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Brevan ran Zarek through his cargo-specialist legend one last time. “Your name is Dorn.” “Dorn.” “Say it without threatening me.” “Dorn.” “We’ll workshop it.”

Sabine explained something about checksums to Anhara, who was clearly not following and clearly did not care, chin on her hand, happy. Kallum said nothing at all and missed nothing at all, and once, when Turnip made a try for the root dish, moved it eight centimeters without appearing to move.

I marked the exits by reflex and then stopped, because for the first evening since Soren died, I couldn’t find a reason to.

“You’re doing the thing,” Anhara said beside me, low. She’d swapped seats with Sabine at some point; I hadn’t clocked the swap, which told me how far off my game the evening had dragged me.

“Watching it like it’s happening to other people. I did it too. When I met them, I was standing on a burned farm with a wounded pig and every one of these faces was a stranger with a gun.” She refilled my cup without asking.

“It doesn’t require anything from you, is the thing I didn’t understand at first. You don’t apply. You don’t perform. They just move over.”

“And if the seat’s temporary?”

“Then it’s temporary.” She shrugged, farm-plain. “It’s still yours tonight.”

Carys leaned across from Anhara’s other side.

“The first dinner is the worst. Everyone’s decided to act normal at you, which for this table is an achievement.” She nodded down its length.

“For reference: nothing tonight is staged. The pig is always on the bench. The lynx always robs Varrick. If Bronwen mentions a man in the past tense, assume she had a hand in it.”

“She’s not exaggerating,” Sabine said, without looking up from whatever she was still calculating at dinner. “This is normal for them. That’s the unsettling part.”

Down the table, Zarek said to Bronwen, apropos of a story I’d missed the front half of, “Like that thing we took care of.” Zarek’s tone didn’t change. Bronwen went luminous.

“Oh, him.” She sighed the way other women sigh over jewelry.

“The Lyrikan, before the prison planet. Three years he had me in a cage logging the animals he broke for fun, and do you know, when we finally paid the visit, he offered us money. Money!” She speared one of the green vegetables Turnip had rejected.

“He screamed so beautifully. Zarek let me do the important parts.”

“We’re going back to the crater next month,” Zarek said.

Nobody blinked. Sabine passed the bread. Carys asked whether the crater was scenic. “Very,” Zarek said. He tucked a loose strand of Bronwen’s hair behind her ear.

That, more than the screaming, was the thing I had no training for. I sat inside the warm noise of a family that discussed a slow murder the way other families discuss a wedding venue and realized nobody at this table was maneuvering against anyone else. I could sit beside them without guarding every word.

I missed Soren so sharply that I had to put my fork down. We used to eat on a hull ledge on Derev, dock rations split two ways, his shift stories against my school ones. That ledge was the last table where I’d been a person instead of a position.

I drank water until I could trust myself to speak.

I had planned to give them the archive, make myself useful, and survive the operation if I could. I had not planned on wanting a place at their table.

Rylos came in late from the war room, still focused enough that he scanned the room before he reached the food. The noise didn’t dip; Bronwen simply loaded a plate and pushed it at him as he passed, and he took it without either of them commenting.

That small familiarity told me more about this crew than every file I’d stolen.

His gaze found me before he reached the counter. It dropped once to my hand around the cup, the hand that had closed around him before the comm interrupted us, and came back to my face. The change in him was tiny and entirely indecent.

“Your operations officer has missed a delivery window,” I said across the table.

Brevan stopped talking. Varrick looked deeply at his plate. Bronwen’s smile developed teeth.

Rylos set the plate down. “The operation was interrupted by a critical credential decision.”

“A competent commander plans contingencies.”

“A competent strategist understands competing priorities.”