“Yes. Yes. Again, thank you. You’ve perfectly encapsulated what I’ve been feeling about my life for the last year.”

“I aim to please, ma’am.”

“You have,” the emperox assured him. “So far, this may be my favorite confidential meeting I’ve had to date.” She smiled again, and cocked her head. “And this is why I’m sad that now we have to ruin it by talking about the end of civilization.”

Marce nodded. “So, you know.”

“You didn’t assume that I granted you this audience because I am in the habit of welcoming minor nobility, did you, Lord Marce? I mean, no offense.”

“None taken,” Marce said. “I just didn’t know what you knew and how much I would have to explain to you.”

“You may assume that I know as much as my father did about what your father was up to on End, why he was sent, and what the implications of his research are.”

“All right.”

“So now that we have that out of the way, my first question: Are the Flow streams going to collapse?”

“Yes.”

The emperox let out a heavy breath. “When?”

“It’s already begun. We estimate the Flow stream from End to Hub has already collapsed. The Yes, Sir, the ship I was on, was probably the last ship to make it through.”

“How will we know if that’s correct?”

“When other ships scheduled to arrive at Hub don’t arrive, you’ll know.”

“Ships are often delayed in their departures and therefore their arrivals.”

Marce nodded. “It’ll be a couple of weeks at least before people begin to notice that ships are missing. Even then they’re likely to blame it on something else.”

“Like that civil war of yours.”

“It’s not my civil war,” Marce snorted, and then remembered who he was talking to. “Ma’am.”

The emperox ignored it. “Is there any way to use the collapse of this Flow stream? The one from End to here?”

“I can present the work and show the math behind it,” Marce said. “But I’m going to warn you ahead of time that anyone who isn’t already a Flow physicist isn’t going to follow it at all, and even then they will argue what it means. It will take time for them to go through my father’s work and his prediction model. But by then it won’t matter.”

“Because more Flow streams will have collapsed, and that will be the evidence.”

Marce nodded again. “Right.”

“You said you knew that the Flow stream from End to Hub has already collapsed.”

“It’s very likely, yes.”

“So you can predict the collapses.”

“We can give you probabilities on which ones are going to collapse and when. It’s not predicting. It’s looking at the data and offering the most probable outcomes.”

“Do you know which one is going to collapse next? I mean, which one is likeliest?”