Item: The Fractal Note was prepared and ready to launch. Oma’s soldiers might not have noticed that. If his first-class rankers hadn’t been arrested themselves, they could still get everyone else out. A unit like Retrieval Two was too unimportant for Archer to bother with much, as long as they were quick and quiet. Most of them would be both of those.

Item: Tennal had escaped. By now he might be halfway across the galaxy.

Surit stopped making the list and stared blankly ahead.

And Surit was in detention indefinitely, charged with aiding the ex-governor. He was a pawn in the middle of a coup. Not an important pawn, even, just one who’d failed to escape back to the right side.

Right side rang oddly in his head.

Surit thought, for the first time: if he were Governor Oma, there was no way he would let Tennal leave through the link.

He looked up as the door opened.

“Wait outside,” a familiar voice said. “I want to ask him something.”

“Sir—”

“Do it,” Tennal said. His voice cracked in a way Surit had never heard before.

Surit stood and said, “Tennal—”

The cell was cold, but sweat prickled at Tennal’s hairline as he stepped in. The first thing he did was turn to slam the close-door button and lock it with his emergency key, leaving his poor, bereft aide outside.

An alarm started overhead. Tennal hadn’t set off one of those for a while.

He turned back with a feverish energy. “Surit! Hope they’ve been treating you well. Oma wants to brainwash you. I’m going to guess now that the alarm’s gone off, we have thirty seconds.”

Surit was on his feet, facing the door like a wrestler squaring up for a match. “Explain.”

“It’s the sync,” Tennal said. “Oma’s brainwashing works like a sync. She can’t do it if you’re already synced, and she didn’t try and brainwash you because she thought you were.”

Surit’s expression changed. “She found out our sync was fake?”

“I screwed up. I let her find out. Twenty seconds. Surit—” Tennal frantically met Surit’s eyes.

Even in a crisis, Surit stood planted in the middle of the cell like an oak tree; quiet, assured, clear brown eyes fixed on Tennal as if absorbing every wild thing Tennal said. When he’d first met Surit, Tennal had taken that as arrogance. Now he knew this was just Surit existing. Surit ready to roll himself like a boulder into the path of anything he thought was wrong. Surit trusting him implicitly.

Surit had always treated Tennal like he could be trusted as much as Surit himself. Surit didn’t seem to have noticed that bar was so fucking high, Tennal could only reach it by setting it on fire. Tennal could hardly breathe.

“Last idea,” Tennal said. “It’s one sync or the other.”