When they’d come here on his school trip, these had been open. Now there was a security interface.

A security guard—not, interestingly, an Archer trooper, but a civilian—flickered on-screen. “Name and business?”

Surit tried to reach out instinctively, but of course, you couldn’t write someone through a screen. He had to remind his brain of that, as if he hadn’t learned it in primary school. Some deep instinct said space is an illusion, but Surit hesitated and didn’t quite understand.

All right, then. Surit thought back to all the times he’d been on guard duty, stared at the screen, and said nothing.

That was unusual enough behavior to get the guard to swear under her breath and dispatch her colleagues. A few minutes later, three security guards appeared on the other side of the force field, cappers drawn.

Quite sensible. One to challenge him and two to shoot if he turned out to be a threat. It wasn’t as if you could expect a random visitor to be a Rank One architect.

He homed in on the closest. The others, he gave quick commands to—sleep for a bit—and they crumpled, cappers dropping from their hands as they fell.

“Let me in,” Surit said to the last guard. Writing her took another wave of power, more than Surit expected. He was running through his reserves. “I need to see Oma.”

“Legislator Oma?” the guard said, blank-faced. “Oh. Yeah. Of course.”

Surit had no sooner taken two steps past the gate, into the tiled and garlanded inner yard, than he felt the first tickle of pain in the back of his head.

Not now. Not now. He could have screamed in frustration.

If he collapsed here, that was it. He might not have much time before the pain fully developed—but he had to find Oma. He had to. Tennal would have thought of a way around it.

Surit didn’t have Tennal anymore, and the hopelessness of that hit him like an unexpected blow in the ribs. He had accepted everything else. But he would have liked to see his alt-parent one more time. He would have liked to see Tennal. But all there was left was to find Oma, and Surit would do that if it killed him.

“This way, sir,” the guard added, and Surit followed her mindlessly, pressing at the back of his own neck with his fingers as if he could stop the oncoming headache. He didn’t think to question where they were going until the guard input her bios, and Surit realized let me in, in the guard’s brain, had been translated into the security room. Two faces looked up at him from the desks. The occupants of the Codifier Halls security room and Surit stared at each other in mutual incomprehension. Surit recovered first.