Surit stiffened, offended. That was better. “There won’t be another chance,” Tennal said. “The army’s not fair. Nothing’s fair. If you let me walk out of this room without syncing, your career is over, you’re heading to detention, and then they’ll discharge you back to your village to dig ditches for the rest of your life. I don’t fucking care. I don’t have any good options. You only have one.” Surit was going to abandon him anyway. Tennal had always wanted to get the worst over with quickly—it was easier when he courted the worst-case scenario, flirted with it, threw himself into it. He felt like the wick of a candle on the wild edge of flickering out. “Do it. Sync us, you conscientious, rule-spouting fucker. Because I’m walking out of this room one day either way, and your time is running out.”

Surit flinched at every sentence. Tennal was used to working people into a rage. It was a shitty way of doing things, to press every button until someone was so furious they couldn’t hide anything from him, but it was what Tennal was good at.

But Surit wasn’t in a rage. Something behind his eyes hardened with every shot Tennal fired, like carbon compacting under pressure. Tennal couldn’t break it, and he didn’t understand it. He didn’t understand, either, when Surit pressed his lips together and said, “We’re both walking out of here.” And before Tennal could take a breath for another salvo, Surit said, like a carefully placed missile, “Fake it.”

Tennal lost all his tactical high ground. His mind went blank. “What?”

“Fake that you’ve been synced so we can leave,” Surit said. “What does a sync look like to other people?”

What did it look like? Syncs were reserved for hushed stories from old veterans, most of whom Tennal would bet had never met a synced reader, or for wildly inaccurate war films. Somehow Tennal doubted you started radiating ominous background music when you synced. On the other hand, a sync had to be something like enhancers, and nobody had been able to tell Tennal was on enhancers when they’d passed him in the street.

Tennal felt light-headed. Everything took on the clarity of total exhaustion. Surit might not be an ally, but even the prospect of someone who didn’t want him brainwashed was firing some neurons that the last few days had paralyzed. “I don’t have the faintest idea what it looks like. Do you?”

Surit shook his head, looking taken aback, as if he’d been sure that Tennal would know. But why should Tennal know? The army hadn’t sat him down with an instructional video.