“I think you might actually be able to help,” Istara said. They sounded even more surprised than Tennal felt. “Grab a headset.”

Tennal took a headset and tried to process the crowded interface of a real pilot’s station. It was three times as complicated as the training interface. He couldn’t shut out his mental awareness of the rest of the unit bustling around, like flickers of light behind him, and Surit’s locked-down mind moving between them. Surit kept disappearing and reappearing, once with a mechanic in an ex-vehic suit. He looked more concerned every time.

As he approached, Tennal caught his eye and acknowledged him with a half wave of his fingers. What are you looking like that about?

Surit gave a tiny shake of his head, a twitch of his shoulders. As clear as saying: I don’t know. “Status?” Surit said aloud. “Are we in shape for entry?”

Tennal glanced at Istara, who nodded back at him. It seemed a formal query, so Tennal got to his feet. And with the very odd feeling of being a lever fitting into a larger machine, he saluted. “Yes, sir, all correct.”

Surit saluted back. Tennal resumed his seat, put on his headset, and sank into a private world with the pilots, the white lines of his chart, and the rapidly approaching vortex.

The roiling chaos outside tingled distractingly on his skin. “How’s our course?” Istara said abruptly.

“What?” Tennal said. “You’re the pilot.”

“You’re the reader, aren’t you?”

Istara couldn’t know about the hot-cold radiation Tennal felt from chaotic space, like spray from a distant sea, but Tennal suddenly realized he could do more. Chaotic space was a glow on the edge of his senses, like the faint light he felt around people when he wasn’t actively trying to read them. He had been trying to block it out. He could let it in.

Tennal shut his eyes and tried to read the universe.

A vast space opened inside his brain. He had a hazy vision of their shuttle from the outside, as if seeing with something other than his eyes: he sensed the fleet approaching the gap in the mass of distorted space like a handful of birds gliding into the tunnel of a great cliff face.

One side of the tunnel was less stable, its side bubbling gently with distortion. They should probably correct their course. Tennal opened his mouth to explain, but all he heard were some garbled vowel sounds, faint and far off. He raised his hand instead, impatiently, and gestured how they should correct. Operating his body was like trying to move a puppet on a string that stretched across the room, but Lights knew he couldn’t get to the delicate controls around his mouth.