Surit’s first duty was to send an update to the commander on the successful sync, which he did. Then he reported to his assigned morning exercise session. Now more than ever, there was no room for negligence.

The movement of the Fractal Note felt different as they neared chaotic space. It was traveling more slowly, taking the cautious approach any vessel relied on near disturbed space-time. Hit the wrong patch of disturbed space and the navigation would go haywire; hit a really bad cloud and it would rip the hull apart, aging parts of it to dust in seconds. Surit had flown near disturbed space, of course; that was what retrieval units did. But the maelstrom around the galactic link was another order of magnitude.

One of those retrieval shuttles in the new fleet was Surit’s. He had been promised a unit to command. He’d been looking forward to it before all this.

Lights knew what the average unit would make of an officer who was synced to a reader. Surit worried, as well, how his new unit would treat an acknowledged reader. Among civilians, readers were vanishingly rare and under no obligation to disclose their abilities. Once people knew about them, they reacted differently. Surit hadn’t liked the sheen of suspicion and contempt from the commander when he’d dealt with Tennalhin.

On the other hand, this wasn’t just any reader. This was Tennalhin. Lights knew what anyone would make of Tennalhin Halkana.

As Surit was on his way back from exercise, the ship sent out an all-hands ping. At least they would get a briefing. The commander had promised that. Maybe a description of the salvage they were here to find. Surit would give anything to wrestle with a nice, straightforward logistics problem again. Then he remembered he and Tennal would have to fake a sync whenever they were in public and resisted the urge to press his hands over his eyes.

When Surit reached their cabin again, he found Tennalhin fastening a wooden button through his cuffs on a clean uniform, the discarded wrapper of yesterday’s ration pack on the table. He looked better—no, Surit realized, that wasn’t true. Tennalhin still had the pale shadows of exhaustion under his eyes, but you could easily miss it behind the low crackle of energy. He had pinned the Fractal Note’s lance-shaped mark to his collar. The points glittered like needles. He gave Surit a smile that even Surit could see was mechanical. “Sir.”

“No,” Surit said abruptly.

Tennalhin narrowed his eyes at the non sequitur. Surit could see a comment surface before Tennalhin shoved it down again.