The only remaining space station was the gracefully rounded shape of Archer Link Station, far off in the distance. It had to be there: Orshan needed a staging post near the galactic link for both spaceships and passengers, so it sat out of reach of the currents, some way from where the fleet gathered. It was too small to see from here, but most Orshans knew its distinctive stacked discs, like a spinning top gently rotating in the void.

The wheeling ships took care to stay far out of range. They had their sights set on a particular abandoned facility, and nobody wanted the complication of alerting Archer Division.

In the middle of all this, the Fractal Note eased into the waiting fleet. It stood out, with its seven troop decks and bristling shuttle berths—the largest ship present, though large meant nothing this near chaotic space, where every ship was a speck of grain against the unimaginable scale of the universe. It took its place amid a hail of polite comms salutes to its commander. The flagship was here. The mission could commence.

None of these polite exchanges made it down to the level of its dormitories, or to the ship’s insubordinate reader and its single, conflicted Rank One architect.

Surit woke up angry. He had been angry through the rest of the night, long after Tennalhin had finally fallen asleep with the rag-doll stillness of the truly exhausted, and meditating hadn’t helped. Surit wasn’t owed explanations from anyone, he knew that. He wasn’t owed the army’s reasoning, or a statement about what they’d planned for Tennalhin, or any information about his own mission, but part of him still wanted to shake all of those out of anyone up to and including his division command. It was unthinkable to push for an explanation from Tennalhin himself, who was a mess of cracks apparently patched together with bent tacks and recalcitrance. He shouldn’t be in the army, let alone conscripted into a sync.

Surit had known, when he joined the army, that he wouldn’t have a lot of choice about what he did. He’d just thought it would get easier after academy and its hothouse of status connections and public exam results, not more complicated. He’d been prepared to work hard to make captain, harder than people with a high birth class might have to, but he hadn’t been prepared for this sort of morass.

He realized, at that moment, that he’d been thinking of those elite, well-connected cadets as coming from families like Tennalhin Halkana’s.

Tennalhin looked peaceful when he was asleep, if you ignored the shadows under his eyes. It was so much better than the glassy-eyed stares he’d been giving the ceiling the past two days that when Surit woke, after an hour of sleep, he left Tennalhin to rest.