It was only when she disappeared into the study that he realized she had not objected to his use of the main room even though he’d snapped at her. Kiem probably wouldn’t mind if Jainan was using the space for the Imperial College’s project. Jainan’s clan flag took up half the wall here already. He felt an odd feeling of space, at that, and he wanted to stretch out his arms and marvel at the

freedom of the empty room. He pulled up his files again.

After some more meticulous trawling, he straightened his back and sighed.

The military had redacted swathes of every useful document. There wasn’t really enough here to put together a complete picture.

He idly pulled all the financial documents onto the table instead and ran through them: many of the suppliers had figures for their equipment listed on the open net, or he could make educated guesses. There was at least more to work with there.

Ten minutes later, Jainan raised his head and frowned at the wall in front of him.

What he was reading didn’t make any sense. He wasn’t an accountant, but he was numerate and used to reading closely for detail, and he couldn’t make any of this add up. There was a lot of funding money going in that wasn’t accounted for in the outputs, even by the most generous estimates.

Of course, there had been disasters. Jainan scanned the incident reports. He had seen Taam come home in a vile mood more than once after a bad day.

Jainan had tried not to disturb him at times like that, but sometimes Taam let hints drop, and once, Jainan had seen a newslog report about a piece of rig that had exploded and set back work by months. But even the disasters wouldn’t account for this.

Taam had cleared every document.

Jainan brought some of the files onto the table and paged through them.

Usually work was a distraction, a pleasant way to lose himself in something during his solitary hours. But now all he felt was underlying discomfort and something else, something like nagging curiosity. He caught himself looking over his shoulder—Gairad was right, it had turned into a tic—and made himself turn back to the table. Kiem was out. Bel was in the study, and Jainan was alone.

He could read what he liked.

He set himself to track every credit he could. The space by his elbow filled up with notes and copied fragments of text. There was a peculiar, visceral appeal to working like this, with his heart in his mouth and bile at the back of his throat.

He tried chasing different strands, specific funding allocations. Most of them petered out somewhere in the stack of documents.

The money wasn’t necessarily missing. It might have been classified. The military wasn’t required to hand all its secrets to academic engineers with bright ideas. But if it was missing, someone should have caught it.