The night cycle lighting dimly lit the small room, catching on the edges of stripped-down control stations and worn seating modules. The viewports were covered with peeling tape, showing the slightest flicker of the external beacon lights. Chio guided me to a threadbare couch, then disappeared into the darkness between the consoles.

  "This is the old medical storage," she said. "No one comes in here. Wait a minute while I get some light."

  I sat stiffly on the edge of the couch, every movement sending fresh waves of pain through my body. Pine's grip had left a constellation of pain: throbbing points where its manipulators had dug into my throat and collarbones, a burning along my face, and a sharp ache in my ear. Even breathing hurt.

  Shade, the wise humans of this voidhold have instigated a mandatory night cycle. Overriding it would trigger all the alerts. I'm sorry, but I can't bathe you in light.

  "That's okay," I whispered. "I think I should better remain unseen for now."

  Metal rattled against metal as Chio searched through storage compartments at the far end of the room. "Come on, come on," she grumbled. "I know she keeps emergency supplies up here somewhere."

  After considerable rummaging, she returned with a compact medical kit and a portable light that cast harsh shadows across the floor.

  "We can patch you up enough to keep going," she said, opening the kit. "But we'll need Vessa's healant for anything more than basic first aid."

  She set the lamp on the console beside the couch and with gentle pressure on my shoulders, angled me into its light.

  "That filthy thing had its claws in you pretty deep," she said. "I'll need to cut away your uniform, just a bit from the top. Is that okay?"

  I nodded, and then said, "It's not a uniform."

  "Oh?" She took a pair of scissors from the box and slid them under the fabric near my neck. "It's a nice look on you, whatever it is."

  "My sister..." I swallowed. The light snip of the scissors tickled. "She has me wear things she likes to look at. Mother too, although she lost interest when..." I faltered and touched my face.

  "I see." Chio frowned, focusing on my sleeve. "Well, if you are not too attached to it, I can give you one of our uniforms. They are nowhere near as glamorous but they are comfortable and practical."

  "Glamorous?" I have never thought of myself as glamorous, although my sister was. I remembered how Rashala liked lounging in the thren while Brons brought her box after box of garments. Whenever Mother wasn't looking, she would ask for the Voidhold Three dowry boxes. I hated when Brons complied, because Mother inevitably found out and Rashala gleefully transferred the blame onto me.

  "What is it?" Chio had started on the other sleeve.

  I shook my head, trying to dispel the sudden memory of being brought to Yeller for disturbing Mother's belongings.

  "Nothing," I said.

  She looked sceptical, and I didn't want her asking about Zero's customs. So instead, I thought of something to ask her.

  "Why did you come for me?"

  She made the last few slow snips, then laid the scissors down and considered me.

  "Well, that's a good question, Shade. But first, why don't you tell me what you were doing behind the bridge console."

  Her gaze was hard, and the bleak white light of the lamp made eerie patterns on her face.

  I couldn't lie. "I was putting in the navigator," I said softly.

  "Ah." Her eyes narrowed. "Why? You know we have renounced the use of functionaries. This is a human voidhold. We don't want mechanical help."

  "But..." I hesitated. "But you still use parts of them."

  "Yes." She gave me an odd look, like Rashala did when I said something unexpected. "Usable components, for computation."

  "No, I mean...in Lidaros' quarters. That's where I found the navigator."

  Chio's hands stilled on my leg. "What?"

  "He has been tapping into it to steer the voidhold. I saw his collection. The way he..." I swallowed, remembering Cedar's head mounted like a trophy, its sensors still flickering with awareness. "He keeps them."

  "You've been in his quarters." It wasn't a question. Her face had now also gone very still.

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  I nodded. "He took me there."

  "Vessa promised us he'd stopped that," Chio said quietly. She looked furious. "She patches up his victims, but never questions why they need patching. And the council..." She shook her head. "They pretend not to see. And now apparently we pretend not to know he uses the functionaries, even though have been doing perfectly well without them."

  I felt the presence of Cedar in my ear, and in the whole of the voidhold around us. It was quiet, yet it was also there. Had it been human, it would have been holding its breath.

  "We cannot fly without it," I said, very quietly, in case she wanted to ignore me.

  She didn't.

  "I fly my craft without a machine to do my thinking," Chio snapped.

  "Yes, your craft." A shiver overcame me. "But the voidhold is something more." I thought of Larkin in his helmet and flight suit, piloting us across the void. "Your craft is like an extension of you. Yes?"

  She nodded slowly, grudgingly.

  "You are at the peak of your skills, and you fly your craft as if it were your body." Her face softened as my words reached her, and a little smile played on her lips, so I forged on. "And that is how it must be for the voidhold. Except none of our bodies can encompass it. Only the navigator functionary can. It flies as an entity, not as parts pushing an entity." I took a deep breath, feeling dizzy, exhausted and in pain. "It was made to hold a home."

