The bed moved as the architect from last night climbed out. Tennal made a wordless noise and unstuck his eyelids. The man didn’t say anything to him but started to pull on a set of clothes folded beside the bed: expensive cuts and fabrics, plus an encrypted pod comm on a flashy lace-gold chain. Tennal should probably have memorized his name.

“You look like shit, sweetie,” the boss said. “I’ve got a call to take care of. You go have a shower.” He put an architect’s command behind shower, a mental flare of light, but it brushed past Tennal like a breeze sliding against glass.

A familiar disappointment settled over Tennal. He’d popped some neuro-enhancer tablets last night to bring down his defenses, but the effect had worn off. “Yeah, yeah. You going to bring me breakfast first?”

The boss chuckled. “Y’know, most readers who do jobs for me have more tact. I wouldn’t even believe you were one if I hadn’t seen you party. Later.”

Tennal levered himself up on his elbows as the architect disappeared. The sun was well above the horizon. Light stabbed in through the penthouse’s glass roof: it looked like nobody had remembered to set it to opaque the night before. Sanura’s morning skyline gleamed.

Tennal felt like death. There was a tab of soothers on the bedside table that had survived the night; he absently popped one of them out. Soothers didn’t interfere with your thinking, only provided a mild buzz that took the edge off the world. Tennal wondered what time it was.

A few moments’ searching located his wristband under the bed. It blinked error lights as he fished it out; he’d had someone butcher it a few months ago to take out any function the legislator might use to locate him. Not that Tennal was the legislator’s top concern, of course, but the more effort required to retrieve him, the less likely she’d bother. It made his wristband into more of a glorified timepiece than anything useful for—

The wristband pinged. Tennal dropped it.

He stared at it as it continued to ping softly on the floor. It shouldn’t be able to do that. All the comm functions were cut off. A thread of terror coursed down his spine, setting off a wave of adrenaline. He crouched beside the wristband and picked it up.

The projection that spilled out of it wasn’t a comm. Tennal suppressed the adrenaline-fueled part of him that had perversely wanted it to be a comm and investigated further. It looked like he hadn’t totally disabled the scheduling functions, even though he hadn’t used them for months. A spinning graphic was trying to remind him that his sibling had some sort of event scheduled. He’d set a reminder for it back when he was still taking comms. Her commencement ceremony for Legal academy.