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“Be straight with me, please. I…really hurt Jorgen today. I need to hear from someone I trust. How bad am I at this?”

“You’re notbadat being a friend,” Rig said, “you’re just hard to be friends with. That’s different.”

“How?”

“You try,” he said. “I know you do. You always looked out for me. Scud, I doubt you would normally have chosen the quiet, occasionally panicky guy to be your best friend. But I needed someone, and you saw others picking on me, and…well, here we are. You’re loyal, passionate, and inventive.”

“But…”

“But you are really,reallybad at seeing things from other people’s viewpoints. You just go and do stuff, Spin, and believe everyone else would have done the same thing if they’d only thought of it and had the guts.”

“Fair,” I said. “I know I pushed you into flight school. But I can’t see things as if I’m someone else. I’m me. Shockingly, I see things likeme.”

“It’s a skill to practice, like any other,” he said. “You love stories. Maybe ask yourself, what if the story weren’t aboutyoufor a change? What if it were Jorgen’s story? How would he feel about what you’re doing?”

Scud, that hit me right in the gut. He made it sound so easy, and maybe for him it was.

But I’d done whatneededto be done. For Jorgen. For Detritus. And given what was happening to me…the powers I was displaying…well, what if alienating Jorgen and the others was the only way to protect them?

It twisted me up inside. Made me start to tremble. Made me think of my friends dying, graphically, over and over in my mind. To escape those images, and another potential episode, I rolled back over and snatched one of the schematics.

“You know, Rodge,” I said to him, “you’re a weird guy.”

“True, true.”

“I walk in here to find you lyingface downamong a bunch of pieces of paper?”

“You immediately flopped down beside me.”

“Practicing empathy,” I said. “Whatisall of this?”

“Detritus has several enormous shipyards among these platforms,” he said.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “I had a battle in one, remember?”

“Right, while it was crashing. Nedd’s brothers…”

I nodded, though he couldn’t see, as he was still face down. Yeah, he really was weird. Maybe we had always been destined to become friends.

“You think you can build me a ship with one of these fabrication plants?” I asked.

“Depends, really,” he said. “Do you have designs for what you’d want? And by that I mean accurate, detailed schematics created by an actual engineer? Not something hand-drawn on a scrap of paper, depicting a catapult for launching Stacy Leftwire into a furnace.”

I smiled. “I forgot about that.”

“I didn’t. You wrote it in blood.”

“Rat blood,” I agreed. “It makes a terrible ink. Kept congealing. Not sure how the old necromancers ever made use of it in their arcane tomes.”

“Can we change the topic?”

“I’ll get you schematics,” I said. “Real ones. They were in the data dump we stole.”

“Great,” he said. “I wanted to do some tests anyway. Been thinking, though, that we don’t reallyneedmore fighters. We have plenty for our trained pilots. Maybe we need something else.”

I myself wasn’t so certain we had all the fighters we needed. Now that we had a hyperslug ejection system for pilots, we might start chewing through ships faster. It was a mindset change. We’d always had ejection systems that worked in atmosphere, but the culture of the DDF had trained pilots to protect their ships—ostensibly harder to replace—over their own lives.

I often wondered how much that short-sightedness had cost us.We hadn’t acknowledged the importance of skilled veteran pilots. Half the reason my friends and I were in such high positions was the fact that we’d managed tosurvivelong enough to actually get some useful combat experience.