Somewhere in the third hour, Kai stopped trying to sleep.

  Bahamut was awake too. The Dragon's consciousness pressed against his, a predator checking that its pack was still alive, still present, still worth protecting. Kai lay on the bunk and let it happen.

  He confirmed: still here.

  Bahamut settled. But not fully. The Dragon was in maintenance cycle on the other side of the containment field, techs running diagnostics on the shield array that Tiamat had shot off his starboard side. The override had ended when Tiamat fired. Bahamut knew that. What Bahamut didn't know, couldn't know, was why the Dragon had fired in the first place. Couldn't map the concept of someone else using your body.

  Kai pressed his palms against his eyes until he saw color.

  Later. We figure it out later.

  The presence at the edge of his mind didn't answer. Just waited.

  Admiral Pohl briefed them at 0600. She started without a preamble. Didn't bother to acknowledge the day before. She pulled up the tactical display and pointed at the Maribor system the way you'd point at a problem already solved.

  The hologram zoomed in on Maribor Prime and the battlecruiser threatening it.

  "Righteous Fury is maintaining a low orbit over the city of Radvanje." She zoomed the display, marking the battlecruiser's position: two hundred kilometers above the capital, nuclear-armed, its guns pointed down at 3.8 million people. "Corvette Beta provides point defense and perimeter patrol. Our window opens in twelve hours, when OSS Cannae and OSS Trebia arrive to complete our assault formation."

  Around the briefing table, the pack sat. Kai watched them without appearing to.

  Mikki had one foot hooked on the chair's bottom rung. Not slouching, positioned to stand without warning. Like she hadn't decided yet if she was staying.

  Alexandra's datapad was face-down on the table. She'd made that decision before she sat down.

  Under the table's edge, Anya's shoulders moved in a small, unconscious rhythm. Calculating something on a surface that wasn't there.

  Sanyog had a pencil and the corner of his notepad. Not the mission diagram. Something else, small, precise.

  Holt and the rest of Pegasus were quiet in the back row.

  "This is the final battle for this crisis. We will attack with overwhelming force. OSS Hannibal and the two corvettes handle long-range fire suppression. Pegasus Squadron maintains intercept coverage against DIF response craft. The Dragon Flight executes close-range assault on Righteous Fury, with emphasis on disabling the nuclear weapons grid before the ship can execute a launch order."

  Pohl brought up the battle diagram. The Dragon assault vectors were highlighted in blue, threading through the civilian-dense sectors, close enough to the ship that any collateral fire would endanger the crew rather than the city below.

  Dangerous work. Precision work.

  Kai looked at the diagram. At the civilian density markers. At how the Dragon assault vectors were positioned as a buffer between the battlecruiser's weapons and Radvanje's population centers.

  He felt it land like a hand on his shoulder.

  She knows what I care about.

  His hands were fists under the table. He hadn't noticed them form. The assault plan was real. The civilian protection emphasis was real. She'd built the whole thing around his best self and was using it to fly him.

  A bone for the Dragon.

  Through the bond, Bahamut caught the shape of it before Kai had named it, something dark and tight that registered as threat without specifying the source. The Dragon pressed back with the patience of something two hundred million years old, waiting for Kai to decide how angry to be.

  Kai sent back what he could: patience. The shape of not yet.

  The pressure settled. Didn't disappear.

  "Questions," Pohl said.

  The room was silent.

  "Dismissed. We launch in twelve hours. Prepare yourselves."

  She left without looking at any of them twice.

  Thorne stayed.

  He waited until the room had emptied of everyone except the pack. Then he moved to the side corridor that connected the briefing block to the research labs and keyed the door open.

  He glanced at his own chronometer. Then at Kai.

  "Twelve hours." A beat. "I'm buying you time. Don't waste it."

  He walked away.

  Kai looked at the open door. At the pack.

  "Let's go."

  The research lab Gamal had used for the architecture review was already prepared.

  She was at the central display when they filed in, hands moving through holographic layers of the neural interface architecture, pulling pathways apart and reassembling them with the muscle memory of someone who'd done this a thousand times. She looked up when they entered. Her shoulders were set differently than yesterday. Straighter. Like she'd stopped waiting to be thrown out.

  "Where were we," Kai said.

  "We were at the bonding protocols." She pulled up the display. "But I want to start somewhere else."

  She expanded the holographic architecture until it filled the room. Cyan pathways, overlapping in dense webs, the whole map of how a human mind learned to share itself with something alien and wide. Kai had seen versions of this before. It always looked like something that shouldn't work.

  "This is what I built," Gamal said. "Neural fusion architecture. The bonding matrix. Sensory integration. Pack-Sync." She touched each section as she named it. "I designed this for collaboration. For synthesis. The Dragon doesn't tell you what to do, it makes you want to do it. There's no debate. No hesitation. The intent was…"

  "I know what the intent was," Anya said.

  Gamal met her eyes. Didn't look away. "You built it too."

  Anya looked back at the display.

