“Bullshit.” It comes out closer to a cough than I’d like. “Christs, Andrade. We’re half a ship away from D, and it sounds like it was one of the first hangars to fold. You flew a recovery op into occupied territory.” I try my eyes on him again, once I’m sure I can hold them level. “I was C-SAR, Wolf. I know what it takes to fly like that.”

Andrade subsides. “That machine”—he levels a finger downrange—“is the only one we know of to survive direct, confirmed exposure. I’ve flown against the hollows six times since the Demiurge hit, sent crews out another eight or nine, and that’s the only one. I needed to know why.”

I smirk. “And they didn’t have anything for you.”

He pulls a bitter smile. “Nothing usable. They’re ground crew; all I got was odd sync numbers and a history of acting out.”

“Nothing you didn’t know before.”

“You have that too. A history of acting out, I mean.”

“What can I say? Juno and I have a lot in common.”

“It seems so.” Andrade’s training keeps his features flat, but it’s starting to crack. You can see it in the corners of his eyes. “Add that to what Hail and Salt brought back, and it feels like we don’t have much of anything.”

“So you came to ask me.”

“You’re all I have left.”

I nod and work my way through another mouthful. “What do you want to know?”

“What did you find?”

“Outside?” I’d laugh if it didn’t hurt so much. “The same thing you always find. Dust and wreckage, open air and empty space.”

“And a prison.”

I shake my head. “We found a cell.” I measure the horizon with my spoon. “Everything—this ship, the Eye, the wind—that’s the prison. What we found was a cell.”

“For what?”

“When we found it—nothing.”

Andrade lets himself down carefully. I can see the discomfort, and hear the creaking joints as he folds his legs around him. He’s been on his feet a while, much as he tries to hide it.

“So what do we do?” He nods at the Juno, my other half. “I have one machine that won’t turn on me at the first opportunity, and a handful of jockeys so scared and shellshocked I can barely trust them to fly, let alone fight.”

“You don’t have a plan either.”

He winces at that. “No, we don’t. It was all we could do to survive.”

“Tell me what you do have.”

For half a second, I figure he’s going to hold out on me. Werewolf habits seize him, start spinning lies to fit, but he knows better than that.

“Thirteen shells,” he says. “The unofficial count is thirty to forty, and there are rumours of more outside. I’m not doing anything to make anyone think differently.”