Surit had brought more remnants to Archer Link Station. It made him uncomfortable, now, that he didn’t know where they were. He had nothing to go on, only nebulous suspicions, but he had brought them here, and he needed to find them.

“Get Yeni to do it,” a loud voice said. “You’re synced, aren’t you?”

Surit’s head jerked up.

The central group of officers had grown louder and louder. By this point they’d shoved the couches aside to make room for an enormous game board that someone had generated, hovering three feet above the floor and glowing. The owner of the restaurant looked on with wary tolerance. Surit made a mental note to check if officers regularly covered damages here.

Tennal stood at the head of the board, one arm stretched out, looking insufferably smug.

Surit knew this space-battle game. It should have tiny clusters of holographic spaceships crawling across the board like grains of rice. Instead, under Tennal’s hand, a whole swarm of game pieces boiled up like locusts. Their tiny guns went off in a miniature firework display. Tennal had apparently not only won, but annihilated everyone. He’d said they needed a distraction: he’d certainly managed to get everyone’s attention.

There was no way he’d done that under the legal rules of the game. The board shouldn’t even generate that many ships.

The rest of the party knew that as well as Surit did. There were yells of protest, and the player next to Tennal hammered on his arm. As Surit made his way over, though, he realized that wasn’t all that was going on.

Tennal brought his other hand up in a beckoning motion, as if saying, Come on, try me. In between the raucous shouts of cheater! Surit saw a few members of the group concentrating, and the small twitching movements Tennal made as he shrugged something off.

Tennal was daring the others to write him. They were trying.

Surit didn’t have time to react before Captain Fari—the aide who kept shadowing them—turned around and spotted him. “Here’s your sync, Halkana,” Fari said. “Let’s see him try writing you.”

“Oh, leave Yeni alone,” Tennal said.

“No, no, let’s have it out.” It sounded pleasant, but there was a note of annoyance under it. There were shouts of support. Tennal was good at riling people up, less good at recovering the situation. “Your defenses are so good that no one can write you, are they? I can’t wait to see what happens when someone tries it through your sync.”

Tennal glanced over his shoulder.

Surit recognized the glint in Tennal’s eye as the relentlessness of a rising tide. By now, Surit knew what it looked like when things were about to escalate, because that was what Tennal did every time.

Surit tried to divert it. “That won’t be—”