“It doesn’t care,” Tennal said abruptly in his ear. “Get the fuck out of there, Surit. I don’t know why one of our own ships is trying to kill you, but if you stay there, you’re both going to die.”

Istara chimed in with the same thing. Surit watched in sheer confusion as the scanning ship turned and made another run at them.

“Move!” Istara said. They swerved their tug out of its path.

The tugs were not fast. Surit tried to follow Istara, but he didn’t make it out cleanly. The scanning ship hurtled through the space where they had been, smashing the hull of the ship they had just left.

Surit was nearly caught in the backlash like a riptide. But he’d spent a year doing retrievals. There were some sounds hardwired in his brain: one of them was the quiet creak of his hull as it started to buckle under distortion, which no living retrieval unit had ever ignored. He rocketed away like someone had held an open flame to his skin.

The scanning ship disappeared back to where it had come, trailing a lethal wave of disturbed space-time behind it. Surit had used too much speed to get away. His tug tumbled precipitously toward the wall of true chaotic space, the currents that would tear his ship apart. He fought desperately for control.

Every retrieval unit knew they were always one mistake away from disaster. Get too close to disturbed space and the distortion would bend or crack metal. Soldiers who had been around it said it felt like a sickening change in gravity. A dense cloud of chaos might buckle a ship into pieces. It might age it to brittle fragments or preserve it for centuries. The organic matter of a pilot might also be preserved from aging—but that didn’t make much of a difference when that same organic matter was smeared molecule-thick across a cloud of dust. The human body didn’t survive.

Surit couldn’t avoid the wall of chaos in front of him. He saw his death coming.

“There’s a—there’s a—” Tennal sounded frantic over the comms. “Surit, I can see— I can— Let me in!”

A flash of light. A searing pain in his head. And suddenly Surit didn’t have control of his eyes anymore.

Tennal’s presence was in Surit’s head, filling it like a second passenger crammed into a single seat. Surit found himself shoved aside as Tennal grasped at his vision and his hearing.

Surit’s first reaction was terror.

Tennal was a crashing wave breaking over Surit’s thoughts. Outside, in front of Surit’s tug, the oncoming wall of chaotic space seemed to slow—time slowed, death slowed—and the incandescent force of Tennal jolted Surit’s thoughts into new paths. Surit’s second, truer reaction was euphoria. He had never felt this alive.

Surit’s third reaction was: Is this a sync?