Everyone in the shuttle had heard me. Basnaaid seemed shocked into silence. Seivarden already knew, of course, and Medic. I didn’t want to know what Seivarden’s Amaats thought. Didn’t want to see or hear Sword of Atagaris’s opinion. I turned to the only person who seemed unaware of me—Lieutenant Tisarwat, who had no attention for anything but what a failure she’d been, at living and dying both.

I pulled myself into the seat beside her, strapped myself in. For a moment I seriously considered telling her just how stupid she’d been, back in the Gardens, and how lucky we all were to have survived her stupidity. Instead, I unhooked her seat strap with my good hand—my left arm was immobilized by the corrective on my shoulder—and pulled her to me. She clung to me and leaned her face into my neck, and began sobbing.

“It’s all right,” I said, my arm awkwardly around her shaking shoulders. “It’ll be all right.”

“How can you say that?” she demanded into my neck, between sobs. A tear escaped, one tiny, trembling sphere floating away. “How could it possibly?” And then, “No one would ever dare offer you such a platitude.”

Over three thousand years old. Infinitely ambitious. And still only seventeen. “You assume incorrectly.” If she thought about it, if she was capable just now of thinking clearly, she might have guessed who it was who might have said such a thing to me. If she had, she didn’t say it. “It’s so hard, at first,” I said, “when they hook you up. But the rest of you is around you, and you know it’s only temporary, you know it will be better soon. And when you are better, it’s so amazing. To have such reach, to see so much, all at once. It’s…” But there was no describing it. Tisarwat herself would have seen it, if only for a few hours, distressed or else blunted by meds. “She never let you have that. It was never part of her plan to let you have that.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?” And of course she’d known. How could she not? “She hated the way I felt, she dosed me up as fast as she could. She didn’t care if…” The sobs that had died down began afresh. More tears escaped and floated off. Bo Nine, near all this time, horrified by my revelation minutes before, horror that was not at all relieved by my conversation with Tisarwat now, caught them with a cloth, which she then folded, and pushed it between Tisarwat’s face and my neck.