  Gamal bit her lip and turned back to the architecture. "Here." She highlighted a second layer, crimson threading through the cyan like infection. "Here is what they added."

  The override pathways ran through everything. Woven.

  "It's integrated into the bonding matrix," Anya said. She'd pushed her cup to one side without noticing. Her hands were moving through the display, tracing crimson pathways. "You can't control a Dragon-bond from outside. You have to be inside."

  "Yes." Gamal pulled up a specific node, expanded it. "The control activation is embedded in the sensory integration layer. When Pohl initiates an override, the signal travels through the same pathways that carry sensory data from the Dragon. Your nervous system can't distinguish it from your own input. By the time you process that the signal isn't yours, the command has already executed."

  "Can she do it again right now?" Mikki asked.

  The question landed flat. No drama. She needed the answer the same way you needed to know if the air recyclers were still running.

  Gamal didn't hesitate. "Yes. The override architecture is still intact. Until you remove it, she can activate it at any time, from anywhere she can reach the OMEGA command network."

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  Mikki absorbed this. Nodded once. She pushed back from the table, stood, crossed to the door.

  "I'm going to check the repair status on Orochi. Tell me if anything changes."

  She left. The door closed.

  Through the bond, Kai felt Orochi's location, the Dragon still on the maintenance cradle, thrusters cold, weapons offline. Felt Mikki walk toward it. Not because she'd learn anything useful about the repair schedule, but because there were limits to how long you could sit in a room and let someone explain the anatomy of your own captivity.

  He understood. He let her go.

  At the table, Alexandra hadn't looked up from the second diagram she'd been building. She'd stopped using Gamal's display as a reference and started working from memory, sketching the architecture as she understood it, her stylus moving in quick precise lines.

  Looking for the seams. Kai observed.

  "The Pack-Sync," Sanyog said.

  Gamal turned.

  "Show me the Pack-Sync in the override architecture."

  Gamal reached into the display, brought up the protocol. She expanded it, and the pathways bloomed outward, threading through all five bonding matrices simultaneously.

  Sanyog studied it. His cybernetic fingers moved through the holographic architecture, not touching it, just tracing. Testing his own memory of the pattern.

  Then he reached in and pressed one specific intersection point. "Here," he said. "That's where it fought back."

  Gamal looked at the point he'd indicated. At the countermeasure node where Sanyog's cybernetics had hit the system's self-healing architecture and the system had fired back.

  "You reached that far?" Gamal asked.

  "I had perhaps four seconds before the system identified the intrusion." Sanyog withdrew his hand. "It was enough to record the defense architecture. Not enough to act on it."

  Gamal looked at the display. "The countermeasure node is the most aggressively protected part of the override system. It watches for intrusion attempts. Responds with targeted neural feedback through the bonding matrix. Designed to disable the pilot attempting breach without alerting to the breach attempt from outside."

  "It's designed to punish you for trying to get free," Kai said.

  "Yes."

  Kai looked at Gamal. At the woman who'd walked in yesterday shaking, and who was now standing at the display pulling apart her own work.

  "Did you know," he said. "When you designed the Pack-Sync. Did you know what it would do to them?"

  Gamal's hands went still in the holographic field.

  She looked at the Pack-Sync architecture spread in front of her. At what it had done to three people on a ship's bridge while they screamed without voices.

  "I knew it could," she said. "In theory. The pathway was there. I told myself the safeguards would prevent it." She paused. "I told myself that because I wanted to be done. Because it was elegant and it worked and I wanted to stop thinking about what else it could become."

  She looked at Kai directly.

  "I knew. And I kept working."

  Kai held her gaze. Nodded once. That was all.

  Mikki came back eighteen minutes later. She dropped into her chair without ceremony.

  "Orochi's thrusters are at seventy-two percent. Weapons grid operational. Combat-ready in four hours."

  She said it to the room. Nobody asked for more than that.

  The full architecture took another hour to map.

  Gamal moved through it methodically, bonding matrix, sensory integration, override pathways, Pack-Sync, countermeasures, release protocols. She stopped using technical terminology somewhere in the second hour. Not because they couldn't follow it, but because translating it into plain language was its own kind of accounting.

  Then, at the edge of the third hour, Gamal stopped.

  She'd been highlighting the burnout pathway thresholds, walking them through where the architecture would degrade first, what the failure cascade looked like. Her hand was extended into the display. It stayed there a beat too long.

  Then she lowered it. Stepped back from the console. Moved to the wall and sat down.

  No one asked why.

  Alexandra looked at the display. At the pathways still hanging in the air. At the place where Gamal's hand had been.

  She leaned forward.

  "The lateral cascade," Alexandra said. "If we overload here instead of here, does the failure propagate differently?"

  The question hung. Not directed at anyone specific.

  Anya answered it. "Yes. The pathway geometry routes through the sensory integration layer. Overload at the node, it backflows into the bonding matrix. Overload along the length, the signal dissipates before it reaches the matrix."

  Alexandra was already rebuilding the diagram, pulling up a fresh layer, sketching the failure cascade Anya had just described. "Show me."

