We had all done it during basic flight training. We had all been encouraged to stare into the nothingness of the hypervoid long enough to start seeing patterns and sparks—but it was something most people only did once, just to find out what it was like. The ensuing headaches and nightmares were usually enough to dissuade them from trying again. The few who did it a second or third time—and there were always one or two in each class—risked losing themselves to delusion and paranoia, becoming convinced titanic creatures prowled out there, at the ragged edge of our ability to perceive them, in the grey nihility of the higher dimensions.

After leaving the bridge, my first port of call was Alva’s cabin. When I reached it, I found she’d left the door open. I stepped inside and leant against the wall, arms folded.

“Hey.”

She was sitting on the edge of her bed, stripping down her sidearm. She didn’t look up. “I could hear you coming from the other end of the corridor,” she said.

“I didn’t want to startle you.” I watched her disassemble the pistol and arrange the parts on the cloth at her feet. “Did you have fun on Camrose?”

“I wouldn’t call it fun.” She raised her chin and I saw the darkening bruises beneath her eyes, the clean white surgical tape across the bridge of her nose. “How about you? Did you see the ambassador?”

“Yes.”

“Did he give you much trouble?”

I gave a half-hearted smile. “Not as much as whoever did that to you.”

Alva brought the fingers of her right hand up to dab her left eye socket, and I caught a glimpse of more tape on her knuckles.

“But you are in the shit?” she asked.

I let out a sigh. “He wants to talk to me when we get back.”

“Do you think you might get fired?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged my shoulders. “Possibly.”

Alva’s expression hardened. “Good.”

I turned my eyes away, unnerved by her defiant stare. “There was nothing I could have done,” I said quietly. “Not even the ship had time to react.”

In my peripheral vision, I saw Alva’s lip curl in a sneer. “He shouldn’t have been standing there in the first place.” She reached down and began to reassemble the gun, sliding each piece into place with instinctive precision. “If you’d done your job properly, you’d have known about the sea life. You could have warned him to keep the stretchers away from the edge.”

“And we would have lost the two we pulled from the Hobo.”

“We lost them anyway.”

I tightened my arms against my chest. “That’s not the point.”

“Isn’t it?”

* * *