The Weight of Stars

The soup was the problem.

It arrived at 2114 ship time on a rimmed steel tray, two bowls, and a paper card printed by somebody in the galley of the Perpetual Regard who had been handed a label template and no supervision at all. CHOWDER, MIXED, TYPE FOUR. NUTRITIONALLY COMPLETE. CONTAINS: SEE REVERSE.

The reverse of the card was blank.

Lance-Sergeant Ashe Lorrigan carried the tray in and set it down on the locker top with both hands, squared to the edge, and then stepped back off it the way you step back off a thing you have placed correctly. She had a bandolier of relay spares on and a smear of dielectric grease on her jaw and she still stood like somebody at the top of a staircase waiting to be announced.

"Galley says it's the last of the batch, my lady."

"Ashe. Sit down. Eat one of these with me and lie to me about it."

"I've eaten, my lady."

"You have not." Eliana was sitting up against the bulkhead with the blanket over her knees and a datapad balanced on the blanket. She looked at Lorrigan over the top of it with enormous calm. "You came off the number-three mast at 1900 and went straight to the spares locker, because I can hear the spares locker through this bulkhead, and you have been in it for two hours, and there is grease on your face."

Lorrigan did not touch her face. "There is no grease on my face."

"There is a great deal of grease on your face."

"Good night, my lady." She went out, and the hatch shut, and Eliana let herself smile at the closed hatch for exactly as long as it took Leon to notice her doing it.

"You made her leave."

"I made her go and eat. Those are different." She set the pad down on her knees and folded her hands on top of it and the whole register of her changed — flatter, slower, the briefing voice, the one that made colonels find chairs. "Docket seventy-one. Subject: the galley. First finding. This is not chowder."

"It says chowder."

"Things say a great deal." She turned the pad round to show him. She had actually written it up. Header block, distribution list, confidence markers down the margin, the entire apparatus. "Chowder is a dairy preparation. There is no dairy aboard this ship. There has been no dairy aboard this ship since Meridian, because I read the manifests and the manifests are the one honest document on board. Therefore the word chowder appears on that card as an aspiration. Confidence: high."

Leon sat down on the deck with his back against the locker, because the chair was hers and the second chair had gone down to the analysis bay four days ago and had not come back. He took the nearer bowl. It was warm through the bottom and not through the sides.

"Second finding," she said.

"There's a second finding."

"There are three." She adjusted the cannula behind her right ear with one finger — the small automatic correction she made forty times an hour and had never once noticed making. "Second finding. The word mixed is being asked to do work that the word mixed cannot do. Mixed with what. Mixed by whom. Mixed when." A pause exactly long enough. "Confidence: high."

"You're going to make somebody cry."

"I have made three people cry this week and two of them thanked me afterwards." She spooned up a little, examined it with real scholarly interest, and ate it. "Third finding. Type four implies types one through three. I submitted a request for the earlier types. Provisioning has not answered in nine days. Assessment: there were no earlier types. The number four was selected because four sounds established." She set the spoon down on the rim. "Confidence: moderate. I am not a monster."

Four spoons, he thought. Ninety-one kilocalories in the bowl, call it eighty-eight after the water, she's had a fifth of it, so—

"You're counting."

"No."

"You are counting." She did not look up. "You do the thing with your jaw."

"I don't have a thing with my jaw."

"You have a thing with your jaw. Garren has a thing with his jaw. It runs in the household and I am the only one of us with a face." She ate another spoonful, slowly, to make a point of it, and the point landed, and he hated that it landed and ate his own so that she would keep going.

Pip came off the shelf above her head and dropped to hover at her shoulder. Palm-sized, white, one edge scuffed grey where it had met a doorframe on Veridus at speed. It sang its three rising tones. Paused. Sang three more.

The last one came out flat.

Eliana hummed it back at the drone, on pitch. Then hummed it flat. Then looked at it with immense pity. "You're tone-deaf," she told it. "It's fine. Wren was tone-deaf. Wren was tone-deaf and could not play chess and I liked her more than anyone I have ever met."

"Its cells are going."

"I know its cells are going." She reached out and put one finger on the top of its shell and it leaned into the finger like a cat, which was a behaviour nobody had programmed and which had appeared some time in the second year. "It has about five weeks of that tone left and then it will have two tones, and then I will have to learn what two tones means, and I will, because I am very clever."

Under the shelf, on the little fold-down table, the board was still out. Black to move. It had been black to move for nine months.

He looked at it. She caught him looking at it.

"Don't."

"I didn't say anything."

"You were composing." She put her thumb through the hole in the left elbow of the cardigan, absently, the way she had been doing for a month, working it a millimetre wider every day with no idea at all that she was doing it. The stitches he had torn out with his own hands had never been redone. Nobody had offered and she had not asked. "You were going to say that black is lost."

"Black is lost."

"Black is not lost. Black is worse. There is a difference and it is the only difference there has ever been." She turned the signet on her thumb until the sunburst sat properly on the back of her hand. "She had knight to f5 and she never saw it and I am not going to play it for her. I will play her actual standard of chess or I will not play at all."

"That's why it's been nine months."

"That is exactly why it has been nine months." She said something then in Old Astraian. Four words, quick and liquid, and the fourth word had a stop in the middle of it that his mouth could not physically produce.

"What was that."

"That was the soup's real name."

"What does it mean."

"It means water that has been formally introduced to a fish." She waited. "Say it."

"Ith sar—"

"No."

"Ith saranna—"

"No, you're putting a j in it, you're making a j sound, there is no j anywhere in the entire language, there never has been, it is a language of vowels and you attack it like a man opening a crate." She was laughing, which cost her, which he could hear costing her — three short breaths in for every one she got back out. "Mother used to say you had the ear of a tunnel."

"Mother used to say a lot of things."

"Mother was correct about a lot of things." She wiped her mouth on the back of her wrist, set the bowl on the tray, and pulled the datapad up onto her knees, and her voice went down half a register into work. "Two ninety-one."

"No."

"I have cleared two hundred and ninety-one of the three hundred and forty Halcyon corridor intercepts. There are forty-nine left. Eleven of them are one operator and I know it tonight and I will not know it tomorrow, because tomorrow I will have slept and the shape will have gone—"

"No."

"Leon."

"Harken said 0600. It's 2120. That's eight hours and forty minutes, and you sleep six of them, or she has the chair taken out of the bay." Which was a lie, and a lie she could dismantle in four seconds, because Harken had had that chair bolted to the deck of the bay herself, with her own hands, without being asked, and in eleven months nobody aboard had said one word about it out loud.

She let him have it anyway.

That was the thing he came back to afterwards, for a long time, in the small hours, over and over. She let him have it. She never let him have it.

"Fine," she said. "Tomorrow. But I want the eleven flagged before you go to bed, and I want the raw, not the cleaned—"

"I'll pull the raw."

"The cleaned takes the stutter out of the timing and the stutter is the man—"

"I said I'll pull the raw."

"And I want—" She stopped.

Not dramatically. She stopped the way anybody stops when the next word has gone somewhere else. Her eyebrows drew together slightly. She looked at the middle distance over his left shoulder with mild, ordinary puzzlement — the exact face she made when a data set had one row in it that did not belong.

"Huh," she said.

"What."

"I've swallowed wrong." She put her hand flat on her sternum. "Could you pass me the bowl."

He passed her the bowl.

It was not a cough.

He wanted that understood later, when people asked him — and they did ask him, all of them, separately — and he told each of them the same thing in the same words, because it was the only accurate description available. She did not cough. She did not retch. She leaned forward over the bowl with the good manners of somebody who did not want to make work for anyone, and her mouth opened, and volume arrived.

The first arrival was dark. Almost black, thick, granular in a way that had a name in the literature. She had bled from the stomach twice before, month six of the exile and again on Meridian, and both times it had looked like coffee grounds in water, and both times it had come to eighty millilitres and stopped.

This came all at once. Not in stages. It hit the bottom of the bowl hard enough to make a sound like a boot going into mud, and it filled to the maker's line, which was two hundred millilitres, in something under four seconds.

Then it kept coming.

The galley bowl held four hundred and eighty to the rim. He knew that because he had drunk out of one for two months. It went to the rim.

"Bowl," he said, and took it out of her hands, and had nothing to put it in and nowhere to set it down, so he put it on the deck, and it slopped, and by then the second arrival had changed character.

It came bright. Frothy. Aerated — which meant it was coming up through lung and not up through gut, which meant two sources and not one, and part of his brain filed that with total clarity and no use whatsoever while the rest of him got a hand under her chin to keep her head forward.

It came through his fingers. It went down the front of the white cardigan in one sheet, collar to hem, and the cardigan stopped being white in about a second and a half. It went past the cardigan onto the blanket and the blanket took it and went on taking it and then stopped taking it, and it ran off the blanket's edge onto the deck plate in a line, and the line spread.

The deck of cabin 6-14 had a list on it of about four-tenths of a degree toward the outboard bulkhead. He had not noticed that in eleven months aboard. He noticed it now, because everything on the deck was travelling.

She was still trying to be tidy.

That was the worst part of the first thirty seconds and he never told anybody about it. Not Garren. Not Pryn. Not her. Both her hands came up to catch it. Twenty-three years of not making work for people, and her hands came up and cupped and filled and went over between the fingers.

She looked at her hands.

Pip started. Three rising tones. Pause. Three rising tones, the last one flat. Again. Again.

"Eliana."

She said something. Not to him. Four words, quick, liquid, the stop in the middle of the fourth, and the sound came out wrong because there was fluid in the airway now, so it arrived as a shape and not as a word. He did not know what it meant. He had asked her twice tonight what a thing meant.

He did not ask her this one.

Then it came in a way that had no manners in it at all.

He got both arms round her and turned her onto her side, and it went across the bulkhead and along the pipe run and into the seam between the deck plate and the locker base, and he could hear it going into the seam. A small continuous sound. A tap left running in another room.

Two hundred in the bowl. Four eighty in the bowl. Tray. Blanket. Deck.

It isn't stopping.

He had audited a great deal of damage. That was, functionally, the job. Not the flying — the flying was ten minutes at a time. The job was afterwards. Wreck files. Hull sections. Fluid volumes. Failure trees. Fourteen thousand two hundred and six names off the Tallis wrecks and two hundred and eleven he could not get.

You look at what came out. You work back to where it came out of.

There is always a where.

He knew this volume. He had knelt in it before, on tile, in Halcyon, eleven days before the invasion had a name. Their mother had been opened collarbone to hip. Fist-width. The pump had run eleven or twelve seconds after, because nothing had told it to stop.

This was that volume.

Out of a girl who weighed twenty-seven kilograms. Less than his flight rig. Four kilos less. He had lifted both this week.

Where.

He had her on her side, left hand under her jaw, right hand going over her — fast, methodical, the way you go over a pressure hull looking for the strike face. Throat: intact. He got the collar back with his thumb and took the whole line of her neck, both sides, the hollow above the clavicle where the port sat. Intact.

Sleeve up past the elbow. Two old cannula scars, the bruise from Tuesday, nothing open. Hands: palms up, palms down, nails. Nothing. He got the hem of the cardigan up and took her flank and her back and the ridge of her spine, every vertebra of it standing under the skin like a chain laid out on cloth.

No entry. No exit. No tear, no puncture, no burn, no graze.

Not a mark on her anywhere.

There was one point four litres of his sister on the deck of cabin 6-14 and there was no wound.

He kept looking.

That was the part he could not explain afterwards and did not try to. He had already looked and he kept looking, twice more over the same ground, both hands, because the alternative to finding it was that there was nothing to find. And if there was nothing to find then it was not damage. It was her. It was the thing that had been in her since before she was born, coming up out of the middle of her, and you cannot get a hand on that. You cannot pull that section and reweld it.

No strike face. No where.

Nineteen minutes, said a line in their mother's handwriting, from a file behind his own key that he had not opened in four months and did not need to open, because he had read it once.

He put that away. He put it away with force.

"Pip. Medical. Now."

Pip was already going. It had been going since the second arrival. Three rising tones, pause, three rising tones with the last one flat, over and over, and there is a reason those alarms are designed to be pleasant. The reason is that people have to be able to stand in the room with them.

He lifted her.

He wanted it recorded that he knew better. He knew the protocol verbatim, because he had read the whole of the Concord Field Medical Compendium at nineteen in a week, the way he read everything, and he could still see the page. Lateral recumbent. Do not elevate. Do not move the patient. Suction the airway if suction is available; if suction is not available, position for drainage and wait.

He put his arms under hers, locked his hands behind her back, and took her off the deck.

Their father's grip. Arms under the arms, forearms bracketing the ribs, her feet swinging clear, her chin coming down over his shoulder. It was what Maximilian Zadkiel had done to both of them in a garden on Aurelion. It was what Leon had done to her at six when she lost at cards and needed removing from the room, and at nine when the fever went to forty and would not come down, and at fourteen at the top of the observatory stairs when her legs stopped for the first time, and at twenty-one in a corridor with tile on the floor.

Holding her off the ground was the only physical act of assistance available to him. So he performed it.

There was nothing about it that helped. His forearms lay across her lower ribs and her lower ribs were where the pressure was coming from. Clearing her feet took the last of her trunk control away. Putting her chin over his shoulder put her airway above her stomach, in precisely the geometry you are told in bold type on page four hundred and nine never to produce.

He knew what he was doing and he did it anyway. He stood in the middle of the cabin with his sister off the deck, her arms hanging down his back and her hair against his ear, and he held her, and it went down inside his collar in a warm line to his belt and past his belt.

"I've got you," he said. "I've got you. I've got you."

Then she went.

Her left foot hit the locker. Once.

Then again, harder.

Her back came up against his arms like a cable taking load. Everything at once. Shoulders, spine, hips.

Her hands closed. Both. Fabric, hair, shoulder.

Her heels drummed the locker door. Fast. Not rhythmic.

There was a sound in her throat under the fluid. A tick on each contraction.

Eleven seconds. He counted them. He did not decide to.

The signet came off her thumb. He heard it land. One clear note. It rolled.

Her hands opened.

It stopped.

She was heavy.

Twenty-seven kilograms had always had a shape when it was helping. Even at her worst, even carried, some small part of her had been holding on — a hand at his collar, a hip finding his forearm, the minimal cooperation of a body with the person carrying it.

That was gone. What he had in his arms hung from the two points where he held it and did nothing else at all. Her head had come off his shoulder and down. Her hair was in the mess on his chest. One sneaker had come off.

He had held her like this once before while something catastrophic happened three centimetres away, where he could not reach it. That time he had had his hand over her eyes.

This time he had both arms round her.

It made no difference whatsoever.

"Eliana."

Pip: three rising tones, pause, three rising tones, the last one flat.

"Eliana."

The hatch came in and Garren Doss came through it with his kit bag already off his shoulder, and he had come from two decks down, and Leon heard the whole distance of it in the man's lungs. The wet catch on the fourth step. On the fourth step. On the fourth step. Two hundred and seventeen years old and he had run the entire way and would not admit to it in either direction.

Garren looked at the deck for a quarter of a second. Then at Leon, holding her clear of it.

"Down," he said. "On her side. Now."

Leon did not move.

"Boy." Garren's hand closed on his wrist, thumb driven into the tendon, an old field grip that had been taught to somebody who had been taught to somebody. "You are pressing on it. Put her down."

He put her down.

Garren had the mat under her before she landed. Turned her. Got the hand suction out of the bag, catheter into the corner of her mouth, and the canister began to fill, and the pump made a noise like a small animal drinking. Blanket off. The cardigan he cut, shears straight up the front, sleeve to sleeve, and the two halves came away and went into the corner in a heap.

The sleeve with the hole in the elbow landed on top.

Then the corridor came in.

Lorrigan first, at the hatch, and she did not enter. She took the frame and held the whole width of it and began running the passage — hard voice, four-word sentences, one flat hand up, moving people back off the door. She stood the way she had been taught to stand at the top of a staircase twice a year in a sash with silver frogging. It worked. It always worked. There was nothing else in that corridor for anybody to hold on to.

Then Pryn, in shirtsleeves, dragging the crash sled with a rating on the far end of it.

"Class four," Pryn said, at the deck, before she was on her knees. "Paediatric protocol, she's twenty-seven kilos, everything by weight, nobody guess and nobody round up. Four hundred milligrams tranexamic, slow. Terlipressin. Paediatric cuff — the paediatric cuff, not the small adult, I will send it back. Two hundred and seventy millilitres is a unit for her. Hang two, cross for six. Warmer on. Somebody get me a scope and a bay."

"Pressure, ma'am?"

"Unobtainable. Try again in the lift." One second. "Carotid's there. Go."

They got her onto the sled. She came off the deck lighter than the mat had gone down, and the whole shape of her fitted inside the straps with room at both ends, and somebody said something about the pads and somebody else said just fold them. The rating on the head end was nineteen at the outside and had the face people got in that bay — the face that had already walked one orderly off the analysis deck at a pace that turned into running in the stairwell. He was not looking at his hands.

"Eyes on the tube, sailor," Pryn said, without heat.

He put his eyes on the tube.

Commander Vael Harken arrived in the passage as the sled came out, and did not come in, and did not ask a question. She looked at the sled for the length of time it took to pass her, and at the deck through the hatch, and the scar out of her left eye socket did not do anything at all.

"Lorrigan. Nobody signals off this ship for two hours. Not the bay, not the bridge, not the chaplain. If Halcyon learns tonight what happened in this cabin, they price her differently in the morning." A beat. "That is not callousness, Sergeant, that is the reason I still have you."

"Two hours, ma'am."

Harken looked at Leon then. She did not touch him and she did not soften her voice.

"You are covered in it and you are in my corridor. Pryn will not tell you anything for an hour. Go and be somewhere I can find you."

Then she went after the sled, and the sound of the sled went up the passage and into the lift, and the lift took it, and the alarm went up with it — three rising tones, a pause, three rising tones, the last one flat — going and going, getting smaller, still going.

The corridor stayed full a moment longer and then began to empty, the way corridors do, in the direction of the lift.

The deck did not empty.

There were nine handprints. He counted them, because they were countable. Four were hers: small, palm and four fingers, two on the plate by the locker base and two on the outboard bulkhead about thirty centimetres up, from when she had still been trying to catch it. Five were his — bigger, smeared, one of them a full flat print where he had put his weight down to get his arms under her.

Then the sled tracks. Four parallel lines out through the hatch and up the passage as far as the frame, fading over about two metres in the way that a wheel fades.

Somebody was going to have to clean that.

The thought arrived complete and would not leave. Somebody — an actual person, with a name and a rate and a rack somewhere on this ship — was going to have to come into cabin 6-14 with a bucket and absorbent mat and a scraper for the seam at the locker base, and kneel down on that deck, and clean up one point four litres of Eliana Zadkiel, who had been arguing about soup at 2114.

An orderly came with the mat and stopped in the hatchway and did not start. Stood there holding it in both arms.

Lorrigan took it off him without a word, jerked her chin, and he went. She got down on the deck in her good uniform and began at the outboard bulkhead, where it had run downhill.

The signet had gone under the edge of the locker.

He got it out with two fingers, wiped it on the inside of his shirt where the shirt was still dry, put it in his breast pocket, buttoned the pocket, and checked the button.

Then he went up to the surgical annex and sat down on the deck of the passage outside it, because there was a bench and he did not use it, and he began to work out the volume.

He did it properly. There was nothing else in him that worked. This worked. It had always worked. So he used it.

The bowl: galley issue, four hundred and eighty millilitres to the rim, filled and gone over. He took four hundred and eighty and not a millilitre more, because the overflow had gone onto the tray and would be counted on the tray. Four eighty.

The tray: rimmed steel, thirty-four centimetres by twenty-four. The pool in it had stood against the base of the bowl at a depth he had looked at for two and a half seconds — call it two and a half millimetres over sixty percent of the area. Two hundred and four. He rounded to two ten and noted the rounding.

His own jacket: dry mass two point one four kilograms, known, weighed against a cargo scale in a hangar on Meridian nine months ago for a rig calculation. He had carried it out of the cabin and put it on the annex scale on his way past. Two point four eight. Difference, three hundred and forty grams. Whole blood at one point zero six grams per millilitre gives three hundred and twenty-one. He allowed three forty, because the shirt was in it and he had not weighed the shirt separately and the error ran the safe way.

The cardigan and the blanket, cut off her and heaped in the corner: not weighed, and he would not get to weigh them. Order thermal fleece, three hundred and forty grams the square metre dry, retention at saturation a little over four times its own mass. The wetted area on the blanket had been roughly a hand-span by two hand-spans. The cardigan had taken a full sheet, collar to hem, across the whole front.

He put one eighty on it and marked the figure estimated. It was the softest number in the column. He kept it low on purpose.

The deck: plate steel, non-porous, four-tenths of a degree of list to outboard. Wetted area in boot lengths, his boot being thirty-one centimetres — eleven boots by two and a half boots of irregular coverage. Call it point five eight square metres at a mean film of point three three millimetres, because point three three is what steel holds before it begins to run, and the rest had run, and the rest had gone into the seam.

One hundred and ninety.

He did not count the suction canister. He had watched it fill and he knew approximately what was in it, and approximately is not a number you can defend, and he would not put a number in a column he could not defend.

Four eighty. Two ten. Three forty. One eighty. One ninety.

One thousand four hundred millilitres.

He ran it again from the top in a different order, the way you check a figure you intend to stand behind, and it came out the same to within twelve millilitres, and the twelve was in the blanket, where he had known it would be before he started.

Her circulating volume at twenty-seven kilograms was one thousand eight hundred and thirty-six. Discount a third of the wet volume for gastric content and saline off her lines and it still came to more than half of everything she had — in a bowl, on a tray, in the seam at the locker base, and in the fabric of his own jacket, hanging on a hook eleven metres up the passage.

Pryn had said class four. Class four was over forty percent. Pryn's number was the conservative one.

He kept his own and said nothing.

One point four litres.

He checked it.

It was right.

Somebody still had to clean the deck.

Bay Four, aft medical, deck nine of the fleet tender Orison: four point two metres by six point one, deckhead at two point three. Air at nineteen and a half degrees, forty-one percent humidity, because the humidifier had been reset ninety-six hours ago and nobody had touched it since. Two overhead panels, one dimmed to a quarter. A recirculator with a bearing that sang at about four hundred hertz on the intake stroke.

Leon had catalogued all of it inside the first ninety seconds and had not been able to stop.

Bed nine of eleven. The other ten had been cleared. Nobody had ordered that.

The bed weighed a hundred and forty kilograms empty and read the load on its frame continuously, because in a bay like this the number mattered more than the name. A strip display at the foot carried it in amber, four characters high.

It said 26.4.

On the day they brought her in it had said 27.1.

Seven hundred grams in ninety-six hours. One hundred and seventy-five a day. Two point six percent of body mass. At a constant rate that is zero on day one hundred and fifty-one.

He had told himself three times to stop. He had not stopped. The arithmetic ran whether he authorised it or not; it had done that since he was six.

Surgeon-Commander Ilsa Pryn came in at 0410 with her sleeves rolled to the elbow and a slate against her hip, and she did not look at the bed first. She looked at the two pumps. Then the warmer. Then the trend column. Then his sister, and she gave that four seconds, which he noticed, because he had started noticing how long people managed.

"You want it now or after I've had something to drink," she said.

"Now."

"Sit down. You're taller than the room."

He sat. She stayed standing, which he understood — it kept her hands free, and her hands were the part of her that never stopped moving.

"Volumes," Pryn said. "Ninety-six hours. Two point three litres of blood product total. Six units packed red cells, four platelet concentrates, two of plasma. Her circulating volume at twenty-six kilos is about one point eight litres. So we have replaced everything inside her, once, and then a third of it again."

"Loss."

"Estimated six hundred and forty millilitres of pulmonary haemorrhage over roughly forty minutes before the airway was secured. That excludes what she coughed into the mask coming down from the shuttle, which I have not counted, because I can't." Pryn turned the slate. "Thirty-five percent of her circulating volume out through her chest, in a body with no reserve of anything at all. Haemoglobin on arrival, four point one grams per decilitre."

"That is not a walking number."

"It is not a conscious number. She was conscious for eleven minutes of it, and she asked me twice whether her drone had been logged in with her property, because she thought we'd bin it."

"It's on the shelf."

"I know it's on the shelf. Lorrigan put it there and stood next to it for an hour like a sentry, and I did not have the heart to tell her the shelf was not going anywhere." Pryn scrolled. "Haemoglobin now, eight point two. That sounds like recovery. It is not recovery, it is credit. Every oxygen-carrying cell currently in your sister's body came out of somebody else's arm in the last four days."

"Her marrow."

"Nineteen percent of expected production for her mass, and the product is malformed. Two in five of the cells she does make are structurally wrong and get cleared inside a week." Pryn set the slate down flat on the trolley. Leon registered that she did it so that she would not be holding anything. "She cannot replace what she loses. Not slowly. Not at all. She is not healing from this event. She is being topped up, and she will be topped up until we run out of people to top her up from."

"How many people."

"Her antigen profile is Astraian. Old Astraian, and there was a lot of cousin-marriage in that house four hundred years ago, which is your family's problem and now mine. Eleven hundred and six Order personnel typed." Pryn stopped. Restarted, flatter. "They queued for it. Nobody was asked twice. Forty-one compatible donors. Nine are deployed, four are anaemic themselves, and one is a hundred and ninety-two and has been lying to me about his cardiac history since the Anvil. Twenty-seven usable arms."

Leon had the division before she finished the sentence. Six units in four days. Twenty-seven donors, one donation safely each eight weeks.

"Ten days of consumption at the current rate," he said.

"Yes."

"And the rate is not constant."

"No." She picked the slate up again. "Which is the part you actually came for. Commander — this was not an infection. It was not a fall, it was not a line, it was not something we did wrong at Tallis and it was not something they did to her at Tallis, though God knows the inventory there is long enough. Her lungs bled because the disease reached the point in its own schedule where pulmonary capillaries stop holding their own walls together. That is what Verrine decay is. Tissue at that frequency does not hold. It came apart on time."

"On time."

"On its own time. Which has shortened." She turned the slate round and he saw the interval column a half-second before she read it. "Major pulmonary events. Before this year, spaced in months. The last three: seventy-one days. Thirty-four days. Nineteen days."

He heard himself say it before he had decided to. "Thirty-eight."

Pryn's eyes came up off the screen. "Say that again."

"If the interval halves each time. Nineteen, nine and a half, four and three-quarters, two point three seven five. The series converges. It sums to thirty-eight days." His left hand had started its tremor against his knee and he let it stay there. "Thirty-eight from four days ago. Thirty-four remaining."

"I was going to make you work harder for that."

"You don't have to make me work for arithmetic."

"No. I see that." She put the slate down again and this time left it. "So here is the honest part, and I would like the whole of it in you before you do anything with your face. Curves like that do not always keep halving. Sometimes they flatten. Sometimes you get a plateau of weeks that looks like a miracle and is only a curve doing what curves do. Your thirty-eight is a floor. It is not my working figure."

"What is your working figure."

