“Noted,” Bel said. Her eyes followed Jainan curiously.

Jainan hadn’t remembered to close the door. As Kiem moved to fix that, he could see the screen inside already lighting up with a connection. A face flickered into view: the Thean noblewoman who had upbraided Kiem the morning of his wedding. Now her expression was softer, more shocked than anything else. “I didn’t believe the ID,” she said. “Jainan, why are you calling now? Is everything all right?”

“It’s. Yes,” Jainan said. What Kiem heard in his voice made him reach more hastily for the switch: it felt like more of a violation of Jainan’s privacy for Kiem to overhear that raw, unguarded note than anything Internal Security had done.

“Yes,” Jainan said again, and swallowed audibly as the door started to slide shut and hide him from view. “I’ve missed you.”

CHAPTER 12

It took Kiem all ten days of the next week to nail down Vaile. In the meantime, he sent a series of increasingly exasperated messages to Internal Security and to the military’s Signals HQ, which was supposed to be in charge of log transmission for flybugs like the one Taam had flown. It was like sending messages into a black hole.

Jainan worked on his Imperial College project and accompanied Kiem to events with the same detachment as before. He didn’t volunteer any information about his first conversation with his sister, and Kiem would rather have set his own hair on fire than ask. Jainan didn’t seem to blame him for failing to get an answer about the crash data. Occasionally Kiem caught Jainan watching him with a slight frown, as if Kiem was an unpredictable cog in an otherwise orderly machine.

Some things coaxed Jainan out of his shell. Professor Audel or one of her students seemed to call him every day for animated discussions about their deep-space mining project. And on the day that Vaile returned from orbit again, Kiem found Jainan in the gardens outside with that Thean student, Gairad, who was also part of the Feria clan. Kiem had been trying to figure out clan etiquette from talking to Jainan and the few Theans at the embassy who seemed approachable, as well as reading the occasional memo from Bel, but the whole system of clan relationships took some effort to get your head around.

It looked like some kind of lesson: Gairad held a quarterstaff above her head while Jainan stood in front of her and corrected her grip. His own quarterstaff leaned against a tree a little way away.

“—can’t get it,” Kiem heard her say.

“You will. Try again.” Jainan took up his own staff and turned it crosswise in front of him. “Ten!”

It seemed to be a code word. Gairad spun in the melting snow, brought her hands together on the staff, and swung it at Jainan’s stomach. She obviously had grounding in the techniques, but the strike was slow, and Jainan blocked it easily. “That was better. The farther down you can get your grip, the more