“Why aren’t they moving?” Pisces asked.

“They’re up to something,” Caledonia answered. But what, exactly, was a mystery. One that left an uneasy storm turning in her gut.

When they’d nearly reached Silver Fleet, Caledonia called an all stop. Almost as soon as she had, a voice came over the radio.

“Uh, Captain.” Harwell looked up from his station, face paler than usual. “They want us to surrender.”

Nettle scoffed, bouncing on her toes like she might take a swing if anyone got too close. “Surrender?! This isn’t our surrender face, you brine-blooded bloat fish!”

“Quiet.” Oran’s command was both soft and unyielding.

Caledonia took the receiver. “This is Captain Caledonia Styx. I’ve come to speak with Fiveson Tassos.”

“The commander has no interest in anything other than your surrender, girl.” The voice that spoke was gnarled.

Pisces made a noise that landed somewhere between a growl and a grunt.

“Oran,” Caledonia said, bringing him near with the implied command. There was no time to waste on pride. The faster she got Tassos in front of her, the better.

Oran took the receiver, his fingers curling briefly against her palm. Wetting his lips, Oran turned his eyes on Caledonia and pressed the button. “Tell Tassos that Fiveson Oran wants to talk.”

The title sent a chill around the room, and Caledonia saw the way speaking it aloud changed Oran himself. It was a subtle shift, so small that she might have been the only one to see it. The cord of tension that pulled taut across his shoulders, the slight squaring of his jaw, the way his breath turned intentionally deep and slow. These were all marks of the Fiveson, every terrible decision and act he’d ever perpetrated etched so thoroughly into his bones that he would never be just Oran.

Once more, Caledonia was asking him to resurrect the past. Forcing him to inhabit the person he was trying so diligently to escape. And every time she did, guilt left another slice in her heart.

She wished there was any other way. But more and more, the truth of the matter was becoming clear: if they wanted to change the world, they’d have to embrace the changes the world had forced upon them.

Silence stretched through the cabin. The radio was dead in Oran’s hands, and the ships before them kept their guns trained on Caledonia’s fleet. Then the radio clicked and the room snapped together around the sounds of a voice as rough as a stone shearing into gravel.

“Steelhand.”

A faraway pain flashed through the tree-ring layers of Oran’s brown eyes. Caledonia wanted to reach across the small distance between them, to soothe him and encourage him, but she needed his heart jagged like the serrated edge of a knife.

“Tassos.” Oran’s voice was flat.