"You will hold me to it."

"Yes."

"Under a year. I would plan for five months." She said it in exactly the voice she had used for the humidity. "If you want that softened, ask somebody else. I was at the Kessler Flats pumphouse. I softened things for four hundred people across two days, and every one of them found out anyway, later, in worse conditions, from someone less qualified. Five months. That is the number I will give her when she asks, and she will ask, and you do not get to instruct me otherwise."

"I wasn't going to."

"Good." She thumbed the left-hand pump rate down by two millilitres an hour and said, with no change in register at all, "She is the strongest patient I have ever had. That is not a compliment. It is a complaint. It means she does not present. She will sit at four grams and correct a lieutenant's threat assessment. You take her numbers off the machine, because you will never get them off her."

"I know."

"Yes," said Pryn. "You would."

She went out. Leon sat in the chair — not the bolted one; that was three decks up in the analysis bay, and he had thought about that chair a great deal in ninety-six hours — and looked at the amber 26.4, and at the tape on his sister's cheek, and at Pip on the shelf beside her head, dormant, its shell scuffed white on white.

Every eleven minutes Pip ran its self-check. Three rising tones. A pause. Three rising tones.

The last one came out flat.

The trouble started at 0630, with the arterial line.

Her right radial had failed overnight. The artery wall would not hold a catheter any more, which Pryn stated in one sentence and did not expand on, and they needed a site for pressures. The rating who came to do it was a surgical assistant called Naev, twenty-two, competent hands, three years of theatre time in his file. Leon had watched him cannulate a burn casualty on a rolling deck last autumn in forty seconds flat.

He set his tray. He turned the arm. He found the vessel with the ultrasound on the first pass, which was the hard part.

Then he looked at her face.

There was nothing in it Leon could have written up. He watched from a metre away and there was nothing. The boy looked at his patient the way you look at a patient — to see whether she was aware, whether she was frightened — and then he did not stop, and his hand came off the transducer, and when he put it back the probe had moved and he had to find the vessel again.

He found it again. He lost it again.

On the third attempt there was a tremor in his hand. Leon recognised it professionally, having one of his own, and knowing exactly which kind was fatigue and which kind was not.

"Rating."

"Sir." The voice was steady. The eyes were wet and the voice was perfectly steady and that was the part that stayed with him.

"Get Chief Ilhan."

"Sir, I can—"

"I know you can. Get Chief Ilhan."

Chief Ilhan came. Forty-one, spectacles, half-deaf on the left from a decompression on a hull she declined to name. She got the line in in twenty-eight seconds with her gaze fixed on four square centimetres of wrist, and did not once raise it above the joint. She wrote her figures. She said, "Pressures are on, Commander." She left the compartment at a pace that was not quite a walk.

At 0900 the orderly changed the linen.

Tess Obrok, nineteen, Veridus accent, eleven weeks in the Order, and she worked like someone taught by a hard person and taught well. Roll, tuck, pin the drain, mind the cannula. She had got as far as easing the pillow — one hand behind that head, the way you lift something after you have been told what it costs — when whatever arrived, arrived.

She finished the pillow. Leon gave her that, then and afterwards. She finished the pillow, squared the corner, bagged the soiled linen, sealed the bag, and walked out.

Twelve seconds later, in the passage: one sound. Not a sob. Shorter than that, and more involuntary — the noise a person makes when a held breath ends on its own. Then footsteps going aft, fast.

Nobody in the compartment mentioned it. Garren, in the corner with his boots crossed, studied the deck. Pryn wrote 0902 LINEN and did not look up.

At 1100 Commander Vael Harken came down to deliver a disposition report she could have pushed to his slate in nine seconds.

She stood at the foot of the bed with her hands behind her back. Two hundred and fourteen hulls. Four platforms over Aurelion, disruptor envelopes layered at three altitudes, roughly two thousand mobile suits, Predator elements at every node worth the name. Kael had brought Therefore inside the ring, which meant the Crimson Lance now covered its own approach and not only the flagship. She talked for six minutes. She was precise and she was useful and Leon logged every figure she gave him.

She looked at his sister four times in six minutes.

Four seconds. Away, to the pump. Three seconds. Away, to the deckhead. Four seconds. Away.

Harken had put nine hundred and forty people in the ground at Corliss and had dug three of the holes herself, with a folding spade, in frozen regolith, because the machine had failed and she had decided that the machine failing was not going to be the reason it did not get done. Leon had read the account twice. He had also watched her hold a man's severed forearm steady for a medic while finishing a sentence about fuel margins.

She could not manage five seconds.

On the fourth look she said, not to him, "Her hair's stuck to her temple."

"I know."

"Does she—" Harken stopped. Started again somewhere else entirely. "Relay traffic out of Halcyon has doubled since Tuesday. He's redrafting."

"I know that too."

"Right," said Harken, and went.

At 1340 Lance-Sergeant Ashe Lorrigan posted a rating on the hatch.

Leon had been aware of the traffic for two days without deciding to be. The passage outside aft medical was a legitimate route to the mess, to the number four ladder, and to the spares locker. It was also, by a longer path, a legitimate way to get from bow spaces to the workshop, if you did not object to a hundred and eighty extra metres.

Since Tuesday, nobody had objected.

They did not stop. That was what made it unbearable rather than merely improper. Nobody stopped, nobody stared, nobody so much as slowed; they went past the open hatch at a working pace with their eyes front, and then continued to the mess or the locker or to nothing at all, and eleven minutes later a proportion of them came back the other way. Leon counted forty-one transits in one hour and identified nineteen individuals, six of whom had no business on deck nine in any watch. One was a warrant officer with thirty-one years in.

Lorrigan came through at 1340, put a rating in the passage with orders to route foot traffic by the number three ladder, and then stood beside the shelf where Pip was, heels together, spine doing the thing it had learned at the top of a staircase in a house that no longer existed.

"Sergeant."

"Sir."

"Did anyone say anything? In the passage."

"No, sir." A pause of about a second and a half. "Nobody's said anything since Tuesday."

Nobody ever says anything, Leon thought. That is the whole of it. Twenty-six years, and not once has anybody said anything.

He put his forearms on his knees and looked at what everyone else was rationing to four seconds, and did the thing he had never allowed himself to do properly, which was to consider it as a fact about the world.

Twenty-six point four kilograms. Grey — not pale; grey, the specific slate of a person running on other people's blood. Cannula in both nostrils. Tape on the left cheek. The groove behind the right ear worn down to something that would not fill in again. Collarbones you could set a pencil in. A drain, two lines, and at the crook of the left elbow a bruise the size of a coin, and another below it, and another below that, a ladder of them going up the arm, because there was nowhere left that had not been used.

Hair dark and damp, three strands across the temple. Fine down along the jaw, which is what a body grows when it starts burning things it should not have to burn.

And she was the most beautiful thing anyone in that compartment had ever seen.

Not in spite of it. He had spent four days looking for a version of the sentence that ran in spite of, and there was not one. The illness had removed everything that was not necessary — the softness, the ordinary upholstery of being alive, all the pleasant noise a face makes — and what was under it was structure. The structure was the problem. It had never been the softness. The disease had been excavating for twenty-three years and had finally reached the architecture.

He ran the list. Not sentimentally. He ran it the way he ran everything, because a pattern with no exceptions stops being a pattern and becomes a law.

The Kaelic envoy at the state dinner two springs ago — the good one, the last one — who had come to insult the Reach and left with his notes untouched, and who had written a private letter later found in the Halcyon archive with nothing in it about trade.

The delegation from the Sethran Cluster: eleven persons, a different galaxy, four separate physiologies, no shared aesthetic tradition, no shared anything. Their reader had lost his place in the formal address twice, and afterwards had asked, through two layers of translation, whether the child in the third chair was well, because he had found himself unable to attend to his own document.

Cadets. Every intake without variation. Some percentage of any group of eighteen-year-olds shown into a room with her in it came out of that room altered, and the officers running the tours had quietly stopped routing them past the east gallery, and had never written down why.

Corrin Vale, who held a Praetor's commission over an occupied world with a hundred and forty thousand people's rations in his gift, who could have had any material thing, and who had wanted this instead, and had come down a set of cellar steps to get it.

Wren Callas, twenty, terrible at chess, ninety-one losses in ninety-one games, back at seven every evening with the board under her arm. Who had died on top of her in the relay ambush, in a position the incident report described in geometric terms, and which Leon had understood immediately, because there is only one way a body arrives at that geometry and it is not accident.

Eleven hundred people on a hangar deck who had knelt because they knew the words from a school pageant, and had gone on kneeling for eleven seconds after the words ran out.

Not one exception. He had tested it against strangers, hostiles, and the professionally cold. Against a surgeon who dug graves with a spade and could not hold five seconds. There was no exception anywhere in the data. It was not a question of taste. It was closer to weather.

And he understood them.

That was the part he had never looked at straight, and he looked at it now, at 1400 on the fourth day, with the recirculator singing at four hundred hertz. He was not blind to any of it. He could see precisely what they saw; he had been able to see it since he was nine and watched a Concord admiral lose the end of his own sentence. He knew, with the flat certainty he brought to load figures and vector geometry, that if he had been handed any other relation to her out of the available catalogue — cadet, aide, guard, envoy, friend, stranger in a corridor — he would have been ruined as comprehensively as any of them. He would have been out in that passage with the warrant officer, walking the long way to the spares locker at a working pace with his eyes front.

That was the shape of his luck, and until this week he had never once been grateful for it.

Of every door into her life, he had been given the only one that was not that door. The one with no wanting in it anywhere. It meant he was inside the compartment. It meant he knew she took the cannula out to eat because she was vain about it, and that she was afraid of the dark specifically between three and four in the morning and at no other hour, and that she pronounced his name wrong on purpose, and that she had cried twice in three years and both times about somebody else.

He got the boring middle of her. He got the part nobody in that queue would ever be shown, and he had it because he had been born eighteen months ahead of her, in the same house, to the same mother, and had therefore been assigned by pure arithmetic to the one position in the universe that is immune.

Thank you, he thought, to nothing in particular, in a bay with the humidity set wrong. Of all of it. For that.

Their mother's signet had turned on her thumb again, so the sunburst faced up off the back of her hand. He put a fingertip on the band and turned it back the way she liked it.

Garren Doss went out to the head at 1520, and Leon heard the whole transit: four steps, a wet catch, four steps, a wet catch, the interval regular enough to set a metronome by.

When he came back Leon said, "How long has it been four."

Garren stopped in the hatch. Two hundred and seventeen years of face, and none of it moved. "What?"

"Every fourth step. It used to be every seventh. When did it go to four."

"You've been counting my breathing."

"Apparently."

The old man came in and sat and looked at his boots for a while. "Eleven weeks," he said. "Fibrosis, lower lobes. Pryn's seen the films. There's nothing to do about it that's worth the bed."

"What does she give you?"

"I didn't ask."

"Ask her."

"No."

"Garren."

"I'm two hundred and seventeen," Garren said, "and you have exactly one problem in this compartment and it isn't me." A pause. Then, in a slightly different voice: "It'll be four for a while yet. I'll tell you when it's three."

"All right."

"All right." His chin came up half a centimetre. "Ask me again in a month and I'll answer you properly."

At 1640 Rating Second Class Bekh brought down the signals summary and stood the way people had been standing near Leon for eleven days — at an angle, prepared to be finished with quickly.

Four days ago Leon had told this man to get out of his way in a passage on deck six. He had not said it loudly. He had said it once, in the flat register, and Bekh had gone back against the bulkhead with the summary against his chest and stayed there until Leon had passed.

"Rating."

"Sir."

"Deck six, Tuesday. What I said to you."

Bekh's face did something complicated. "It's nothing, sir."

"It wasn't nothing, and it wasn't about you, and I'm not going to explain the difference because explaining it doesn't improve it." Leon took the summary out of his hand. "It won't happen again. And thank you for bringing these down four times a day. I know they're routed through the analysis bay. I know you're walking them here as well."

Bekh stood there for about a second and a half, rearranging some furniture.

"Sir," he said, and went, and in the passage Leon heard him say something to the posted rating in a tone he had not used coming in.

At 1810 somebody put a tray on the trolley at his elbow. Fish protein, rice, a cup of the tea that came out of ship's stores and tasted of the tank it had been stored in.

Leon looked at it for some time, the way you look at an object whose function you know without being able to locate the point of it. Then he ate all of it. Because it had been put there. Because the person who had put it there was standing in the hatchway not leaving. Because eating it was less trouble than the conversation.

The person in the hatchway was Tess Obrok, nineteen, Veridus accent, back on shift.

"Obrok," he said, when the tray was empty.

She braced. "Sir."

"Thank you for the pillow."

She did not know what to do with that, which was fair. He had not entirely known either.

"She likes the seam turned inward," Leon said. "You did it right. Nobody's done it right since the Anvil."

"Yes, sir," said Tess Obrok, and took the tray, and got out of the compartment before anything else could happen to her.

She surfaced at 2247.

He knew before the monitors did. Ninety-six hours had taught him the tell: her right hand, the one without lines in it, closed and then opened. Then the respiratory trace lifted. Then the eyes, which took a long time and did not properly focus, and went — of course — first to the shelf. To check on Pip.

"It's fine," Leon said. "Sixty-one percent. I've stopped it running the self-check at night. It's fine."

Her mouth moved. Nothing came with it. The larynx had held a cuffed tube for thirty-one hours and there was a bleed in the tissue that Pryn had described as cosmetic, in the sense that it will hurt like hell and mean nothing.

He put the straw against her lip and she managed maybe four millilitres.

She tried again. Got a sound out — not a word; a shape with air behind it. He leaned in until his ear was twenty centimetres from her mouth. She spent the whole breath she had been four days accumulating, and she spent it on this.

"Am I still pretty?"

Leon put his forehead against the bed rail. Then he lifted it.

"You're a public order incident," he said. "Lorrigan's had to post a rating on the hatch."

Her eyes closed. Something happened at the left corner of her mouth — three millimetres of it, which at 2247 on the fourth day was a laugh. It cost her. The trace jumped, saturation went eighty-eight to eighty-four, the pump alarmed, and Pryn was through the hatch in eleven seconds with her sleeves already up.

"What did you do," Pryn said, not unkindly, taking the oxygen up two litres.

"She made a joke."

"Of course she did." Pryn watched the figure climb to eighty-seven and stop there. "Eliana. Blink twice if pain is above six."

Two blinks.

"Above eight."

Nothing. Then, slowly, two blinks.

"Thank you for being honest with me, which is more than your brother manages," said Pryn, and did what she needed to do with the syringe driver, and stayed until the number read eighty-nine.

Then she stood over the bed with her hand flat on the rail. That lasted about four seconds.

His sister was under again by 2310.

Leon took out the slate. Not the signals slate — his own, the grey one with the cracked corner. He cleared it and started the Core assault model from the top, because he had run it ten times and there was nothing else his hands could usefully do at 2310 in a compartment where all the remaining work was somebody else's.

Eleventh run. Built clean, from first principles, the way you rebuild a thing once you have decided the fault must be in your own assumptions.

Two hundred and fourteen hulls. Four orbital platforms over Aurelion at eight hundred, twelve hundred and two ring stations at nineteen hundred kilometres, disruptor envelopes overlapping in three layers, which he mapped again by hand. Two thousand mobile suits, mean sortie latency one hundred and ten seconds. Predator elements at every node, twelve to an element — and a twelve-unit element cannot fire simultaneous vectors inside four hundred metres, which was the entire reason he was still breathing and not a fact he intended to stop using. Everyone thinks it is rage. It is geometry.

Conclusion at the centre with Darvhen Kael aboard. Therefore pulled inside the ring, which put the Crimson Lance across both approach corridors that closed inside eleven minutes.

He set the drives at design authority. Coolant mass. Heat rejection. Thermal ceiling of eighteen hundred kelvin on the outer conduits. The four-second lag on the particle reservoir above eighty percent draw. He put himself in the seat at 91.7 and nobody else in the sky.

Coin toss. Same as the previous ten. And every coin-toss version assumed the Lance missed, and the Lance did not need to hit him twice.

So he took the ceiling off. Not in words. He entered a term in the output column that no pilot in the history of the psycho-frame had ever been able to write, and the model stopped arguing with him and began producing timelines, and the timeline it produced was the one it had produced the last four times he had allowed himself this.

Fourteen minutes to the inner ring if nothing went wrong.

Seventeen if anything did.

Sustained. Open frame. No governor.

He wrote 14:00 at the head of the column and 17:00 beneath it and drew a bracket round both.

Then he sat with the slate on his knees, and the recirculator singing at four hundred hertz, and the strip display reading 26.4, and after a while he wrote below the bracket, in the small square hand he used for figures he intended to check later:

17:52.

He did not label the row. He knew what was in it. He had known since a vault under an observatory on Meridian-7, and it had been sealed behind his own key ever since, and there was exactly one place in the galaxy to obtain that duration and it was lying eighty centimetres to his left with somebody else's blood in it and her mother's ring turned right way up.

He erased the row.

He ran it a twelfth time. Changed the approach. Changed the drive profile. Changed the order in which the platforms came down.

The row came back the same.

At 0140 he tore the last page off the slate. Not the assault page — the other one. The one with the measurements copied off the chart four days ago in Pryn's hand and then again in his: chest, shoulder, nape to hem, sleeve, and a note in the margin reading cannot lift her arms above ninety.

He folded it twice and gave it to Lorrigan at the hatch with an address on Meridian-7 and no explanation of any kind.

Lorrigan read the address, put the paper inside her jacket, and said, "Before winter, sir?"

"Before winter."

Then he went back to the chair, and picked up the slate, and started again from the top.

Three rising tones. A pause. Three rising tones.

The last one flat.

He came up out of it the way he always came up out of it, all at once and from a long way down, and for about half a second he did not know which ship he was on.

Then the deck told him. Steel, cold through the shirt, with the particular hum the Vespertine ran at when her secondaries were idling and the main plant was banked — one hundred and forty-two hertz, give or take, a note he could have hummed on demand and had never once mentioned to anybody. Under that, the oxygen concentrator on its trolley, cycling. Pulse-dose. A tick, a soft draw, a pause. Every four point one seconds. He had timed it on the second night and now his body did the timing whether he asked it to or not, and the count ran under everything the way arithmetic always ran under everything. A second floor beneath the floor.

He was on his side on the deck with his back against the frame of her bunk. Left arm folded under his head. The tremor was going in that hand, small and constant, a wire pulled just short of the note.

Two hours and eleven minutes. That was what he had got. It was more than usual.

He had surfaced because she had moved.

Not much. The sheet, first — the dry rasp of a body with no fat left on it sliding four centimetres across cotton. Then the cannula line, which was the real tell. Three metres of soft tubing that snagged on everything and had a sound entirely its own, a thin plastic whisper, like a page turning in another room.

She is getting up.

He had half a second to decide and he spent about a tenth of it.

He did not open his eyes.

Because he knew what she did when she was watched and he knew what she did when she was not, and they were not the same girl. Watched, she was funny. Watched, she was the best analyst in the Order, with a chair bolted to the deck of the analysis bay to prove it, and she made her voice do a thing where it went light at the end of a sentence so that anything just said could be treated as a joke by whoever in the room needed it to be one. Watched, she said I am a strategic asset and let you laugh, and you laughed, and that was the transaction.

Unwatched, in nine days, he had heard her cry exactly twice. Both times with a towel pressed over her own mouth. Both times under forty seconds. Both times in a head with the water running.

Garren had put it to him once, on the hangar stair at Meridian, in one sentence and no more. She does not do anything when you are looking. Then he had gone back to the coolant manifold, because Garren did not elaborate and never had, and the wet catch came on his fourth step going up.

So: eyes shut. Breathing long and slow and stupid, four in and six out, which is how a man breathes in a training film and not how Leon actually slept. She had no way of knowing that. Nobody had ever watched him sleep.

He lay there and let her think he was gone.

He was aware, with total clarity, that this made him a thief. He did it anyway, and he would have done it again, and there was no version of the next four minutes in which he opened his eyes.

Getting out of the bunk took her four minutes and eleven seconds.

He counted. He could not not count.

The sheet came off in stages, worked down by increments, because a single motion was not available to her any more. Motion had become a sequence of smaller motions with rests between them, like a machine running on a bad supply. Then the left hand, finding the bunk frame twenty centimetres above his head.

He heard the tendons in it. That was a real sound now. A faint dry creak, the noise a rope makes taking load, out of a wrist he could close two fingers around.

Then nothing for thirty-one seconds.

That is not resting. That is waiting out the vertigo.

The concentrator ticked eight times into the silence.

Then the shift of weight. The small hard sound of a heel finding the deck edge, and the second heel. The sneakers were white, off a market stall on Veridus-9, nine marks, and they made almost no noise — and that was the thing about them, because a person weighing twenty-seven kilograms does not make the sound a person makes. There was no thump. There was a settling. A dry tap, like someone setting down a cup.

Then the trolley.

Four castors, one out of true. Front left, flat-spotted, from being dragged over a threshold at Tallis by a man who had not been careful about anything at that particular moment. It went tick on every third rotation. He had meant to fix it. He had meant to fix it for nine days and had instead spent those nine days reciting names into a recorder.

She did not lift the trolley. She could not lift the trolley. She leaned into the handle and let it take a portion of her and moved with it, and the castor went tick, tick, tick, and every tick was roughly twenty centimetres of deck.

Nine ticks. Then a rest.

The rest ran ninety seconds and she spent all of it not breathing well. He heard the top of her lungs working and the bottom of them not participating — that narrow wet sound in the upper third, and silence below it. Which is what a person sounds like when four hundred millilitres is doing the work of two litres. Pryn had given him the figure in the corridor and had not softened it, because Pryn did not do that. Four hundred. Down from four sixty in March. Ask me again in March.

Six more ticks. Another rest. Forty seconds this time, which meant the first rest had bought her something.

Then the tubing, dragging over the lip of the bunk mounting, and a small metal click he identified before he had finished hearing it. The signet. Their mother's, Astraian gold, worn turned so the sunburst sat on the back of her hand, three sizes too big now for the thumb it lived on. She had stopped mentioning that around month four.

Three metres.

Two minutes and fifty seconds for three metres, plus four minutes and eleven to stand up. Two hundred and eighty-one seconds total, and he had the number before he had decided to want it. At Tallis he had crossed nine hundred metres of burning dock in under forty and thought nothing of it at all.

Then she was behind him, and above him, and the tubing hissed once, and the trolley stopped ticking.

She had come all that way to reach him. There was nothing else on this side of the cabin.

She got down onto the deck in two stages and the second stage was not controlled.

Her knee hit the steel eleven centimetres from his spine. Hard. He heard the breath go in through her teeth and hold there, and then come out slow while she waited for the joint to stop reporting.

He did not move. He would have given a great deal to put a hand out.

Then her arms came around him from behind.

Left arm over his shoulder and down across his chest. Right arm underneath, along his ribs. Her forehead set itself between his shoulder blades — a small hard point of contact with hair falling over it — and she got as much of herself against his back as there was of her to get.

It was not enough to feel like a person holding him. He made himself have the fact. It felt like a coat laid over him. Twenty-seven kilograms distributed along a metre and a half of a man's back registers mainly as warmth in two lines and absence everywhere else.

Her forearm across his chest had no weight in it whatsoever. He could feel the individual bones. The ulna lay against his sternum like a rod.

Her hands were freezing.

Not cool. Cold the way a thing is cold when it has been out of a body's supply for a long time, and dry, and the fingers curled into his shirt without any grip in them at all. Where the signet touched his collarbone the metal was colder than the fingers. He had been holding her hands most days for three years, in every temperature a ship or a cellar or a hospital bay could produce, and they had got cold by increments so small that no single week had ever been the week it happened.

Then her heart came through his shirt.

Left shoulder blade, through the cotton, where her chest was against him. A fast light tapping, high and quick, and not a rhythm a person of twenty-three should own. He counted fifteen and multiplied by four.

One hundred and thirty-two. At rest. Lying against her brother on a deck at 0340.

Because there is not enough of her blood carrying enough of anything, so the pump runs fast to cover the shortfall. It has been running fast for eleven years. It is twenty-three years old.

He kept the count. Four in, six out. He kept his shoulders soft, which took actual strength — not the arm, not the frame, a different muscle entirely, one he had first located in a cellar on Aurelion two years and four months ago.

Then she started talking, and he stopped feeling the deck at all.

"You are so heavy," she said. "You are like a wall. I do not know how anybody carries you anywhere. Garren says you weigh eighty-one kilos and I have decided he is lying out of kindness."

Her voice was almost nothing. Half a metre from him and pitched under the concentrator.

"You should not sleep on the floor. Pryn says the discs in your lumbar spine will be a legal problem by forty. I asked her for a number, because I always ask her for a number, and she said sixty-two percent by forty if you keep lying on steel, and then she said she does not round down for family. Then she went to get a coffee and did not come back for eleven minutes. So I think that was Pryn crying. You did not hear it from me."

A small sound. Not a laugh. The place a laugh goes when there is no air for it.

"I am going to say some things now, and you are not going to hear them, which is the only condition under which I have ever managed to say them. So. Congratulations. You have finally made yourself useful."

The arm across his chest shifted two centimetres. She was trying to hold him tighter and that was the entire available range.

"I love you. That is first. I want it first because it keeps getting put last — after the reports and the dispositions and the bit where I am funny about my own lungs — and I have started to worry you think it is the punchline. It is not the punchline. It is the sentence. Nothing goes on the end of it. I said it out loud once and I did it in a corridor, like a coward, with a rail under my hand. So. Here. Properly. I love you. I loved you before I had the vocabulary in either language and I will go on doing it for the whole duration, whatever the duration turns out to be.

"I remember the lumenwing. East garden, the summer I was six, when it came off the wall and landed on my wrist and I would not breathe in case it went. You stood there with a garden lamp held out at an angle so the light stayed on my hand and it had no reason to fly. Eleven minutes, Leon. I counted. I have always counted, I get that from you. You were nine and your arm must have been screaming and you did not say one word the entire time. I have thought about that more than I have thought about almost anything."

She stopped to get some air and did not get much.

"I remember the wine glass. Every state dinner from when I was seven until I was fifteen. The whole table drinking whatever it was that cost a house, and me with pressed pear juice in a proper glass, so nobody could look down the table and see a child. You did that. You told the kitchen. You were twelve the first time you told the kitchen. I never mentioned it and you never mentioned it and it happened somewhere north of forty times.

"I remember the cardigan. God, the cardigan. Two sizes wrong, four marks, off a rack in the rain, and you held it up and said this is temporary, and I have worn it for three years. The elbow went. And when the elbow went you put your fists through the hole and made it bigger, and I let you, because it was the only thing in the room that could take it."

A pause. Four ticks.

"I remember the tape measure on my wrist in the pod."

He stopped breathing.

Four seconds. He caught it and put it back on the count and hoped four seconds read as a sleeping man turning over inside a dream.

