Tennal tapped his fingers on his sorry-looking wristband. “Technically it’s not conscription anyway, is it?” he said. “Technically you have to break the law first, if you don’t volunteer.” The army officially disapproved of readers but still found the strong ones useful. If you were strong enough, it was amazing the minor technicalities that counted as breaking the law. Readers made good pilots, apparently. They synced you to an architect to keep you reliable—because, after all, you’d broken the law.

The woman snorted. “Like fuck anyone volunteers.” She moved her head. “What’s that noise?”

Tennal realized two things at the same time. The buzzing wasn’t part of his hangover, and disabling locators wasn’t nearly as easy as he’d thought it was.

The spike of realization made all his muscles coil up. He should have known what that buzzing noise was because he’d grown up with it in the background. He hadn’t recognized it—he hadn’t been listening out for it—because Sanura didn’t have its own military base.

“Shit,” he said. “That’s a Swift-47 engine.”

“What?” the woman said sharply.

Tennal had already shot out of his chair and was hammering at the room control panel by the door. “You need to get out. You, specifically, need to get out. Warn any other strong readers. Where the fuck is the fire code on this thing?”

The woman reached over his shoulder and jabbed a sensor. “Police?”

“Worse,” Tennal said. “Army.” He gave it confirmation for the highest-priority alarm: fire in the room. “They must have scrambled, so they won’t have all the exits blocked off yet. Take a fire chute from the service stairs. They’ll be following the location of my wristband, so I bet they’ll come in at one of the top floors.” He slipped it out of his pocket. “I’m going to—” He broke off. Dump my wristband in the penthouse was on the tip of his tongue. That was the next logical step. He could blend in with the crowd on the way out, and they’d waste time finding his abandoned wristband.

Sprinklers started to lower from the ceiling. The woman backed up a couple of steps and paused in the doorway. “So I need to find a new city?”

Tennal’s thoughts were already going down the same track. The army would go through Sanura’s underworld like a dirt grinder, sifting for info on where Tennal had run to, because they’d have to justify losing the objective of their scramble. She might get detained. Tennal mostly didn’t care about the people he met here because they were just as shitty as himself, but he had an unwelcome surge of fellow feeling for another reader. She’d made some bad choices to end up in this job. What Tennal was about to bring down on her head was worse.