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He almost smiled. I felt it against the crown of my head more than saw it. We slept, actually slept, three hours tangled on a cot built for one. It was the best sleep I’d had in any bed.

Dawn was a briefing.

The Penumbra hung silent in the Kaddran drift. The Spire’s traffic lanes glittered far off through the war room viewport.

In full kit, Rylos briefed his family: routes, timings, abort criteria, all in the command voice I had first heard aboard the Virelle. Nobody hearing him would have known he had slept with me in his arms.

The crew took the war the way they’d taken dinner. Bronwen in trade clothes with one hand on the case holding her breach armor; the ribbon still braided somewhere on Turnip, who was staying aboard and outraged about it; Zarek beside her being Dorn, grudge rehearsed, glare holstered.

Kallum and Anhara checked each other’s kit in a wordless choreography that took eleven seconds and covered everything. Brevan was already fully inside his delegation role.

Carys had Flinx in the equipment case, sulking at the indignity. Sabine and Varrick ran final checksums holding hands beneath the table. No one commented.

I stood at my place third from his left with my hair secured by a plain cover pin. My mother’s gold was locked in my quarters. I had hated leaving it. I meant to come back to it. I gave the room the same professional face he did. Neither of us fooled the other.

His eyes found mine on the last beat of the briefing, over the heads of everyone we were both terrified of losing. There was nothing cold in them at all. Heat, and one second of unmistakable promise: after the war.

I caught Talon catching it. The pilot looked from his commander to me and back, and something moved through his face that on any other morning I’d have called approval. He said nothing, because Talon had seen enough and had the grace not to comment.

“Positions,” Rylos said. “We deploy.”

RYLOS

The Capital Spire covered a city block and rose a hundred and twelve floors above the plaza. At 1237 I stood in its lobby queue holding a tariff petition.

The plaza had been the hard part. Two hundred meters of white stone in open afternoon light, fountains, functionaries, petitioners moving through the doors in orderly batches. Above it all stood the tower where my Sovereign was murdered, now hung with Conclave banners and gold sunbursts.

I’d planned this approach for three days and rehearsed the man who’d walk it, and Reth Corvan crossed the plaza thinking about tariffs. The horn sheaths and contour mesh held through every step. Beneath the high trade collar, no sigil showed. Behind Corvan’s face I counted the floors up to the throne level and kept walking.

Lika crossed it beside me without once looking up at the throne level. Interpreter of commercial dialect, manifest position four, facial mesh changing the planes of her cheeks, dark lenses over the eyes half this building knew, voice filter riding under her collar.

A woman who had walked this plaza a thousand mornings as someone else now walked it as a third person entirely. If the walk affected her, her expression did not show it. Her breathing did. Every exhale had been two counts too long since the shuttle. I noticed.

The queue advanced. Security was tighter than Lika’s old routine: two extra officers shadowing the line, a second visual check at every stamp, a new recognition arch behind the clerk’s desk. Quiet hardening. Nothing that admitted why. We reached the doors and went inside.

Reth Corvan, freight principal, Verratt Combine. Twenty-two pages of shipping grievances sat under my arm. Brevan had drilled one rule into us: the grievance came first.

I ran the Ministry of Adjustments through my head one more time. Rejected petition. Shorted quarter. A clerk named Ollis whom Reth Corvan had never met and hated anyway. The grudge sat easier than I’d expected. Hating this building required no rehearsal at all.

“Purpose of visit.” The checkpoint clerk didn’t look up.

“Tariff relief petition, Verratt Combine, filing number on the first page.” Brevan’s voice carried exactly the right blend of tedium and injury. “Third filing. The first two went through the Ministry of Adjustments, and I’d sooner not discuss what that office did with them.”

“Everyone says that.”

“Everyone’s right.”

The clerk’s stamp hovered. His gaze moved down the delegation while he asked, “Which office handled the second rejection?”

“Adjustments. Clerk Ollis. Two years and he still wants the fee schedules in triplicate.” Brevan answered before the question finished. Zarek made the disgusted sound we had rehearsed.

The clerk looked back at the slate and stamped it. Brevan hadn’t left him a hesitation to investigate.

The clerk waved the delegation forward. Their filing class authorized an unescorted route only to the ministry suite on public floor nine; any lift command above it would lock the car and call a guard.

We had no intention of asking the lift for permission. Ten people and one furious cybernetic lynx in an equipment case entered the most fortified building in the sector through the front door, on an appointment, with a grudge.

The imaging arch came next. Secondary imaging, the deep read, the one that would find the breach kit in the cases in four seconds of honest work.