He activated the tug’s comms. Possibility prickled in his veins. Tennal had never been free to do as he chose the whole time Surit knew him, and yet Tennal was the least circumscribed person Surit had ever met. Surit understood that now. The freedom to do something gloriously unwise. The freedom to be a firework in a munitions dump.

A query came over the voice channel. They hadn’t expected him to activate the comms. They’d expected him to be taken prisoner.

Surit gathered the unraveling strings of his mind, concentrated to keep his thoughts together, and opened the voice channel.

“Lieutenant Surit Yeni, Cavalry Division,” Surit said. “I’d like to see Governor Oma.”

CHAPTER 28

—need him conscious—

—treatment half-finished, don’t you dare—

—higher sedative dose, he has a tolerance—

—give him time. You’re lucky he’s not dead.

Tennal woke in the sterile surroundings of Medical with a hole in the fabric of himself.

It felt like he had been bleeding out for days, though he couldn’t feel a wound. Surit was gone. Tennal was stuck in a bed with—he cataloged swiftly—a drip, some standard monitors, and two scanning bars in a precise tent over his head. The bars were heavy and white, like square metal arms. They gave Tennal a buzzing sensation in his back teeth.

Tennal should’ve probably let whatever treatment this was finish. But Tennal had gone to the ends of the earth and the far reaches of outer space to avoid being picked over by concerned people in military medic uniforms, and even when the rest of his mind was bobbing like a fishing lure in a whirlpool, he was very clear on one thing: fuck this.

Tennal swung the bars aside—the buzzing stopped—and sat up. He’d been on drips before after too many experiments with drugs; this one was just hydration, a preventative measure, so Tennal nicked it out and stole some tape to put pressure on the scratch. He felt Surit’s absence like a wound, like someone had sliced Tennal’s mind in half. But the wound had been cauterized. Tennal knew without thinking that he was going to survive—more than that, he was going to be fine, even if his brain felt like someone had freshly irradiated it. He even had Surit’s old thought patterns. He didn’t know what the scanner had done, but his reading abilities had desperately latched on to the vestiges of Surit and taken the dregs of his powers as Tennal’s own.

The medic had told them the truth. Tennal could see how to write now.

Tennal knew instinctively he’d never be that good at writing because it took some sort of energy Tennal didn’t have, but by the same alien instinct, he knew it was just the opposite side of the reading coin, like someone had taken his head and gently turned it around to a new angle.