Jacob fell asleep with his cheek mashed against the cold glass of the viewport, and it was almost midnight on the station when he woke to the sound of the door chime. Stumbling to the door to check the screen by the security panel, it took him a blurry second to recognise Roshan.

Jacob barely waited for the doors to finish sliding open before he threw his arms around Roshan, who was looking rumpled, as if he had dressed in the dark in a hurry.

It took a second to register the camera crew in the hall behind Roshan—they were filming on equipment barely bigger than their phones, but the lights were still big and cumbersome. "Roshan—what is all this, how did you find us?"

"Come on, you think there's anything Ahriman can't find?" said Roshan jovially, gripping Jacob by the forearms, but then drew him down to whisper in his ear. "This was Natalie's idea to get us inside, and so far it's working, so play along."

At regular volume for the cameras, he added, "We're just shooting some material for the big Taltos re-launch before we head back to Ahriman's Earth campus."

"It's time you boys came home," Liz intoned, with such aggressive emptiness that it had to be a scripted line. She was lurking between the two camera techs like a lost stage hand, her arms folded. "Perdigon was a shitty idea anyway. A fetid swamp full of bottom-dwelling garbage fish and Catholics. You guys'll have to cut that, huh?"

"Yup," said Roshan, not breaking eye contact with Jacob. "Can we please just do this competently, without acting like we're above it? Everyone has to do marketing, Murdoch."

"All right. From now on, I'll just spontaneously and naturally say what you told me to say."

"Well, I'm really touched that you guys wanted to capture this moment on video," Jacob said, intervening before they could waste too much of the crew's time. He clapped his hands with forced cheer. If there was one thing Jacob Roth was good at, it was forced cheer. "It's been so long since we saw you—come on over here, Murdoch, you can't refuse me a hug tonight! Although of course you can, I don't want to hug you without consent."

"I do not consent," said Murdoch.

"If you're not going to help then stay off-camera. Let's go find Ezra and then we're on our way," said Roshan, shouldering past the lighting guy to proceed down the hall. "Oh, hey Natalie, look who we found—"

Natalie was waiting at the corner of the hallway with Shruti slouching against the wall beside her. "I wanted to be right there when you opened the door, but Roshan didn't want to crowd the frame," Natalie said with a crooked smile, giving Jacob a quick hug. "We found Shruti for you, we thought you guys deserved a better send-off."

Jacob's eyes prickled as he embraced Shruti again, her skinny arms looped low around his waist. "God, I didn't know when we'd see you again—"

"Don't give me abandonment issues, dude," Shruti mumbled against his shirt, then stood back and pasted on a brisk smile. "Enough with the reunions, let's go..."

"Where are we going?" Natalie asked Jacob. "You know where Ezra's room is, right?"

"Marty showed me a few days ago," said Jacob, leading his friends and the disaffected camera crew in the right direction. "They've got him in...um, I'm not sure that filming this part of the station is going to be a good idea..."

"If we're not allowed there," said the camera tech with the Moses beard, "you can't pay us enough to go."

"I think you'll find we can," Roshan said. "Let's remember our through-lines here, okay? Stay in the moment."

"We're not gonna go out of our way to piss off Bija, okay?" said the bearded tech's partner, a scruffy guy who was almost as tall as Jacob, built like Joey Ramone. "We don't want to get blackballed from distribution on the Lumen."

"First of all, the Lumen's gonna be toast in two years when Ahriman rolls over Bija. Second, there's a ten-thousand-dollar gratuity in it for each of you if you stick with us all the way back to the ship."

Natalie flipped to the writeboard screen on her phone and scrawled OVERSPENDING on it, flashing the screen in Roshan's direction.

"...And not a penny more," Roshan told the crew.

"Deal," said Moses.

Joey Ramone sighed. "You're the boss."

Marty found them in the central concourse, and as they rode the walkway to BijaNext, Moses took some establishing shots of the station and Natalie went through the motions of an oral history interview.

* * *

NATALIE: How are you doing, are you excited to see Ezra again?

ROSHAN: Totally. Yeah. Very excited.

NATALIE: How long has it been?

ROSHAN: Well, we haven't really been—like, I wouldn't say estranged. It was very much an amicable breakup, Taltos and Ahriman. We still went to Jacob and Ezra's wedding. Beautiful ceremony.

MURDOCH: Beautiful? Really?

ROSHAN: I mean, you could definitely tell which parts of it were things that Ezra chose. But everything else was really nice.

NATALIE: What was the original impetus for splitting into two companies?

MURDOCH: Ezra wanted to build something that didn't work, and we wanted to develop Ahriman, which did work.

NATALIE: I'm gonna ask that question again, and we'll hear Jacob's answer this time. What was the original impetus for splitting into two companies?

