“No you don’t,” Surit said. “You were forgetting details. You couldn’t process more than one person speaking at once. If you can think on that level when you’re chemically altered, you’ll think twice as effectively when you’re not. I know you don’t answer to me, but I strongly advise you to ask the medics for a withdrawal shot and break that habit.”

The doors started to open on the cabin level. “To hell with that,” Tennal said, nettled. “Last time I got one of those, they slipped in a priming shot. Fuck if I let someone near me with a needle again.”

“A priming—” Surit said, looking bemused, as if he’d never heard the word. To be fair, whatever the medics had used for priming might have been in the scanners instead of the shots. “To do what?”

Tennal didn’t have to hand Surit that information if he hadn’t worked it out. He pushed past Surit to the door.

Surit put out a hand and grabbed Tennal’s arm as he passed. A glimmer of light brushed Tennal’s mind, something like a write command but much more distant, faint, and unfamiliar, like the light from a new star. It touched the itch in the back of his head—the priming—like the sun lighting up a vein of crystal. The refractions sent a shudder straight through Tennal’s brain. He jerked his arm violently out of Surit’s grip.

“They’ve taken down your defenses.” The mental touch withdrew. Surit sounded blank, so blank that Tennal wasn’t expecting it when he said, “That’s barbarous.”

Tennal swallowed in shock. The elevator doors beeped a protest, unable to shut. “Welcome to the military,” he said. “Is this your first day?” He pushed himself away from the wall and started down the corridor to put distance between them. Both their wristbands pinged at the same time: a troop muster. Tennal didn’t plan to attend, but he knew why it was there. He had been counting down the days to the new threat. “Isn’t your fleet commander due to board today?” he said over his shoulder. “Don’t you have some shoes to shine?”

CHAPTER 7

Surit couldn’t get the sound out of his head as he reported to the bridge: Tennalhin’s bitter, casual voice saying, They slipped in a priming shot. As if what they’d done to him were a minor indignity and not viscerally shocking, not a crime. But was it a crime if the army had done it? Had they planned this? Surit couldn’t believe they’d genuinely meant him to sync with an unwilling civilian—an unwilling civilian who was also the nephew of the Orshan legislator. But it disturbed him more than he could articulate that he felt he could have made them sync, could have fallen into Tennalhin’s orbit and Tennalhin into his, like they were mirrored binary planets—