"I was not as far under as everybody thought, coming off Tallis. I remember a tape going round my wrist and round my shoulders, and somebody taking the shoulder number twice because the first one was wrong. I remember a hand keeping my head from rolling. And I remember thinking, well, he is measuring me for a box — and then thinking, no. No, he is not. He has waited three years to make that joke and he is not going to waste it on a coffin.

"So. Thank you for the coat. In advance of me being gracious about it in daylight, which I will not be, because I have a position to maintain."

A rest. Nine ticks of the concentrator. She was paying for the talking and he could hear the bill coming due in the top of her chest, a fine crackle on the intake, like paper being folded somewhere behind a wall.

He lay still and let his mind go where it went during her rests, which was anywhere but the count.

There had been an orderly in the bay at Meridian. Nineteen, maybe. Came in with a tray, stood at the foot of the bed, put the tray down twice because the first time it was on the wrong side, and then went out into the corridor and did not come back on shift. Harken had reassigned him without comment. There were officers on this ship who took the long route past the analysis bay, and Leon had timed the traffic on that passage against the traffic on the parallel one and the figures were not close. Two techs had refused to run her line kit and had said it was a hand-steadiness issue. Pryn had said, flatly, in a corridor, I have to rotate people out of that room. Nobody works properly in there. It is a staffing problem and I do not have a fix for it.

He had never once had it. Not for a second, in twenty-three years. He had been four when they put her in his arms and she had been a red creased thing weighing two and a half kilos and she had been his sister before she had been anything at all, and whatever the rest of the galaxy stood in the doorway losing its footing over, he was exempt.

He was grateful for the exemption. It was the only piece of luck he had ever been issued.

"Sixty-one steps," she said. "The great stair at Lumengarde. Sixty-one, and the ninth from the bottom was worn on the left, so you had to put your foot down flat or it took you. I never once went up them on my own feet. Not one time in eleven years. You carried me up for every gala since I was four, in dress uniform, with a sword on your hip, and at the top you would set me down and straighten my collar and say there — walked it. And every single person in that hall pretended they had watched me walk it.

"Right," she said. "That is the good part. I am going to do the other part now, while I still have the air for it."

The count. Four in, six out. Jaw locked. The throat was the traitor — it wanted to close and then open with a sound in it, and a sound would end this.

He put his tongue against the roof of his mouth and held it there like a man biting a strap.

The water went sideways. Across the bridge of his nose, off the side of his face, onto the deck. Cold in about a second. He had put himself down, without deciding to, with no part of his face available to the room.

He did not lift a hand to it. Lifting a hand moved his shoulder. His shoulder had her forehead on it.

If you move, she stops. If you move she never says any of it again, ever, and she is pleasant about it forever.

So he cried without moving one muscle above the diaphragm, which can be done, and which cost more than nineteen minutes over a dock.

"I have been doing arithmetic on myself since I was about five," she said.

Conversationally. That was the horror of it. She said it in the voice she used for enemy fleet dispositions at the morning brief.

"Not sad arithmetic. Real arithmetic. I am good at it, as you know. It is the one thing they let me be. So here is the ledger, and I am going to read it properly, because I have never read it to anybody and I do not think I get another quiet night.

"Veridus-9. You worked seven and three-quarter shifts a week. That is not a figure of speech, that is the actual number off the depot roster, which I read, because you left the terminal logged in the way you leave everything logged in. Seven point seven five. Fourteen months of it. Two of those shifts a week were mine — concentrator hire, filters, nebuliser cartridges at eleven marks a box and a box every nine days. I could tell you what my throat cost per week to the half-mark. You came home at 0400 grey to the lips and said the depot was easy work, and I said good, and we both put that away where we put things.

"Your Academy ring. Two hundred and forty marks. You sold it in month three to a man off Pier Nine who knew exactly what it was and paid you a fifth of what it was, and you told me it went in the sorting yard, and I let you tell me. Then I looked up the pawn index, because I am incapable of not looking things up. Two hundred and forty marks bought eleven weeks of oxygen. You gave away the only object you have ever been proud of so I could breathe until August. And you have never mentioned it. Not drunk, not angry, not at Tallis. Not once.

"The Requisition. I want to be careful here, because I have thought about this a great deal and I do not want to be dramatic, I want to be accurate. Vantalar did not want a girl. He wanted a signature and a bloodline and a legal instrument, and the price he set on the amnesty and the corridors was my face and my name on a page. And the Reach considered it. Not the collaborators — ordinary people, in a queue, at a distribution point, in front of me. They did the sum with their children standing there and they found it fair.

"And here is the part I have never said out loud. They were not wrong. One girl for the food corridors is a good trade. I would have signed it myself if it had actually opened the corridors. I ran the model eleven times and it never opened them. That is the only reason I did not sign. Not virtue. Modelling."

The fingers on his chest tightened by nothing at all.

"But four families came for me anyway, because of that. And you dealt with all four. And one of them was a man in a cellar in month nine, and his name was Corrin Vale, and you carried him alone for eleven months while I already knew, because you left the ledger open, Leon. You always leave the ledger open.

"So I traced it. I traced the whole chain back and it terminates in one place. My face, printed four metres high on the side of a grain silo, under the word CONSORT. Somebody put my face on a silo, and a man went down into a cellar, and my brother went down after him, and only one of them came back up, and you were twenty-four years old.

"Wren was twenty. She was so bad at chess. She used to bring her queen out on the third move like she was walking a dog, every game, for nine months, and never once learned. And she died on top of me at the forward relay because she chose to put her body between mine and a wall, which is a decision that only exists if I am in the room. I was awake for all of it and I could not lift my head off the deck to find her face. Eleven kilos of gear on a twenty-year-old and she used it to be a roof.

"And Tallis. Fourteen thousand two hundred and six. Two hundred and eleven you could not get names for. And a light on the second floor, north face, in a service block, that you logged, and entered, and did not look at twice.

"I did that. Not the Dominion. Not Vantalar, not the platform crews, not the man who wrote the target set — you wrote the target set. I did it. Because every one of those numbers exists downstream of somebody having to come and get me out of a room, and I have been the room my whole life."

She stopped. He heard her swallow and the swallow was wrong — thick, with a catch at the end of it — and he knew what colour the basin would be at 0700.

"So that is the ledger. I have checked it in the way I check things. It balances.

"Every terrible thing that has ever happened to you has my name on it, in my handwriting. All of it. You were nine years old holding a lamp up so a moth would not leave my wrist, and you have been holding something up ever since, and it has cost you your ring, and your sleep, and your left hand, and fourteen thousand two hundred and six people. And I want to write the line that goes at the bottom of a ledger.

"I am sorry.

"Not for the illness. I did not pick the illness and I have made my peace with the physics of it, more or less, on a good day, with drugs. I am sorry for being born the way I was born. I am sorry that when they made me they put a thing in me that shakes, and that the shaking has to be paid for by somebody, and that the somebody has always been you. I would have arranged it differently. I would have arranged to be something you could put down."

Her hand moved. The cold fingers found the front of his shirt and closed on a fold of it, without strength, the way a child holds a sleeve on a crowded platform.

"There is one more," she said, much quieter. "And I am not going to say what it is. You are asleep and it would still not be fair.

"I am going to do something. It is the correct thing. I have run it eleven ways as well — you are not the only one in this family who runs things eleven ways — and I got your eleven answers, and then I got a twelfth that you will not look at. It is the only one that works. The arithmetic on it is not even close, and you know the arithmetic as well as I do, and neither of us is going to be the one who says the last line of it.

"You will know exactly when it happens. You will know exactly what it costs. And there will be no time at all to argue, which is, if I am honest, part of the design.

"You are going to hate me. For about forty years, which is roughly what Pryn gives you if you stop sleeping on floors.

"So: I am sorry. In advance. For that. I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry, and I am doing it anyway, and those two things are both completely true and I have stopped trying to make them agree.

"And do not let anybody put the word sacrifice on it. It is not that. It is the first bill in twenty-three years that comes to me."

Then, into his back, so low that he felt it more than heard it, in the language he had never got his mouth around — four words, then five more, the vowels long and falling away at the ends the way their mother's had:

"Máthir. Ai vaunn e'thelien."

A breath.

"Ne sella-mé. Th'ai valdon in, ai valdon in shan."

She did not translate it. She never had. He had asked twice, years ago, and both times she had smiled and said it was rude.

She stayed a while after that and said nothing, and he lay under the small warmth of her and counted, and it came down from one hundred and thirty-two to one hundred and twenty-four. Which he supposed was the closest thing to rest she got.

Then she said one more thing, and it was not large.

"You are going to be all right," she said. "You are the most all-right person I have ever met. You just do not know it, because nobody has ever let you put anything down."

She patted his shoulder. Twice. The way you reassure a horse.

Then she went back.

Getting up off the deck took three minutes and forty seconds and used the trolley handle and the bunk frame and, near the end, something in her gave and she went down onto a hip and stayed there for a full minute breathing off the top of her chest. She did not make a single sound of complaint. He lay eleven centimetres away with his eyes shut and his hands open and let her do it, because she had come all this way to hold a man who was not looking, and taking that from her now would have made the whole crossing a mistake.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Six ticks. A rest. Nine ticks.

Cotton. The dry rasp of a body sliding across a sheet. Three metres of tubing coming to order.

Then nothing.

Pip did not chirp.

Three rising tones, a pause, three rising tones, the last one flat now, because the cells were going and could not be replaced. That was the sound of his sister getting into a bed. It had been the sound of it every night for nineteen months and he could have picked it out of a hangar deck at full alert.

Silence.

She had muted it before she stood up. Before any of it.

He did not open his eyes.

He lay on the steel with his face wet and cooling and the tremor going in his left hand and the concentrator ticking every four point one seconds, and he stayed exactly as he was for a long time — past the point where her breathing lengthened, past the point where it went shallow, past the point where it finally went quiet.

She had every figure right and had put the minus in front of the wrong number: all of it had her name on it, and that was not the cost of his life, that was his life.

He did not say it.

He lay in the dark with his eyes shut and let her sleep.

The briefing room aboard the Perseverance of the Concord had been the first-class dining saloon, and nobody had ever finished converting it.

The chandelier had come down in the third week. The bolt holes were still in the ceiling — nine of them, in a ring, four hundred and ten millimetres on centre — and Leon counted them every time he came in, because he could not stop counting them, and because the room was otherwise full of things he did not want to look at. The mural of the Concord Founding still ran the length of the port bulkhead. Someone had screwed a tactical repeater over the face of the Third Signatory. It fit badly. The screws were the wrong length and had gone through into the plaster, and a fine white dust came out of the holes whenever the ship changed attitude.

Nine holes. Ring diameter one point two metres. Load rating of the original fitting, four hundred kilos.

Four hundred.

He sat down at the head of the table with his left hand flat on the surface, where the tremor did not show.

Harken came in with the deck slates under one arm and set them down hard enough that two of them woke up. The scar out of her left eye socket had gone the colour it went when she had not slept — a dull mauve, like a bruise on fruit. She did not sit. She had told him once that she stopped sitting in the third month because sitting made the meetings longer.

"Before the war," she said, "we ran forty-one worlds and stations."

"Forty-four."

"Forty-four now. Forty-one when I wrote the paper. Three came over last week." She pushed a slate across. "Dunmoray, Little Ashwood and the Pellun orbital cluster. Nobody fought for them. The Kaelic garrison packed, left on their own hulls, and left the tax rolls behind, which I want you to notice, because it is the only competent handover I have seen from either side in fourteen months."

"They left because they cannot supply that far out. The Overlord decided the calories were better spent inside the envelope."

"Yes. So we hold two fifths of the Reach." She said it the way a surgeon says a mass is operable. "Two fifths if you count generously. One point eight seven billion people. And I would like to walk you through what two fifths actually is, because everyone in this fleet keeps saying it like it is good news."

It is not good news. It is a shape.

"Go."

"We hold hulls and we hold fuel and we do not hold food." She tapped the slate twice and the Reach came up over the table in pale amber, the Dominion volume a solid mass at the core of it, the Order's holdings a scatter of grains flung out along the rim. "Karn Belt refineries are ours. Sixty-one percent of the Reach's pre-war refined helium-three. We have more fuel than we have engines to burn it in."

"And the yards."

"The Ceres-line yards at Meridian-Seven. Four building slips, fourteen-month cycle." She let a beat go by. "We can use one. The fitters who could weld a pressure hull to survey standard all lived in the Aurelion arcologies, and they are either dead or they are working for Kael with a rifle in the room. We have eleven qualified pressure welders. Eleven. For four slips. I have two of them teaching and that costs me two welders."

"And the arable."

"Nine percent." Harken's mouth did something that was not a smile. "The Aurelion cluster and the Selvarre basin were seventy-one percent of the calories in this civilisation and both are under his platforms. So we sit on top of the fuel and the shipyards and we starve slowly, and he sits on top of the wheat and does nothing at all. He does not have to attack us. He has to wait."

"Standard civil ration."

"Seventeen-eighty a day."

"Delivered?"

"Fourteen-ten on thirty-one of the forty-four worlds. Eleven-sixty on Ostrava Shelf." She rubbed the heel of her hand into her good eye. "Ostrava Shelf is where I stopped writing numbers down and started writing names. Line troops get twenty-four hundred. Which means every soldier we field is eating a civilian's shortfall, and every civilian on the Shelf has done that arithmetic. Last month a supply sergeant was beaten to death outside a distribution point by a crowd of about two hundred. The tribunal has forty-one of them. I have read the statements. I cannot find one person in that crowd I would have behaved better than."

The room held that. Lorrigan, by the door, had come to attention without being asked, the way she did when something needed a body held straight near it.

"Say the rest," Leon said.

Harken laughed, one note, with nothing in it.

"The rest is that fighting is the easy part."

She put both hands on the table then, finally, and leaned on it. Leon watched her decide to say all of it.

"I buried three cells with these hands, my lord. And the worst month of my life was not a burial. It was the month we took Pellun and I understood what the Order of the Concord actually is. A nine-hundred-year-old body whose entire institutional memory consists of how to seat four hundred people at a gala without insulting anybody's grandmother. We have a protocol office. It is fully staffed. Eleven people, and they are extremely good."

"And no tax code."

"No tax code. No customs schedule. Not one trained civil magistrate, because for nine centuries the magistrates were Concord appointees and the Concord is a smear on a feed." She turned a slate face down, which she did when she was about to name somebody. "So a Knight-Companion called Uvall Serrin currently sets the price of insulin on Pellun for two hundred and six thousand diabetics. Before the war he imported wine. That was his profession. He was good at it — he could tell you the drainage of a hillside by tasting it."

"Why him."

"Because he was the ranking sworn officer in the room the day the Kaelic administrator walked out. Because somebody had to. Because he is honest." Her voice did not change. "He is honest. That is the whole of his qualification and it is more than most of them have. He has got the price wrong twice. The second time four people died and he came here and told me himself, standing where I am standing, and then he went back to Pellun, because there is nobody to replace him with."

"Water rights on Dunmoray."

"Adjudicated by a Lance-Corporal who used to own a pharmacy. He is working from a textbook. It is a textbook on maritime salvage. It was the closest thing anyone could find in the ship's library."

She straightened, and pushed the last slate an inch, and did not look at it.

"Eleven hundred reprisal killings in the first ninety days after liberation. Collaborators, allegedly. We have reviewed six hundred. Something over sixty percent were wrong — wrong person, wrong grudge, wrong brother. Tribunal backlog is nine thousand four hundred cases. It grows by two hundred a week. We clear thirty." A breath. "I can take a fortified moon in an afternoon. I cannot build a functioning ration board in a year. Winter on the Shelf starts in eleven weeks."

Leon looked at the amber and did not answer for a while.

Two fifths. Nine percent arable. Fourteen-ten against seventeen-eighty was three hundred and seventy calories a day, which across one point eight seven billion people was six hundred and ninety-two billion calories a day, which was not a number any more, which was — he made himself stop — which was somewhere north of four hundred thousand excess deaths across the winter if distribution held, and considerably worse if it did not.

It will not hold. Distribution is the first thing that goes.

"Thank you," he said. "Put the Ostrava statements in front of me. All forty-one."

"They are seven hundred pages."

"Put them in front of me."

The second slate was the war itself, and it was worse, because it was clean.

"He stopped moving," Harken said. "Fourteen months of him coming at us, and then, over about nine days in the spring, he simply stopped. Everything came inside the Core."

The amber went dark. The Core Worlds came up in Kaelic red, and the red was not a front. It was a solid.

"Two hundred and fourteen warships," Leon said, before the count finished resolving, because he had been carrying the count for three weeks like a stone in a boot. "Twelve Sovereign-class. Forty-one heavy. The rest line and escort. Roughly two thousand mobile suits — two thousand and forty on the last confidence interval, of which about three hundred are the new pattern with the reinforced actuator housings. Four orbital defence platforms over Aurelion. Palisade One through Four, geosynchronous, ninety thousand kilometres apart along the orbit."

"And the envelopes."

"Four layers of them." He turned his hand over on the table. "That is the part everyone misreads. They see two hundred and fourteen hulls and they think the problem is two hundred and fourteen hulls. It is not. I have killed eight hundred and seventy hulls in an afternoon." She did. In fifty-one minutes, and it took her apart in fifty-one minutes. "Numbers are not the problem. He has bought time, and he has bought it in a currency I cannot spend."

From the door, quietly: "Explain it to me as if I am not a pilot, my lord."

Lorrigan had been Sworn of the Watch once, when Sworn of the Watch meant a sash with silver frogging and a place at the top of a staircase twice a year, for a ceremony nobody remembered the origin of. She still stood the way she had been taught to stand on that staircase. She also asked the best question in the room, every time, because she had never once been embarrassed to.

"A GN Disruptor field does not stop a particle beam," Leon said. "It decoheres it. Every metre of field the beam crosses, I lose collimation and I lose sensor return. So the further out I shoot, the more I am guessing, and the wider the beam lands. Inside four layers my range for a guaranteed kill comes down from twenty-two thousand kilometres to about six hundred metres."

"Six hundred."

"And I do not fight at six hundred. I fight at four hundred."

"The Predators."

"A twelve-unit Predator element is built to put twelve simultaneous firing vectors on one object. Inside four hundred metres they cannot. The geometry will not permit it — they would be shooting through each other. At four hundred metres a twelve-unit element brings three weapons to bear, maybe four." He said it flatly, because it was flat. "I can survive three. Everyone thinks it is rage. It is geometry."

"Then the problem is what."

"The problem is that four hundred metres is slow." He put a finger into the red and dragged, and the volume rotated on its axis. "At four hundred metres I have to physically go to every single thing I intend to kill. The defended volume is forty thousand kilometres across. Under a four-layer field my thrust efficiency drops to sixty-one percent, so transit inside the envelope runs at about point-six of book acceleration. And I cannot use the high-mobility profile at all, because the field eats the vernier feedback and I will put myself into a hull at nine kilometres a second."

"Give her the times," Harken said. "She has earned them."

"One point nine seconds per mobile suit. Eleven seconds per line escort. Forty to sixty per heavy, longer if they close up and I have to work through the flak. Two thousand and forty suits. Two hundred and fourteen hulls. Four platforms." The figure came up the way a reflex comes up. "Fifty-one minutes. Best case. Everything goes right, nothing surprises me, and nobody on my side needs saving."

Harken's jaw moved. "And the Therefore."

"And the Therefore." He sat back. "Sovereign-class. He has hung the Crimson Lance on it. Reverse-engineered off Unit-Zero-One fragments — the pieces out of Aurelion orbit that were still coherent enough to characterise. Which means somebody in the Dominion took my mother's wreckage apart with real care and real skill, and I would like to meet them, once."

He heard his own voice do nothing at all, and went on.

"The Lance cannot match Unit-Zero-Two. It is about a third of the output. Its collimation is worse, its cycle is ninety seconds, and it is bolted to a hull that cannot turn." He let the pause sit where it belonged. "None of that matters. It is not built to fight me. It is built to hit me once. One clean hit through the frame housing and the field collapses. If the field collapses inside a layered envelope with two thousand suits in it, everything after that is paperwork."

"It has to find you," Lorrigan said.

"It has ninety-second cycles and fifty-one minutes. Thirty-four firing solutions." He looked at the red. "And every solution is better than the one before it, because I am not manoeuvring freely. I am working a target list at four hundred metres, which makes my position for the next three seconds the most predictable thing in the volume. I am a machine that has to be adjacent to things. He has built a defence that only requires me to be adjacent to things for a long time."

The repeater over the Third Signatory's face hummed and dropped a little plaster dust onto the deck.

"Then we make him move," Harken said.

"Yes. That is the right instinct and it is the whole of my next four days."

The captured order came off a Kaelic courier that had made an emergency translation into the Ostrava lane with a cracked drive housing and a crew of nineteen who surrendered inside four minutes. Signals had it in a day. Analysis had it in two. It came back up to Leon with three pages of marginalia in a small, level, right-slanted hand.

The chair on the analysis-bay deck was empty this morning. It had been welded to the plating four months ago at a height nobody had asked Harken to specify. He had never once heard her mention it.

He read the order standing up.

FROM: OVERLORD DARVHEN KAEL, FLAG, CONCLUSION. TO: COMMAND, PALISADE ONE THROUGH FOUR. COMMAND, THEREFORE. COMMAND, PREMISE, COROLLARY, GRANTED, NEVERTHELESS. ALL ELEMENT LEADERS, PREDATOR RESERVE. SUBJECT: STANDING DISPOSITION, CORE VOLUME. SUPERSEDES ALL.

The enemy is not a fleet. Cease preparing for a fleet.

The enemy is one object, with a crew of one, and a finite duration. It has no logistics, no relief, no reserve and no second shift. Everything that has failed against it has failed by attempting to construct a wall. A wall is a thing that must hold. Do not build a wall. Build a clock.

You will not attempt to prevent its entry into the Core volume. You will make its entry expensive in seconds. Every disposition in this order is to be assessed against one question and no other: how many seconds does it purchase. Layer depth purchases seconds. Dispersal of the mobile suit reserve purchases seconds — you are not to concentrate. Concentration is a convenience for it. Palisade platforms are not to be defended. They are to be positioned so that reaching them costs transit. Predator elements will not engage on contact. They will engage on the forty-first minute.

THEREFORE will not manoeuvre to engage. It will hold station and cycle. It requires one hit. It has all afternoon.

I do not require anyone in this volume to be brave. I require you to be slow.

Under the last line, in violet, in the small right-slanted hand:

He is not describing a battle plan. He is describing my brother's fuel gauge. Someone has told him what a Psycho-Frame costs its pilot per minute and I would very much like to know who, and then I would like a quiet half hour with them and a notary.

And three lines down, smaller:

Note the omission. Nothing in this order concerns Unit-02's output ceiling. He has stopped caring what it can do. He has correctly concluded that the interesting number is how long it can do it.

And at the foot of the page, in the same hand, without a flourish:

That is the first competent thought anyone in the Dominion has had about us in fourteen months. Do not let anyone in that room tell you otherwise to make you feel better. — E.Z.

Leon read the order twice, which for him was a decision and not a necessity.

He is right. Every word.

Kael had looked at the most powerful object ever built by human beings and had declined, entirely, to be impressed. He had asked one question instead. How long. And having asked it, he had thrown away every instinct a commander is issued with — to concentrate, to defend the valuable thing, to be seen being brave in front of his own crews — and had built forty thousand kilometres of deliberate, patient, humiliating sludge.

I would have built the wall. I would have built the wall because I would have wanted to see it.

"He is a good officer," Leon said, aloud, in an empty bay, and closed the file, and did not say another word about the man for the rest of the war.

He had run the final battle eleven times.

Not simulated. Run. The distinction mattered, because a simulation asked a machine what happened, and the machines available to the Order were second-rate salvage that had spent nine centuries computing seating plans. He had run them in his head, in the two hours a night he did not sleep and the four he lay on top of the blanket, and he had written each one out afterward in a hand that got worse as the models got later.

Model One was the decapitation run.

Straight in. Ignore everything. Take the Conclusion, take Kael, and let the Dominion's command structure do what command structures do when the top comes off. Envelope contact to the flag's station-keeping box: sixty-one thousand kilometres. Transit at point-six of book, threading four layers: nineteen minutes. Nineteen minutes of Predator elements engaging on contact and the Therefore cycling. Twelve firing solutions before he arrived at the thing he came for.

And then the actual defect, which he had not found until the second night: he did not know which hull Kael was on.

Premise, Corollary, Granted, Nevertheless and Conclusion were the same class. Signals had confirmed in the fourth month that all five ran identical emissions envelopes, identical traffic volumes, identical drive harmonics, and rotated flag traffic on a schedule with no pattern in it, because it was generated off a physical source Signals could not model. Kael had made himself a one-in-five.

Leon could kill five Sovereign-class hulls. It took fifty-one seconds apiece with the flak they carried. They were not adjacent to one another. By the fifth he had been in the volume forty-four minutes.

Model One failed on the twenty-ninth firing solution. He had written 29 in the margin and circled it.

Model Two was the platform-first sequence.

Kill Palisade One through Four. The envelope was generated from the platforms — take them and four layers came down to one, and one layer he could fight at eleven thousand kilometres instead of four hundred, and eleven thousand kilometres turned the entire war from a travelling problem into a shooting problem. It was the right idea. It was so obviously the right idea that he gave it four days.

Each platform was hardened to a standard the Reach had never built to: laminate over a hundred and forty metres of structural depth, field emitters inboard of everything. Forty seconds of work each, at four hundred metres, inside the flak of a station designed to shoot at capital ships. Ninety thousand kilometres between them along the orbit. Transit, degraded, six minutes and change per leg. Four platforms, three legs. Twenty-six minutes before he touched a single warship — twenty-six minutes with the Therefore cycling and two thousand suits under patient instructions to make him late.

And under that, the other thing. The reason he had stopped working on Model Two on the fourth day and gone and stood in a corridor for nine minutes with his hand against a frame.

Palisade One through Four were geosynchronous over Aurelion. Each massed one point one million tonnes. A field-emitter kill did not vaporise a structure that size. It opened it, and it stopped it holding station.

He had run the debris. Deorbit windows between nine and thirty-one hours, into atmosphere over the eastern arcology belt, over Aurelion Prime, which before the war had been nine million people and was now six point one million, most of them there because Kael had moved them there to work the wheat.

He knew what a mass entering an atmosphere over a city did.

He had done it from the other side. Nineteen minutes. Fourteen thousand two hundred and six names off the wrecks. Two hundred and eleven he never got.

Model Two worked. It was the best of the eleven. Under it he had written: works. 26 min. 1.1e6 t x 4 into the arcology belt. Casualty range 400k–2.2M. NO. Then NO twice more. The pen had gone through the sheet on the third one.

Model Six was the Moonlight Butterfly opening.

Unit-02 could disperse its own particle field across an enormous volume — a wide, thin, deliberately incoherent bloom that destroyed nothing and simply made electronics stop being electronics. Everything inside forty thousand kilometres with an unhardened avionics bus went dark and stayed dark. Two thousand mobile suits. All the flak directors. Most of the escort fire control. It was the single most useful forty seconds available to him in the entire war.

