“The stairs too—”

“Fucking Cavalry—”

Surit was no longer the biggest threat. Hands grabbed him. He couldn’t force his limbs to move. He just lay there like a rag doll, you failed circling in his head.

He was dragged through a door, through a service corridor. His handlers didn’t speak. Then the space was suddenly quiet, and someone shut the door, and a voice he recognized said, “We lost them—Guidance Lights, he looks half-dead.”

Something in Surit’s brain clicked. He knew the hand helping him up. He knew the crackle of energy in front of him.

“Hi,” said Tennal.

Tennal, the other half of Surit.

Tennal had the temerity to grin—uncertain, wary, but triumphant. “I thought we’d screwed up rescuing you, but it looks like we’re actually great at this.”

The stubborn core of Surit that had always relied entirely on himself gave up its grip. And the rest of him, which had hoped beyond thought and beyond reason, took over.

“You’re late,” he said, and collapsed on Tennal.

CHAPTER 31

In the end, a moment was all it took.

Tennal’s mind flowed into Surit’s, knitting back together the indefinable wounds all at once. Their first sync had been like a tempest; this one was the confluence of two rivers. The shape of Tennal’s mind around his was so familiar, Surit could have wept. It was like breathing oxygen for the first time in weeks.

The pain in his head disappeared. Surit could think and move and balance on his own feet again. He rested his hands on Tennal’s shoulders to push himself upright. They were in some kind of office; Surit didn’t care. Tennal stood there. Tennal, with his sharp eyes boring into Surit and his bony shoulders under Surit’s hands, his whole body a lightning strike caught in motion, his face pale from tiredness but vital and alive. He had made it across uncounted miles of space into enemy territory to find Surit. And he’d given up his mind a second time to keep Surit alive.

Surit was struck, confounded, by the immovable way he loved him.

Like no other thought he’d had, that almost caused a rift—Tennal’s mind didn’t understand; it slid from the notion like oil from water. But Tennal wasn’t done. He rested his forehead against Surit’s, his eyes green and close and his breath on Surit’s face, and said, “Hey, Surit. Don’t ever do that again.”

Surit kissed him.