They followed the emergency lighting. Not all the accesses were still turned on: they found unpowered doors, sullen and unlit. As they walked deeper into the station, their footsteps ringing out on the metal flooring, they passed old, discolored wall displays, blank and dead. Some of the plastic panels were cracked. In one corridor they turned into, even the emergency lights were broken, and they both stopped to listen for the awful hiss of escaping atmosphere.

“Clear,” Basavi said after a moment.

“Is it?” Tennal muttered, which wasn’t an approved military response, as they felt their way through the darkness.

They hit several dead ends. Tennal got Basavi to show him how the manual releases for doors worked and tried every single one that had atmosphere. That led them to an emergency staircase and another level.

This was supposed to be a laboratory, but the part they were in didn’t look like one. A couple of the doors stood open, as if the main power had gone off unexpectedly during evacuation. Through them, Tennal could see … beds. Personal lockers. All abandoned.

On the third level, they heard the occupants.

Basavi and Tennal stepped out into a sudden eye-scrunching brightness. This was a working floor: doors had standard lock/unlock lights over them. There was a rumble of voices a few rooms away. As Tennal looked at the camera eyes in the ceiling, the distant conversation stopped with a suddenness that made the back of his neck prickle.

At the same moment, the door at the end of the corridor switched to UNLOCK.

“Well,” Basavi said, after a moment.

“I never turn down an invitation,” Tennal said. “And, coincidentally, I really don’t like being played with.” He strode down the corridor, ignoring the churning in his stomach, the unsteadiness of his feet, and the way his mind still felt like a viciously pruned rosebush. He was going to find out what was going on if it killed him.

The door opened into what looked like an anteroom. Tennal caught sight of a silhouette through frosted glass that sent all his false bravery scurrying back into the pit it had come from. “Basavi,” he said, in a voice that sounded very strange, “could you wait out here?”

Basavi took one look at his face, nodded, and drew her capper.

Tennal stepped into the wide bay. In the middle of a nest of medical equipment, from an ambulance chair, a small silhouette of a woman looked up with a glint in her eye like the end of a burn gun.

His aunt said, “I rather thought I’d hear from Zinyary first. But I see you’re the element of chaos as usual, Tennalhin.”

“Legislator Yasanin,” Tennal said. “And here I fucking wondered where I got it from.”

PART FIVE

CHAPTER 29

The legislator of the Orshan sector was not dead, but it looked like it had come pretty close.