Three problems, in ascending order of how much he hated them.

It did not reach the fourth layer. The bloom decohered against the innermost envelope at about thirty-one thousand kilometres, which left the Therefore, the four platforms and eleven of the twelve Sovereigns sitting inside a bubble of perfectly functional hardware.

It cost seventy-one percent of design authority for forty seconds, at the top of the engagement, when reserve was the only thing he had.

And it blinded the Order fleet. All of it. Eighty-eight hulls: seventy-one corvettes and armed civil conversions, three captured heavy cruisers, fourteen light. The conversions were passenger liners and ore haulers with guns bolted to them, and the yards at Meridian-Seven had eleven welders and no time and had signed the wiring off as adequate, which was true, and which meant not hardened.

So he would open the battle by killing two thousand enemy suits and turning his own fleet into eighty-eight blind hulks inside a volume containing two hundred and fourteen warships that could still see.

He had written: butterfly = I win the opening and Harken dies with everyone.

Model Nine was the honest one.

No cleverness. Enter the volume and attrition it. Kill everything in the order in which it becomes adjacent, with total mechanical patience, until there is nothing left to work.

Unit-02 carried eight photon battery banks. Sustained close output at four hundred metres — full field, full vernier, the high-load profile that let him live through three weapons at once — burned a bank every four minutes and eleven seconds. Eight banks. Thirty-three minutes and twenty-eight seconds of engagement-grade output, and after that the drives went to reserve trickle and the frame began drawing structural coherence out of whatever it could find.

At the rates he had measured on himself, thirty-three minutes and twenty-eight seconds got him to target one thousand three hundred and forty.

Out of two thousand two hundred and fifty-eight.

He ran out of cycles before he ran out of targets. Fifty-nine percent of the job, in the middle of a volume built to make him late, with the Therefore on its twenty-second solution.

Nine hundred and eighteen left. And they only have to be slow.

Model Eleven was the one where he assumed the Lance missed.

Every version that worked assumed the Lance missed. That was the finding. Not one of the eleven survived a Crimson Lance hit, and every model that closed had a term in it, in his own handwriting, that read assume L misses n solutions — and the smallest n in the eleven was nineteen.

Nineteen consecutive misses. From a fixed emplacement. With improving fire control. Against a target obliged to hold position at four hundred metres.

He had put a figure on it in the end, because Harken would ask, and Harken deserved a figure, and Pryn had taught him by example that the correct answer to how bad is a number and not a hand on the shoulder.

He put it at a coin toss.

And I do not believe in coin tosses. A coin toss was what people said instead of looking at the distribution. He had looked at the distribution and it was not symmetrical. On one face, the Order took the Core Worlds and the wheat and the war ended. On the other, one failure at minute nineteen, and then no fleet, no Unit-02, no House of Zadkiel, and one point eight seven billion people going into a Kaelic winter behind nine thousand four hundred tribunal cases and a wine importer pricing insulin.

Fifty percent was not a coin toss. It was a fifty percent chance of ending a civilisation on purpose.

The council pushed. He had known they would. The worst of it was that they pushed well.

"Eleven weeks," Harken said. She laid the Ostrava figures out flat and did not dress them. "Winter on the Shelf in eleven weeks. Dunmoray in fifteen. Mortality projection for the four hundred million on the seven worst worlds is between four hundred and ten and six hundred and ninety thousand excess deaths, if distribution holds. My honest professional opinion is that it does not hold past the second month, because the ration boards are being run by knights with textbooks about salvage law."

"I have the projection."

"Then take the second one." Another slate. "Fleet attrition with no combat at all. Eighty-eight hulls. Fourteen were due pressure recertification eighteen months ago and will not get it, because eleven welders. I lose four hulls a month to maintenance, my lord. Not battle. Bearings, hull fatigue, no spares. In a year I have sixty ships and no yard capacity to replace them, and he has two hundred and fourteen and four building yards on Aurelion he took intact, because he wanted them."

Pryn had come in halfway through and stayed standing near the mural with her sleeves still turned back.

"Give him mine while he is in the mood," she said.

"Go ahead, Surgeon-Commander."

"Four surgeons. Two theatres. Eighty-eight hulls." She did not consult anything. "Whole blood on hand, four hundred and ten units. Plasma, nine hundred. Casualty flow off an engagement of the duration he has been describing runs two thousand two hundred to three thousand one hundred wounded inside the first six hours, of whom about six hundred need a theatre within ninety minutes. I can take eleven an hour. So I will triage four hundred people into a category that means I have decided not to try, and I will do it standing up, in a passage, in about forty seconds each, and I will be right about most of them." She let that be the end of the sentence. "That is not an argument against going. It is what going costs on my deck. You asked me once to always give you the number."

"I did. Thank you."

Lorrigan spoke from her place by the door, at attention, in the voice she had been taught to use on a staircase.

"And the Order, my lord."

"Say it."

"Eleven hundred people knelt on a hangar deck. I was one of them." She did not raise her voice at any point. "I knelt because I learned the words at eleven years old for a school pageant, and I want you to hear what that means, because I do not think anybody has put it to you plainly. The thing holding two fifths of the Reach together is not an institution. It is a feeling. It is a feeling about a family and a hangar deck and some words we learned in a school hall."

"Go on."

"I have been sworn to a ceremonial body my whole adult life, so I can tell you exactly what happens to a feeling that is asked to do the work of a government for a second winter. It does not turn into anger. Anger would be manageable." A pause, precisely placed. "It turns into embarrassment. People begin to feel foolish about having knelt. And once they feel foolish we will not get them back, and we will not lose the two fifths in a battle. We will lose it in ration queues, one shrug at a time, and there will be nothing left for the Order to be sworn to."

"You are both right," Leon said.

"Then—"

"You are right about the strategy." His hand stayed flat on the table. "You are right that two fifths cannot be held through another winter. You are right that waiting is his plan and that executing it is winning. You are right that the fleet decays faster than it builds. You are right that legitimacy has a half-life. If you asked me to grade the argument you have both just made, I would grade it correct. Every part of it." He looked at the amber. "There is exactly one thing you are wrong about, and it is not in the strategy."

Harken waited. She was good at waiting; she had waited out worse men than him.

"Then say what it is."

"No," said Leon.

The silence went eleven seconds. He counted them.

"We convene again in four days," he said, and stood.

Pryn caught him at the lift head, because she had been waiting there, which meant she wanted the passage and not the room.

"Ask me," she said.

"Weight."

"Twenty-six point nine this morning, with the cannula and the gown on. Down four hundred grams from Tuesday. She is holding fluid in the ankles, which flatters the figure, so call it worse than it reads."

"Saturation."

"Ninety-one on four litres at rest. Room air, eighty-four at ninety seconds, at which point I stopped the test and she told me the test was badly designed." Pryn's mouth flattened. "Eleven millilitres Tuesday, nine Thursday. She measures it herself and logs it in a hand my staff cannot match. She has also worked out that I round up, and she has started giving me the volume before I ask, so that I cannot."

"The drone."

"Third tone is flat. The cells are past service life. There are no cells."

"There are none in the Karn Belt, none on Pellun, and the two Concord suppliers were both in the Selvarre basin." He had made those calls himself, four of them, in one night, and had a fifth in progress that was not going to work either. "I know. Keep it running."

"I am keeping it running." Pryn shifted the slate to her other arm. "One more thing, and it is not clinical, so tell me to stop if you want. I have moved her to the aft bay. Not for her. For my people. I had an orderly walk out mid-observation yesterday, stand in the passage, and apologise to a bulkhead. Nineteen years old. Second one this month. Nobody can take a set of vitals in that room in under twice the time it should take, and I have stopped disciplining them for it, because it is not insubordination and I do not have a word for what it is."

"Move her back when the aft bay gets cold. She hates the aft bay."

"She told me. In two languages." Pryn went, and did not say anything kind on the way out, which he was grateful for.

Twenty-three years and I have never once had to look away from my sister. Everywhere she had ever been, he had watched grown adults find a reason to walk past the door twice. He had been exempt from it since he was three years old, and he had never wanted to understand why he was exempt, only to remain so.

Garren was in the passage aft, because Garren was always in the passage, and had been for eleven years before Leon was born.

He fell in on the left, which was where he had always walked, and they went aft along the spinal corridor past the sealed frames where the liner's cabins had been. Every fourth step there was a sound out of his chest like a hand pressed into wet cloth. Two hundred and seventeen years old. Retired Concord Security Directorate field engineer. In fourteen months he had never once referred to the sound.

They got about sixty metres.

"You are going to run out of ways to end that meeting," Garren said.

"I know."

"Harken is not stupid. Lorrigan is not stupid. You have told them four times in three weeks that this war is a duration problem. They can all count. Sooner or later one of them asks the obvious question, which is what would change the duration."

Leon said nothing.

"I am not a physicist. I want that on the table, because you will be tempted to argue physics with me and I will lose." Wet catch. Step. "I read telemetry. That is the whole of my trade. I read your mother's telemetry for eleven years. I sat in a bay with a slate and read what came off Unit-Zero-One's frame, and off the test rigs before it, every run, and after a decade of that a man develops opinions he cannot defend and is usually right about anyway."

"And your opinion."

"Every model you have built has a duration in it. Fifty-one minutes. Thirty-three and a half. Twenty-six. Nineteen." He did not slow down. "And every one fails because the machine cannot hold output long enough. That is one variable, Leon. There is one number in your entire war."

"Garren."

"And it is asleep two decks down with a mask on."

The corridor lights on this stretch ran at sixty percent. The Order had rationed lighting on non-critical decks in the fifth month.

"You will not say it in the room. Fine. I would not say it in the room either." Garren's voice stayed exactly where it had been. "But do not stand up there and let Harken be wrong about what this costs when you know precisely what it costs, to the decimal. I have watched you not say it for eighteen months and I know how long you have known."

"You do not know what I know."

"I know when you stopped sleeping the way you used to and started sleeping the way you do now, and I know it was four days after Meridian-Seven, and I know you sealed a file behind your own key that week and have not opened it since." He stopped walking. "I do not know what is in it. I have never asked. I am not asking. I know it is eighteen months old and I know it is about her, because everything you have ever locked has been about her."

"That is not an argument."

"No," Garren said. "This is."

He turned. The corridor light took the side of his face and made no allowances for it.

"I stood outside an office for eleven years while your mother did not say things."

He let it sit long enough to be heard properly.

"Aria Zadkiel knew something for a long time and she did not say it. Not to your father. Not to Elizabeth. Not to me, and I was the man who read her numbers — she used to hand me a slate with one column blanked and tell me to check the rest. Eleven years of that. She was not lying. She was protecting people from arithmetic. That is what she would have called it, and she would have believed it, and she was the most honest person I have ever served."

He coughed once, let it finish, and went on.

"Then she flew Unit-Zero-One alone. Alone. Nobody argued, because nobody in the Reach had the information they would have needed to argue. She had seen to that for eleven years, out of kindness. And the result of eleven years of kindness was that she made the largest decision in the history of this civilisation with no one in the room qualified to tell her no." A step. "She died of it in fifty-one minutes. And there was nothing wrong with her judgement. That is the part you have to take. Her judgement was excellent. It was just never checked. Unchecked judgement is how a Zadkiel dies. Not from being wrong. From being the only one holding the paper."

"She is twenty-seven kilos," Leon said.

"Twenty-six point nine. I carry her." No inflection at all. "Up two ladders this week. And I am telling you not to hand me her weight as an argument, because it is not an argument. It is a way of not having the conversation."

"Garren—"

"She is also the best analyst in this Order by a margin that embarrasses everybody in it, me included. She is the only person alive who could look at whatever is in that file and tell you where the mathematics is wrong." Wet catch. "If it is wrong. And if it is not wrong, she is the only person entitled to be told."

"Entitled."

"Entitled." Garren's mouth moved a fraction. "She wrote three pages on Kael's standing order and she found the omission in it and not one of the rest of us did. She works everything out eventually. Everything. Always. Faster than you want her to, and you know it better than I do."

He started walking again, which meant he was nearly done.

"So the only question actually in front of you is whether she hears it from you, in a room, with the door shut, while there is still time for her to think about it — or whether she assembles it herself off scraps in about a fortnight, alone, at three in the morning, with a mask on. And then has to decide what to do about the fact that her brother let her assemble it alone."

The corridor made its small sounds. Circulation plant. A hull frame taking heat.

"She left the ledger open once," Garren said. "You remember what she did with that."

"She waited eleven months."

"She waited eleven months for you. Then she told you she had known the whole time." He turned to go. "The worst day of your life was not the day you killed Corrin Vale. It was the day you found out she had been carrying it for you, and that you had let her, by saying nothing."

He got four steps. Wet catch on the fourth.

"You did not answer me," he said, without looking round.

"No," said Leon.

He went up two decks to the compartment he did not sleep in. Shut the hatch. Sat on the deck with his back against the bunk frame, because the chair faced the door and he could not use the chair.

His left hand was going. He put it under his right thigh and held it there with his own weight.

Then the key.

FILE OMEGA-7. SEALED BY ORIGINATOR. LAST ACCESS: 548 DAYS.

Past the lattice models. Past four hundred and eleven failed protocols with her age at the head of each — three, four, six, nine, eleven, fourteen. Past the tuning tables. Past sixty-one point four, and ninety-one point seven, and the blank cell where a third figure was not.

The last page. The curve that doubled every forty-two seconds. The integral under it. The total, which was a duration, cumulative across a life.

Beneath the projection, one line in his father's handwriting. Nothing after it. Not a date, not a signature, not another word in the remaining twenty years of the man.

Leon read it.

Garren carried her back from the analysis bay at 0140 instead of 0400, and did not say why, because he never did.

The corridor ran two hundred and eleven metres from the bay hatch to her cabin and he took it at the pace he took everything, which was the pace of a man who had worked out the arithmetic of his own lungs and did not intend to renegotiate it. On the fourth step there was the catch. Wet, low, somewhere under the right clavicle. It came again on the eighth, and the twelfth, and she counted them because counting was what she did with her hands full of nothing.

"You could put me down and rest."

"No."

"There's a bulkhead seat at ninety metres."

"There is."

Her head was against his shoulder. Twenty-six point four kilograms, and the oxygen line trailing behind them off the mobile bottle clipped at his belt, and Pip flying escort at her left ear, one hundred and forty grams of white shell running its cycle. Three rising tones. A pause. Three rising tones, and the last one flat.

An orderly came the other way at the ninety-metre junction. Young. New off the Meridian intake, four weeks in, and he had the deck manifest in one hand and he was looking at it, and then he looked up.

He got about a second.

Then he put his eyes back on the manifest and kept them there and went past close to the far wall with his shoulder nearly on the conduit run, and once he was behind them Eliana heard his boots stop for a moment and then start again faster.

Fourth one this week, she thought. No. Fifth. The one at the water point on Tuesday counts.

"He'll settle," Garren said.

"They don't, though."

"Some do." Fourth step. The catch. "Doss settled."

"You had eleven years under my mother. You were pre-broken."

"Mm."

She let it go, because the thing was not interesting to her and she had stopped hoping it would become interesting. It was a fact about rooms. She entered a room and the room stopped working properly for a while: hands went slower, sentences came out with a small wrong pause in the middle, a surgeon-lieutenant last month had drawn a cannula from the tray, looked at her, and drawn a second one without noticing he was holding the first. Harken had a chair bolted to the analysis-bay deck for her without being asked and nobody had ever mentioned it, and Eliana suspected that part of the reason was that a bolted chair meant nobody had to walk her in.

There was exactly one person it did not happen to, and she was going to see him in forty minutes.

"Left at the junction," she said. "Not the bay."

"I know where you live."

"You went right on Sixth-day."

"I did," Garren said, and did not explain himself.

At her door he put her down the way he always did, which was slowly and without any ceremony at all, one arm behind her back and the other under her knees until her weight was on the bunk edge and the grey cushion was where her lumbar spine wanted it. He unclipped the mobile bottle and cross-connected her to the wall concentrator and checked the flow at the rotameter, four litres, and stood.

He did not ask her what she wanted the second chair moved for.

"Garren."

"Mm."

"If he asks you tomorrow whether I looked tired tonight."

"He will."

"Yes."

Garren looked at the coat on the hook by the door. White. New. The hood folded flat.

"You looked tired," he said, and went out.

The cabin was two point four metres by three point one, and she spent an hour arranging it.

Lorrigan moved the second chair. Not beside the bunk, where every chair in Eliana's life had ever been put, angled inward, the geometry of a bedside. Square-on. A metre and a half of deck between them, the way two officers sat when one of them was going to be told something.

Not a bedside. A table.

Ashe set it down with the back exactly parallel to the bunk edge, stepped away, and stood the way she had been taught to stand at the top of a staircase twice a year when the Order was a thing that handed out medals at galas.

"Further back."

"Ma'am."

"Another ten centimetres. He puts his heels out."

Ashe moved it ten centimetres and did not ask.

The oxygen line went left, dressed along the bulkhead clip so it did not lie across her lap like a leash. Pip took the shelf above the water spigot. The cannula had bitten its groove behind her right ear years ago and the groove no longer hurt; it just was, the way a hinge is.

She was in the cardigan. Secondhand, two sizes wrong, white gone the colour of weak tea at the cuffs, and the hole in the left elbow was not a hole any more but a geography — an absence the size of a plum where the stitches had gone when her brother put his fists through them four days after Tallis Anchorage. Ashe had offered to mend it. Pryn had offered, which was funnier.

On the hook by the door, the coat hung with its hood folded flat.

She did not look at it. She had already decided when she was going to look at it.

He knocked twice, which he did not do for anyone else, and came in without waiting, which he also did not do for anyone else.

"Your feet are cold."

"My feet are always cold."

"Your feet are cold and the deck's at nine degrees because they're running the port loop down for the layup." He came in, picked the folded blanket off the end of the bunk, and put it over her feet with his shaking hand, and looked at her face while he did it — straight on, no pause in the middle of anything. "There. Now I'm allowed to sit down."

"Sit down. Not there. The chair."

Leon stopped.

He looked at the chair, and then at the metre and a half of deck, and she watched him read the room in about a second and a quarter, because that was how long it took him to read anything.

"Ah," he said.

"Yes."

"Is it the chair where I get told I'm working too hard, or the chair where I get told the Ninth Fleet requisition was drafted by somebody who has never seen a boot?"

"Sit in it."

He sat. Still in the grey underlayer, sleeves shoved to the elbow, and he brought the smell of coolant in with him and the hot-dust smell of a hangar in cold soak. There was a bruise coming up under his right eye from something he had not mentioned. His left hand lay on his knee and the tremor moved through it, fine and constant, four or five hertz, a struck wire that never stopped being struck.

He waited. He was very good at waiting. He had been very good at it since he was nineteen.

Fine, she thought. I did say I would go first.

"I want to tell you something, and I want you to let me finish it. All of it. Because if you interrupt me in the middle I will not get to the end, and I have been getting to the end of this in my head for nine months and I am tired of it living there."

"All right."

"Say it properly."

"I'll let you finish."

"Thank you." She turned the signet on her thumb with two fingers until the sunburst sat on the back of her hand, where her mother had worn it. It was a thing she did to buy two seconds. She bought them. "I have put my hand on a Psycho-Frame conduit three times."

Nothing moved in his face. That was the thing people got wrong about her brother. They thought he was cold. He was not cold, he was slow to render, like an old plate camera. The exposure took a moment.

"Bare hand," she said. "Skin to collar. Eleven seconds the first time, and eleven again, because I wanted the same number, because I am my father's daughter, and if you are going to run something three times you run it the same way three times or you have not run it three times. You have run it once, badly, and twice more for no reason."

"Where."

"I said let me finish."

"Where, Eliana."

"Deck two spine corridor. Number three trunk, during the diagnostic layup. The inspection collar sits at nine hundred millimetres, which is chair height, which I imagine nobody in this fleet has ever thought about, because nobody in this fleet has ever had to think about what nine hundred millimetres means." A breath in, and out. It came about two thirds of the way and stopped, the way they all did. "Twice there. The third time in the hangar during the cold soak, panel off, port shoulder trunk."

"Who pushed the chair."

"You will not ask me that." She said it without heat. "I asked to be left. I said I wanted four minutes with the routing because I was writing the load note. I lied to a subordinate to get four minutes alone with a machine. That is mine. It is not anybody else's, and if you go looking for it in the deck log I will know within the hour, because I wrote the deck log."

His jaw moved once.

"Leon."

"I'm not asking," he said.

"Good."

The ventilation cycled up. Two decks down and aft, the number four heat exchanger ran its purge, and the frame of the ship registered it as a soft knock in the plating, and she felt it arrive in the cushion at her back, and thought what she thought every single time. Eight hundred kilos of coolant moving, and the ship does not notice. I weigh twenty-six point four and I notice everything.

"Now the part I actually wanted to tell you," she said.

And she smiled.

It was not a brave smile. She wanted to be clear with herself about that afterwards, when she went back over the recording she kept in her head. It was not brave and it was not for his benefit and it was not the one she used on surgeons. It was the real one. It got away from her.

"I was well."

Leon did not move.

"Not better. Not managed. Not, oh, her sats came up and her colour's good, the way Pryn says it when she wants me to eat two hundred more calories. Well." She put her hand flat on her sternum; it lay so light there she barely registered it as pressure. "It took about a second and a half the first time, and I thought the collar had shocked me, because something enormous happened in my chest, and then I understood what had happened. My lungs had finished."

"Ellie—"

"You said you'd let me finish. Do you know I have never once in twenty-three years got to the end of a breath? I get to about here." She sketched a line with two fingers. "Two thirds. And then there is a wall, except it is not a wall, it is that the breath stops being interesting. It declines to continue. I thought that was breathing. I thought everyone arrived at two thirds and then had to make a decision about whether to bother with the rest."

She laughed. One dry syllable.

"Leon, it keeps going. It fills all the way and then it keeps going, and there is more room, there is a whole other room in there, and at the top of it there is a sort of click, and it is pleasant, and then you let it out and you do it again and nobody has to schedule it—"

He said nothing.

"My hands were warm." She held them up. Twenty-six point four kilograms of girl, and the hands gave it away first, always; fingers too long for the palms now, nails ridged, the blue that lived under the nail bed and never left. "Not warm like a heater. Warm from inside. There is a difference and I did not know there was a difference. I have had my hands in Garren's hands and in yours and around a mug and under a lamp, and they go hot on the outside and stay cold underneath, and I thought — well. I thought hands were cold. I thought that was hands."

Pip cycled. Three rising tones. A pause. Three rising tones, and the flat one.

"And then the noise stopped," Eliana said.

That one she had to go carefully with. She had rehearsed it and the rehearsals had never come out.

"There is a noise. There has always been a noise. It is not a sound, I want to be accurate about that, it is not in my ears — it is everywhere in me at once, all the time, at a constant amplitude, and it is like a wire being drawn very slowly under a fingernail and never arriving anywhere. It is older than language. It is underneath everything I have ever thought." She turned the signet. "I did not know it was a noise until it stopped. That is the part I need you to have. You cannot hear the thing you were built on top of."

"Eleven seconds," Leon said. His voice had gone very level, which meant something in it had come off its mountings.

"For eleven seconds it stopped, and in the quiet I could not think of a single thing to do with myself. I had all this capacity and no idea what people spend it on. I was sitting in a corridor with my hand on a pipe, being a person, with nothing wrong."

She looked at the deck between her sneakers.

"And I thought: oh. This is what it's like for everybody. This is what it has been like for all of them, the entire time. Wren felt like this. Ashe feels like this right now, standing off the doorframe being bored. Garren feels like this with two ruined lungs — he feels better than I have ever felt in my life, and he is dying, and he is right that he is dying, and he still gets this." She spread her fingers on her lap. "Nobody ever told me. Why would they? How would they know to? You cannot tell somebody that water is wet."

Leon put his hands together and looked at them.

"Then I let go," she said. "On purpose, both of the first two. I counted. I did not wait to be made to."

"The third."

"The third time I did not let go. Pip did. It went to emergency tone, dumped four hundred micrograms of something into my line, and the collar current tripped because my conductivity had changed. I came out of the chair onto the hangar deck and lay there about ninety seconds before my arm would take an instruction."

"How much."

"Forty millilitres the first time. About sixty the second." She said it flat, a technician reporting damage. "Third time Pip logged one hundred and ten and flagged for surgical review inside four seconds."

"Pryn never—"

"I edited the log."

The plate camera finished exposing.

"You falsified a medical record."

"I falsified two. The first two flagged at lower priority and I cleaned those the same night." She met him with no give in her at all. "I am the Order's best analyst by a wide margin. Everyone says so, generally people holding a rifle. Do you imagine I cannot get into a drone's log? Pip's write key derives off the same schema as the relay auth. I found that when I was seventeen and bored and being nebulised."

"Ilsa is going to open your chest and post the findings on the mess board."

"Ilsa is going to say a number at me and not soften it, tomorrow, at 0900, because I am telling her myself. That is why she is the only doctor I have ever liked." Eliana let out what breath she had. "I did not tell you because I knew what you would do with it. You would have welded the panels. You'd have put a guard on the trunk and never once said why, and then I'd be living in a ship where I am the reason there is a guard."

He opened his mouth. Closed it.

"Yes," he said. "I'd have welded the panels."

"I know."

The exchanger knocked in the plating. Two decks down, eight hundred kilos of coolant, going about its business.

"Second thing," she said.

"There's a second thing."

"There are four. They're in order. Sit still."

"I have read the traffic."

She put her hand out and Pip stepped into it, and she held it the way other people held a cup, for the warmth off cells that were failing and could not be replaced.

"Not the summaries. The traffic. Harken gives me everything because I am faster than her whole cell and she is not sentimental enough to pretend otherwise. So. The Dominion is holding the Core with the heaviest concentration it has put anywhere in this war. Two hundred and fourteen warships. Call it two thousand mobile suits, which is soft — yard flow says two thousand and forty, and yard flow lies low. Four orbital defence platforms over Aurelion."

She said Aurelion evenly. She had practised saying Aurelion evenly.

"Layered Disruptor envelopes, sixty per cent overlap at the third shell, which is the only genuinely clever thing they have done all year. Predator elements in twelves. And the Therefore is holding at second shell with a beam weapon on it that they cut out of our mother."

"The Lance can't match Unit-02's output."

"It does not have to match it." She turned Pip over in her fingers. "It has to hurt it once. That is the entire design brief. Somebody in a room in Halcyon looked at the fragments and said: we cannot build a better one, so build one that only needs to connect once, and put it where he has to come. And they were right, which I resent, professionally."

Leon said nothing.

"Kael commands from the Conclusion, fourth shell, dead centre, because he names his ships after the parts of an argument and he has arranged them in the order of the argument. I have written four hundred words for Harken explaining that this is not vanity, it is doctrine, and the doctrine is that he does not believe he can lose a syllogism." She set Pip down on her knee. "I have run the assault."

"Ellie."

"Nine ways. You ran it eleven." She watched his face. "Yes. I read your runs. You file everything and you file it properly and it never once occurred to you to restrict a document from your own intelligence chief, because you are honest in a way that is frankly a liability. And because some part of you wanted me to find it."

