In reality, Jamies, Count Claremont, didn’t give a shit about any of that nonsense. He performed the role of chief imperial auditor well enough, primarily by delegating it to underlings with the admonition that any graft too obvious to be ignored would have to be punished. But that wasn’t why he came to End, or why his friend, the Emperox Attavio VI, had sent him. He had been sent to examine the navigational data of the ships for discrepancies, but not of trade. He was looking for data that backed up his hypothesis, first formulated while he was still an undergraduate at the University of Hubfall, that the Flow streams that defined the Interdependency did not benefit from “robustness through resonance”—the theory that the unusual density and interaction of Flow streams within the Interdependency helped to create a stable waveform within the Flow that would keep those streams open and unchanging for millennia.

Jamies read the math behind the theory and surmised what others didn’t, or did and preferred not to believe: that “robustness through resonance” was data-fudging nonsense, and that the collapse of the Flow streams to Earth and Dalasýsla were precursors, rather than the exceptions that modern Flow theory held them out to be. He said as much to his friend Batrin, the newly crowned Emperox Attavio VI, showed him the data, and warned him that a collapse could happen within the century.

Batrin saw the possibility of validity in the data. He also recognized that it represented a threat to the trade and stability of the Interdependency, and would likely be considered blasphemy by the church. So he did two things for his friend Jamies. First, he bribed him into silence by making him a count. Then he sent him to End, as far as he could be sent in the whole of the Interdependency, and gave him a job that would give him the data he needed to verify or dismiss his hypothesis, and told him to tell no one but him about the work.

Which Jamies did, mostly. First he told his wife, Guice, and then after their twin children Marce and Vrenna were old enough, told them too. He assumed the emperox wouldn’t mind. Guice took the secret to her tragic, early grave. Vrenna kept the secret because she was good at secrets. Marce kept it because once he showed enough interest and aptitude in the physics of the Flow, Jamies relied on him to check his work.

Now, all the years of quiet, methodical data collection and interpretation had paid off. Jamies, Count Claremont, had verified the most important discovery in human experience since the discovery of the Flow itself. If it were known to other scientists, they’d shovel every single possible award they offered onto him.

That is, if the Interdependency were still around for them to do so.

“So it’s true, then,” Vrenna said, to her father and brother. “The Flow is collapsing.”