He felt Surit in his mind, looking at the disordered remains of what had been Tennal. Tennal had expected dismay, but that wasn’t what he got. Instead Surit circled thoughtfully around his mind in that quiet, determined way that said Surit thought he knew what he was doing.

Stay there, Surit said.

Tennal had forced his eyes open, but he couldn’t see past the void in his mind. He was exhausted. Like a rat in a maze, you could try every Lights-lost method at your disposal to escape yourself and even make up new ones unknown to science, and you would still end up here, with the fractured pieces of yourself, alone, with no escape and with an even steeper hill to climb. It was staggeringly unfair.

Only, this time, he wasn’t alone.

He said, Surit, I fucked up.

There was a thoughtful pause, and in that silence—not despairing but busy—Tennal felt like he had hit the ocean floor, and his fall was arrested.

You tried something that didn’t work, Surit said at last. Tennal recognized what Surit was doing, now. He was sifting through the chaos and pulling splinters of Tennal out of his own mind, out of Tennal’s mind, out of the fragmented space around them.

This is you. Surit’s mental voice was strong and assured, and with it came a piece of Tennal.

Tennal saw—

In the middle of the flag chamber, among military types Surit knew well, Tennalhin Halkana sat crackling with energy like an exposed wire. Surit had met him once and now meant to ignore him, but he was impossible to ignore: a barbed comment for every argument, a knife slid into every weak point, an upturned nail in every path. Surit had tried to look away. That hadn’t worked.

He saw—

Tennal, feet up on the seat opposite him, cradling Surit’s stolen tea, sketching an impossible past and an impossible future like picking sweets from a tray. Surit still thought sometimes, What if we’d met in Exana? He hadn’t been able to stop.

Tennal saw himself over and over again. He stalked down the corridors of the Note, lied smoothly to Oma, threw himself behind his captain’s desk on the station, hung over the back of Istara’s chair to argue piloting, took briefings from Basavi, wordlessly turned to Surit. In Surit’s mind, Tennal was both an open flame in a fuel depot and someone Surit could rely on completely. And Surit didn’t seem to see a contradiction.

Surit set the points in Tennal’s mind like stars in the firmament. Tennal had no way to argue.