His left hand closed. Opened.

"Every version at full authority, alone, is a coin toss at best. And every coin-toss version assumes the Lance misses. That is not an assumption. That is a prayer with a number written next to it."

"I know what it is."

"Then we agree and I am telling you nothing and we can move on." She leaned forward two centimetres, which was as far as she got now. "Run eleven. Column K."

He went very still.

"Every run has a figure in column K. Coupling authority ceiling. Runs one through ten, there's a number — eighty-eight, ninety-one, ninety-one point seven, whatever the assumption of the day is. In run eleven the column is empty." She held his eyes. "You did not delete it. You left it blank. There is a difference and you know there is, because you are the most careful person alive about the difference between not saying a thing and saying that there is no thing."

Ventilation. The concentrator's hiss. Pip: three, pause, three, flat.

"I have known there was a variable since Meridian-7. Since the vault. I said the door word, and the door opened, and you looked at me on the stairs, and that was not the look of a man whose sister had just been useful. That was a man having something confirmed that he had been hoping was wrong."

"Eliana."

"In the hangar afterwards you stood beside me four minutes and did not speak, and I let you have it. I decided, standing there, to let you have it." Her chin came up. "Four days after Tallis you were on the floor of my bay with your head in my lap, and when you could talk the first thing you said was 'there is a—' and then you stopped. I let you have that too. On purpose. Both times. Because you had just recited fourteen thousand two hundred and six names to me and I thought, he is allowed one more day."

She turned the ring.

"That was Sixth Month. It is Ninth. I am not letting you have it a third time. Give me the file, Leon."

"There isn't—"

"Do not." It came out louder than anything had come out of her in a month, and it cost her; she felt the cost arrive in her chest and sit down. "Not you. Anyone else in the Reach can lie to me and I will file it and use it against them by Fourth-day. Not you."

Pip chirped low priority. She thumbed it silent.

"There is a sealed object behind your own key. I know its class, because the seal shows in the index even when the content doesn't. It has been there since Fourth Month, since the vault. You have not opened it to Harken. You have not opened it to Garren, and you tell Garren things you do not tell me, which I have decided to be adult about." She smoothed the cardigan over her knees. "I want the file. Not reassurance. I am not asking you to tell me it will be all right — I would not believe you and it would be beneath both of us. I want the document."

"Ellie, you don't—"

"I am twenty-three. I weigh twenty-six point four kilograms. I cannot stand, I cannot manage a stairwell, I am carried into every room I have ever changed the course of this war from, and I have never once in my life been given a choice about anything at all." Level. That took work and she did the work. "Let me be a person in the room where the thing about me gets said."

The exchanger knocked.

Leon Asher Maximilian Zadkiel sat a metre and a half from his sister with his hands open on his knees, and for eleven or twelve seconds he was not a general.

Then: "Omega-seven."

"Thank you."

"You'll want to be sitting up."

"I am sitting up. I arranged the entire room so that I would be sitting up. Ashe moved the chair."

"Yes," he said. "I noticed."

He told it flat.

That was the mercy and it was the only mercy available, and she was grateful for it later. He did not perform any of it. He laid it down in the order it had happened, the way he would have briefed a strike, and every time he came to a place where a kinder man would have stopped to say I'm sorry he did not stop, because there was more information, and information was the thing he had.

"Verrine decay is not a degenerative process. That's the first line of the file and it's the whole file; everything after it is arithmetic. It is not a defect in the lattice and not a defect in the repair mechanism. It is a standing coherent harmonic in the lattice. Your cells hold a frequency and they hold it faithfully. Matter does not stay assembled at that frequency. Your kidneys, your lungs, your marrow — all downstream. The mechanism is that you are resonating, and matter cannot resonate there and remain matter."

"Since when."

"Conception. Not acquired. No onset. You have been shaking yourself apart at a fixed frequency and a very low amplitude, continuously, since before you had a heart to do it with."

The noise, she thought. Somebody has finally named the noise.

"Father spent twenty years trying to break it," Leon said. "Most of the file is the twenty years. Forty-one approach classes. Damping. Counter-phase. Substrate replacement. Three things I do not believe were legal and one that certainly wasn't. Every one failed, and every one failed in a way that told him more about the resonance than about the treatment, and by year fourteen he had stopped writing about cures and started writing about the phenomenon." One breath. "He produced the most complete characterisation of a coherent living resonance in the history of physics. Nobody has come within an order of magnitude. He filed it as Harmonic E."

"E for Eliana."

"E for Eliana."

She was aware of Pip's weight on her knee, and the flat tone, and the fact that her hands were cold from the inside, as they had been for twenty-three years, except for thirty-three seconds.

"Go on."

"The Psycho-Frame is tuned to Harmonic E. Both units. Unit-01 and Unit-02. The resonance envelope, the coupling band, the whole lattice response curve — Harmonic E, to eleven places, because that is where he had data and nowhere else in the universe did anybody have data of that quality about anything." His voice did not change. "He built the most powerful machine in recorded history out of his daughter's disease, because his daughter's disease was the only mathematics of its kind that existed."

Eliana said nothing. She had a queue forming and she was not going to spend it early.

"Which is why every pilot fights the frame. The frame isn't neutral and it isn't a tool with a difficulty rating. It is a shape, and it is your shape, and every pilot who has ever coupled to it has been pushing a waveform at it that is nearly right and not right. The mismatch is the load. Nobody matches it." A pause. "That's why it killed him inside an hour. He got into a machine built out of you and he was not you."

"Sixty-one point four," Eliana said.

"Yes."

"Which the whole fleet quotes as the second-highest figure ever recorded and treats as a measure of how extraordinary he was."

"A sync figure isn't talent." Leon looked at his hands. "It's proximity. It's a similarity metric. It measures how close a nervous system's native coherence sits to Harmonic E and it measures nothing else, and the reason nobody has ever noticed is that nobody has ever held the reference waveform, because the reference waveform is a girl and she is in a drawer marked E. He scored sixty-one point four because he was your father. He had half your lattice."

"And you."

"Ninety-one point seven. Because I'm your brother."

Pip cycled. Three tones. Pause. Three tones, flat.

"Everything I have ever been praised for," he said. "The reflexes. The recall. The arithmetic I can't switch off. The four-hundred-metre thing everyone thinks is rage. The frame response — that I can hold ninety-one point seven for nineteen minutes and get out and walk. All of it is the same phenomenon as your disease, expressed at an amplitude low enough that a body survives it."

He said the rest without moving.

"You got the disease. I got the gift. It's one object. There was never any difference in kind."

The cabin was two point four metres by three point one. The ventilation ran. Under her back the exchanger knocked.

"And I have no sync figure," Eliana said.

"You have no sync figure."

"Because there is nothing to compare me to."

"Because you're the reference. You're the carrier wave. Coupled to the frame there is no mismatch, so there is no governor, and no ceiling — the interlocks all derive off mismatch, that is what an interlock is, and yours read zero, so nothing engages and nothing limits. Output is bounded by the drives and by nothing else." His hand shook against his knee. "And the frame holds its field by drawing structural coherence out of the carrier. That's not a side effect. That is the mechanism. It is how the machine works and it has always been how the machine works, and at sixty-one point four it worked by taking a small amount out of a man standing in for you badly."

She let it sit. Then she started her queue.

"Four questions," Eliana said. "Answer them the way you have been answering. Do not get kind."

"All right."

"One. Is the harmonic invariant, or does it drift with mass?"

"It drifts." No hesitation; he had had this conversation with himself already, many times, in an empty room. "Frequency invariant to nine places. Amplitude scales inversely with total structural mass. At forty-one kilos you sat at about sixty-two per cent of your current amplitude. At twenty-six point four you are the loudest you have ever been, and amplitude is a component of coupling gain."

So it got worse because I got smaller, and it will get worse because I will get smaller.

"Two. When the frame draws coherence out of the carrier — is the draw proportional to output, or to output squared?"

"Neither, cleanly. Linear to about sixty per cent of design authority, then a power law with a hard knee. Above the knee, attrition compounds. Doubling about every forty-two seconds of sustained open output."

"Forty-two."

"Forty-one point eight."

"Three." She had to take a breath here. She took it in front of him and did not apologise for it. "Did he test it. On me."

Leon's jaw set.

"Flat," she said. "You promised."

"Once. You were fourteen months old. Bench harness, zero output, two point four seconds. He logged everything and never did it again." He looked at the deck. "Your amplitude fell to instrument noise inside four hundred milliseconds. Oxygenation went to ninety-nine per cent and held. There's a note in the margin in his hand."

"Read it."

"She stopped crying."

Eliana breathed twice.

"Four," she said. "The contact. Zero output, bare hand, thirty-three seconds total. Same integral as coupled exposure, or a separate budget?"

And there it was. The small flinch, the one thing in twenty minutes that got past him, and she had the answer before he said it, and she was proud of the question in a way she did not much like about herself.

"Same integral. There is only one budget." His voice did not lift. "Contact at zero output draws at the floor rate, which is cheap. But there's an onset transient every time the boundary forms, and the transient is not cheap. You paid three of them."

"How much."

"Fifty-seven seconds."

"Off what total?"

He did not answer.

"Off what total, Leon."

And she began, then, to laugh.

It was a bad laugh. It came up out of a chest with a hundred and ten millilitres of history in it and it turned into the cough on about the fourth beat, and she put the heel of her hand against her sternum and rode it while Pip went amber and dosed her, and Leon came up out of the chair — and she pointed at him, one finger, and he stopped half standing, and went back down.

"I'm sorry." When she had the air. "That is not hysteria. Pryn would write hysteria."

"I know what it isn't."

"Twenty-three years." She wiped her mouth with the ruined cuff. "Twenty-three years of being an anomaly, and do you know how they say it? Kindly. That is the worst part. A very unusual presentation. We have never seen a case take this course. You're one in ten thousand years, sweetheart. Every ward on four planets looking at me like a weather event. No mechanism, no cohort, no family, no purpose, nothing to do — just a girl who does not fit the tables and happens to be good at reading traffic, and everyone being extremely careful to imply that the reading is a compensation."

"Ellie."

"And the answer, the whole time, the actual answer, in a file, in a drawer, in Father's own hand, is that I am not an anomaly at all. I am a reference standard." The laugh came back, smaller, and she let it. "I am the calibration source for the most important machine in the galaxy. Both units run off me. Your entire career runs off me. Mother's eight hundred and seventy warships ran off me. I am the most useful object in the Reach and I have been in a filing system since before I could talk."

"It isn't fun—"

"It is exactly funny. It is precisely and only funny, it is the single funny thing that has happened to me in three years, and I would appreciate it if you did not take it off me."

He stopped. He let her have it.

She got her breath back to two thirds and stopped there, at the wall that was not a wall, and thought, entirely without permission, it goes all the way, though. All the way, and then it clicks.

"He should have told me," she said.

Flat. One sentence. She had carried it four minutes and she put it down.

"He wrote down every failure across twenty years. He wrote down two point four seconds of a fourteen-month-old. He wrote down she stopped crying, and he never wrote one line for me to read. He decided what I was and filed it where I could not reach it, and then he died and left it to you to be the one who—"

She stopped.

Because she had arrived at the end of the sentence and the end of the sentence was standing there with the answer already in its hand.

"Oh," Eliana said.

"Yes," said her brother.

"He did answer me." She looked at the two white sneakers that had not taken a deck under load in fourteen months. "He got in it himself."

"He got in it himself."

"At sixty-one point four. A mismatch of thirty-eight point six on a machine he had tuned to eleven places, so he knew. He knew to four decimals what an hour of that would do to him. He'd have known it in the walk to the hangar." She turned the signet all the way round her thumb. "And he had the file. He had a daughter with no ceiling on her, eleven years old, forty-one kilos, sitting in a house on Aurelion. And eight hundred and seventy warships coming."

"He never opened the option," Leon said. "It isn't in the flight log. It isn't in the last message. There is no version of that day where he considered it and declined. He just went."

"Then I forgive him, and that is the end of that, and we are not doing it again."

And you knew which man you were being when you sealed the file, she thought, looking at him. You have been being him for five months.

"There's a projection," Leon said.

"I know there is. Give me the number."

"Total survivable exposure is cumulative across your lifetime. It is not a rate, there's no per-session limit and no recovery term. The integral never resets, because what it integrates is structural coherence, and you do not make more." He said it evenly. "He ran it at open output with the compounding folded in. The figure is a wall clock. Eighteen minutes, fifty-one seconds."

"Minus fifty-seven."

"Minus fifty-seven."

"Seventeen fifty-four," Eliana said.

She said it fast, before he could get there, because she had known since the third question that he would try to arrive at the subtraction ahead of her and put a shape on it.

"And the Zero System requirement. To break the shells and reach the Conclusion, with me in the frame at open output. What did the runs say?"

"Fourteen to seventeen minutes of sustained open-frame output."

"Fourteen to seventeen."

"Yes."

"So it fits," she said.

Ventilation. The exchanger, knocking, two decks down. Pip's cycle: three, pause, three, flat.

"Seventeen fifty-four against seventeen hundred is fifty-four seconds. Seventeen fifty-four against fourteen hundred is three minutes fifty-four." She did not look away from him and he did not look away from her. "That is the envelope. Fifty-four seconds at the pessimistic end. Three fifty-four at the optimistic end, which nobody has been handed once in this entire war."

"That's the envelope."

"And it compounds the whole way through. Doubling every forty-one point eight."

"Yes."

She let that stand.

She was very good at arithmetic. Not his kind — his ran without being asked, a fault in the wiring. Hers was a trained instrument she picked up and used. She picked it up.

Fourteen minutes above the knee, doubling every forty-one point eight seconds. Twenty doublings. And the last doubling is the sum of every doubling before it, plus one, because that is what doubling is. It is the only fact about doubling there is.

So the last minute costs more than the first fourteen combined.

She looked at her brother, and her brother looked at her, and she watched him arrive — the plate camera finishing its exposure, the small movement at the corner of his mouth that was not anything, and the shaking hand going flat on his knee so it could not be read.

He had arrived there five months ago. He was arriving at her arriving.

Neither of them said it.

It has a name, she thought, and if either of us says the name it becomes a thing we are discussing, and I am not ready to discuss it, and he will leave the room.

"All right," Eliana said instead.

"All right?"

"I have the file. That is what I asked for. I have it." She smoothed the cardigan over her knees, over the hole in the left elbow, over her mother's ring. "Now the thing I am actually angry about. Understand that it is none of this."

"Ellie—"

"It is not the harmonic. I have the harmonic. I have had it since before I had a heart, and learning what it is called does not change one millilitre of anything. It is not the machine. It is not the arithmetic and it is not Father." Low, and steady, and she put it in the way a blade goes in flat between two ribs, because that was how she meant it to go. "It is that you have had this since Fourth Month of last year and it is Ninth Month of this one. Seventeen months. And I told you."

He had gone grey.

"On the floor of my bay, four days after Tallis, with your head in my lap and my cardigan coming apart in your fists, I said: I can be the place you put it down. All of it. I said that is the job, it is the only one I am rated for, do not fire me from it."

Pip cycled. Three, pause, three. Flat.

"You didn't fire me. You kept me on. You gave me fourteen thousand two hundred and six names, one at a time, out loud, for four hours and eleven minutes, because I asked you to, and I took every one of them and I have all of them still."

She stopped for air. She did not stop long.

"And the whole time you were sitting on the one that was mine."

He did not move.

"There's a word in Old Astraian for what I offered you. Sedh'aranai doreth. It does not mean comfort. It means the floor of a granary — the flat stone they cut to take the whole harvest at once, so the roof does not have to."

"Sedh—" He tried it. "Sedh-arran—"

"You can't pronounce it."

"No."

"You have never been able to pronounce any of it." She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, once, briskly, and it was not a performance either. "I do not want to be the thing you carry. I have been the thing everybody carries my whole life. I get carried up stairs. I get carried into briefings. Garren carries me and does not say what I weigh, and I have made my peace with the stairs." Her voice held. "I have not made my peace with this. Seventeen months, and you were alone in it, and I was eleven metres down the corridor, awake, at three in the morning, with nothing to do but read traffic."

Leon put both hands over his face.

He did not cry. She had seen him cry exactly once in her life, four days after Tallis, for forty minutes, and she did not need to see it again and neither did he. He sat with his hands over his face for perhaps twelve seconds, the left one shaking against his temple, and then he took them down.

"I know," he said.

"Say the rest."

"There isn't any rest. You're right. That's all of it." His voice came out sanded down. "I read the projection four hundred times looking for the error. There is no error. He wrote one line under it and nothing else, and I have thought about that line every day since Fourth Month."

"What's the line?"

"This result is not to be used." A beat. "In his hand. Underlined once. Then eleven blank pages, which he did not have to leave, which means he sat there and left them."

"Yes," Eliana said. "He would."

The exchanger finished its purge and the plating went quiet, and the cabin came down to the ventilation and the concentrator's hiss and Pip's cycle, three and three and flat.

"So," she said.

"No," said Leon.

"I haven't asked yet."

"You've been asking for forty minutes. Since 'sit down, not there.'" He looked up at her, and his eyes were red and completely dry and would not move. "No. I am not putting you in it. Not at open output, not at zero, not for eleven minutes and not for eleven seconds. I'll take it alone at ninety-one point seven and run the coin toss, and if the Lance connects then it connects, and the Order can put somebody else in the frame and get the same answer out of them."

"That's not a plan. That's an alibi."

"Yes," he said. "It is. And it's the one I'm having."

Eliana looked at him a long moment.

Then she nodded once and let go of it. Not conceding. Filing. She was the best analyst in the Order and she knew the exact difference, and she watched him almost visibly decline to trust the nod, which was correct of him.

"Go to bed. You have had two hours in three days and Ashe says you were in the hangar at 0400 arguing with a torque wrench."

"The wrench was wrong."

"The wrench was calibrated in Fourth Month and you know that because you signed the tag. Go on. It's nearly four. I have a load note to finish, I want to be in the bay by nine, and Garren does the stairs better before noon."

He stood. One hundred and eighty-five centimetres of him, filling the cabin the way he filled every room he had ever walked into. At the end of the bunk he stopped and put his hand on her hair, briefly, the way he had since she was four, and she let him, because she always let him, because it was the only sentence he had that did not need pronouncing.

"Two hours," she said.

"Two hours."

He went out. The door cycled. Pip climbed off her knee onto the shelf and began the count again — three rising tones, a pause, three rising tones, and the last one flat, and it would be flat tomorrow and flatter after that.

Eliana Zadkiel sat propped against the bulkhead in a cardigan two sizes wrong with a hole in the left elbow, and turned her mother's ring until the sunburst sat on the back of her hand, and looked across the cabin at the hook by the door.

White. New. A hood, folded flat. Made, not bought — there was no shop in the Reach that cut for one hundred and forty centimetres, and the shoulder seam sat exactly where her shoulder was, to the millimetre, which meant somebody had measured her, and she had worked out three weeks ago when.

Not tonight, she thought.

And she pulled the blanket up, and started on the load note.

The box was the wrong shape to carry with one hand, so he carried it with two, which meant he came down the accommodation passage with his forearms full and could not open her door, and had to stand there like a delivery boy until Garren reached past him and did it.

"You could have asked," Garren said.

"I was working up to it."

"For eleven days."

"There was a lot to work up to."

Garren looked at the box. He did not look at Leon. "Hinge is on the left," he said, and went back up the passage.

Four steps, then the wet catch in his chest, then four more, then the catch. Leon counted it because he counted everything, without deciding to. Sixteen paces to the ladder. Four catches. The number had been three catches in spring.

Her berth was two and a half metres by three. Bunk, restraint webbing, the concentrator bolted to the deck by the head of the bunk with its intake filter three days past its service card, a data slate propped against the bulkhead showing a Dominion supply table she had not finished dismantling. Twenty-two degrees. She kept it warmer than the rest of the ship and nobody argued about it, ever, including the engineers who paid for it.

She was sitting up against the bulkhead with her knees folded to one side and the white cardigan over her shoulders like a blanket, because that was what it had become. Twenty-seven kilograms four days ago. Twenty-six point six this morning. He had read the chart upside down through Pryn's elbow and Pryn had let him, which was its own kind of answer.

Pip lifted off the blanket and did the announcement. Three rising tones, a pause, three rising tones — and the last one came out flat, the way it had for six weeks. A note that started to be a note and then stopped being anything.

"That's a box," Eliana said.

"It's a box."

"It's a large box." She looked at it, and then at him.

Two days ago a nineteen-year-old orderly had come in to change her cannula line and had gone out again after eleven seconds and stood in the passage with his hand over his mouth. Leon had told the boy it happened to everybody, and to go and drink some water, and to come back when he could hold a fitting. Then he had gone in and changed the line himself. It did not work on him. It never had. He had been three years old in a nursery on Aurelion when they brought her in, and whatever the rest of the galaxy had to survive when it looked at his sister, he was exempt from it, and he had understood some time ago that the exemption was the single luckiest thing in his life.

"You're being strange," she said. "Your hands are doing the thing."

His left hand was doing the thing. It always did the thing. He put the box on the end of the bunk to give it somewhere to be.

"Open it."

She did not reach. She had learned not to reach for anything at chest height. She looked at the corners of the box instead, and then at him, and her face went careful.

"How long have you had this?"

"Eleven days."

"Leon."

"Open it."

She got the lid off in two goes. The packing was ship's insulation liner, cut into sheets, because there was no tissue paper in two fifths of the Reach, and somebody had ironed it flat.

Then she stopped moving.

Here is what it cost. He was never going to tell her any of it.

You cannot buy a coat for a woman who is one hundred and forty centimetres tall and weighs twenty-six point six kilograms. He had tried. Four days of it, in the gaps, at three in the morning: the Order's requisition net, then the civilian salvage exchanges, then once, with his ears hot, a Kaelic-administered commercial catalogue out of Halcyon, which had been an error of judgement he intended never to revisit. Children's outerwear at that height ran eleven centimetres too wide in the chest and four too short in the sleeve, because children have short arms and she did not. She had adult proportions at four fifths scale, and then hollowed. Adult extra-small started at a hundred and fifty-two centimetres and assumed shoulders that could hold a garment up by themselves.

Nothing in the human supply chain is built for an adult who has been subtracted from.

So it had to be made.

He already had the measurements. He had taken them on Veridus-9, month three of the exile, on a randomised vector between two rocks with the drives cold, using a strip of packing tape and a pen, because she had asked whether she was still growing and he had said he would find out. Wrist, one hundred and twenty-two millimetres. Shoulder point to shoulder point, two hundred and ninety-one. Nape to hem, five hundred and forty, if you wanted it at mid-thigh on her.

He had never looked at those numbers again. He had never once not known them.

They were also three years old, and she had been going down the whole time, and that was the part that took work. He had a shoulder measure off a suit fitting, a chest off one of Pryn's thoracic scans, and an arm length he had checked himself without telling her, by where the sleeve sat when she pushed it up her forearm to read. He gave the loft fourteen current figures and one instruction: right on the day it was handed over, adjustable downward after.

Lance-Sergeant Ashe Lorrigan cut the shell. She had been Sworn of the Watch when that meant a sash with silver frogging and a place at the top of a staircase twice a year, and one of the things they made you learn on the way up that staircase was how to repair your own frogging, because the House did not pay for that. She had not said yes. She had held out her hand for the numbers, and gone away, and eleven days later she put the box into his hands in a stores compartment and said, "The hood's a bit stiff. It'll drop," and was gone before he got anything out.

A rigger off the Anselm did the lining, because sailmakers understand what happens to a seam that has to be flexed by something weak. A woman in ordnance made the closures — four of them, magnetic, six and a half newtons of separation force, because Pryn had put her grip at three point four kilograms on a dynamometer and a button would have beaten her. Somebody in environmental built the collar.

Nine people. Possibly more. He had asked Lorrigan who else and Lorrigan had said, "People," and looked at him until he stopped.

And somebody — he did not know who, and had decided not to find out — had cut a channel in the collar, run it under the left facing, and bound an eyelet out at the hem, sized for four-millimetre oxygen line. So the cannula tube could go inside the coat and come out at the bottom instead of riding over her shoulder.

That was not on the spec sheet. Nobody had mentioned it. It was just there, finished, bound in white thread.

She got it out of the box with both hands and it was still too much for her, so she got it out into her lap.

White. Not ship-white, which is grey. The real thing: an off-cream shell over a quilted inner overstitched in a five-centimetre diamond so it would hold loft without weight. Three hundred and ten grams. He had put it on a scale in stores twice, because the first reading had seemed wrong.

The hood was lined with something soft that had certainly been somebody's scarf. The cuffs were narrow, with an inner storm cuff that stopped fifteen millimetres short of the wrist bone, so her hands would come out of it and stay out of it. There was a pocket on the left, inside, at the height where her hand would fall. One hundred and thirty millimetres across.

Exactly the size of a palm-sized medical drone.

She found that first. Of course she did. She put two fingers in, measured it, and looked up.

"Someone measured Pip."

"I have no information about that."

"Someone measured my drone, Leon."

"It's a pocket. Pockets are a standard size."

"It is not a standard size, it is a Pip size, and you are the worst liar in this house and you have been since you were nine." Her voice had gone thin at the edges. She turned the coat over on her knees and ran her thumb up the shoulder seam. Stopped. Went back and did it again, slower.

And her face changed into something he had not seen since the last gala season before the war, which was the face of a woman assessing work.

"Oh," she said. "This is made."

"Yeah."

"No, you don't understand what you're holding." She got the front facing up into the light and turned it edge-on. "The buttonholes. These are hand-worked. Nobody hand-works a facing on a field garment — it takes four hours and it does nothing a machine can't do faster and uglier. And this." She had the collar now, close to her eyes. "That's a bar tack. That is Watch work. That is staircase work. Nobody in the galaxy stitches like that unless somebody stood over them at eleven years old and made them redo a sash forty times."

He said nothing.

"Leon."

"The hood's a bit stiff," he said. "It'll drop."

She looked at him for three seconds and then let him keep it. She was better at mercy than he was; she always had been.

"Right," she said. "Get out."

"What?"

"I am not putting on my first real coat in three years while my brother watches me fail to find the armhole. Turn around."

"You can't do the sleeves."

"Turn around."

He turned around. He faced the door and looked at the door, which had nine scuff marks on it in a rough arc, because Garren opened doors with his boot when he was carrying her.

Behind him: fabric. Then the concentrator note climbing as her demand rose, which happened any time she did anything with her arms above her heart. Then a sound of effort that she would have died before letting anybody call a sound of effort.

"How's it going."

"It's going extremely well."

"Yeah."

"There is a — this arm is not where I left it."

"That's the storm cuff. You go through the inner first, then the outer."

"I am aware of how a sleeve works. I have been dressing myself since I was three."

"You have not been dressing yourself since you were three. You had a woman."

"Yes. Marta. She was superb and I never once had this problem." More fabric. The concentrator stepped up again and held, which was the point at which Pip started pinging, and Pip started pinging. "Oh, be quiet. Traitor."

