“Corvus,” he says. There are clearly more words on the tip of his tongue, but he hesitates, and instead throws his arms around me. I embrace him without hesitation. We remain like that for several long moments, our arms wrapped around each other, heedless of the bustle of other soldiers and army personnel passing through the hallway around us. My heart aches as the hard shell of my anger melts away.

“That wasn’t the goodbye I wanted,” I whisper.

“I know. Me neither.”

“I don’t want to abandon—”

“I know. I know.”

The foot traffic in the hallway around us has slowed to a trickle now, leaving us essentially alone. We stay close together, in the kind of long embrace I’ve always held myself back from these past three years. It doesn’t matter anymore. I have nothing left to lose.

“I need to ask you something,” he says, close to my ear. I can feel his heart jumping in his chest.

“Anything.”

“Your family… they’re smugglers.”

My stomach drops. I have an inkling where he’s going with this, but I hope I’m wrong.

“That’s not a question.”

I try to lean back, but Daniil grips my arm, his voice lowering to a whisper.

“How much would it take to transport a person?”

I sigh. There it is—the question I was hoping he wouldn’t ask, and all the truth it implies. Apparently Daniil is hoping for more than a goodbye after all. Treason, a small voice in the back of my head whispers, but I push it down. As much as I want to be angry with him for asking, I can’t help but understand. I brush his hand off my arm and take a step back.

“You can’t ask things like that,” I say, speaking low but firm. “And we don’t smuggle people. We don’t even have the capability for it. We’re a small ship.”

Devan plants are complicated enough to transport. Fortuna is too small of a vessel to hide anything close to a living, breathing human, even if we had some way of getting them onto a planet once we reached it.

“Surely you have a deep freezer.” He avoids eye contact, his voice still hushed but rapid. “If I was in cryosleep, you could—”