The door shut behind them as they left. There were officials passing in the corridor, but a sharp right turn took them to a landing on a quiet staircase, where an arched window looked out on the dome of the palace shrine and the grand entrance hall behind it.

Jainan stopped as soon as they had some privacy and immediately turned to Kiem. There were lines of tension around his eyes. The shrine dome framed his head and shoulders, making his figure seem smaller. “I have not held back anything of significance.”

“What are we talking about?” Kiem said plaintively. “Jainan, I have zero idea what the Auditor meant. Surely someone would have told us if Taam was murdered. And what did he mean about you and the investigation?”

Jainan ran a hand across his face, the first visible sign Kiem had seen of his control cracking. “It was nothing. Nothing important. I asked Internal Security for the crash data after the accident—Taam’s flyer was army-issue, but I know the military gave them the flight logs. I was told only the investigators had a need to know. They were right. This is irrelevant. There is no way Taam could have been murdered.”

Kiem leaned against the bannister next to him and frowned, trying to make sense of this. “Internal Security said you didn’t have a right to know about the investigation?”

“It was an accident,” Jainan said, though more as if he was trying to convince himself. “This is a mistake. The Auditor must confirm us.”

“Internal Security refused to give you the crash data?” Kiem said. “The crash your partner died in? You’re an engineer, aren’t you? You could have helped them read it.”

There was a pause that Kiem couldn’t parse at all. Then Jainan touched his newly fixed wristband and said abruptly, “I am not making this up.”

“I didn’t say—” Kiem broke off as Jainan, suddenly intense, brought up a light-screen in front of him and started spinning through his messages.

The stairwell had no display screen. Jainan turned to the wall instead, which was inlaid with the brushed-steel crest of the Hill Enduring, and projected his messages on top of it. Kiem wished he would stop doing that. He was prepared for Thea to have different notions of privacy, but it felt wrong to see all of Jainan’s correspondence. He tried to glance away surreptitiously until Jainan found the one he wanted to display.

“Here,” Jainan said. Kiem looked back. Jainan had put up a conversation with several officials: Internal Security, palace civil servants, some military bureaucrats. “I would not bother you with this,” Jainan said, his voice sounding as if his control was fraying, “except you should know what he was talking about. I don’t know how the Auditor brought this into his data set. I thought it was private.”

Kiem scanned the messages with a growing sense of indignation. Jainan was right, he had asked for information, and he’d been refused. “This is ridiculous,”