Surit stopped. That thought had come straight out of his head. As if, on the way to verbalizing it, Tennal had diverted the impulse from the neurons of Surit’s brain to his own tongue.

Surit could almost see how to do the same. But he shouldn’t; that way lay madness. He forced himself to speak aloud. “That would help, if you feel well enough. But don’t do any reader navigation if you can avoid it.” He didn’t have to explain: in their current state, neither of them knew what would happen.

“I won’t.” Tennal gave him a sharp-edged smile. Surit could feel the muscle movements of Tennal smiling, brittle and intricate like sea ice. “Keep the ship together, Lieutenant.”

Surit kept the ship together. He and Basavi hastily worked out how to spread the skeleton crew to keep the Note running, and the resulting chaos kept Surit on his feet for a double shift and half a third one. When the night cycle bled into its fifth hour, and Surit was frowning over a fuel report with bleary eyes and a cup of coffee, Tennal leaned over his shoulder and said, “That’s not how you take your coffee.”

“What?”

“You’ve put in enough milk powder to clog a drain. That’s how I take my coffee,” Tennal said. He picked up the cup and examined it. “You take it black.” The smell was sweeter than it should be, now that Surit came to think of it, but another whisper told him he’d always had coffee that way.

It was like seeing double on the inside of his own brain. Surit pressed his hands to the sides of his head.

“Get some sleep, for Lights’ sake,” Tennal said. “You’re not a machine.”

“Ah,” Surit said blankly. His eyes felt sandy. “Yes.”

“Did you even assign yourself a bed?” Tennal said.

Surit brought up the ship plan on his wristband and frowned at it, his thoughts moving slowly. It hadn’t seemed necessary. Anyway, they had hundreds of empty crew quarters. Surit found a ranker’s bunk in the nearest dormitory and assigned it to himself.

“Really?” Tennal said. “Suit yourself, I suppose.” He leaned over and prodded his finger at the light-screen. “I’m a petty bastard, so I’ll take the commander’s old cabin. See you in six hours.”

Surit was so tired that he should have fallen unconscious as soon as he hit the familiar regulation-thin mattress. But he couldn’t. He rolled in the bed, tried the cover on and off, wondered if he was ill.

What he had thought was generalized stress coalesced into one specific ache: he was missing something. Something should be there and wasn’t, like an amputated limb.

This was self-indulgent and ridiculous. Surit put the pillow over his head and pressed his forehead to the mattress. He could go a night without sleep if he had to.