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“Well,” he says, “that was horrible. I give the lie a seven out of ten.”

I turn toward him. “Excuse me?”

“Structurally sound. A little too shiny around the panic phrase. Needs grease.”

Sira closes her eyes. “Brakk.”

“What? I’m helping.”

I look at Sira. “Did I just become Rolaev ?”

The question leaves me before I can make it clever.

Ghar goes still beside me.

Sira opens her eyes and looks at me with a tenderness that almost hurts. “No.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know enough.”

“I lied.”

“You contained.”

“That is a prettier word for lying.”

“Yes,” she says. “Sometimes prettier words are dangerous. Sometimes they are also accurate.”

I shake my head, the med-bay lights blurring at the edges. “I stood there and decided what they were allowed to know. I withheld the worst of it because I decided they couldn’t handle it. That is exactly how Rolaev starts.”

“No,” Ghar says.

I turn on him, anger rising because fear needs somewhere to go. “You do not get to just say no because you love me.”

“I say no because I love you and because I am correct.”

“Those are not the same thing.”

“They can overlap.”

“Ghar.”

He reaches for me. The medic makes a distressed sound as he shifts against half-sealed wounds, but Ghar ignores him with the serene confidence of a man who has never once obeyed a medical recommendation he disliked.

“Come here,” he says.

“I am mad at you.”

“Come here while mad.”

I go because I am exhausted, because he is hurt, because I want to, and because apparently this is who I am now. I sit carefully on the edge of his trauma platform. His hand closes around mine, warm and too steady for someone whose body is mostly medical alarms at this point.

“Rolaev ’s certainty made her a fanatic,” he says. “Not restraint.”

I look down at our hands. “She thought she was protecting people.”

“Yes.”