Roel didn’t wake up the first day.

When I got back from the inquiry, I checked in on her to make sure her vitals were stable. Eifni comms are etheric devices: they don’t really have access to realspace the same way an MRI does. What they detect is significance, implication—not the MRI results, the stuff your doctor sees in the MRI results.

My comm told me Roel was gravely wounded, and that her condition was getting worse. I picked up the signal of an infection, despite the honey that had been slathered all over the wound, so I slipped back to my room, extracted my emergency medkit from the false floor underneath my belongings, and returned with antibiotics. It took some wrestling—thankfully Hadalce had gone home or she’d have tried to kill me on the spot—but I managed to administer the medication orally. A week of this and she’d be good to go. Well, aside from the deleterious and probably permanent effects of the stab wound.

People walk off stab wounds in the movies all the time. And the human body is pretty durable, you’re built to survive stab wounds. But physical trauma is physical trauma. You don’t just bounce back to 100%. That’s why Velean medicine is optimized for first aid; when your body takes a hit to efficiency, they assume you just flash to backup. For the poor souls without reincarnation technology, you’re dealing with severed muscle fibers, long-term scarring, inflammation, and other stuff like that.

And it’s not just the immediate area of the wound that’s affected. Maybe you end up walking with a limp and it throws your back out. Maybe an infection overstresses your immune system and you get autoimmune problems. Maybe a blood clot makes its way into your vasculature and you get a stroke.

There was a medical translator in my kit, and I was going to sneak in here every night to prevent as many of those issues as I could, but this wasn’t the med bay back on the Ragnar.

Kuril found me asleep in Roel’s room the next morning.

“Make yourself presentable,” she whispered, shaking me gently by the shoulder. “I’ve called for a priest of Gamal. We’ll do the formalities when she wakes up this afternoon.”

I felt anxious about leaving Roel—if something were to suddenly go wrong, I wanted to be on hand to react. Kuril picked up on that, telling me that Hadalce was going to be there, and everything would be okay. I realized too late that I probably wasn’t making too great an impression there—she’d specifically said she wanted to adopt me to reduce her burden, and here I was, adding to it—so I put on a brave face and told her I’d handle myself. I even swallowed my middle-class discomfort and let the attending ladies do my hair.

I knew there was a problem when they called me in to wake Roel up. They should have known better.

“The fugue shouldn’t have lasted this long,” I said. “It should have worn off overnight. Are you sure she’s not just asleep?”

“She won’t wake,” said Kuril. “Will you try anyways?”

“Of course,” I said, knowing it wouldn’t make a difference.

It didn’t. The comm now read coma, terminal.

We sent the priest home.

*

Roel didn’t wake up the second day.

I wasn’t panicking—yet—about the coma. Ether signatures are timeless but contingent; the fact that she was in a terminal coma didn’t mean that the coma wouldn’t become non-terminal later. You can check that sort of thing with a moirascope if you’re really curious, but after some testing Eifni operational doctrine restricts the use of moirascopes under most circumstances. Otherwise, you run the risk of introducing a self-fulfilling prophecy and screwing yourself over.

(Squad one assaults the west flank, wins the engagement. Future is contingent on proactive squad decision: observers’ moirascope detects victory ahead of time. Squad two doesn’t engage without go-ahead from the moirascope, shifting future contingency to the moirascope instead of their own decisions. Moirascope is reactive rather than proactive, does not detect successful engagement on the west flank. Squad two does not engage.)

What I was doing was spending a lot of time by Roel’s bedside while Abby learned to read. Lirian was biding her time again, it seemed, and we’d taken advantage of the opportunity to hunt down a sebek—basically a tutor, with Loranan religious baggage—and buy her knowledge with translated coin. I pulled up Abby’s feed, bracing myself for a headache. Learning the alphabet would be the easy part. The problem was I’d need to learn Estheni in order to make sense of what the alphabet was saying. And to do that I’d need to have my comm in dual-processing mode, which was migraine-inducing if you kept it up too long. Technically I was supposed to have been doing this my whole insertion, but I’d, uh, been less than diligent. Sue me, it’d been a chaotic couple of weeks. I was going to get around to it eventually.

