“Will,” the ship admitted.

Dabry grimaced and turned his attention back to Atlanta. “Why do you want to know?”

“Because I don’t understand why the Empress sent me to her. She doesn’t seem able to protect me. She isn’t able to advise me on my current situation, or what the Empress thought she was doing to send me to her. And she’s not spending any time working that out. She is, in fact, herself in deepest peril and dragging me with her.”

“Perhaps,” Dabry suggested, straight-faced, “she’s intended to create extra obstacles in your path, in order to push you to the fullest in a test being administered by the Empress.”

Her jaw dropped as she stared at him. “Do you think that’s what’s happening?”

“Not at all,” he said. “It’s just amusing to think of all the different possibilities.”

“Amusing?!”

“Instructive, perhaps.” He studied her for a breath. “In actuality, I suspect that it is one of two things: Either she provides a resource that the Empress thinks will be vital to solving your current situation, or you were meant to learn something from her. If it is the latter, I would suspect that it is related to things that happened at the Leap, because I am not sure the Empress knows of her in any other way. Therefore, think about what happened there and how it might prove instructive to you.”

“Why not just tell me openly?”

“Perhaps there wasn’t enough time?” He fiddled with the cookies, rearranging them on their plate. “Or she thought that there was someone with you who might betray you? Or something else entirely? There is no way of telling.”

She slumped where she sat. “I wish that we could jump ahead and get to where we’re going. It’s the waiting and not knowing that’s killing me.”

“Never regret time that you can use before a situation,” he told her. “Set everything in motion that you can.”

“But in the meantime”—was it her imagination or did he wink at her as he lifted his eyes back up to the speaker that the ship’s voice had come from?—“let us see if we can come up with any other remedies for this question of discernment of taste.”

At the end of the last day, Niko called the rest to her in the dining hall. They gathered to watch the light change and resolve into knowable stars as they dropped out of Q-space.

“Where are we?” Atlanta asked.

“On an edge of Known Space, a little-explored one,” Niko said. “Give it another century, and they’ll have been pushed out farther. Gentrification happens on the galactic level, too, and dregs like these don’t survive encounters with well-trained military forces.”

Atlanta gasped as she saw their destination. “It’s a portal! I’ve never seen one so small.”