“No promises,” Tennal said. “All I can definitely say is we’ll squash the communications charge because I don’t want my sister involved in this.” Birimi was visibly surprised at my sister. Tennal didn’t plan to give them time to ask questions. “As for you—we’ll be in touch. Don’t go anywhere.”

Birimi blinked and looked around the detention cell. The flowers were the only pleasant thing about it. Tennal wondered what it took to just sit there, knowing your enemy was in power, and patiently send messages until the wind changed. “I wasn’t planning to.”

Once they were out of the cell, Tennal and Surit said nothing to each other until they signed out of the building. The gates of the detention block crashed together behind them.

It was only when they were walking down the street under the city-dome, fresh air drifting down from the leafy hydroponics floors, that Tennal said, “We don’t even know if Birimi was telling the truth.”

Surit was silent for a long moment. There was no one on the street but a lone soldier patrolling at the end. Surit’s footsteps were loud on the walkway. “Where are the remnants?”

“What?”

“The remnants should have been logged and handed over to the Resolution. The Resolution has the storage to neutralize them—and anyway, it’s in all the treaties. Did anyone log them? Where are they?”

Surit had found a loose end and was not going to drop it. And something was nagging at the back of Tennal’s mind as well. He didn’t care about Archer Link Station, he didn’t care about their politics or their power struggles, and he didn’t even care about the remnants. But Zin had cared. And Surit cared.

Surit was getting to him.

“All right,” Tennal said. “All right. I’ll ask.”

“Thank y—”

“Don’t thank me,” Tennal said. “You haven’t heard how I’m going to find out yet.”

Surit shut his mouth and looked sideways at him.

They turned a corner into a busier street. Banners floated in the breeze, advertising shops. Bright signs for bars and restaurants started to flicker into life on the buildings overhead.

Tennal said thoughtfully, “You know how you told me you weren’t good at parties?”

CHAPTER 19

The restaurant was as elite and exclusive as Archer Link Station got, and it made Surit uncomfortable.

It occupied the whole top floor of a city block, covered with a glass ceiling open to the artificial night sky. In the hushed and spacious room, lamps shed golden pools of light and groups of couches were scattered over the floor. Carved wooden trays hovered in the air by each diner’s elbow. This close to the galactic link, the owners had collected luxuries from outside the sector: Ecivit tree-branch art covered the wall, and underneath it, Nhäine goldwork pots stood next to couches, holding spindly alien flora in individual air bubbles.