Surit’s dishonorable discharge paperwork came through surprisingly fast.

He was excluded from the afternoon session of the inquest, as was most of the previous audience. Surit didn’t mind. He went back to the barracks and spent the afternoon signing statements and military release forms.

He didn’t know where Tennal was. Before he’d left the halls, a politician’s aide had delicately asked about the sync then drawn him aside and murmured, “I wouldn’t contact him before he goes to the Resolution; the less neuromodified he seems, the better.”

Surit had said, “Is that right?”

The rest of the day was a blur. Several officers tried to stop Surit from being discharged. Someone very senior in Cavalry Division came to glare at him and urge him to think very carefully about what he was doing. This barely registered; Surit fixed his gaze on the barracks wall behind the officer and thought about the lunch he’d missed.

He spent his spare time writing up a promotion recommendation for Basavi. He was leaving behind good people. The thought wasn’t enough to stop him.

At one point his collection of forms was tagged HOLD PENDING COURT-MARTIAL, and Surit guessed it wasn’t going to go through. But later on, the tag disappeared, and magically, five minutes later, his notice period was waived, and he was cleared to go.

Surit wondered whom he had to thank for that.

And without further ceremony, the barracks spat him out into the pale gold of the summer street in a set of machine-extruded civvies, the remains of his personal possessions in a bag over his back. Surit had always been a soldier, and now he wasn’t.

He felt incredible.

It was early afternoon. The sun filtered through a haze in the sky. His body felt home in a way spacefarers only felt when they came back to the atmosphere they grew up in: the city was strange to him, but the gravity and the breeze were right. The atmospheric pressure cradled him like a cocoon. Above him there was weather, not just ventilation but the massive weight of several billion tons of air across thousands of miles of planet. The smell of fried dough wafted from a nearby food cart. The street was busy, and barely anyone was in uniform at all.

Surit wandered aimlessly down a tree-lined avenue and into a park. There was so much of the day left. For the first time in years, his mental to-do list was gloriously blank.

In the back of his mind, he was waiting.

It took him about half a lap of the park to decide that a break was pleasant, but it had gone on long enough, and to start filling his to-do list again. He didn’t have a purpose. Maybe he’d never had one. But Surit could always find things to do.