His hands slowed as he slid the lid away. He hadn’t seen these in years. A Thean ceremonial knife he’d once thought he would wear at his wedding. A clan flag from his aunt. A slim paper volume of classical poems Ressid had given him, insisting they wouldn’t be available in the Empire—Jainan was not a poetry reader, but he had never been able to convince Ressid of that. He cut off the memory swiftly before it made him unnecessarily maudlin.

These things didn’t really have a place here. Perhaps it was finally time to clear them out. But even as he thought that, he found himself taking the box and packing it in the bottom of the hoverchest. There would be another corner for it, maybe. He’d probably lose it again; he seemed to have been getting steadily less organized over the past few years. Taam would have laughed.

As Jainan turned back from the hoverchest, his wristband gave a chirp that meant it had hit another error. It had been behaving erratically for weeks. Jainan

tried to clear the error, but as he did, he saw it was pinging Taam’s account to refresh a backup file. Taam had always stored some of his backup accounts on Jainan’s device. Jainan had forgotten.

His headache sent up another flare of pain at this unexpected responsibility.

He tried to convince himself it wasn’t important. The investigators looking into the flybug crash already had all the data from Taam’s devices. Jainan could be forgiven for just ignoring this.

He had never ignored something that had to be done, though. He shut his eyes for a brief instant, breathed out, and brought up a small screen from his wristband to call Internal Security.

The call didn’t go through to the agent working on the case, of course. They had stopped answering him some time ago, when the investigation wound down.

The person who appeared on the screen was a low-level Human Intelligence processor.

They recognized Jainan immediately, smoothing out their expression and resigning themself to wasting their time in a way that made Jainan’s skin crawl.

He knew they did not consider him credible.

“Yes, Your Grace?”

“I wanted to inform you that I found some more of Taam’s files,” Jainan said.

He could hear himself sound even more stiff and formal than usual. “I believe it to be a backup. It is protected by a passphrase.”

Taam’s various messaging and storage accounts had been a tangle of different encryption layers, all of which were compulsory for military officers. Jainan knew Internal Security had managed to get most of the relevant keys and passphrases from Taam’s superiors, but it seemed nobody had known Taam well enough to have a full overview of his life. That person should have been Jainan.

“The investigation isn’t currently active, sir,” the agent said.

“I know.”

The agent paused. “Please pass us a copy and then delete it. Someone may visit to ensure it’s been completely wiped.”