  I fell silent. Chio considered me.

  Thank you. I have never heard it put so well.

  "It's true," I said, lowering my gaze.

  "You are speaking to it now," said Chio, her brow wrinkling.

  "Yes. I have this thing." I pointed to my ear. "A receiver."

  More silence. I looked at my hands in my lap. Eventually, she sighed and sat down beside me, adjusting the lamp so that its glare didn't fall on us.

  "It spoke to me on the bridge," she said. "Through the console. I was trying to fly and failing worse than I had ever failed." She shook her head and chuckled. "Then, out of nowhere, the trajectory lines did things I had never seen them do before. Like they were curving to convergence, really weird. Then suddenly there it was. Right in the middle of a data stream I was, ah,...struggling to comprehend. Words!"

  "What did they say?" I asked, curious despite myself.

  Well, this is going to be embarrassing.

  Chio made an odd face, somewhere between a smile and a frown.

  "It said, 'May I have this dance?' Right there, amidst the vectors."

  She reached over and carefully peeled down the top of my blouse. Some of the fabric was caught in the wounds Pine had made around my collarbones, and I couldn't stop a flinch.

  "Hold on," she murmured, then took tweezers from the box and started teasing out the fragments.

  "The thing is," she said as she worked, "at first I thought someone was playing a prank. But then I realized that no one except the bridge shift has that kind of access. And we were all far too stressed to be playing practical jokes."

  She held up the lamp to examine the larger wound on the left side, where Pine's blades had dug deep. Another frown formed on her brow, and she took a spray and gauze from the box to clean it.

  "So I said, more to myself than anything else, 'What dance?' And the console data replied, 'A waltz of course'."

  Fortunately the bridge consoles still have their audio inputs. I am not as good a reader of mouths as I'd like to be.

  Her eyes flicked from my chest to me. "I don't even know what a waltz is. So, I said 'Who is this?' And the console replied, 'a navigator friend.' Now, I was about ready to start tearing the place down, but...well, the trajectories started coming in so fast, like I could see them being made before my eyes." She shook her head, then bent to tend to the wound on the other side of my chest.

  "I still thought that there was a human behind all this nonsense, so I said, 'You're skirting two vortices. How are you doing that?' The reply was almost instant: 'I'm an agile acrobat performing acrobatics'."

  I didn't catch what she said just now, but it sounded flattering. I don't suppose you'd consider moving your ear closer to her mouth and asking her to repeat? No?

  "I started to think I was going mad, but then it said something that stopped me in my tracks: 'Your beast is in the brig, hurting my friend'."

  She looked at me from under her frown. "I asked what friend. Funnily enough, I didn't need to ask what beast."

  I nodded, not trusting myself to make the right words.

  "Then it said 'Our Zero friend'. And let's just say that I know Lidaros and he's in vengeance mode, so I knew exactly what was going on."

  She swabbed the wound with the last piece of gauze. "There, that should hold up for a while. The question is now, what do I do with you? You'll still need to submit to the council first thing in the morning, there's no getting round that."

  "Yes, of course. But...what will happen to Cedar?" I asked. "Will the council remove it?"

  No! That would be a tragedy.

  Chio's expression hardened. "That's not my decision. The council will determine if reinstating our navigator is a violation of our principles." She shook her head. "You don't understand what it took for us to free ourselves. We can't just throw all that away by accepting machine control again."

  "But are you free?"

  The words slipped out before I could stop them. Chio's lip curled, her eyes darkened, and she pulled back from me.

  "Of course we are," she said. "But I don't expect you to understand. Not with your background."

  She went to put the box away. By the time she returned, she had regained her composure.

  "Look, Shade. I need to get back to the bridge. I've already done too much here. Lidaros is not someone to cross lightly."

  "I know. Thank you for your help," I said

  "Don't mention it." She stood up. "You're probably thinking you can run away, but I should warn you that more than half of Voidhold Two does whatever Lidaros tells them to do. You don't want them to find you."

  "I'll stay here," I said, leaning back against the couch and hugging myself.

  She pointed to the lamp on the console. "Keep it switched off. I'll send someone I trust to watch over you until morning." She pulled a storage container from beneath the couch and took out something flat and dark.

  "Here. It'll do for now."

  I took the package and felt rough fabric. "What is it?"

  "One of our old uniforms. You'll feel better in it. I'm afraid we've made a mess of your Zero outfit."

  After she left, after her footsteps faded, I touched my ear where the receiver sat. In the darkness, I could feel the voidhold's systems humming around us.

  Well, that was interesting.

  "Yes," I said, rising to my feet and shaking out the uniform. It was a lightweight one-piece in dark grey. Mother would hate it.

  I undressed right there beside the couch, folded my blouse and skirt and placed them in the storage container. Then I put on the uniform and smiled to myself.

  It felt good.

  "How do I look?" I asked.

  Give me a twirl in the light. Yes, very human.