As the last of Surit’s powers drained out, he fell away from Tennal and drifted, unmoored. He had nothing left. Surit came apart.

He lost all sense of time; the moments of his end stretched out, oddly gentle, to eternity. Tennal had not yet noticed Surit was gone. Or perhaps he had—a handful of seconds ago or a thousand years ago. The currents Surit sank into measured time in the deaths of galaxies.

As Surit bled out, exhausted, into the cosmos, the flow of time warped for him. He felt stars change and disappear. He saw the link grow out of nothing, and shrink, and stabilize. He saw other links open, like the pulse of the universe. And, in the final moments, he saw a procession of beings like him, a great congregation, vast and solemn and utterly beyond comprehension. He saw their ghosts disappear into the link: a death, a withdrawing. The same link that humanity used to go from a single point to a single point, like children skipping rocks.

Surit—Surit! Don’t you fucking dare!

He knew that voice. Surit struggled to remember—humanity. Tennal. Marit.

It was over.

Blaze of glory, Surit thought at Tennal, and went dark.

Head. Check. Limbs—all there, check. Lungs and heart. Spinal cord—two? No, just one. Check.

Where the fuck was his spleen? Oh, there.

Tennal lay on the plush carpet of his aunt’s office, with—against all odds—nobody inside his head but himself.

It was so quiet.

He levered himself up in the deathly hush. His limbs felt filled with sawdust. He could almost imagine he was nine and playing hide-and-seek in here with Zin, until he saw it: Oma’s body, slumped forward on the antique wood of the legislator’s desk. Her eyes were glassy and unseeing. She wasn’t breathing.

Fuck, Tennal thought. She looked beyond help, but surely they had to try: Medical?

There was no echo of someone else hearing him. Tennal turned his head.

He remembered the last few moments of the fight at the same instant as he saw Surit’s body crumpled in front of the desk.

As if in a dream, Tennal saw himself dropping to his knees beside Surit, grabbing his shoulders, shaking him. Tennal knew his own lungs had worked a minute ago, so why had they stopped now? He could only take short snatches of breath. Surit, he said. Surit.

No answer. Of course.

But Surit wasn’t gone. Unlike Oma, Tennal could feel a trace of him still in there. As Tennal dived in, chasing the thread through Surit’s quiescent mind, he realized Surit wasn’t just in here: he was somewhere else. He was spread across the sector, drifting and dissipating. Like Tennal had done to himself before, but a thousand times farther.

If the universe wasn’t going to give Surit back, Tennal would bloody well take him.