“Hah!” Aren said. “So you got that far. What gave that away? I caught your Sefalan comms specialist sniffing around one of our proxies. Was it her?”

Jainan nearly struggled into sitting up through pure adrenaline. “Have you done something to Bel?”

“She’s fine,” Aren said, smiling faintly. “Just making sure nobody interferes.”

Jainan was holding on to his self-control with his fingernails. “Interferes in what?”

Aren checked his wristband. “Hey, my technician’s here,” he said. Something beeped in the distance, swallowed by the dark. The echo made Jainan double his mental estimate of the size of the space. Aren gestured a command sign and a door clanked open in a distant wall. Light started to glow overhead with the whine of industrial floodlights. “Suppose you might as well see.”

White light flooded the space. Jainan squinted with suddenly painful eyes.

The warehouse could have fit half of Carissi Station’s facilities. It was full, despite its vast size. At first Jainan didn’t recognize the shapes—metal and crystal and hydraulics—but once he understood one, the others fell into place like terrible dominoes, one after the other.

Jainan stared around Kingfisher’s stockpile, his nausea forgotten. His body felt like a drone he could no longer control. He heard himself say, “You want a war.”

CHAPTER 24

The staterooms next to the Observation Hall were a wasteland of half-laid white carpet and cleaning supplies in the dim night-cycle lighting. They weren’t open to the public until the Unification ceremonies in four days’ time, which was why Kiem had ended up there. He couldn’t face anyone right now. He sat on a stack of carpet rolls in the dry, musty station air and wished for the clean cold of an Iskat winter night.

Kiem spun through his wristband, his fingers clumsy and slow. He’d been sitting here for too long, and he still hadn’t worked out what to do next. He wasn’t even supposed to be here. He should go back to the residential modules.

He didn’t. He spun compulsively between a short list of names projected from his wristband: Bel, Jainan’s sister Ressid, the Thean Ambassador. Bel was in the shuttleport and not answering. It wasn’t even fair to try and get hold of her when she was worried herself, but Kiem had been calling her anyway because he was desperate. He hadn’t yet brought himself to try the Theans. What could he even say? We’ve failed Jainan in every way, but I can’t tell you anything more than that?

He dropped his wristband and let it jar against his leg while it was still scrolling. The display broke up and disappeared. The door of the Observation Hall yawned opposite, waiting to be decorated for the ceremonies, and starlight played across the floor.

His wristband lit up again. Kiem glanced briefly at the caller—not Bel or Jainan—and didn’t activate it. This was the first time in his life he’d ignored this many calls in a row.

“Is everything all right there, sir?”