JACOB: Taltos was facing some challenges as we developed the implant model, but Ahriman—a machine learning system that Liz Murdoch created—was in an incredibly strong position to dominate the market. Ahriman may be named after a Zoroastrian force of cosmic evil, but the system's so aggressive and robust that I always thought of it as a mighty minotaur just waiting to be unleashed upon the hapless Athenian youths and maids. So far it's dispatched them all handily, with nary a sign of a Theseus on the horizon. In a situation like that, it only made sense to let Ahriman forge on ahead while we at Taltos focused on perfecting our product.

NATALIE: Thank you. Jesus, Murdoch, was that so hard?

* * *

Thus rebuffed, Murdoch turned to Marty, who was playing a game on his tablet like a bored kid on a field trip. "I want your system password," Liz announced.

"You can have it, but I don't really have any kind of interesting system privileges," Marty said with a shrug. "I had full system access at first, but I didn't use any of the advanced features. After the first six months they said, 'use it or lose it' and cut me down to Bija Express level."

"Bija Express?" Liz shook her head. "That's cold."

"Kinda, but really, all I do is use chat and the multiplayer servers. Sometimes I stream games, but people just dunk on me all the time. I'm a pretty bad gamer," Marty admitted frankly. "It's become kind of a thing online, I guess? That the Bija futurist guy can't even get to a savepoint, people think it's funny. Everyone just swarms as soon as I open a game. The chat window fills up with users calling me an idiot, and anyhow, I don't really like the interface—"

"Why don't you let me have that password anyway," Liz interrupted.

 * * *

When they got off the moving walkway at the Nirodha arm of the station, they were accosted by a security guard, a trim and intense man with a shaved head. A true believer. His name tag read Turnbull, and he was important enough that he was wearing a suit rather than the usual Bija polo-and-lanyard uniform.

"What's up, gang—shooting the next big indie flick, huh?" said Turnbull with a smile. "Unfortunately, BijaNext is a restricted area, although I do understand the impulse to immortalise it for the historical record. Mind if I check your ID real quick?"

"We logged in at the Samudaya gate," said Natalie, showing him the code on her tablet. It was spoofed, Murdoch's handiwork, but it turned up a convincing result when Turnbull scanned it. "Everything's kosher. We're exclusively using Bija tech to film, even."

Turnbull frowned at the screen, then glanced at Shruti and nodded. "Sounds good. Sorry to bother you, folks, enjoy the rest of your day. Ms. Agnihotri, Mr. Roth—I hope your time at Bija has been pleasant."

"As pleasant as it always is, thank you," said Jacob.

Shruti gave him a tight smile, brows lifted. "The pleasantest."

Turnbull left them, and Jacob hurried to the nurses' station with Natalie and the others in tow. The white corridors were as quiet as they were last time, and through the viewport, the cold planet with its pale sea ice was in darkness, a few points of light scattered across its face. Mining settlements, maybe. The staff deferred to Marty, as usual.

Shruti was clearly weirded out. "I feel like they're going to wheel Ezra out on an upright gurney wearing a straitjacket and a muzzle."

"It wasn't quite that bad," Jacob said, reaching down to take Shruti's hand. To reassure himself, just as much as her. "We'll go in together, maybe keep the lighting...subdued, and we won't crowd him. Can we find a wheelchair, actually?"

"On it," said Natalie, breaking to go sweet-talk the nurses.

"Ezra can still walk, though, right?" Shruti said as she followed Jacob to the dimly-lit hall that was marked WARNING: UNSHIELDED AREA. "They didn't...did they do something to him?"

"He was already in rough shape when we left Perdigon, and the implant had to be removed," Jacob said. "So the wheelchair's just a precaution. He gets tired pretty quickly."

"This is such a clusterfuck," Shruti whispered to herself as the scanner made its unsettling noises in the walls, beeps and bangs and deep flanging thuds.

The last panel slid back to reveal the small, red-lit chamber where Ezra was waiting. He didn't look any worse than usual, Jacob thought, but Shruti wasn't ready for it and drew her breath in sharply.

"I can't believe they roped you into this, I'm sorry," Ezra said to Shruti, although he was clearly not surprised to see her.

"That's such a gracious welcome." Shruti reached for his arm. "Come on, man, they didn't rope me into anything. You tried to get me home, so I can try to get you home. Are you okay? You don't look okay."

"I'm fine if Jacob gets me on my feet," said Ezra, struggling to get upright with their help. "This was Natalie's idea, right?"

"It was."

"Has Turnbull spotted us already or does that not happen yet?"

"That...already happened," Jacob said.

Shruti helped Ezra over the threshold and into the hall. "Are we already fucked, then?"

"Not...necessarily," Ezra said, taking a long breath and steadying himself between Shruti and Jacob. "Turnbull buys the documentary story and gets excited to tell Magnus about it, so that the boss can show up to look pretty on camera. Magnus is gonna intercept us, so just—don't give him a reaction."

"Jesus fucking Christ, Magnus, can we have a minute without this performative PR shit?" Shruti muttered. "Is there time to get back to the ship before he—"

But there was no time.