On one level, Jainan knew he had been putting off this work because it was more complicated. He moved the file dumps around the desk, trying to make some sense of the material. Professor Audel wanted him to go through and see what he could find out about the extraction methods the military was already using, because she wouldn’t be able to make the case for her new method without that. Gairad thought she could reconstruct them if she could just find a

plan of Kingfisher’s spaceside refinery; Jainan was meant to try other angles. It would be detailed, painstaking work, but he had done that sort of work before.

The other reason he had been putting it off was that this was Taam’s operation.

The files mentioned Taam a lot. He was somewhere on every major document, usually on the clearance list. Seeing his name gave Jainan a minor jolt every time, as if someone’s hand had just brushed against the back of his neck.

He was in the middle of a particularly tricky calculation when the door slid open. “Wait a moment, ” he said with some exasperation.

The door shut. It took only a split second for him to realize he had just snapped at someone. Jainan’s heart hammered as he reflexively cleared the wall and turned around. It wasn’t Kiem, but it wasn’t much better: Bel was watching him quizzically. She said, “Didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“I thought you were at that school fete with Kiem,” Jainan said. Bel was carrying a large cone of cotton candy and a novelty balloon. Jainan took a moment to register them.

Bel looped the string of the balloon around a chair arm and gingerly placed the cotton candy cone on a side table. “He won the raffle,” she said. “Be glad he found someone else to donate the twenty boxes of smoked fish to.”

Jainan’s mind was still half in his calculations and half preoccupied with the panic of realizing he’d snapped at his partner’s aide. He couldn’t remember how to hold a normal conversation. He swallowed. “Good?”

“I should warn you, I left him trying to find a design you’d like at an almond-cake stall run by thirteen-year-olds. Do Theans eat almond cake?”

“Yes,” Jainan said. He cleared the desk as well and waved a command sign to wipe the filter he’d put over the windows, hastily getting rid of all signs he’d occupied the room. “Doesn’t everyone?”

Bel shrugged. “I’m space-born. Home baking makes my skin crawl. Think of all those hands that have touched it. Are you all right?”

Jainan’s head was still too full of equations for the question to really sink in.

“Yes,” he said. “I was just working on … on Professor Audel’s project.”

“I’m going to get some paperwork cleared,” Bel said. “I’ll leave you to it.”