Tennal felt as if he had flung open a window and leaned out into a freezing wind. It wasn’t comfortable—the fabric of his mind was stretched, as if the churning cold of deep space itself were leaching it away—but there was an exhilaration to it, like he was stepping over a cliff. His heart must be thumping. Strangely, he couldn’t feel his heartbeat at all.

His shriveled sense of caution sounded a warning bell. Tennal ignored it. He could go further. At a much greater distance, he could even feel the link: not Archer Link Station, but the link itself, like a whirlpool, like a maelstrom, its faint currents touching everything else in the sector.

The chill made him sluggish. His thoughts came slow and deep. He was vaguely aware of a blaring alarm sounding back on the ship, and another one, of people tapping and shoving his body, but that was all happening a long way away.

Then an immense and searing presence touched an exposed part of his mind from back in the shuttle. The touch sent lines of fire through his whole being. Tennal felt a momentary exultation: he could draw on this, use the bright strength to ground him and sustain him in the vastness of space, if he just reached out—

As he reached out, he remembered he was primed to sync at the exact moment that he collided into Surit’s controlled machine of a mind. The shock was so great that he opened his eyes.

“—Halkana!”

There was a warm pressure around his wrist. Istara stood in front of him, looking frazzled. Tennal’s muscles, coming back online, reported an escalation of forceful attempts to get his attention. But the touch at his wrist wasn’t Istara: it was Surit, who was leaning over his chair with a crease of earnest consternation between his eyebrows, rather like, Tennal thought irrelevantly, Tennal was a badly filled-out form that Surit had found himself responsible for.

The mental presence he had felt was Surit.

Surit didn’t remove his grip on Tennal’s wrist immediately. An alarm whined overhead. Tennal was vaguely aware that the instrument screens were showing an awful lot of red and that half of Retrieval Two had left their stations, but from the increased tingling on his skin, he assumed they’d made it into chaotic space. He looked at his wrist, and Surit looked down as well, as if he’d just remembered he was holding it.

“Don’t do that again,” Surit said. He let go.

“That’s so sweet, boss,” Tennal said, mostly as a way of checking if his hoarse voice still worked. “Do you have any idea what I did? Let me know, because I don’t.” If that was what they expected a fleet reader to do on a regular basis, just to help the pilots with their route-finding, he was surprised he hadn’t heard of more readers going mad.