Jainan felt cold. General Fenrik had submitted the remnant they called the Tau field. It had been in military hands. Had Taam been in possession of the real one? Had he sold it?

“Sir?” a station official said. “Can I ask what you were doing on the screen—

are you all right?”

Jainan moved away from the screen and turned, absently hearing the question like the buzzing of a fly. “I don’t need it anymore.” He began to walk to the door, barely seeing the rest of the control room. His mind was full of moving parts that ticked over every few moments and fell into new positions. It wasn’t only Taam who had something to hide. Kingfisher had something to hide.

He tried to call Kiem, but Kiem’s wristband was dead. There was no point leaving a message; Jainan needed to talk to him. This whole thing had grown too big for them to keep quiet about it. If he was honest, it was too big even for Internal Security.

Jainan screwed up his courage, activated his wristband, and sent off a brief, formal meeting request to the Emperor’s Private Office about discrepancies in Operation Kingfisher.

A cold sweat settled on him as soon as he’d done it. The audacity of it was beyond anything he’d ever attempted. But neither Internal Security nor the military had solved Taam’s murder, or what Taam had been doing at Kingfisher, or where the missing remnants were, and time was running out.

He had walked through half the station before he recognized where he was.

His subconscious had been problem-solving without consulting him, and he realized his feet had been taking instructions from it just as it presented him with an unwelcome conclusion like a lump of plutonium.

He looked up at the closed door to the Auditor’s quarters, which had an ACCESS DENIED sign over it. The control panel glowed red beside it. Jainan reached out slowly and gave his skinprint and retina scan to request entry.

“The Auditor is not seeing visitors,” a Resolution staffer said, their face appearing on a screen midair.

Jainan had been prepared for that. “I am a treaty representative,” he said. He probably still was, despite the REVOKED status. It wasn’t as if they had an easy replacement. “I have information about the remnants.”

He had expected he would have to argue. But instead the staffer’s eyes tracked something on their eyepiece, and they said, “Enter.”

The screen disappeared, and the door opened. Jainan stepped inside.

The room was surprisingly small, even for the station. Like the temporary Resolution office on Iskat, they’d hung some of their odd textile-screens around the walls, but there was only one tiny desk, and all in all the room looked like an afterthought. The staffer was leaning back on a chair behind the desk, looking bored and uncomfortable. “Go on in,” they said, gesturing to the opposite wall.

One of the textile-screens lifted itself aside as if an invisible hand had pulled it.