Abby pretended to be a foreigner to explain her weird “accent” and lack of literacy. Apparently the Estheni valued reading quite highly. The sebek took it in stride—Abby’s pretended circumstance was common—which let them get right into it, leaving me to frantically try to parse the sebek’s Estheni.

Two brutal hours passed. Roel’s attendants mostly ignored me, lurking in the corner of her room with a book I was struggling to read. Occasionally I threw phrases from the book back at Abby, like what the fuck does Ou eloi camereon mean, the sebek said the -eon ending is just for questions and it’s not a fucking question. Oh, great, it’s sarcasm? Their grammar has sarcasm? Who designed this shit? By the end of the session my head was swimming with a mess of English and Velean and Estheni, declensions and conjugations and endings swirling around limping thoughts that blorched through the sludge of what was left of my brain at that point. Haldou sebekoui an uthena maresthe: let all the sebeks trip on their robes and break something. Roughly. Don’t fucking ask me if I got all the endings right.

The promised migraine had shown up by that point, my meatware footing the price for a month of learning accelerated a thousandfold. Fortunately, my eyes were artificial, so I was able to deal with the light-sensitivity part by cranking the signal intensity down. The augments giveth and the augments taketh away.

Kuril had been putting on a brave face—the graced were supposed to be above things like fear or anxiety—but you could kind of tell her composure was slipping. The Vitares girls didn’t check all the boxes they were supposed to, and Markus had speculated that had more to do with their decaying social position than what Kuril termed “rank opportunism.” It was just little things, behaviors you could write off individually but which collectively told a story of immense emotional strain.

She was terse with people, and her smiles were brittle. The time she spent on paperwork doubled without external reason, and despite the fact that I should have been shadowing her, I was rarely invited. One time she handed me a document with a teardrop-sized spot of water damage. I didn’t comment. Drawing attention to a lapse of control was what the Estheni did to their enemies.

Between Kuril’s distance and the time camping out in Roel’s room, I was left interacting with the other members of the household more than usual. I quickly realized I’d blundered with my insertion strategy. Dumb in retrospect. The House wasn’t just the Vitares girls, obviously, it was also a bunch of staff sworn to the Vitares family who managed the upkeep of the estate and various aspects of the family’s business investments. They weren’t exactly servants and they weren’t exactly employees, but they were certainly part of the House as far as the cultural norms were concerned. I’d been trying not to get in their way, but apparently that had come off as snootiness. The rumors about my manipulation of Kuril and Roel weren’t a Voranetti maneuver—they had started here.

They loved Markus, though, which was probably the only reason they weren’t openly siding with Hadalce’s accusations. But I needed to get control of the situation. My first idea was to ask Kuril if we could have the priest cleanse me of blood magic just to kill the rumors, but after an uncomfortably long blank stare she informed me that I might as well hold individual meetings with the entire household and confess to everyone individually. I didn’t ask any more questions, especially about why her eyes were red.

*

I spent some time jumped in to Val’s feed that evening. He was prepping for the Renathion tomorrow, assembling the instrument he’d brought among his personal effects. The notion organ was a typically Velean approach to music, in that they’d skipped the actual music part and had just built a device that would shove the experience of music straight into your noetic faculties.

“I admit I would prefer a more efficient storage solution,” he said while adjusting a bolt. “I’ve spoken with some deicide operatives who use Kiri instruments while on deployment. They’re designed to be portable. Setting up the Benivok will take all night. I could have had a Kiri operational by now.”

“Why’d you bring it, then?” I asked. I felt the practiced surety of his hands on the inner workings of the machine as he slotted each part into place. It was meditative, a relaxing separation from the stress of the last couple days. It was weird experiencing that kind of skill firsthand, though—I didn’t have any fine muscle movements trained to this degree.

“I was displeased with the semantic range on the Kiri,” he said. “And there are technical limitations with the axis controls—here.”

