead as it gave up its heat, four days late.

"I need to say a thing," Eliana said. "Don't talk over it. I don't have the air for two attempts."

"All right."

"I can't help you."

She felt him start to move and pressed her hand flat on the back of his head until he stopped.

"That's not self-pity, it's a statement of specification, and I want you to hear all of it. I cannot help you. I have never once been able to help you. Not on Aurelion. Not in the fourteen months. Not on Meridian-7. Not at Tallis, where my contribution was being the reason." Steadier than she expected. "I can't carry anything. Literally. I can't get a jug of water across a room. I can't do stairs. I can't pick Pip up off the table when he falls off it. People carry me. I am, functionally, luggage that argues."

"Eliana—"

"I said don't."

He didn't.

"I'm not strong, I'm not useful, and I'm not going to get better, and I'm not going to pretend at you about it any more, and you're not going to pretend at me, and if we can manage that it will be the most honest either of us has been since mother died." She took the bottle. Twice. "So here's what I've got. It isn't much. I've been turning it over for months and it's the only item in the inventory."

"What is it."

"I can be the place you put it down."

He was very still.

"All of it. Corrin Vale. The light on the roof. The fourteen thousand two hundred and six and the two hundred and eleven you don't have. Whatever it was you nearly said just now and didn't." Her hand stayed flat on the back of his head. "You bring it in and you set it on the floor in front of me and I'll sit with it. I won't fix it. I can't fix it. I can't fix me and I've had twenty-three years and a hospital's worth of practice. But I can be the one place in the galaxy where you're allowed to set it down and not pick it up again for an hour."

The pumps ran. Out on the gantry a hatch closed and somebody swore at it.

"That's the job," Eliana said. "It's the only one I'm rated for. Don't fire me from it."

"No," he said.

"Say it properly."

"I won't fire you."

"Good." She let out a breath she had been holding since Meridian-7. "Good."

Then she took his face in both hands, because she could still do that, and made him lift his head.

His eyes were a wreck. But they were his. They had come back into his face from wherever they had been for four days, or eleven days, or two years and four months.

"I love you," she said.

He blinked.

"That's the whole sentence. Nothing goes on the end of it. No joke, no cleverness, no Old Astraian so you can pretend you didn't catch it. I'm twenty-three and I have said it to you out loud, in that order, exactly never, and I've decided that's absurd. So. I love you. Done. That's the event."

Leon Asher Maximilian Zadkiel put his forehead against his sister's and said nothing at all, and this time it was the right kind of nothing.

Pip sounded off at her shoulder. Three rising tones. Pause. Three rising tones, the last one flat.

"Also," Eliana said, "you still owe me a coat."

"I know."

"White. With a hood. That actually fits." She shut her eyes. "Before winter, Leon. Whichever winter we get."