There was a right thing to do and Surit knew what it was.

His and Tennal’s minds were tangled irretrievably. But Surit knew how to recognize the parts of Tennal’s presence now. He had pulled every part of it out of the void, separated it from his own mind, and helped Tennal rebuild himself like cracked pottery. The sync was a mess, but like puzzle pieces of two colors, Surit now knew which piece was which.

Tentatively at first, then with increasing momentum, he went methodically through his mind—through the ocean inside it, the submerged timbers and bits of flotsam that had once been a house—and tagged each current as him and not him. Even with Surit’s new knowledge and his talent for memory, holding that many pieces of information at once stretched his abilities to the utmost. But he could do it.

He got off the bed and shrugged on his tunic. The twinge of mild pain from the capper rash wiped out a whole swathe of his mental tagging. Surit had to pause with his hand on the bunk, concentrating hard, to redo the pieces he’d lost. It felt like he was holding a stack of glass vases in his head, as if one wrong move would see them smashed on the floor.

He walked, very carefully, to their old, empty shuttle, where the retrieval tugs had once launched.

As he stepped up to the closed door of a retrieval tug, he carved off a tiny fraction of his attention to authorize the tug’s departure. The alert wouldn’t reach anyone: on a fully crewed ship, some bored ranker would be monitoring this, but the Note’s skeleton crew barely had enough people to monitor life support. The door opened. Surit climbed into the pilot’s chair.

In his head, he had drawn a bright line between parts he knew as Tennal and parts he knew as himself. He wasn’t interfering with them, and Tennal couldn’t tell what he was doing. Keeping them all in place was like spinning a thousand plates at once. In the dark space of their minds, he could see all the parts of him and Tennal threaded through with a shining net of connective tissue, like the invisible lines of gravity that connected the stars.

Surit sealed the tug and used its systems to send an order to Basavi: continue course. He marked it as low priority and put it in the bottom of the command queue.

For the last time as the lieutenant of a Cavalry ship, Surit gave a console the command to launch a tug. The vacuum hissed as the corridor sealed behind him. There were no windows. The only sign he was ejecting into space was the clanking movement of the tug around him and the gentle acceleration as he eased out of the bright cocoon of the Fractal Note and into the cold, star-strewn dark.