“And now he’s gone,” Niko said.

Petalia was silent.

Niko said, “There’s something that you’re not telling me.”

“I fear him still,” Petalia admitted.

Niko held her breath before releasing it in a long sigh. “We’ve done our best to circumvent that. The last revenge scheme was decades in planning, but this time he’d want me to know something was coming. He wouldn’t have been able to resist sending me some ominous note.”

“I know,” Petalia admitted. Their hand fluttered at their throat as though remembering the clutch of Last’s fingers choking them. “But it is a fear in me nonetheless.”

Niko caught the hand and held it. “All the more reason to stay here, where I can protect you,” she whispered.

Petalia pulled their hand away so forcefully that it staggered them both. “Don’t touch me!”

Niko stepped back, holding up both hands. Down the way, the Geglis were staring, nudging one another. “I only meant…” she began.

“You meant that you were making another promise you could not keep,” Petalia said coldly. “You would have thought you had learned better than that by now, Captain Larsen.”

Niko’s hands dropped and she straightened. “Very well,” she said. “I bid you good voyage and unfettered stars.”

The phrase was traditional among Free Traders. Petalia did not return it. Instead, they simply spun and walked away.

Niko stood watching them until they were out of sight. How had so many decades slipped away there? Was Pet right to consider it a desertion? Niko had spent every night going over her plans to rise in rank, get a crew under her command, take it to rescue Petalia. She’d had the power to do it all of ten hours too. Maybe she should have moved faster, but she hadn’t seen her fall coming. Who would have? She had thought herself a hero.

So the Ten-Hour Admiral had her power for those hours, and that had not been enough time to assemble an expedition and get them safely away. At first when she had been given the news and had not entirely understood it, she thought they had caught on to her intentions, that they knew she meant to go rescue Pet, even though she had managed to hide it so well, even to the point of keeping it out of the Hive Mind’s meld, so that the others would not be held complicit in her crime when it happened.

She’d thought perhaps she could move fast, had even been on her way to the docks when they had caught up with her.

Surely Petalia’s accusations were unjustified. But a side of Niko wanted to embrace them, to confess herself a poor and broken human being and throw herself on Pet’s mercy. Which she had seen in action before.