Jainan had half smiled, but it faded almost as soon as it appeared. Kiem still couldn’t quite read him. It sometimes felt like a song playing just out of earshot, or a step on a staircase in the dark. “Yes,” Jainan said. “We do.”

CHAPTER 9

As the winter deepened, the Resolution and the Empire paced toward Unification Day with the heavy, unswerving tread of two automatons converging. Jainan had listed the ceremonies that led up to the treaty signing; he checked them off as they passed. Most of them took place behind closed doors with the Emperor and her increasingly harried-looking team of aides, but one couldn’t be completed without the vassals: the formal handover of what the Resolution called proscribed material. The remnants. Jainan hadn’t paid much attention to them, but the ceremony must be crossed off the list. Kiem and Jainan were required to attend as the Thean representatives: they would surrender everything found on Thea since the last treaty.

Jainan spent the four days leading up to that ceremony obsessing over Taam’s crash data. He used to feel his time in the palace drag, but now it slipped through his hands like water. Fortunately Kiem seemed to get invited to every dinner and charity gala in Arlusk, so it wasn’t hard to keep Jainan’s preoccupation away from him. Things had always turned awkward with Taam whenever Jainan became obsessed with something like this; Taam had joked that Jainan should just join a monastery where they’d let him retreat into his own world for years on end.

Jainan knew on some level that this was displacement. His duty was to attend the ceremonies and represent Thea, not to fool around with log forensics for an investigation that Internal Security already had in hand. But the Auditor’s refusal to instate him and Kiem had shaken him—it must sort itself out, he told himself, nobody could genuinely want to break the treaty—and he needed something to focus on.

He found nothing in the crash data. Every line of the logs supported Internal Security’s conclusion of a natural compressor failure causing a catastrophic leak of fuel into an adjoining thermal chamber. Any attempt to artificially induce that failure would have stood out like a sore thumb. Jainan wasn’t an expert in landside craft, but he knew the basics; a badly maintained compressor was a common failure point. The data was almost textbook.