And, right now, that thing was finding a scared child who didn’t deserve to be treated like a pawn. The new brief didn’t shed much light on the kidnapping. If this really was everything that the Valoffs knew—and that was questionable—then we were all working with the same data now. Commodore Morten meant to use Cien as a lever, and the empress meant to use me. One wrong move and we’d face a return to war.

No pressure.

A shadow fell across my screen. “Have you eaten?” Torran asked quietly.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that he held the tray that had spent the morning outside my door. “I ate a meal bar,” I said without looking up. “You may dispose of that.”

“Tavi, please—”

I sucked in a sharp breath. He’d so rarely called me by my first name and now it cut like a knife.

“I am sorry,” he murmured. He left with a whisper of sound.

Kee slanted a glance at me, proving that she wasn’t as oblivious as she seemed. “You okay?”

I shook my head slowly. “No, but I will be.”

I spent three hours trying to trace Commodore Morten’s movements on the surveillance videos before giving up. The transport that he’d entered had made more than a dozen stops, half of them inside buildings with large amounts of traffic and no significant importance. Morten might be an asshole, but he knew how to run an operation. He had likely switched vehicles multiple times.

With no other leads, I watched the video of the kidnappers’ transport again. It stopped at Torran’s gate for pickup, then continued on to the edge of the forest, where it disappeared. I checked that final camera’s video, watching two days flash past at high speed, but nothing else appeared.

Still, something about the dingy little monitoring station in the middle of the forest wouldn’t leave me alone. I tried researching it, but the public data on it was surprisingly scarce. Torran wasn’t kidding about the landowners’ desire to keep people away. Trespassing in that part of the forest carried a hefty fine due to its proximity to the Imperial Palace, and the surrounding owners were all too happy to turn people in.

“Lexi,” I asked over the comm, “did you look into the monitoring station?”

“Yes, but I didn’t find much. It was built during the war as part of the global network of stations scanning for ships approaching from the wormhole closest to the human sectors. Several of the other stations have fallen into disrepair, but this one was deemed strategically important, so they’ve kept it running.”

Her information matched mine. When I didn’t respond, she asked, “Do you want me to look again?”