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Kesta looked at her.

The older healer was smiling openly now.

“You are enjoying this again.”

Sera adjusted Horan’s blanket with exaggerated care. “Immensely.”

Kesta shook her head and returned to the scanner.

She had an imperial implant to understand, a grieving woman waiting in the next room, Mira’s body to prepare before dusk, and a council meeting in less than an hour.

Those were problems she knew how to approach.

Dreven was becoming a different kind of problem.

Unfortunately, she was beginning to suspect she might enjoy that one.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Kinder Cage

The council chamber had once belonged to a ship.

Kesta recognized the curved wall panels as soon as she stepped through the entrance, though years of soot and mineral deposits had almost hidden the emergency seals around the doors. Dead interface ports ran in uneven rows beneath one wall, some filled with resin and others converted into hooks for tools, coats, and battered data slates. Whoever had salvaged the compartment had buried its lower half in the red stone beneath Ash Camp and built benches around a broad central table made from black timber.

It was an ugly room.

It was also the first governing chamber Kesta had entered in years where no one had searched her before allowing her through the door.

She wasn't sure whether that qualified as progress or merely demonstrated how low the empire had set the standard.

Dreven sat at one end of the table, though nothing about the arrangement suggested a throne. His chair was larger because he was larger. Keth stood behind him with his mechanical eye dimmed to a soft blue, while Sera had taken the place nearest the door. Pela sat opposite her with two ledger slates spread across the table. Tavi occupied enough space for two people by virtue of having four elbows.

The remaining council members were strangers. One was an elderly reptilian male whose scarred neck frills rose and settled when he breathed. Beside him sat an older Kharovian male with one horn capped in dull metal, while a Kharovian woman with iron-gray braids and narrow silver eyes watched Kesta enter without attempting to hide her curiosity.

Nobody offered Kesta a seat.

She chose one beside Sera.

The older woman’s mouth twitched.

Across the table, Dreven noticed too. His gaze met Kesta’s briefly before dropping to the ledger in front of him. The shallow cut she had cleaned in the infirmary showed as a dark line between the scales of his forearm.

Apparently he had managed not to reopen it.

Kesta found that ridiculously satisfying.

Pela tapped the first slate with one thick claw. “We begin with the medical threat. Horan has agreed to release the implant image to the council without his name attached. Kesta Frank identified the device. She should explain it.”

Everyone looked at her.

Kesta had spent enough years presenting forensic findings to hostile commanders that being stared at by seven condemned aliens should not have bothered her. Somehow it did. Perhaps because these people would actually have to live with whatever she told them.

She rested her hands on the edge of the table.

“The implant is built around Horan’s endocrine system. The central node appears capable of stimulating or suppressing hormonal response through the adrenal pathways and nearby neural tissue.” She glanced toward Tavi, who had transferred the scan to a larger slate. “I saw the same architecture in classified Project Helix material before I was arrested, but those were design records. Horan is the first living person I’ve examined with one still active.”

The metal-capped Kharovian leaned forward. “What can it make him do?”