Events and visualizations scrolled through his hands in a river of color. He stared at them, forcing himself to concentrate. He could imagine the flybug jolting in the air, failing to respond to Taam’s increasingly desperate commands, slipping nose-down into a death spiral. The compressor had been giving out maintenance warnings for months. It was all in the data.

The cold stone of the bench pressed into the back of Jainan’s legs. Taam’s perfect, textbook crash data.

Like a free-spinning gear clicking its teeth into alignment, something in Jainan’s mind started to tick. He gestured a command sequence over his wristband. More screens came up, floating in the cold air, requesting data from various research libraries Jainan had once been a member of. He searched for his old university access keys, slowly at first, and then with more impatience. When he found them the screens changed into lists and lists of materials.

He found it in a second-year undergraduate textbook under failure analysis. A textbook example of a gradual compressor malfunction.

He arranged the textbook and Taam’s data side by side. It wasn’t a one-to-one correlation. The component IDs were different. The time stamps on the compressor events also looked different, but when he examined them, they were all offset by exactly the same amount, as if someone had just shifted them forward by the appropriate interval. His skin prickled.

He would expect a compressor failure to take place the same way every time.

It was mathematically possible that the similarities were a coincidence.

He stared at the time stamps and tried to shake the persistent feeling that he

was going mad.

“Jainan? Count Jainan!”

Jainan’s head snapped up. He had lost track of time. Through the trees, he could see the conservatory had emptied out, leaving only staff clearing away the meal. The figure hurrying out of a walkway in the opposite direction, huddled into a greatcoat against the Iskat cold, was a Thean embassy staffer.

Jainan glanced behind him automatically, clenching his fist to kill the screens.

But though there were open paths behind him, he was socially trapped. It would be unforgivably rude to ignore her. Jainan rose to his feet instead and bowed stiffly. “A good afternoon to you.”

“And to you, Your Grace.” Jainan knew the staffer by sight—Lady Fadith of the Nasi clan. The Nasi clan was a close ally of Feria. “Are you leaving for the reception? I just had a meeting that overran, but we shouldn’t miss more than the first ten minutes. May I offer you a lift?”