Defender

While his household, these people around him—they were here on his account, and because of their man’chi, and because their home was always where he was.

Even the dowager, be it remembered, had left the world she championed. There was no fiercer advocate for the old ways of the world, and here she was, outbound with the next generation of her household, to take on whatever humans had done at Reunion—to use hishelp, among others.

Jase only thoughttwo captains ran this ship.

He drew one breath and two, having his bearings, with the world and the station behind him—or under his back, as the axis of the ship went—and getting further away by the second. It wasn’t so bad. He could have drunk the tea more slowly.

No emergency, and they were launched.

They were going to go out to wherever the ship did such things and fold space, bizarre thought. He couldn’t wait to explain that process to Banichi.

And his family, such as he still had back on Mospheira, would have to deal with things in his utter absence, as families could, and did, surviving somehow, and in their own way.

Another set of large breaths. He felt completely lightheaded.

“ Acceleration will continue at 1.2 G,” C1 said over the intercom. “ Emergency movement only until further notice.”

They were on a ship hurtling faster and faster through the cosmos and away from all they knew.

And the whole ship was a place of only crew, only staff—inaccessible to strangers and random lunatics, a place where he didn’t have to worry about assassins and vantages for snipers.

He drew two and three free breaths, in that heady thought.

He was free—for the first time in more than a decade. Give or take Sabin, no one on the ship wanted to kill him.

Wasn’t that a marvelous thought?

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