“No,” Tennal said. He wasn’t really ill, and by now everyone on the ship would know the commander had slapped him down. They’d think Tennal was sulking if he suddenly claimed he was ill. A medic would either laugh at him or sedate him.

Surit took an obvious moment to keep his voice calm. “Then what do you suggest? I know you don’t like me, and I know the situation is difficult, but if you’re going to play games with your own health—”

Tennal started laughing, which was a mistake. It came out ugly, each breath more violent than the last, and once he started, it was difficult to stop. He covered his face with his hands. “Fuck this,” he said. The inside of his head was an awful void. “I know what you’re doing. And you win, understand? You win.”

“I—what?” Surit said.

“I can’t take any more of this.” Tennal had lost control of his mouth; the words spilled out before they’d even formed in his head. “Put me out of my fucking misery. Sync.”

The way Surit stood still was something more than an absence of motion. Tennal’s hands clenched in the sickening silence before Surit finally said, “We have a misunderstanding. When I said I wouldn’t sync you until you asked, this wasn’t what I meant.”

Tennal’s mouth tasted like bile. Surit wanted more than a brief crack. There was nothing to stop him from stringing this out for weeks until he realized he was never going to get an easier version of the reader on the other end of it. Tennal curled his nails into the edge of the bed he was sitting on and said savagely, “Please.”

Surit blinked. The tiny movement broke his blank expression, and he raised a defensive hand, looking almost disturbed. “I don’t—” He looked at his hand as if he hadn’t seen it before, then pulled out the desk chair and sat down hard. “I think I haven’t been clear.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Tennal said bitterly. “This is as much as you’re going to get. Just take it.”

Surit spoke over Tennal as if he hadn’t heard. “I thought I was taking an assignment to sync with a volunteer,” he said. “I assumed you were a citizen who’d applied for a career in the army because you wanted to use your reader skills for piloting. I thought you were trained and briefed and had joined to protect the social contract.”

Even in the dark groove Tennal’s mind was running in, he took a moment to be incredulous at this. “Is that what you joined up to do?”