He gestured at—and very carefully did not touch—an intricate series of interwoven rings, each similar in design to the emitter in the med bay. It was like one of those old desk globes, only instead of a sphere inside the rings, there were just more rings. Thin, flexible spindles ran from the rings to the pipes and levers that made up the rest of the notion organ’s guts.

“I have sixteen channels on here—which is absurd, I’ll be the first to admit; even Setsiko’s Implosion only uses thirteen—whereas the Kiri models are limited to three so they can fold in on themselves.”

“It can’t just align the rings in one direction?”

Val’s attention moved to one of the fine spindles coming out of the axis controls. “Those threads have ethertech compliments. If they get tangled, the wires cross in etherspace, and the instrument requires serious repair. On a purely physical instrument we’d already have solved the problem, but with bi-ontological engineering the complexity jumps by an order of magnitude.”

The usual bite in his comments was completely gone. He hadn’t snarked all evening, even when I professed ignorance about something. Granted, we were mostly talking about his hobby, so maybe that was it. But the interaction just felt different somehow. Ever since I’d taken my first baby steps in the weird Velean roleplaying thing, the vibe had changed. I didn’t think anyone had lectured me at all since the inquiry. Judging from Abby’s comments, I was supposed to figure this out without asking for help, so I wasn’t. It felt like it’d be a step backward in some indefinable way.

“I should play Road to Nowhere for you,” said Val. “It’s an old favorite. It’s about two lives ruined by separate betrayals and the alliance they build to start again. You can’t do it justice on fewer than five channels, of course, which is another reason to use the better instrument.”

“You never struck me as sentimental,” I said—teasing him a little bit, a risky decision last week and maybe still risky now.

He smiled. “What would I gain from that?”

The lack of the expected clapback was such a pleasant surprise that I laughed. It was now or never, I guessed.

“I wanted some advice,” I said.

I felt the set of his face shift minutely. His posture too. He’d opened up a bit, I realized, and now I was losing that. After a beat I could tell he was about to tell me to go on, and when that happened I’d lose whatever weird peer respect he was giving me now. I barreled ahead.

“I’ve decided,” I said, relishing that little bit of agency, “to adapt my insertion strategy. I need more social capital with the House staff.”

“Before the Roel situation resolves?” Val said, aligning two pipes for some reason. They weren’t connected as far as I could tell.

I bristled at the implicit questioning of my judgment. Was this more roleplaying stuff? Some kind of social move made for structural reasons rather than sincere intent?

“This is part of the Roel situation,” I said. I could tell immediately that I was being too defensive. He didn’t say anything explicitly, though. “My usefulness to Kuril is limited if I don’t have staff support. I need to win hearts and minds here.”

“So, naturally, you went to the technical officer.”

I tried to project as much casualness into my voice as I could. “You’re the strategist.”

Val barked out a sharp laugh. “Well played. You’re coming along.”

It was so tempting to accept the praise, and if I wasn’t currently sharing his experience I probably would have. But something about his posture kept me on edge. That smile was a little too close to a smirk. And no one had been explicitly acknowledging this stuff since I started.

I realized after too long what I should have expected from the beginning. It was a power play. If I let him have this, I was letting him paint me as the junior team member whose progress he got to judge.

The moment had already passed, but I tried anyway. “That’s not what I asked, technical officer.”

He gave it to me. This time the smile was genuine, and when he nodded I wanted to pump my fist.

“It seems to me,” said Val, “that if this is part of the Roel situation, the solution must involve Roel.”

“I know Lirian did something to her,” I said. Val’s head tilted slightly, go on. “But the comm scan didn’t find anything. Wait, can she do a stealth poison? Is that why we didn’t find anything?”

“I could arrange for more powerful scanning equipment,” Val said neutrally.

Bastards. He’d known. They’d all known. They were just waiting for me to ask.

“I think that would be a good idea,” I said. “How soon can you get it here?”

*

On the third day, I rushed into Kuril’s room.

“I can wake her up,” I said.

She started to cry.