The word “interrogation” landed on the table between them like a severed head. Voss picked up his fork and resumed eating.
Across the table, Octavia's gaze found Skarreth's.
The worry in her eyes was open and unguarded. She couldn't have known the significance of what Voss had said — she didn't have the context — but she'd seen something in Skarreth's stillness, in the quality of his silence, and her artist's instinct had parsed it in the time it took her to blink. She looked at him with an expression that saidsomething is wrong and I see you, and the ache of it hit him sideways because he had nothing left to manage it with.
He'd spent everything on the mask. Every ounce of discipline, every reserve he maintained for exactly this kind ofcrisis, was given to the performance of not reacting to Tolen's arrest. Nothing remained to handle the way Octavia Tate looked at him across a dinner table with worry she couldn't hide for a man she was supposed to hate.
He looked away.
He finished dinner. He endured the rest of the evening — brandy, conversation, the rituals of hospitality that Voss stretched intentionally, testing Skarreth's patience. When Voss finally retired to the south wing, his unhurried footsteps echoing down the corridor, Skarreth listened until the sound faded completely.
He locked the study door and let the mask collapse.
Star charts spread across the desk like surgical drapes. Nadir stood beside him with a secured comm unit and a face carved from stone.
"Northern corridor's clear but tight. Teck can reroute the Axis-bound transit, but the other two need new coordinates within four hours or they'll fly into a Ledger checkpoint."
"Pull the Meridian Three safehouse. Burn it."
"Already done. I triggered the protocol the moment you excused yourself from the table."
Skarreth looked up. Nadir's muted gold eyes held steady, but his inner eyelids fluttered — processing, choosing. The scar on his neck caught the lamplight.
"He knows, my lord."
"He suspects. Suspecting and knowing are different things."
"The distance between them is closing."
"Then we work faster."
They worked. The encrypted comm chirped with incoming coordinates, route changes, confirmation codes. Skarreth plotted new transit paths on the star charts with a stylus, his handwriting degrading from sharp to jagged as the hours dragged. Nadir fielded communications with steady calmness.He had been doing this longer than most of the people they were saving had been alive.
One in the morning. Two. The second transit confirmed the reroute. The third was still in dead space, unreachable for another forty minutes. Nadir brewed tea. Skarreth didn't drink it.
At three in the morning, a shadow moved in the doorway. There was a knock at the door.
Nadir’s hand went to the comm unit. Skarreth raised two fingers — wait — and touched the security panel on his desk. The hallway feed flickered to life.
Octavia. Barefoot, arms crossed, she waited for entrance at the study door.
Skarreth said nothing. He looked at Nadir and nodded once.
Nadir crossed the room, unlocked the door, and opened it with the unhurried grace of answering at a reasonable hour. “Mistress Tate.”
Octavia crossed the threshold, and Nadir closed the door behind her.
She wore the loose shirt she slept in, creased at the elbows, her locs gathered in a knot at the crown of her head. No shoes. Her sketchbook was tucked under one arm and her fingers were clean — no paint, no charcoal — which meant she hadn't been working. She'd been lying awake.
Her gaze moved through the study: the star charts, the encrypted comm still crackling with static, the weapon Nadir had set within reach on the side table. Skarreth himself — no gloves, no silk, no performance. Rolled sleeves. Exhaustion carved into every line of his face. The stylus still in his hand, his claws partially extended from hours of stress, visible and unhidden.
She looked at his claws, then at his face. She didn't ask questions. She didn't demand answers. She crossed the roomand sat in the leather chair across from his desk, then opened her sketchbook, pulled a pencil from behind her ear, and drew.
Skarreth stared at her. Nadir, at the comm station, went still. His inner eyelids fluttered twice in rapid succession — the most expression Skarreth had seen from him in years — and then the old butler turned back to the comm and said nothing.
The pencil moved across the page. A steady sound, rhythmic, the soft scratch of graphite on paper that had no right to be as grounding as it was. She didn't look up. She didn't speak. She drew with focused calm as if she had decided this was where she was going to be, and nothing was going to move her.
An hour passed.