  Anya moved to stand beside her. Her stylus found the display, tracing the pathway, marking thresholds. "Here, here, and here. These are the overload points. The architecture can't heal fast enough if we hit all three simultaneously."

  "But the signal has to originate from inside the bond." Alexandra was ahead of her. "We have to generate the overload while under override."

  "Yes."

  They worked in parallel, trading questions and answers without looking at each other. Anya mapped failure modes. Alexandra built the approach architecture around them. The display filled with annotations, alternative pathways, probabilities scrawled in margins.

  Kai watched them. Watched Alexandra's stylus never stop moving. Watched Anya point to a node, say something too quiet to hear, and Alexandra nod and redraw the whole approach.

  "What's the synchronization tolerance if multiple pilots attempt burnout simultaneously?" Sanyog asked.

  Anya answered without looking up. "Two point three seconds. After that, the system isolates each pathway and the cascade fails."

  Sanyog wrote something on his notepad. Not the small drawing from earlier. Something else now.

  At some point Chase appeared in the narrow window beside the door, through it, Kai could see into the corridor, the CIC station visible at the far end, Chase at his console with his back to them. They made eye contact through the glass.

  Chase looked at Kai for exactly long enough. Then he turned to his console, pulled up a diagnostic queue, and rerouted it to cycle on delay. The monitoring sweep that should have been running every twenty minutes was now running every forty-five.

  He turned back to his work without looking at Kai again.

  "Two options," Alexandra said.

  She'd been silent for six minutes. Now she set down her stylus and turned her diagram to face the room.

  Her version of the architecture had the override pathways traced in red, but she'd marked two different intervention points in different colors.

  "First option." She pointed to the external approach. "A hacking attempt. Remote changes to the control architecture. If we can access the OMEGA command network and modify the override protocols from outside, we can disable the activation trigger without touching the bonding matrix itself. Safer. Preserves bond integrity. Significantly more difficult, the countermeasures are aggressive, the system heals faster than we can probably rewrite, and we have to do it from somewhere Pohl isn't watching."

  She paused.

  "Second option." She pointed to the internal pathway. "We overload the backdoor pathways from inside. Force so much signal through them that they physically degrade. Permanent."

  "Burnout," Sanyog said.

  "Burnout." Alexandra didn't look at Gamal. She didn't need to. The architecture was on the display. The risks were in the room. "Massive neural stress. The pathways run adjacent to memory integration, sensory processing, the bonding matrix itself. Hemorrhage. Permanent neural scarring. Bond capacity reduction. Depending on individual variation and how aggressively the procedure is administered, severe neural injury or death."

  She delivered it the way she delivered any technical specification. Without softening.

  The room held that.

  Kai heard it twice, once through his own processing, and then again through what it meant for Bahamut.

  Bond capacity reduction.

  At the edge of his awareness, Bahamut stirred. A pressure, like a hand testing a locked door. The Dragon couldn't understand the words, but it felt the cold shape of the fear underneath.

  Kai breathed. Deliberately. Not yet, buddy.

  The pressure receded. Didn't disappear. At the edge of his awareness, something kept watch.

  That was the cost no one else could see. Having to hide this from the mind that shared his. Having to calculate how much damage the bond could take before it became something else. Something thinner.

  "So," Kai said. His voice came out level. "We try the Disable option first."

  He looked at each of them.

  "If it works, nobody pays the other price. If it doesn't…" He stopped. "We'll know what comes next."

  No one argued.

  Kai watched the countdown for launch. Ten hours and fourty-two minutes left.

  The session broke up in pieces.

  Sanyog left with his diagnostics still running. Anya stood at the display for a long moment, then gathered her notes, folded them once, and left without explaining anything.

  Mikki paused at the door, looked back at Gamal.

  "The Pack-Sync," she said. "You said you knew."

  Gamal met her eyes from against the wall.

  "If it works," Mikki said, "I'll tell you when I've decided what to do with that."

  She left.

  Kai followed, pulled the door most of the way shut, and stopped.

  Through the narrowed gap, Alexandra was alone at the table. Her own diagram was in front of her, but she'd pushed it aside. She was reaching into the archived display, pulling up a specific section.

  The Pack-Sync pathway.

  Not to study it. Not to annotate. Just holding it in front of her. Looking at the architecture of what had made Tiamat's targeting system calculate a kill shot on him while Alexandra screamed without a voice somewhere behind it.

  Against the far wall, Gamal hadn't moved. She sat with her arms still wrapped around her knee, watching Alexandra the way you'd watch someone handle something you'd once held and broken.

  Alexandra touched the pathway with one finger. Her other hand found her stylus. She started working.

  Gamal watched.

  Neither of them spoke.

  Kai stood at the door for a long moment. Then he pulled it shut and walked toward Bay 7.

  Ahead, Bahamut was waiting. The Dragon's presence pressed against his mind, not a question. An acknowledgment.

  Still here.

  Kai walked toward it.

  Which character of the pack you like the most?