"El."

"Do not turn around."

"I'm not turning around."

Eight seconds. He counted them.

"Turn around," she said, "and help me, please, and if you say one word about it I will read your service file aloud in the wardroom. Including the part about Meridian traffic control."

He turned around and helped her.

It took ninety seconds. It required him to hold her forearm and feed her hand through the cuff the way you thread a line through a fairlead, and to lift the whole weight of her upper body off the bulkhead with one hand flat between her shoulder blades so the shell could come down her back. Her scapula sat under his palm like something out of a bird. He kept his hand exactly as gentle as he would have kept it on a live conduit, and did the arithmetic he could not stop doing, which was that three hundred and ten grams was one point one six percent of her body mass, and that the last coat she had owned had weighed eleven hundred and she had worn it to a state dinner and complained the entire way there.

Then the closures went home. One, two, three, four. Six and a half newtons each.

"Oh," she said, in a completely different voice.

Because it fitted.

That was all. It fitted. The shoulder seam sat on her shoulder point. The sleeve ended where her wrist ended. The hem came to mid-thigh and did not swallow her. The collar stood up and cleared the groove behind her right ear where the cannula had bitten a permanent channel, and the line went in at the collar and out at the hem, and the whole of her upper body was inside something built to contain exactly and only her.

She put her hand into the inside pocket. Pip landed in her palm; she posted him in and he fitted, and sounded the announcement from inside the coat, muffled, the last tone flat.

"Well," Eliana said. "That's his now. He'll be insufferable."

She got herself around by degrees until she could see herself in the polished face of the stowage locker, which was the closest thing to a mirror on the ship. She looked at that for a while. She turned the signet on her thumb without noticing, the way she always did, until the sunburst sat on the back of her hand where her mother had worn it.

Then she said six syllables in Old Astraian, falling.

"What's that mean?"

"It means 'the hood is stiff and it will drop.'"

"It does not."

"Prove it," she said, and reached over and picked up the cardigan.

She held it up in both hands, at arm's length, the way you hold up a chart.

Secondhand. Two sizes wrong. Bought on Veridus-9 for four days of protein ration by a fourteen-year-old boy who did not know how to buy clothes and picked white because white was what she wore. Grey now, honestly, along the line where the concentrator strap had lived. Pilled at the cuffs.

And in the left elbow, a hole the size of a fist, the ribbing gone loose for eight centimetres around it in every direction, because it had started as a hole the size of a coin and then somebody had taken hold of that arm with both hands on a medical bay floor four days after Tallis Anchorage and had not let go for a long time.

He knew exactly how. He could have drawn it.

Eliana turned the cardigan so the bay light came through the elbow. It came through easily.

"I have been receiving heads of state in this," she said.

"El—"

"No, genuinely. Let's do the list." Mild. It was the voice she used in the analysis bay before she took somebody's operational estimate apart in front of nine people. "Commander Harken. Twice. The Assembly delegation off Corvin — in this, in a chair, with a bottle in my lap, discussing the grain corridors. The surrender delegates from the Pell garrison. Eleven hundred people knelt on a hangar deck to the House of Zadkiel and I was in this." She let one hand drop. The new sleeve did not fall over her fingers. "And not one person has mentioned the elbow. Three years. Not one. Do you know what that is?"

He did not say anything.

"That's the kindest anybody has ever been to me," she said, "and I have never known what to do with it."

She folded it. She was bad at fine work in the afternoons and it took her three tries. She got it into thirds, elbow inward, and smoothed it flat on her knees with her palm, twice, the way you smooth a bedsheet.

Then she held it out to him.

He took it. She did not tell him what to do with it. He put it in his lap and put both hands on it, and found, some seconds later, that his left thumb had gone through the hole and was resting against the back of his own knuckle.

She got herself upright.

That was the thing he should have seen coming. She swung her legs off the bunk and put her feet on the deck and took the concentrator frame in her right hand and the bunk rail in her left, and she stood up, which she could not do, and did. Four seconds. She swayed and he had a hand at her back before the sway finished, and she leaned on his forearm and stayed standing.

Standing. One hundred and forty centimetres of her, in a coat that fitted, hood down, hair caught inside the collar, hem exactly where a hem is supposed to sit.

"So," Eliana said.

Then she waited.

She said nothing else. She looked up at him and did not fill the silence, and she had been in enough negotiations to know that he would.

It took him about a second.

When you own real clothes, we'll consider treating you like an adult.

A stairwell on Meridian-7, she was twenty, she had asked to sit in on a briefing. A rented room on Veridus-9, twenty-one, she had wanted to walk to the exchange by herself. The analysis bay four months ago with three officers listening, and everybody laughing, her included.

Every time she had asked him for something that belonged to a person instead of a patient. He could produce the dates. He could produce everything.

It had never been a joke. It was a door. It was the last door on the ship he still had a key to.

He had brought her the key in a box. Wrapped in ironed insulation liner. As a present.

"You planned this," he said.

"No." She was completely steady. "You did. Eleven days ago. I asked you for a coat in a medical bay and you had one built for a body that has changed size four times, by nine people, in the middle of a war, with a channel in the collar for my line." She let that stand there. "I only had to hold still and let you finish."

"You're not going in the frame," he said.

"Say the rest of it."

"There isn't a rest of it. You're not going in the frame."

"There's a great deal of the rest of it and we are going to do all of it, so you may as well pick a wall." She did not raise her voice. She never raised her voice; she had not had the volume for it since she was nineteen and she had turned that into a technique. "Try the first one."

"Pryn won't clear you."

"Surgeon-Commander Pryn does not clear me for stairs. I asked her for a number anyway, because she gives you one if you ask, and she does not soften it." Eliana's hand tightened very slightly on his forearm. That was the only sign the standing was costing anything. "Eleven weeks. Fourteen if the effusion stays where it is. There's a footnote about winter and the footnote says possibly, and she said 'possibly' once and did not say it again." A pause. "You read the same chart this morning, upside down, through her elbow. Don't make me do this half for you as well."

"That's not—"

"That's the first one gone. Second."

He went for the second. "You don't know what it's like inside the field."

And he heard it leaving his mouth, and knew.

"Eleven seconds," she said. "Three times. Bare hand, live conduit. You have my own account of it in your log, in your handwriting, and your handwriting fell apart on the second page." Nothing in her voice moved. "I know precisely what it is like. I am the only person alive who has been well inside it. Full lungs, Leon. Warm hands. No pain anywhere, for the first time since I was born, three times, for eleven seconds each. So of the two people in this room, the one who does not know what it is like is you."

"El."

"Third. You get one more."

"It's my job." His hands had closed in the cardigan. "Carrying it is mine. That's the arrangement. That's what I'm for—"

"I can be the place you put it down. All of it. That is the job. It is the only one I am rated for. Do not fire me from it." She recited it flat, the way she recited enemy tonnage. "You accepted that. On a bay floor, four days after Tallis, with my arm in your hands. Then you tore the elbow out of my cardigan and you have drawn on that account every day since, and I have never once refused you." She tipped her head. "It runs both ways or it was never true. You cannot have a sister who holds it and also a sister who is not allowed to spend anything."

"That's not the same thing."

"It is the same thing to six decimal places and you know it." Still gentle. That was the unbearable part. "I am twenty-three. I am an adult under three separate charters, including the one this Order operates on, whose annexes I drafted. I am the best intelligence analyst you have by a margin that embarrasses everybody, and I know that because I have been told so repeatedly, generally by people holding a rifle at the time. I have read your eleven battle plans. All eleven. I found the error in the fourth and you thanked me and you put my correction in the operational order under my name." A breath; the concentrator stepped up and held. "I have run the other numbers too. Fourteen to seventeen minutes of open frame to reach the Conclusion. A little under eighteen in the account. I did that arithmetic before I read your file, and then I read your file, and I had it right."

He said nothing. He had checked her working three times looking for the flaw that would let him win, and it was not there, because she was better at this than he was.

"So," she said. "Here is the whole argument, and then we're finished. A person you treat as an adult is a person allowed to decide what their life is spent on. That is all being an adult is. It isn't a coat." She glanced down at herself, at the white shell, the four closures. "It's only that you told me it was a coat. For three years. So I got the coat."

He went for the last one. It was the only honest one left and he had been holding it behind his teeth since the door opened.

"I can't survive it."

"I know."

"Then—"

"And you will anyway," Eliana said. "You already have."

He did not understand for a moment.

"Mother," she said. "Father, in a corridor, with your hand over my eyes. Nobody asked you about either and you did it, badly, for years, and you are doing it right now with your thumb through a hole in a cardigan." Her voice stayed low and warm and did not move a millimetre. "You will survive me. That is the cruel part and I am not going to pretend otherwise, because lying to you is the one thing I have never done. You will get up. Somebody will need carrying and you will get up. I have watched that mechanism work every day of my life."

"Don't."

"And the choice was never her alive against her dead. That column does not exist. It was not in Mother's file, it is not in Pryn's, it is not in mine." She turned her hand over and the sunburst caught the light. "The only column is what it's for. Eighteen minutes of me spent, and two fifths of a Reach becomes all of it, and Darvhen Kael stops. Or eighteen minutes of me kept in a drawer, and a bed with a window if we are lucky, and a footnote about winter, and you go out alone at full authority and flip a coin that assumes the Crimson Lance misses." A breath. "I am not going to be the thing you failed at. I refuse. I have refused worse offers than that, in a room, with a pen, in my mother's handwriting."

"That's not fair."

"No," she agreed. "It's true, though. I have never had the luxury of both."

He sat down.

There was nowhere to sit except the deck, so he sat on the deck with his back against the bunk frame, and the cardigan came down into his lap, and his hands stopped.

Both of them. The left one too. It had not stopped in fourteen months.

He looked at the deck plate between his boots, at the four countersunk fasteners in it, and ran the arithmetic one more time because he could not not, and it came out the way it had the last eleven times.

"All right," he said.

"Say it properly."

"You're in the frame. Open output." It came out flat and administrative, the way you read a hull number. "I'll put your name on the flight card tonight."

That was how he signed things. He had never learned another way.

Then she was kind to him, immediately, which was worse than all of it.

She got down onto the deck beside him, which she absolutely could not do, and did, using his shoulder and the bunk rail and about nine seconds. She got her back against the frame with her legs straight out and the coat rucked up under her, and she took his left hand in both of hers and turned it over and looked at the tremor the way you look at a piece of equipment you are fond of.

"You haven't eaten today," she said.

"El."

"You'll eat, and you'll sleep your two hours, and in the morning you'll come and tell me what the fourth platform over Aurelion is doing, because it moved eleven kilometres last week, nobody has said why, and it is bothering me." She put his hand down in his lap, on the folded cardigan, on the elbow, and left her own hand on top of it. Her fingers were cold. They were always cold. "And tell Lorrigan it's beautiful. Tell her I said beautiful, and that I know what a bar tack costs, and that I will not embarrass her by saying anything else."

"Yeah."

"And Leon."

"Yeah."

"Thank you for the coat," she said. "It is the nicest thing I have ever owned, and I have owned things that came with a footman."

She reached up with her free hand and pulled the hood over her head. It sat where it had been built to sit, clear of the groove behind her right ear, clear of the line.

She left it there.

Hangar Four had been swept for it. Four hours on a deck that will be scuffed again inside a week.

Leon stood at a folding table with a chalk stick in his right hand because his left would not hold one steadily enough to write. Behind him, welded to the bulkhead at shoulder height, was a four-metre sheet of rolled plate, painted matte grey that morning, still smelling of it. No podium. No dais. The deck lights were at sixty percent, because the Anselm Dray was running her fusion plant at station-keeping load and every kilowatt above that was going into the fabrication bays.

Eleven hundred and six representatives. He had counted them coming in without meaning to, the way he counted stairs and rivets and the seconds between the pumps in a coolant loop. Two hundred and eleven of them were sitting on the deck because there were not enough crates.

He did not say good morning.

"Operation Last Light," he said. "Four phases. I will give you the phasing, then the cost, then I will take objections. The cost is second because if I put it last you will hear the plan through it."

He wrote the H-hour on the plate. Then four phase blocks beneath it, in columns, the clock down the left margin in the Directorate convention, hours and minutes from H-nought.

"Objective. The Dominion holds the Core Worlds with the heaviest concentration of force in this war. Two hundred and fourteen warships. Approximately two thousand mobile suits — call it nineteen hundred serviceable on any given day. Four orbital defence platforms in a tetrahedral arrangement over Aurelion at eighteen thousand kilometres. Layered GN Disruptor envelopes generated from the platforms and from twelve heavy cruisers in the inner screen. Predator elements, twelve-unit. Fourteen elements confirmed. I am assuming eighteen."

Chalk. He wrote 214, 1900, 4, 18. The numbers sat in a row and did nothing to soften themselves.

"Overlord Darvhen Kael commands from the Conclusion. She holds behind the third screen at a mean two hundred and ten thousand kilometres from the planet and does not manoeuvre, because in nine hundred days of this war he has never once needed her to."

Somebody at the back coughed. Nobody spoke.

"Phase One. H-nought to H plus seven. The fleet translates in as three columns and emerges at one point four million kilometres, sunward of the ecliptic by nine degrees. Emergence will be untidy. Column intervals will be wrong by four to six thousand kilometres, the drive signatures will be hot and dirty, and to a Dominion tactical officer the whole arrival will read as a fleet that has committed everything it owns."

He turned back to the room.

"That is not a deception. That is a description."

He worked Phase Two for nine minutes and never raised his voice.

"The GN Disruptor is not a shield. It is a coherence sink. It takes four minutes twenty to spool an envelope to nominal, and it binds to a defined engagement volume, because the field geometry has to be solved against real masses and the solution is expensive. Once an envelope is bound, re-tasking latency is thirty-eight minutes. That is doctrine, and it is also physics, and the Dominion has not deviated from it in ninety-one recorded engagements."

He wrote 4:20 and 38:00 and drew a box around the thirty-eight.

"Everything in this operation is that box.

"Phase Two, H plus seven to H plus twenty-two. The columns close to three hundred and eighty thousand kilometres and enter the platform engagement envelopes deliberately. All four. Not sequentially. Inside a ninety-second window — because if we give them two minutes they will bind two platforms and hold two in reserve, and then this does not work at all."

A woman in a mining coverall, section chief's tab sewn crooked on the shoulder, put her hand up. He nodded at her.

"What binds a platform envelope? What does it take?"

"Mass and threat. A platform will not spend an envelope on a picket. It wants a capital hull, or a formation dense enough to model as one." He let it sit for a second, then gave her the rest, because she had asked properly. "The converted ore carriers bind the envelopes. That is what they are for in Phase Two. An eleven-hundred-thousand-tonne bulk hull at three hundred thousand kilometres is the most attractive object in the volume. The platform will solve on it. The solution takes four minutes twenty. And for thirty-eight minutes after that, the envelope is nailed to a piece of sky with our people in it."

She sat down. She did not look away from him.

A man two rows over, no badge at all, hands like a rigger's. "Can we not bind them with drones? Hulls with nobody aboard?"

"A hull with nobody aboard runs a station-keeping solution a fire-control officer can read in ninety seconds," Leon said. "We tried it at Ordry with two colliers. Both were assessed and dismissed inside four minutes and no envelope was ever spooled. The platform is solving for threat, and threat is behaviour. Behaviour is crews."

"So the crews are the bait."

"The crews are the operation," Leon said. "Phase Two is the operation. Phase Three is a consequence of Phase Two."

Nobody applauded that. He had not wanted them to.

"Phase Three. Unit-02 launches from the dorsal rail of the Kessler Girl at H plus eighteen. Cold, on the sled, no drive signature for the first nine seconds. Open frame at H plus twenty-two, in the seam between the first and second screens, with all four platform envelopes bound behind it and unable to re-task for thirty-six of the following thirty-eight minutes.

"Transit to the Conclusion is three hundred and eighty thousand kilometres through nineteen hundred mobile suits, two hundred and fourteen hulls and eighteen Predator elements. The Zero System requirement for that transit, at open frame, is fourteen to seventeen minutes of sustained output."

He wrote 14 – 17. He put the chalk down.

"Kael is removed. That is the operation. We do not take the Core Worlds. We do not break the armada. We fix the armada in one engagement volume, hold the envelopes committed, and cut the head off. Then the Dominion has to decide who signs things, and the eleven separate men who each believe it should be them will take four to nine weeks to find out."

Commander Vael Harken stood at the end of the third row with her arms folded and her weight even. She had not moved in twenty minutes.

Leon knew the shape of what was coming, because she had said it once in a passage on Meridian-7 with a door open behind her. He briefs like Aria. Garren had not answered her.

No rhetoric. No pause for the room to feel anything. A sequence of numbers and dependencies, and at the end of it the numbers had done the work and there was nothing left to cheer.

"Phase Four," Leon said. "H plus thirty-nine. Any hull that can break contact, breaks contact. There will be no covering force. There is no covering force in this plan, because every hull that could cover a withdrawal is required in Phase Two to hold an envelope, and an envelope held is an envelope held to the end of its latency."

He looked up.

"Cost."

"Committed strength. Two hundred and nineteen hulls. Thirty-one Directorate pattern — eleven patrol cutters, fourteen corvettes, six frigates of the old Kestrel line. Four fleet auxiliaries. One hundred and eighty-four converted civil hulls: ore carriers, colliers, four tankers, two passenger liners, one dredger, and the Ninth Lamp, which is a seed hauler with a forward gun mount we welded on nineteen days ago. I have rated her combat-capable because she can hold a station and take a hit, and holding a station and taking a hit is the entire job.

"Six hundred and forty mobile suits. Two hundred and forty Directorate GN-pattern. Four hundred mining and salvage frames with weapons fitted.

"Personnel committed. Forty-one thousand nine hundred."

He wrote the figures in a column, drew a line under them, and wrote the next number below the line.

"Expected hull losses, one hundred and sixty-three of two hundred and nineteen. Expected personnel losses, twenty-six thousand four hundred and eleven."

The room made a sound. Not a gasp. Lower, and more like a room settling on its foundations.

"The interval is nineteen thousand eight hundred to thirty-one thousand two hundred. The low end requires the Dominion to bind all four platform envelopes inside the ninety-second window, and I do not expect them to be that obliging. The number I believe is twenty-six thousand four hundred and eleven."

A man stood up in the fourth row. Sixty-something. Scavenged Directorate jacket three sizes too big, and a civilian yard's chief engineer badge sewn where the Directorate flash should have been.

"Did you round that?"

"No."

"You could have said twenty-six thousand."

"I could have."

"Why didn't you?"

It was a fair question, asked without heat, by a man who had spent a working life being handed rounded numbers by people who wanted something.

"Because the difference is four hundred and eleven people, and I can't make that trade in my head any more without knowing what it costs. I recovered fourteen thousand two hundred and six names off the wrecks at Tallis Anchorage. It took eleven days. There were two hundred and eleven I could not get."

He picked the chalk back up.

"Rounding is something you do to numbers you will not have to read out loud."

The engineer sat down slowly. Nobody filled the gap.

A hand went up near the auxiliaries' block. "Casualty plan?"

"Surgeon-Commander."

Ilsa Pryn did not come forward. She spoke from where she was, hands in her coat pockets.

"Nine hundred and forty berths across the four auxiliaries. Two hundred and six of those are litter berths and the rest are deck space with an oxygen manifold over it. Expected wounded who reach a hull alive, eleven thousand. Blood on hand, four thousand one hundred units, and there is no more in the Reach, because I have already taken all of it."

"That's not enough."

"No," Pryn said. "Triage will be by whether you can get to it."

She stopped talking. She did not add anything, and the silence afterwards was worse than the arithmetic.

Harken took two steps forward and did not ask permission.

"Commander," Leon said.

"My objection is not the girl." Flat, to the room as much as to him, and it landed like a bolt dropped on a deck plate. "Let us get that off the table, because half of you are waiting for me to say it and the other half are waiting to be angry with me for saying it. My objection is structural."

She turned to address the plate instead of him.

"Every phase of this operation is a support phase. One, Two and Four exist to create the conditions for Three. Two hundred and nineteen hulls and forty-one thousand nine hundred people are shaping. There is one striking element, and it is one object."

"Yes," Leon said.

"I have buried three cells." No weight on it at all. "Kessler Flats, Ordry, and the forward relay. Nine, fourteen and twenty-two people. All three died because the plan had a single item in it that had to work. At Ordry the item was a door code. At the relay it was a repeater mast, and the mast was fine, and the man rated to climb it took a fragment through the pelvis in the first eleven seconds, and there was no second man rated to climb."

She let that stand for exactly as long as it needed.

"I do not build plans on one object. Not out of sentiment. Because one object has one failure distribution and you cannot average it. Two hundred and nineteen hulls is a distribution. Unit-02 is a coin."

"Go on," Leon said.

"Then I will list it, and you will not enjoy this." She counted on her fingers. Her hands were steady. The scar from her left eye socket into the hairline went white as her face tightened. "One. Drive casualty. Unit-02 is a two-year-old machine out of a sealed vault with forty-one flight hours on the log and a coolant architecture Doss describes as, quote, adequate. Two. The Crimson Lance. Three. The cradle, which is an improvisation, built in eleven days, by one man, out of parts he found. Four. The pilot, who is the most fatigued human being I have ever certified for flight duty and who I would ground today under any doctrine written by anyone."

"Four is noted," Leon said.

"Four is not noted, Commander, four is signed, by me, against my own judgement, and I want the room to know that. Five." She stopped. "Five is the carrier, and I said that would not be my objection, so I will put it as a machine problem. Five: an interface element with an operating envelope nobody in this fleet can independently verify, because there is exactly one of it and it has never been run at load.

"Five single points of failure. In series. Not parallel. If any one of them goes, the operation does not degrade. It ends. And it ends with twenty-six thousand four hundred and eleven people already dead in a volume they were told to hold for thirty-eight minutes."

The hangar was very quiet. Aft, an air handler cycled, caught, settled.

Leon did not look away from her.

"That is correct," he said. "All five, in series, and your ordering is right. I would put the Lance second as well."

"Then you have an answer."

"I do not have an answer. I have a statement." He turned the plate sheet over. On the back were eleven columns, hand-ruled, each headed with a Roman numeral, each dense with figures in his own writing. "I ran the final battle eleven ways. Six are the fleet alone, at full authority, with Unit-02 flown by me at ninety-one point seven, no carrier, no cradle. Column Three is the best of the six. Column Three is a coin toss, and Column Three assumes the Lance misses.

"Columns Seven through Eleven are attrition. No decisive engagement. Nine to fourteen months of raiding, corridor interdiction, industrial nodes at the edges. Column Nine is the one I would recommend to a room I did not respect, because it looks survivable on the day you brief it. Column Nine has us at forty percent of the Reach and Kael at forty, with the middle fifth starving through two winters, and at month eleven the Dominion finishes the second Lance mounting on the Nevertheless and the arithmetic closes and there is no version after that."

He set the chalk on the table with a small clean click.

"There is no other plan."

Harken did not move. "That is not a rebuttal."

"No," Leon said. "It is not."

She held it for four seconds. Then she nodded once, the way she nodded at a fuel figure she disliked, and stepped back into the line. Eleven hundred people understood the same thing at the same moment, which is a thing you can hear. She had not been beaten. She had been shown the bottom of the box.

"The Lance," Harken said, from where she stood. "Item two. What do you intend to do about it?"

He had known the question was coming since he wrote the phase blocks. He had not written a line for it, and everyone with a slate could see the line was not there.

"The Crimson Lance is mounted on the Therefore, Sovereign-class, second screen, mean two hundred and ninety thousand kilometres. Reverse-engineered from Unit-01 fragments recovered at Aurelion. Aperture two point one metres. Charge cycle, from the two firing events we have telemetry for, between one hundred and ninety and two hundred and forty seconds. Output is roughly eleven percent of Unit-02 at open frame."

"I know what it is."

"Then you know it does not have to match her. It has to hurt her once."

"What do you intend to do about it, Commander."

"It will not get a shot."

Harken waited. Nothing else came.

"That is not a plan."

"No."

"There is no phasing under it. No element tasked. No timing. You have given this room four twenty, and thirty-eight, and ninety seconds, and fourteen to seventeen. On the one item that ends the operation in a single event, you have given me a sentence in the future tense."

"Yes."

"Then what is it?" she said. "Because I write an operations order tonight, and I cannot staff that."

Leon looked at the plate, at the box drawn round the thirty-eight, and then at her.

"It is a promise."

Her jaw moved. She had a doctrine, one line long, which she had said to him once in a corridor on Meridian-7 and never repeated. We do not die for things. We make them pay to have us. Everything in her working life stood against what he had just said.

"I cannot put a promise in an operations order."

"Then leave the line blank," Leon said. "Don't fill it with something you don't believe. People fly to those lines."

She looked at him for a long moment.

"Blank," she said.

And wrote nothing.

The doors at the aft end of Hangar Four opened at forty-one minutes past the hour.

Garren Doss came through them carrying her. He took the seven metres of open deck at his own pace, which was not fast, and on every fourth step there was the wet catch in his chest that he had stopped bothering to hide. He did not adjust his grip. He did not shift her weight. Twenty-seven kilograms was not a thing he had ever said out loud.

Eliana Zadkiel was wearing the coat.

White. Wool milled thin, hood lined with something softer, hem to mid-shin on a hundred-and-forty-centimetre frame instead of pooling on the deck. Shoulder seams that sat on her shoulders. Cuffs at her wrists. Sleeves cut for arms that measured what her arms measured now. No cardigan under it. The hole his fists had opened in the left elbow was in a locker two decks down and was not on her body.

Pryn watched the shoulder seam go past her for about two seconds longer than a person looks at a coat.

Later, in the passage, she said, "You used my numbers."

"The full anthropometric set. Taken the morning after she came off the Anchorage."

"Those are clinical."

"Yes," Leon said, and that was the end of it.

Pip came in over her left shoulder at head height. Three rising tones. A pause. Three rising tones, and the last one flat — a dead quarter-second where a note should have been. The cells were failing. There were no replacements anywhere in the Reach.

Eleven hundred and six people looked at her. Then most of them looked at the deck. A corpsman in the second row turned around entirely and stood facing the bulkhead with his hands at his sides.

Not this again.

Eleven times in nine days, in the analysis bay. Two nurses had asked to be reassigned and had not been able to say why. A young orderly had walked out at the eleven-day mark, gone down two decks, sat in a store cupboard for forty minutes, come back and said, "I could not do the obs. I could not get my hands to do the obs." Pryn had said, "I know," and put him on stores.

She had not faded. That was the trouble. It had gone somewhere past what a face is allowed to do, in a body of twenty-seven kilograms that could not stand, and the two facts would not sit in one room together, so the room broke around them instead.

Leon looked at his sister and saw his sister. It was the only exemption he had ever been granted from anything, and he had never once stopped being glad of it.

Garren set her in the chair. It had been bolted to the deck an hour earlier on Harken's order — at the front, angled inward, facing the room and not the plate. A principal's chair. Nobody had been told to do it and nobody mentioned it.

