The line between consciousness and sleep was very thin, and Jainan was still unsure he’d crossed it when he opened his eyes. His vision was hazy. He felt some sort of restraints around his wrists and padding under his back. He was lying down.

What was terrifying was that the dizziness didn’t clear any further as he woke. The slightest movement of his head left him drained and sick. He forced himself to try and look around.

At first he thought he was back on one of his student manufacturing placements. The space felt enormous, like a warehouse, though most of it was dark. The gravity was still weak. The only illumination came from a single, jury-rigged floodlight that formed a pool of brightness around a figure perched on the side of a crate, working from a wrist-screen.

Aren.

“Oh hell, already?” Aren said. He idly wiped away the screen. “I’m still waiting for the technician. You’ve got the constitution of a fucking elephant, anyone ever tell you that?”

Jainan was battling his nausea too hard to answer immediately. The bed he was lying on felt like a hospital bed, with removable guardrails on each side and clips at the foot to hold machinery. He couldn’t tell if it was normal to feel this way; he had never been on the wrong end of an incapacitator gun before. He took a deep breath against the rising dizziness and concentrated hard. “We didn’t even suspect you,” he said. “Why move now?”

Aren pulled his legs up and sat cross-legged on the crate, somehow balancing on the very edge. “Okay, well, here’s the thing,” he said. “When you send a meeting request to the Emperor’s aides and mention the fucking army, the first thing they do is get in touch with the supreme commander to find out what’s going on. And the first thing the supreme commander does is come down on me like a ton of fucking bricks for not maintaining a minimum level of operational secrecy around Kingfisher. So, thanks for that! Really made my day.”

Jainan turned around the phrase operational secrecy in his head, where it felt jagged and painful. Kingfisher—not just Taam, but his whole operation—had something to hide, and the supreme commander knew about it. “General Fenrik knew what Taam was doing.”

“Yes, well done, congratulations on catching up with the rest of us. All those years with Taam really did fry your brain, didn’t they? Mind you, I always felt my IQ dropping when I sat down to dinner with him—a boor in the grand tradition of all royal boors.” Aren moved again, dangling his legs off the crate.

“No wonder Fenrik was so fond of him. Like to like.”

Jainan tried to sit up. That was when he realized the cuffs and the guardrails were totally unnecessary; he could barely manage to make his muscles acknowledge him, let alone obey him. There were odd-shaped spikes around the