They stood in a snowy, windswept gravel yard outside the gray monolith of the base. Aren had taken Kiem’s suggestion they talk somewhere quiet and invited them to see the hangar, an enormous shell of a structure large enough to hold a small spaceship.

Kiem pulled his coat around himself in the cutting wind. “Yeah. I know,” he said. “But I’ve seen the evidence. We can show you.”

Aren didn’t immediately ask for proof. He took off his uniform hat and tugged at his hair, disordering the pale curls. “I would have seen—I mean, Taam dealt with the budgets, I’m only on personnel and logistics, but I can’t believe I could have missed it.”

“We should take this inside,” Jainan said quietly. “This is not something any soldiers should overhear.”

“No,” Aren said. “Fuck, no. Let’s get inside.”

He gave the hangar door his bios and ushered them in, rubbing his forehead every couple of seconds as if he’d been physically stunned. They stepped into a dim cavern.

Despite the situation, Jainan let out a low, soft breath. A scale model gleamed above them, suspended several meters above the ground and ringed with an observation catwalk. To Kiem’s eyes it looked like a space station, but he could see REFINERY MODEL 002 stenciled on the side, along with another jagged Kingfisher logo. There were other models, some in their own vacuum units: engines and odd combinations of pipes and liquids. Jainan couldn’t keep his gaze away from them.

“Our design models,” Aren said absently. “I was going to give you the tour, but that’s just become a lot less relevant.” He stopped at the foot of some catwalk stairs and turned, leaning against the railings. His face was pale and determined. “Okay. I’m listening.”

It was the wrong place to lay out Jainan’s painstaking evidence trail, so Kiem kept it short: the equipment. The obfuscated finances. The encrypted messages

sent over relays that Bel had identified as fence drops used by Sefalan raiders.

“But why?” Aren said, sounding baffled. He focused on Jainan. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you’re lying. But why would Taam risk it?”

Jainan had rested a hand on the railing beside him, and his knuckles were clenched tight around it. “I don’t know,” he said. “I may—I may be wrong.”

Aren’s silence left a gap open, and in it Kiem found himself turning over in his head what would happen if they were wrong. None of this chaos would help the Auditor decide that Iskat and Thea were voluntarily entering into the treaty.

And even if they were right, they were no closer to an answer—embezzling or no embezzling, Taam was dead. If it hadn’t been an accident, then someone had killed him.