He clipped the oxygen line to the chair frame, checked the cannula where it had bitten its groove behind her right ear, stepped back two paces, and stayed there.

Lance-Sergeant Ashe Lorrigan came out of the front rank.

She had been Sworn of the Watch when that meant a sash with silver frogging, a place at the top of a staircase twice a year, and a voice trained to carry the length of a marble hall over eight hundred people in evening dress. She still stood the way she had been taught to stand on that staircase. She stopped three paces from the chair, squared herself, and did the thing she had been trained to do, in the register she had been trained to do it in, for a house with one member left in it, who could not walk.

"The House of Zadkiel," Lorrigan said, at full staircase volume, to the roof of Hangar Four. "Entered, and seated."

Then she stepped back into the rank.

The sound eleven hundred people make standing up on a steel deck takes about two seconds to finish.

Eliana let it settle. Then she turned her mother's signet on her thumb so the sunburst sat on the back of her hand where it could be seen.

"Sit down, please, all of you. I cannot brief a room that is looming."

They sat.

"Intelligence picture." Her voice was thin and did not carry, so Harken moved a pickup to the chair arm without being asked, and after that it carried. "Order of battle, platform rotation, the Therefore, and Halcyon. Twenty-two minutes. Stop me if a number sounds wrong. Two of them are inferences and I will tell you which."

She did it in nineteen.

She gave the armada by squadron and the four platform envelope crews by watch. She gave the reason the ninety-second window in Phase Two was survivable at all: the platform fire-control watches changed on a fixed cadence, and Kael's staff had not varied a watch bill in nine hundred days, because Kael's staff was structured as an argument and an argument does not improvise. She gave the twelve heavy cruisers of the inner screen with their spool times individually, because three were older refits that ran four seconds slow, and she named those three.

She gave the Therefore. Position, screen assignment, the eleven-degree traverse limit on the Lance's dorsal mounting, which meant it could not depress through her own screen. The two firing events. And the nineteen days out of the line at Halcyon afterwards, from which the ship had returned with an additional two hundred and forty tonnes of radiator area amidships.

"Which tells you they have not fixed the charge cycle," she said. "They have decided to live with it and cool it harder. That is a decision made by people who are confident."

Then Halcyon.

"Vantalar is at Halcyon. He has been since the fourth hour of my eleventh day at Tallis Anchorage. He left before my brother arrived because he had found the forgery, and the redrafted instrument now exists, in a form that does not require me to sign anything. I have seen the second clause. It is competent work."

Nobody moved. Half of them had heard some version of it. None had heard her say it.

"He is not in this operation. He is not at the Core Worlds, and the instrument does not function while Kael is alive to guarantee it. That is the entire reason I am content to leave him where he is. I want that on the record, because I know how it looks."

She drank two swallows of water and put the cup down with both hands, which took a moment.

And then, before Leon could get a breath in front of it — before he could frame it, or phase it, or hand it to them already made small:

"My role in Phase Three. I will be in the frame."

She said it exactly the way she had said the spool times.

"Unit-02's Psycho-Frame will not reach open output on a pilot alone. Not because my brother is not good enough. Because the frame is tuned to something he approximates and I do not. I am the carrier wave. Coupled through the cradle there is no governor and no ceiling, and output is bounded by the drives, which is what the fourteen to seventeen minutes on that board is measured against. There is no version of Phase Three without me in the cockpit, and anyone who tells you otherwise has not read the tuning file."

She looked at the room. Twenty-seven kilograms, oxygen at three litres, a white coat with a hood, and eleven hundred people looking back at her.

"I am a strategic asset," she said. "I have been told so repeatedly, generally by people holding a rifle at the time."

Nobody argued.

One hand went up, at the back, slowly. A woman from one of the tanker crews. "Surgeon-Commander. Will she survive it?"

"I do not have a number for you," Pryn said.

"Give us the ones you have."

"Body mass twenty-seven point one kilograms, down one point four in nine days. Haemoglobin sixty-eight grams per litre. Resting saturation ninety-one percent on three litres, eighty-two off it. Forced vital capacity thirty-one percent of predicted for her height. Frank haemoptysis most weeks, typically ten to twenty millilitres." Flat, evenly spaced, as though reading a manifest. "Those are her numbers today, sitting still, at one gravity. For the cradle at load I have nothing, because it has never been run, and I am not going to invent a figure for a room that would fly to it."

She put her hands back in her pockets.

Leon stood two metres away with chalk on his right hand and said nothing, and understood exactly what his sister had done. She had taken the room off him deliberately, in the correct order. Competence first. Then the claim. So that the claim arrived as an operational fact from the fleet's best analyst, and not as a brother's arrangement about his sister.

Nineteen minutes to buy it.

Fourteen to seventeen on that board. A little under eighteen in the budget. Every person in this hangar can do subtraction, and not one of them will do it out loud.

He did not say the conclusion.

Neither did she.

Garren Doss briefed the cradle in six minutes and made no attempt to make it sound like anything.

"Resonance cradle. It is a second interface. It couples a body to the Psycho-Frame conduit trunk without going through the pilot's channel, because the pilot's channel has a governor in it, and the governor is what keeps a pilot alive, and she does not want the governor and cannot use it.

"What it is made of." He read from nothing. "Frame is a Directorate rescue litter, magnesium alloy, cut down and re-welded, because it was the only load-bearing shell already sized for a person who cannot hold themselves in one. Contact plates are gold foil off four hundred and sixty scrapped signal boards, rolled to eleven microns, laid on ceramic. Sixty-one metres of superconducting ribbon out of the gradient coils of a medical imager from the Meridian-7 district clinic, which is now not a medical imager. Ferrite from six pallets of surplus chokes. Coolant loop is a food-plant chiller — forty-one litres a minute of glycol at minus nineteen — with a plate exchanger I made out of a hull-condenser core.

"Harness is off an ejection rig. Five-point. It will hold her at nine g and it is padded, and the padding is the only part of this I am pleased with."

He stopped. He looked at nothing in particular.

"What I could not make safe. Three things.

"One. There is no isolator. Once the field is up, the coupling is inside the frame's own coherence solution, and there is nothing on the outside of it to open. You cannot break it with a switch, or a breaker, or by cutting the ribbon, because the ribbon is not what is holding it.

"Two. There is no dump load. There is nowhere for what comes back to go. So what comes back goes into the cradle, and the cradle is a person.

"Three. There is no draw limit. The frame takes what the solution requires. I cannot cap it, because a cap is a governor, and I have already explained why there is no governor."

"Your verdict, Chief," Harken said.

"It works. It does exactly what he asked for, it will do it on the first attempt, and I would put my name on every weld." He picked up his cap. "There is no off switch on the side she is on."

He sat down.

Afterwards, in the alcove behind the plate sheet where the deck crane controls were, with eleven hundred people filing out past them in the dark, Garren said one thing.

He had a rag in his hands and was not using it.

"You could have asked me for one part and eleven seconds and I would have called it mercy; you asked for eleven days, so that when she goes my hands are on the machine."

He put the rag in his pocket and went down the ladder to the fabrication bay. The wet catch came on the fourth rung, and the eighth, and the twelfth.

Leon put his left hand flat on the cold plate and held it there until it stopped.

By second watch the yard lights were on the whole length of the anchorage spine, and the fleet had begun to look like a fleet in the only way it ever would.

Two hundred and nineteen hulls at the Meridian-7 field moorings, in eleven sticks. Thirty-one of them had been built to be shot at. The Anselm Dray, ore carrier, one point one million tonnes, four hundred and ten metres, a corvette's fire-control mast bolted straight through her number two hatch cover. The Kessler Girl, collier, Unit-02's launch rail running the full length of her dorsal deck on jack-welded stanchions, forty tonnes of ballast in the forepeak to trim for it. The Ninth Lamp, seed hauler, gun mount forward, four hundred and eighty souls. Ordry Bell. Cold Harbour. Hesper Line. Meridian Rose, late passenger liner, brass still in her stairwells because nobody had found the time. Six Kestrel frigates, every one older than everyone aboard her, except on the Sparrowhawk, whose chief was a hundred and ninety-one.

Fabrication Bay Two ran three shifts cutting armour belts out of cargo-hold bulkheads. Which meant every hull in the line would enter the engagement volume with its own holds open to vacuum, because there had never been enough plate, and there was not going to be.

In the mooring galleries, four thousand people queued at eleven folding tables to be entered on the Vigil roll. Mining coveralls with the reflective tape still on them. Scavenged Directorate jackets with the flashes cut off and civilian rate badges sewn where the flashes had been.

The Vigil of the Concord. Nine hundred years old. A rite that had existed, within living memory, purely as the part of the annual gala where a herald read names off a card while everybody stood up holding a drink.

They were doing it properly. A chaplain who had been a hydrology inspector nine months ago read the ninefold form off a slate. At each name a man or a woman put a hand flat against the hull plate of the ship they were going out on and gave the response, and someone with a chalk stick wrote the name up beside the hand, and the plate would go into the volume with the name on it.

The Anselm Dray was white with names from the waterline to nine metres up.

They were still writing. They were going to need a ladder.

The observation deck ran at eleven degrees, and it took Eliana four days to work out that this was on purpose. Warm air fogged the viewport. Nobody wanted a fogged viewport. So the compartment was cold, and everyone who came up came up in a jacket, and left inside ten minutes, and that was the entire reason she liked it.

She sat in the chair.

The chair was the tell. Two days ago it had been bolted to the deck of the analysis bay — four bolts, M10, and she had put nine hundred hours into it and worn a shine into the left arm with her elbow. Yesterday it was here. Same bolt pattern, eleven metres off the glass, angled fourteen degrees so the light did not come in straight. Nobody had asked. Nobody had mentioned it. There were four fresh plugs in the analysis-bay deck where the old holes had been, painted over, and the paint did not match.

Not one of them will ever say a word about it.

She ran the comparison. She could not stop it any more than Leon could stop the arithmetic. Same disease of the head, different symptom.

Lumengarde, the roof of the east wing, the summer she was twenty-one. Sixty-one steps up from the gallery landing and she had walked all sixty-one, and been out of breath at the top, and had believed at the time that being out of breath at the top of sixty-one steps was the worst thing her body would ever do to her. A low iron rail, waist-high on Leon, chest-high on her, cold by midnight and leaving a bar of ache across her forearms. Sea wind off the Halcyon roads with salt in it, and under the salt the green rot of the harbour at low tide. Two moons, one nearly full, one a nail-clipping. A white blanket out of the cedar press in the north corridor, so it smelled of cedar. No cannula. No machine. No numbers.

Tonight: recycled air, scrubbed nine times through and tasting of nothing, which was itself a taste. A viewport, four hundred and twelve centimetres of laminate with a scuff at knee height that nobody had polished out. A chair bolted to the deck. Twenty-three years old. A white coat with a hood, which fit. And a concentrator, forty-one centimetres tall, matte grey, set on the deck to the right of the chair at a specific angle — because on the left the line came across her lap and kinked under her own forearm, and the alarm went at ninety seconds, and then a corpsman came running, and then everyone was involved.

She placed the concentrator herself. It was one of about five things she could still do without asking.

Four litres a minute. The groove behind her right ear had stopped hurting some time last winter and she had never asked Pryn whether that was healing, because Pryn would tell her.

Sixty-one steps, she thought.

I could not do one.

She pulled the hood up. It came up properly. That was the whole miracle of the object: it came up and it stayed, it did not slide off the back of her head, it did not swallow her, the shoulder seam sat on her shoulder and not halfway down her arm. Three years of the cardigan. She had forgotten what a garment felt like when it had been built around a particular person instead of donated in the general direction of one.

The tag in the inside pocket had a date on it. She had read the date and put it back and said nothing, and intended to go on saying nothing, because the date was eleven days before Tallis Anchorage. There was exactly one way he could have had her measurements to two millimetres eleven days before Tallis. Pryn's chart. And Pryn's chart at that point had her at twenty-nine point one.

The coat fit her now at twenty-six point eight.

Which meant somebody had taken it in. Recently. Without being told.

This whole ship is full of people who do things and then look at the ceiling.

The hatch cycled. Boots, unhurried, and a folder under an arm — she knew the walk.

"You're on the cold deck," Surgeon-Commander Pryn said.

"It's the only compartment where nobody talks to me."

"I'm about to talk to you." Pryn crouched, checked the flow meter without touching it, and read the strip off Pip's flank. "Ninety-three on four litres. On two you're at eighty-six. I've written you up for continuous."

"I know what I'm at."

"Then you know what continuous means." Pryn opened the folder. "Twenty-six point eight this morning. Down four hundred grams in nine days. Tuesday's collection was forty millilitres, Thursday's was fifty-five. That's not a trend yet, it's two points, but I'm required to say the word trend out loud so that you've heard it."

"Consider it heard."

"Haemoglobin's seven-one. I'd like to transfuse before launch and I'm not going to, because two units puts volume through you that your heart doesn't want, and I'd rather have you thin than wet." Pryn wrote something. "That's my call, not yours, and I'm telling you so you don't think you got away with anything."

"Ilsa."

Pryn looked up.

"The groove behind my ear stopped hurting last winter." Eliana kept her eyes on the glass. "Healing or nerve?"

"Nerve," Pryn said. "The greater auricular's gone under the pressure point. It won't come back."

"Right."

"You asked."

"I did." Eliana moved one finger on the chair arm. "Thank you for not making a face."

"I'm too tired to make faces." Pryn closed the folder and stood, and the pause before she went was about half a second long, and Eliana felt it happen and stayed still through it, and did not look, because looking pinned people and the kindest thing available to her was to let them get out intact. "Four hours of sleep, if you can get it."

"I'll get one and a half."

"I know," Pryn said, and left.

Behind her the hatch cycled again nineteen minutes later. She did not turn her head. Turning her head cost thirty seconds of recovery and she was budgeting.

"That's my chair," Leon said.

"It's my chair. It has my elbow on it."

"It has four of my bolts in it." He came around into her field of view, and stopped, and did the thing he had done every time for four days: looked at the concentrator line before he looked at her face. Left hand in his jacket pocket, because the tremor was worse when he was tired and he was always tired. Twenty-six years old, and there was grey coming in at his right temple in a patch about the width of a thumb.

You are the only person alive who has ever looked at me and seen his sister.

She had checked. She checked everybody.

"Eleven hours, fifty-one minutes," he said.

"I didn't ask."

"You were going to."

"I was going to ask in about four minutes, and then it would have been a conversation. Now it's a briefing." She moved her hand two centimetres along the chair arm, which was as much gesture as she had. "Sit down, you enormous idiot. You're standing like you're waiting to be inspected."

He sat on the deck. Not in one of the other three chairs. On the deck, at the foot of hers, back to the stanchion, one long leg out. He had done that on the roof, and on the floor of the Veridus-9 room with the bad heater, and in the corridor outside every med bay she had ever occupied. She had never once seen him take a chair while she was in one.

Pip lifted off her shoulder and settled on his knee, because Pip had no loyalty of any kind.

Three rising tones. A pause. Three rising tones, and the last one came out flat.

"Ninety-three," Leon said, reading the strip.

"Ninety-three is fine."

"Ninety-three is fine," he agreed. Neither of them said anything about the tone. Pip pulsed once and settled, and the deck hummed at ninety-eight hertz through the stanchion and up into the base of her spine.

For a while there was nothing.

That was the good part. There had been so little nothing in three years that she had begun to think of it as a delicacy. Served rarely. Small portions. Eat slowly.

"The rations in the aft mess have a number on them," Leon said.

"Twelve."

"Twelve. I asked Lorrigan what twelve meant."

"And?"

"She said it's the twelfth thing they tried."

Eliana laughed, which cost her, and she paid and thought it was worth it. "That's not what it means."

"It's what it means now." He turned the sachet over in his hands. He had brought one up with him, she realised, for no reason whatsoever. "There's a one through eleven in a warehouse somewhere. Waiting."

"Nobody survived one through eleven, Leon. That's why there's a twelve."

"Garren says four was edible."

"Garren has no palate. Garren's palate is in a jar in a Directorate basement with a label on it." She shifted the line at her ear half a centimetre and the hot little bite of it eased. "He drank the green thing on Veridus."

"The green thing was fuel additive."

"He said it was a tonic."

"It was a fuel additive. It said so on the drum in three languages." Leon pressed the heel of his palm into his eye. "He read all three."

Boots on the deck behind them. They did not slow and they did not hesitate. They stopped — dead, mid-stride, the way boots stopped when the man in them had walked into a compartment expecting it to be empty. Then a hand fumbling for the hatch frame and finding it.

"Sir. Ma'am. I— the port lockers, I was—"

"They're behind you," Leon said, without turning.

"Yes. Sir."

A rating, very young. Eliana kept her face to the glass. The lockers opened. Something metal went from one shelf to another shelf, which was not a task. Then the boots went out fast and the hatch cycled twice, because he had missed the pad on the first try.

Four seconds of quiet.

"Third one tonight," Leon said.

"Fourth. One at twenty-one hundred came to offer me a blanket."

"You have a coat."

"He offered me a blanket for the coat." She let her head go back against the rest. "Harken's got a watch rotation on this deck. She won't say she has. But the same four people keep needing something out of the port lockers, and one of them needed it twice."

"She's got a chart."

"She has absolutely got a chart." Eliana closed her eyes. "There is a woman on this ship who buried three of her own cells with her hands, and she has drawn up a chart about who is allowed to walk past me."

"It's a good chart."

"It's a humiliating chart and I intend to steal it."

The hatch cycled. Garren came in four steps and stopped on the fourth, and the wet catch came up out of his chest and he let it happen and did not apologise for it. He was carrying a flask and a folded square of cloth.

"Deck's cold," he said.

"The deck is eleven degrees so the glass doesn't fog," Eliana said. "You could have asked."

"I did ask. Engineering told me eleven degrees so the glass doesn't fog." He put the flask on the deck by Leon's boot and the folded cloth on the arm of her chair, under her hand, where she could reach it without lifting anything. "Lorrigan's got glasses now. For close work."

Eliana did not move her hand.

"Has she," she said.

"Mm." Garren looked out of the viewport for about two seconds, at nothing, the way men look at weather. "Yard crew's seating the shoulder pin by hand. Won't trust the actuator."

"Is the actuator bad?"

"Actuator's fine." He turned for the hatch. "Crew's not."

"Garren."

He stopped, but did not turn round.

"The green thing on Veridus was fuel additive," she said.

"It was a tonic," Garren said, and went out.

The stars went by. Not fast. The flagship was station-keeping on the outer shell of the Meridian well and the drift put about two degrees an hour through the glass, which was slow enough that you could pretend it was a window and not a ship.

She found the group she wanted on the third sweep. Low, off the right edge, and the angle was wrong from up here — you needed to be down a gravity well, looking up through eleven kilometres of air, for it to look like anything — but the shape was there once you had it.

"There," she said. "Off the strut. Four bright, then the two dim, then the hook."

Leon looked. She watched him find it, which took a second and a half, because his recall did not hold the sky over that house as a picture. It held it as a coordinate set.

"Sagitta Minoris and the top of the Kell chain," he said. "That's two groups. You're joining two groups."

"It's a fish."

"It's not a fish."

"It has a tail, a body, a head, and the little dim one is the eye—"

"The little dim one is eleven hundred light-years further out than the other five. You're drawing a fish out of a piece that isn't in the same room." He tipped his head at the glass. "And the tail's wrong. That's not a tail. That's — what's the word."

"A tail."

"That's a hook. That's the shape of the thing you catch the fish with. You have drawn a fish out of the fishhook, El, which is—"

"Which is poetry."

"Which is a category error."

"You said it was a trapezoid." She opened one eye at him. "On the roof. You said — and I have this exactly — you said, 'It is a trapezoid with an appendix.'"

"It is a trapezoid with an appendix."

"A trapezoid." She lifted her hand off the chair arm, all of two inches, and let it drop. "A trapezoid. Twenty-one years old, my brother, on a roof, under two moons, with the sea going, and the girl beside him says look, a fish, and he says—"

"There are seven degrees of arc between the fourth star and your fish's eye—"

"—a trapezoid with an appendix. And people wonder why I have no friends."

"You had a friend," Leon said.

It went past fast and it did not go past clean, and she let it stand, because pretending it had not been said would have been worse.

"I had a friend," she said. "She thought it was a fish too."

"She thought everything was something. She thought the Kell chain was a bicycle."

"It is a bicycle."

"It is nine stars in a curve—"

"It's a bicycle, Leon, it has the two wheels and the—"

The breath went. She let it go and waited for it to come back. Fourteen seconds. Pip lifted off his knee and hovered and she flicked two fingers and it went back down.

Three rising tones. A pause. Three rising tones, and the third one flat.

"Ninety-one," Leon said.

"Ninety-one is fine."

"Ninety-one is fine," he said, and put his hand flat on the deck, and did not move otherwise. That was the discipline he had built himself over three years. She knew exactly what it cost him and she had never told him she knew.

"It's a fish," she said, when the air was back.

"It is not a fish."

"Good. I'd hate to have won."

The two dim stars went behind the strut and came out the other side. Eleven degrees of hull swept the whole group away, and then the well curve brought it back, lower.

"Leon."

"Mm."

"Do you think the stars ever get tired of shining?"

He went still. She had not put her hand on his shoulder; she had let her arm hang over the chair arm, and twenty minutes ago he had moved back into it without either of them acknowledging the manoeuvre, and now her fingers were on the seam of his collar. The stillness went through him like a shim driven into a joint.

Two years and two months since she had last asked. She had counted. She counted things. It was the family disorder.

The first time he had been twenty-one and he had answered in four seconds. No. A star is hydrostatic equilibrium. Radiation pressure out, gravity in, and it holds because the numbers hold, and there's no mechanism for fatigue in that. It isn't doing anything. It's just failing to collapse. And she had looked at him with the sea wind pulling her hair across her mouth and told him he was the worst poet in the galaxy, and he had said thank you, and had meant it as thanks, and that was the night she understood she would have to teach him everything, from the beginning, herself.

He did not answer in four seconds this time.

He took eleven. She counted them. On the ninth she understood that he had been waiting two years and two months for her to ask it again.

"Yes," Leon said.

She said nothing.

"I think they do." He was looking at the glass. "A star spends every second of its life holding itself up against its own weight. That's the whole job. It isn't producing light because it wants to. It's producing light because that's the sound the effort makes." He turned the sachet over once. "Nothing that does that isn't tired. I don't think there's a way to do that and not be tired."

The deck hummed at ninety-eight hertz.

"And they keep doing it anyway," he said. "That's the part I can't get past. It isn't brave. There's nobody in there deciding. It just keeps going. Ten billion years of the worst possible load, no relief, no end date it knows about, and it comes up over some harbour where nobody's looking at it and does the whole thing again."

He stopped. Then, quieter, and she could hear that this part had not been planned:

"I think they're all tired. I think that's what the light is."

Eliana did not answer for a long time.

Out past the glass the fish that was not a fish sat where it had sat for eleven thousand years. Every one of those six points of light was, at that moment, one hundred percent of the way through the worst day of its life, and would be again tomorrow.

"That," she said, "is the best sentence you have ever said."

"El—"

"Don't do another one." She got her thumb onto the ridge of his collarbone through the collar. "You'll ruin it. That's your one. It's done. You peaked. Twenty-six years old and everything from here is decline."

"Understood."

"You were the worst poet in the galaxy."

"I know."

"You are now —" she considered it seriously, because it mattered that it be accurate — "fourth. Maybe fifth. There's still Garren."

"Garren doesn't write poetry."

"Garren said the Kaelic formation at Tallis looked like a wasp's nest 'if you kicked it and it deserved it.'" Her hand rested. "That's poetry, Leon. That's actual poetry. That's how far down the list you are."

Station-keeping thrusters fired somewhere aft, four seconds, and the deck went a degree off level and came back.

"I want something," she said.

"Name it."

"Don't say name it before you've heard it. That's how you end up in a cellar." She waited until he looked up, because for this part she needed his eyes. "Three items. It's a tasking order. You will not negotiate the items."

"You've written it out."

"It's in the coat pocket. I'm not going to read it to you off a paper like some kind of widow. But yes, it's written, because I know what you do with verbal instructions." Two breaths. She used them both. "One. The service block. North face, second floor. There was a light on, it went in your target set, and there is one person in that building who is not in the block register and does not have a name. You will get the name."

His jaw set.

"You'll get it," she said, "because two hundred and ten of them are in your file with names on and one of them is a line that reads unidentified, and you will not survive being a man who left a line that reads unidentified. So you'll get it. It'll take you eight months and you'll have to deal with the Halcyon land registry, who are the worst people in the Reach."

"And then?"

"Item two. You close the file. Not archive. Not seal it under your key like the other one. You put two hundred and eleven names somewhere a stranger can read them, and then you never open another one." Her fingers tightened as much as they could, which was not much. "No new ledger. Not for Tallis. Not for whatever comes after Tallis. Not for the ones you get tomorrow. You don't get to keep count any more. That's the item."

"That's not—"

"It is a practical instruction. You are a man who has never once failed to keep count of anything, and I am telling you to stop, and I know precisely what I'm asking, and I'm asking anyway, because I have watched what the counting does and I am the only person in the galaxy with standing to say it." Her voice went thin. She stopped it. "Item three."

"Item three."

"Nobody makes a picture of me."

He turned his head then, fully, and looked at her.

"Not a plate. Not a hull name. Not a statue in the Halcyon roads with the coat on. Not a school hall, not a foundation, not a stamp, not a day." She held his eyes. "Twenty-three years, Leon. Ratings dropping things. That boy tonight who couldn't hit the hatch pad. Vantalar wanted a legal instrument and even he burned four hours drafting around the fact that he couldn't stop looking. I've been looked at my whole life and I never once got to say no to any of it."

"El."

"So that's what I want. Afterward, I'm not looked at. Item three is the only one of the three that's for me." She let out most of a breath. "Say yes to all three."

"Yes," he said. "All three."

Under a second.

Leon did not say yes to anything in under a second. Leon priced it first — always, out loud or not, the audible half-beat while the arithmetic went through. Eight months for a registry. Four hundred and eleven days to block a foundation charter. She had watched him price a request for a cup of water.

He had not priced one item of it.

The plate is already drafted, she thought, the way she read a signals intercept. Drafted before he brought me the coat. And he'll keep the ledger until the day he dies, and my name will be the last line in it.

He was waiting to be caught. She could see him braced for it. Some ruined part of him wanted it.

"Good," Eliana said. "Thank you."

The relief went through him. She watched it happen.

Take it. Don't ever know I gave it to you.

"You're welcome," he said.

"My turn," Leon said.

"You have an ask."

"I have an ask."

"This should be humiliating." She shifted her weight; the line pulled; she fixed it. "Go on."

"Hum."

Eliana waited. "Hum."

"Tomorrow. In the frame. On the channel." He was looking at the deck between his boots. "The four notes. The thing you used to do on Veridus over your reading. The four notes that were the wrong four notes."

