“I bet nobody on this ship knows either,” Tennal said. The thoughts running through his brain felt so electric that he could almost taste them. “There aren’t many readers. What if we kept faking it? What if we faked it for the whole mission?”

Surit placed a hand flat on the desk in front of him. Tennal could have reached out and traced the line of solid tension across his arm muscles and all the way back to his shoulders. “That will be weeks,” Surit said. “We’ll need to keep it consistent. We don’t have a lot of data.”

Tennal dismissed their collective lack of knowledge with a wave of his hand. “We know you should be able to write me without any effort. You can fake the writing—we’ll work out some signals. Or if you’re strong enough to really write me and pretend it’s easy, you can do that.” He pushed to his feet. “I know what being written feels like. I can put on a show. And after that, it’s only convincing them you have me under control, isn’t it? We can act that out, no problem. I’ll shine my emblems and stop insulting the commander. I’ll be a fucking model recruit. It’s only until I can escape. This will work,” he said, tasting the words in pure shock. “This will work. We can do this.”

There was a yawning silence. Tennal stopped.

He recognized that silence. The problem was always this: there was too much of Tennal. There was too much of him for his own head, too much for other people, too much to let him settle into any respectable niche in society. Certainly too much of him for Surit.

It was a bad enough feeling that he almost avoided looking at Surit. But when he did, he got something he wasn’t expecting. Through Surit’s inscrutable expression, Tennal thought he could feel a crack—just a tiny crack—in Surit’s defenses. Surit was totally focused on him. Behind that focus, Tennal didn’t sense caution, or bafflement, or anything Tennal usually engendered. Instead there was a single glimpse of clockwork arranging itself around Tennal’s quick-fire ideas, of a vast, immovable will bending itself to a purpose. Something that never let itself be stopped. Something that could meet Tennal and not be knocked off course.

Tennal would not admit he had stopped breathing for an instant.

“Yes,” Surit said at last. That was it. Yes. No bargaining, no equivocation, no price.

Tennal still had the self-destructive urge to push him harder. There must be a catch somewhere—or, no, he was lying to himself. Tennal pushed because there was too much of him in his own skin, and the energy had to go somewhere. He felt himself open his mouth to ruin it.