"They were not the wrong—"

"They were catastrophically the wrong four notes. There is no key on any instrument in the Reach in which those are four notes." He rubbed the back of his neck. "You did it for fourteen months. Every night. Under your breath, over the intercepts. I asked you to stop about ninety times."

"A hundred and six times."

"A hundred and six times." He nodded slowly. "So. Tomorrow. Open channel. Harken listening, Lorrigan listening, eleven hundred people listening, and Garren, who will have something to say. Hum the notes. And don't stop."

She looked at the top of his head. The grey patch. The two-centimetre scar behind his ear from a coupling clamp.

You need to know I'm still there without having to ask. Because you won't be able to ask.

She stopped the thought where it was and put it away.

"Which four notes," she said.

"The four notes."

"Sing them."

Leon opened his mouth and produced a sound, and Pip lifted off his knee and rotated once, as though checking the hull for a breach.

"No," Eliana said.

"That's them."

"That is not them. That is not within a whole tone of them, which is genuinely remarkable, because there are only four and you have eidetic recall." She let her head go back and laughed until it hurt, and then a little past that. "You hold fourteen thousand two hundred and six names and you cannot reproduce four notes that were hummed at you nightly for fourteen months."

"They didn't go in as notes."

"What did they go in as?"

He was quiet for a second. "You," he said. "They went in as you."

"Oh, don't," she said. "Don't do a second one. I warned you."

"You'll do it, then."

"I'll do it." She turned her hand over on his collar. "Badly. Loudly. Continuously. And when Garren comes on the channel to complain, you're on your own, because I intend to say it was ordered."

The two dim stars went behind the strut again.

"Seventeen minutes," she said.

The change in him was small, and she felt it through the fabric rather than saw it.

"Fourteen to seventeen," he said.

"Seventeen. Schedule seventeen." She kept her eyes on the glass. "Not eighteen. If it runs to eighteen then something went wrong between minute four and minute eleven and you should have fixed it at eleven, and if you're fixing it at eighteen it isn't getting fixed. So. Seventeen on the schedule, and nothing behind it. I don't have an eighteenth minute on the calendar. There's nothing in the eighteenth slot."

"Understood."

"And don't be late to the start, because the clock runs from the couple, not from your first vector. Every second in the launch bay comes off the back."

"Eleven seconds," Leon said. "Bay to open sky. I've run it forty times."

"Nine."

"El—"

"You've run it forty times at eleven. Do it in nine."

He did the half-beat. She heard him do it — the small pause where the arithmetic went through, the reason he was who he was, the reason she had known ten minutes ago that he was lying about the ledger.

"Nine," he said.

"Good."

Neither of them said the rest. It sat on the deck between them with its own weight: that the curve compounded, doubling about every forty-two seconds above sixty percent of design authority, and that the seventeenth minute cost more than the first fourteen put together, and that nothing in the eighteenth slot was not a remark about scheduling.

She had run it more times than he had. She was better at it than he was. Everybody knew that.

"Fine," she said. "Then we're planned."

Cold came up out of the deck through the bolts and into the frame of the chair, and she was warm anyway, and that was the coat.

She had not been warm outdoors since she was nineteen. It was a real number; she had checked it against the medical log. Nineteen years and four months, the last time she had stood in air under fifteen degrees without the shivering starting in the small of her back inside two minutes. The coat had a quilted panel across the kidneys that no catalogue coat had ever had, and a lining she did not recognise, and it fit, and she was warm.

Her hand had gone from his collar to his shoulder at some point. She left it.

The fish came back around. It was a fish. She was going to die knowing it was a fish and he was going to live knowing it was a trapezoid, and there was nothing further to be done about the matter.

"El."

"Mm."

"You should get four hours."

"I get one and a half. You get two. We're a very impressive family." Her eyes had shut at some point and she let them stay shut. "Be quiet."

He was quiet.

Ninety-eight hertz through the bolts and into her spine. Pip's fans, thinner and higher, somewhere over her left ear. And further off, through two bulkheads, the yard crew still on Unit-02's left shoulder, and every eleven or twelve seconds a knock — one, distinct, a spanner on a housing — a man seating a pin by hand at eleven hours to launch because he did not trust the actuator.

She let herself go down against him. Her cheek found the top of his shoulder, which was where it had gone on the roof; the geometry had not changed, because he had stopped growing at nineteen and she had stopped a long time before that. Twenty-six point eight kilograms of her, in a coat with a hood, leaning on a man who did not shift a millimetre to receive it, because he had trained himself not to.

Three rising tones. A pause. Three rising —

She did not hear the third.

She was going under and she knew it, the slow warm slide she had spent three years learning not to fight. The concentrator ticked into its night cycle and dropped half a litre. The hood was up.

Under her palm his left hand came out of his pocket and settled against her wrist.

It stopped shaking.

He was holding it still. She had two seconds of knowing that.

You could do that the whole time.

Past the strut the six stars went on doing the only thing they knew. Her mother's signet had turned on her thumb the way it always turned, so the sunburst sat on the back of her hand where anyone could read it. Into the wool of his shoulder, without opening her eyes, she said the word her mother had said at the end of every night, in a house that no longer existed.

Ivenne.

Leon did not ask what it meant.

He never had.

They had vented the hangar twice in ninety minutes, so it was cold, and everything metal in it was colder than the air. Leon could see his own breath. He could see hers, which was worse, because hers came out in bursts of four and then stopped for a beat while the pump caught up, and he had been counting them since the lift.

Unit-02 stood in the cradle gantry with its access trunk open along the spine, white plating pulled back on both sides and pinned. Two hundred and eleven tonnes dry. Four GN drives, two of them still carrying the vault's serial plates in a script nobody used any more. The trunk breathed out warm air that smelled of glycol and hot ceramic. It was the only warm thing on the deck.

Garren was doing the pre-flight.

He did it in order, out loud, off the card, the way he had done it under their mother for eleven years, and he did not believe a single line of it. Leon knew because Garren was reading the card. Garren had not needed a card since before Leon was born.

"Primary couch. Harness one through six. Green." A wet catch in his chest on the last word. "Coolant loop A, two point one litres a minute, thirty-four degrees at the plate. Loop B, standby, cross-fed, same numbers." He stopped. "There is no loop C. I am saying that now so nobody goes looking for one later."

"Understood."

"Cradle shell. Hard-mounted to the frame spar. Four bolts. Torqued yesterday. Torqued again this morning by me." He turned the card over and did not look at what was on the other side. "Nine days to build. It is not a certified component. It is a chair I made."

Four hundred millimetres aft of the pilot's couch, elevated one hundred and ten, inside the trunk where the conduit runs are exposed. Leon had the drawing behind his eyes whether he wanted it or not. Two contact plates, palm-sized, bare psycho-frame conduit, faced and polished by hand. Held at thirty-four degrees by the glycol loop. At load they wanted to run at sixty-one.

"If the loop drops," Garren said, "she has four seconds before the plates take skin. I will be watching the loop."

"I know you will."

"Then stop looking at me and put your boots on."

The straps did not fit. That was the part nobody could engineer around, so instead everybody worked on it. The webbing was rated for nine gravities on a seventy-kilogram pilot, it was the smallest set in the Reach, and Eliana Zadkiel had weighed twenty-six point four kilograms on Pryn's scale at 0230. Twenty-seven point one at the start of the month. The load had to be spread instead of concentrated, which meant padding, which meant foam.

Somebody had cut the foam by hand. Not machine-cut. You could see the knife work — long clean draws, the bevel rolled off at every edge so nothing would sit hard against bone. There was a bevel at the sternum, one at each hip, one where the diagonal would otherwise cross her right collarbone, which was the collarbone that showed.

The bevels matched the seams of her coat.

Leon looked at that for slightly too long. Then he stopped looking at it and checked the stirrup pins, which did not need checking.

The coat was white and it had a hood and it fit. Across the shoulders, at the wrist, at a hundred and forty centimetres, which meant it had been made and not bought. The left seam carried a flat channel sewn in from collar to hem, wide enough for four-millimetre line. The oxygen went in at her shoulder, ran inside the coat where it could not snag, and came out at her hip to a two-point-two-litre bottle clamped to the cradle spar. Four litres a minute. Ninety-eight minutes at that rate. Less under load.

Lance-Sergeant Lorrigan held the bottle while two fitters set the clamp. She held it the way she had been taught to hold things at the top of a staircase twice a year, elbows in, weight even, chin level. Her hands were steady. Her jaw was not.

"Sergeant," Eliana said. "You can put it down. It's a bottle."

"I have it, ma'am."

"You've had it for six minutes."

"I have it, ma'am," Lorrigan said, and did not put it down.

Surgeon-Commander Pryn stood two metres back with her arms folded and her coat still buttoned, which meant she had no intention of touching anything.

She had filed her objection in writing. One page. It stated that the procedure had no clinical precedent, that the patient's cardiac reserve would not tolerate sustained sympathetic load, and that the physician of record considered the exposure not survivable. It had been countersigned, entered, and overruled by the patient, in the patient's own hand, in a court script from a court that had been dead for six hundred years. The duty clerk had photographed it rather than transcribe it, because he could not read it.

"Are you going to say it," Leon said.

"I said it. It's on the file." Pryn's face did not move. "You want the number, you can have the number. Nobody has asked me for one this morning, which tells me everyone in this hangar already has it and has had it for nine days."

"We have it."

"Then my job as of eleven minutes ago is to stand here and watch." She jerked her chin at the trunk. "Get her in the chair. She's spending oxygen standing there being brave at you."

"You wrote not survivable," Eliana said. "Two words. You could have written four hundred and made it sound kinder."

"I could have."

"You spelled my name right. The Order clerks have never once managed it." A breath, four in, stop. "Thank you for that. Genuinely."

"Don't thank me," Pryn said. "I'm still on the record against you."

"I know. That's why I'm thanking you."

Harken came up the gantry with a slate, and she did not slow down and she did not lower her voice, because lowering her voice would have been a message.

"Fleet's been committed fifty-one minutes," she said. "We have lost eighty-one hulls. They have lost nine. The wedge is folding on the left and I have nothing to put in the gap because everything I own is already in it." She turned the slate face down against her thigh. "That is the situation. Nobody in it is being saved by another six minutes of fitting foam."

"Two more minutes," Garren said.

"You have two."

"Then stop standing on my gantry."

Harken did not move. She looked at the cradle shell, then at the padding, then at the girl. "Analyst," she said. "Last chance to be a coward. I've got a chair for you on my bridge with your name on the deck plate."

"You had it bolted down without asking."

"I did."

"Then you already know the answer," Eliana said, "and you're only asking so it's on the log."

"Correct." Harken went down the ladder without another word, which was how she said goodbye to people she expected to lose.

Nobody spoke much after that.

That was the part Leon kept afterwards, out of all of it. Not the noise. The quiet. Forty-odd people on a deck doing skilled work with their hands and no chatter at all. No jokes about the fit. No fitter asking another fitter to hold something — they passed tools without asking and checked each other without being told. Every one of them had done the arithmetic in their own way to their own accuracy, and not one of them said a word about it, because saying it would have meant she heard it again.

A rating in her twenties came up with the shim stock, put it in Garren's hand, looked at Eliana once, and went down the ladder with her face wrong.

Nobody remarked on that either. It had been happening for weeks. Whatever the illness had taken, it had not touched the thing nobody had ever been able to look at directly. It had reduced it. Boiled off everything that was not it. Left it standing there at twenty-six kilos in a white coat with a groove worn behind the right ear, and people could not do skilled work in the same room. Harken had solved it with a roster: nobody in the analysis bay longer than ninety minutes. That was the only solution anyone had found in three years.

Leon put the shim where it went and thought, without any particular feeling, that he was the only person on the deck who was exempt. He had never had to look away from her. She was his sister. He got the one who cheated at chess by talking, who had opinions about the correct way to open a ration pack, who had bitten him on the arm at nine and drawn blood. He was grateful for it the way you are grateful for air, which is to say almost never, and today for about a second and a half.

She raised her arm.

Garren picked her up, because that was the arrangement — she raised her arm, he lifted, and nothing was said. Eleven steps to the trunk. He did not comment on her weight. He did not make the sound old men make when they lift things. On the fourth step his chest caught, wet, and he did not let it break his stride, and Leon watched him do it and understood the price down to the decimal.

The drone could not come. She switched it off herself — three tones rising, the last one flat — and set it into Lorrigan's hands with the charging cuff wrapped twice round the shell so it would not drift. "Don't let them scrap it while I'm out," she said. Lorrigan said ma'am and did not manage anything after it.

Leon seated first.

He always seated first. Boots into the stirrups, shoulders back into the couch, and the harness came over and locked with four flat clacks he could have identified blindfolded at a hundred metres. The couch took his mass and settled six millimetres. The cockpit smelled of hot ceramic and glycol and the particular dryness of a psycho-frame at idle — ozone, with something under it, like the air in a room where a piano has just stopped.

"Contact," he said.

VEDA came up in his skull rather than in his ears, the way it always did.

Primary contact. Neural handshake in progress. Latency nine milliseconds. Latency four. Latency one point two.

The frame reached for him and he let it, and there was the familiar shove behind the sternum, the one he had stopped mentioning to medical two years ago.

Sync: eighty-nine point four.

Low. Low because he had slept an hour and fifty minutes, and because the left hand had been shaking since the lift and the tremor bled off about a point and a half. His ceiling was ninety-one point seven. It had been ninety-one point seven the first time he coupled and it would be ninety-one point seven the day he died, because that figure was not a talent and never had been. It was a distance. It was how close he stood to a frequency he had not chosen and had never caught.

Nine years old, on a hangar floor at Halcyon, an instructor telling their father the boy had the best hands he had seen in thirty years.

Frame authority available: one hundred percent of design. Governor engaged at one hundred percent.

Three years of that wall. One hundred percent of design, and above it the frame took structural coherence out of the pilot to hold the field, and the pilot came apart. Their mother had gone into that wall at sixty-one point four and it had killed her in under an hour. The wall was the reason he had run the final engagement eleven ways and got a coin toss eleven times, and the coin-toss versions all assumed the Crimson Lance missed.

"Secondary," Garren said on the loop. "She's in the shell. Harness one through six, green, on the pads. Plates at thirty-four. Loop A holding. Palms down."

I'm fine, Eliana said on the intercom.

Four hundred millimetres behind him and a hundred and ten above, and he could not turn his head far enough to see her. That had been designed in. He had signed it off himself, and he could not now remember why, and there was no time to work it out.

"Contact on three," he said. "One—"

She did not wait for three.

There was no ramp. That was the first thing that was wrong. Every coupling he had ever done had a ramp — handshake, latency, the frame walking around the inside of you deciding how much it could use, thirty or forty seconds of arithmetic. This had none. The plates took her palms and the frame did not find her, because the frame had never been looking. The frame had been built out of her. Twenty years of a man's failure, filed under a letter.

What happened in the trunk of Unit-02 at 0412 shipboard was not an interface coming up.

It was a room going quiet because the right person had walked in.

Secondary contact, VEDA said. Sync—

Nothing. The field where the figure went stayed empty. It was not a fault. Everything else on the board was green.

Coherence: one hundred percent.

Coherence: one hundred percent.

Coherence: one hundred perc—

Coherence: unity. Report suspended. Value is not a ratio.

Then the governor let go.

He had no better word for it. Not fail. Not disengage. The governor had been a fact of the universe, a hard edge you could feel with the back of your mind the way you can feel the end of a corridor in the dark. He reached for where it had always been and his hand went through. The numbers that had been a wall for three years did not rise. They stopped being the kind of thing that could be a wall.

Frame authority available: one hundred and forty percent of design.

Two hundred and six.

Four hundred and eleven.

Nine hundred and—

Frame authority available: out of range. No field available. Report suspended.

And under it, through the conduit, through two hundred and eleven tonnes of hardware built in a hole under an observatory by a man who had been trying to save his daughter and had accidentally built the most powerful machine in the history of the species out of the shape of her coming apart —

— he heard her.

Not her thoughts. He had braced for her thoughts. He had lain awake on that for nine days and decided he would not look at whatever came across and would apologise afterwards. There were no thoughts.

What came across the frame was a tone. One sustained standing note, pure in a way nothing physical is pure, not rising and not decaying.

He knew it immediately.

He had been carrying a flat, dilute, three-quarter copy of it in his own cells since the day he was born. It was in the arithmetic that ran without permission. It was in the way the geometry of a room arrived before he asked. It was in eighty-nine point four and in ninety-one point seven and in every commendation and in nineteen minutes over Tallis Anchorage.

He had heard it every day of his life.

He had never once heard it in tune.

Oh. The thought went out of him and it did not matter, because thought was not what the channel carried. That's what I am.

The tone did not answer. It did not need to.

The field came up around the hull in a shape he had never seen the frame make. Not the hard sheared bubble of a psycho-frame under a fighting pilot. Something smooth, enormous, unhurried. The drives spooled and the load never appeared on the coherence budget at all, because the coherence was not coming out of him.

It was coming out of her. Every second of it. Above sixty percent, compounding, doubling about every forty-two seconds, and their mother's husband had integrated that curve twenty-one years ago and written one line underneath it.

"VEDA. Secondary vitals to Surgeon-Commander Pryn's station. Continuous."

Secondary vitals. Heart rate sixty-two. Blood oxygen saturation ninety-nine percent on ambient. Respiratory rate twelve. Tidal volume within predicted range for height and age. Peripheral temperature thirty-six point eight. Auscultation clear bilaterally.

Not one of those figures had been true of her since she was an infant.

On the loop, Pryn's voice came through flat and slightly too loud, the way people talk when they have forgotten the channel is open. "That's wrong."

"It's not wrong," Leon said.

"I know it's not wrong. That's what I'm telling you."

Then Eliana laughed.

"Leon." She was laughing, and it did not stop to breathe, and that was the part he could not get past, because she had not had a laugh that did not stop to breathe since before their mother died. "Leon, I can feel my feet."

"Eliana—"

"They're warm. They've been cold since Veridus. I don't remember them being warm on Veridus either, so possibly longer." Something shifted in the shell behind him. A small sound. Someone sitting up straight because they could. "Oh — oh, this is what it's like. Twelve breaths a minute and you don't have to think about any of them. Nobody ever told me you don't have to think about them."

Leon had both hands on the grips. The frame was giving him nine simultaneous overlays of a hemisphere of sky nine hundred kilometres across and he was not looking at any of it.

"You can't stand up," he said. "The harness is—"

"I know I can't stand up, I'm strapped into a chair the two of you built out of spite." She laughed again. "Garren. If you're on this loop — the chair is good. It's a good chair. I withdraw what I said about the bolts."

From a telemetry board on the deck of the Sworn, Garren Doss said nothing at all, and left his channel open, and every fourth second Leon heard the catch in the old man's chest.

"Eleven seconds," Eliana said. Quieter. "Three times. That's all I ever got. And afterwards I'd lie in the bay and try to remember what it felt like and I couldn't — that's the thing nobody knows. You can't remember being well. You can only remember that you were." A pause. She was not out of air. She had simply chosen to stop. "This isn't eleven seconds."

"No."

"I'm not frightened. I've been frightened for three years, constantly, underneath everything, like a fan somewhere in the ceiling." Fabric moved. The hood, going back. "It's off, Leon. I'd forgotten it was ever on."

He did not trust his mouth, so he ran numbers, because the numbers came whether he asked for them or not. Two point two litres, four a minute, ninety-eight minutes, irrelevant — she isn't drawing on it. Ninety-nine on ambient. She's breathing hangar air like a person.

"Leon." Her voice changed. Not sad. Level and warm and horribly practical, the voice she used in the analysis bay when she was about to tell Harken something Harken had not asked for. "About Father."

"Don't."

"You've had that file since Meridian and you've carried it like a conviction. I watched you not eat for a week and lie about it in three languages." An easy breath, unforced. "You think he built a weapon out of me dying."

"He tuned the frame to Harmonic E," Leon said. "Both units. He spent twenty years failing to cure you, and he filed the failure, and then he built the most powerful machine in the history of the species out of the mathematics of my sister coming apart. I've read every page. That's what the pages say."

"Yes. And what do you think he was doing?"

"I don't know."

"He was building a room where I'm well."

She said it the way you say the time.

"He couldn't cure it. Nobody can. It isn't a disease, Leon, it's a note — you can't cure a note, you can only put it somewhere that it's in key. So he built the one place in the universe where the note is the right note and I'm not broken in it." Nothing in her voice was pushing. "This is the only room I've ever been well in. He made it with his hands and he never got to see me sit in it."

His left hand shook on the grip. The frame compensated. It always compensated.

"And then he ran the exposure curve," she said. "And integrated it. And got a number. And wrote one line under it."

"Yes."

"Say it."

"Under nineteen minutes." Leon heard his own voice do it. "She will want to spend it."

"There," Eliana said.

The tone went on behind her, unvarying.

"Everyone in my life has made my decisions in front of me. A galaxy sat down and priced me and found the price fair and did it in the room, out loud, while I was in it. You've done it. Harken does it. Pryn does it and at least writes it down and signs it." Her voice did not rise at all. "He's the only one who ever left me the arithmetic and let me spend it myself. He knew exactly who I'd grow up to be and he didn't take it off me. Say something else about him if you want. Not that."

Leon Asher Maximilian Zadkiel sat in two hundred and eleven tonnes of machine with no ceiling in it and could not find one word.

"Also," she said, "I'm wearing the coat."

He shut his eyes for exactly one second.

"I know."

"It fits."

"I know it fits."

"Whose tape was it, Leon?"

"Mine."

"When."

"Tallis. The night after. You were asleep and Pryn had you on a monitor and I did shoulders, sleeve, hip to hem, and hood." Fifty-two centimetres across the shoulders. Sleeve thirty-nine. I have not been able to stop knowing that. "I gave the numbers to a tailor on Kestrel Deck who used to make dress sashes for the Watch."

"Three years you told me that when I owned a coat that fits, we'd consider treating me like an adult."

"I remember what I said."

"So do I. Every part." Something in the shell moved again — palms flattening on the plates, adjusting, comfortable. "Say it, or admit it was never a joke and you were only ever finding a way to keep me nine."

Leon breathed out.

"Two adults," he said.

"Two adults," Eliana said. "Take the frame up, brother. I'm cold in exactly none of my extremities and I would like to go and end this."

Authority up.

He took it in steps, because steps were the only discipline he had left. Twenty percent. Thirty. Forty-five. Below sixty it was free — the frame drew nothing structural out of the carrier and it cost her nothing at all — and he held at fifty-eight for eleven seconds longer than the flight plan allowed. Garren did not comment on the discrepancy. Garren did not comment on anything.

"Sixty," Leon said, and pushed it through.

Design authority sixty-one percent. Carrier draw active. Attrition regime: compounding.

He started the counter.

Lower left of the primary overlay. White figures. Hundredths suppressed, because he did not need hundredths and because he was not going to be looking at it for the next quarter of an hour.

00:00.

00:01.

The requirement was seventeen minutes. That was the honest figure. The Zero System had given him fourteen to seventeen minutes of sustained open-frame output to cut through two hundred and fourteen hulls, four orbital platforms, layered Disruptor envelopes and whatever the Predator elements still had, and reach the Conclusion. He had run it enough times to know that fourteen was the version where the Dominion made three mistakes and seventeen was the version where they made none.

Her budget was seventeen minutes and fifty-two seconds. That was what remained after three contacts of eleven seconds and twenty-three years of standing next to the machinery.

Fifty-two seconds of margin. And because it compounded, the last minute cost more than the first fourteen put together.

Both of them could do the arithmetic. Neither of them said what it came to.

"Unit-02, launch when ready," Harken said, from a bridge, on a converted grain hauler, in the middle of the worst day in the history of the Aetherian Reach.

"Zadkiel. Launching."

Harken had said in the briefing that the first forty minutes would be free and everything after that would be bought at a rate they could not sustain. Harken had been optimistic.

They brought two hundred and eighty hulls to the Core. Nine were warships. The rest were ore haulers, grain freighters, two liners, a hospital tender, and a hundred and four ships whose armour was plate welded over cargo blisters and whose point-defence had been fitted in dock by volunteers in eight days. The Dominion had two hundred and fourteen purpose-built warships, four orbital defence platforms over Aurelion, and roughly two thousand mobile suits, and they were fighting inside their own Disruptor envelope, where GN output falls off and mass and numbers decide everything.

The Ardent Providence went first. Four hundred and ten thousand tonnes of bulk hauler out of Corrilane, crew of six hundred and eleven, hit twice amidships by the Corollary at nine thousand kilometres and once more as she yawed. She did not explode. That was the part nobody who watched it was ready for. She came apart along her cargo spine over about forty seconds, in sections, venting grain into vacuum from the two holds there had not been time to strip, and for a long while afterwards there was a slow bright cloud of wheat across four hundred kilometres of the engagement. It fouled the optical tracking of eleven Order ships. It killed at least two of them.

Forty minutes later the Thessaly Bell — liner, converted, nine hundred and forty aboard including two hundred and six Order infantry with nowhere left to be deployed — put herself between the platform Granted and the hospital tender Meridian Mercy, on her own captain's authority, without signalling, because signalling would have cost four seconds. She took the platform's full battery for eleven seconds and then stopped being a ship. The Meridian Mercy got clear with three hundred and nineteen wounded aboard and a hull temperature that peeled her port sensor mast back to the frames. The Thessaly Bell's last transmission was a partial roll call that reached the letter H.

By the fifty-first minute the Order had lost eighty-one hulls and the Dominion had lost nine, and the grey wedge of the fleet was folding backward and inward the way a hand closes. Past all of it, high over the curve of Aurelion, the Therefore held station unhurried with the Crimson Lance run out along her dorsal spine. It could not match Unit-02. It did not need to. It needed to hurt it once.

Petty Officer Second Class Devrin Ost, forward optical board, Dominion light cruiser Nevertheless, logged an unidentified contact at 0419 and eleven seconds and spent the last four seconds of his professional life trying to make his console give it a category. Leon read the board log eleven days later, off a wreck, in a compartment with the deck plating still warm. It was one light. It was inside the envelope, where nothing put out light like that. It crossed the engagement laterally at a closing rate the board rendered as three separate impossible figures before it gave up and displayed the raw number, and the raw number was going the wrong speed — not fast the way a warship is fast, not fast the way a suit is fast. Steady. Unaccelerating. As though the distance between it and the Nevertheless were being spent rather than travelled. Behind it, the Disruptor envelope was going out. Not burning through. Going out, in a widening cone, like a corridor where somebody is walking along switching off the lamps. Four hundred metres from where the fitters had cut foam with a knife, Garren Doss watched a telemetry board resolve a frame-authority figure in the fourteen thousands, sat back very slowly in his chair, and found that he had no word for it in any of the three languages he spoke.

Inside the cockpit it was quiet. Eliana was humming. Old Astraian, four notes, the thing their mother used to hum in the observatory, and under it the tone came through the frame and was not humming and did not vary.

Leon put his hands where they needed to be and went inside four hundred metres, because a twelve-unit Predator element cannot fire simultaneous vectors that close.

00:41.