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I avoided Kali’s eyes, but I saw her smiling. I saw tears on her face before I managed to look away. I saw Uye wiping his cheeks, too.

Balidor looked more wary, as did Tarsi.

Jon looked worried.

Wreg beamed at me, his dark eyes dancing with light. He gave Revik an expressive scowl, showing he still hadn’t fully forgiven him for whatever he thought happened between us, then beamed at him, too.

Most of the others just looked weirded out by me again.

It felt like I’d gone back to being “The Bridge” in their eyes, instead of just Allie. Since I’d been trying to shake them of that since we left New York, I couldn’t help sighing at some of their expressions.

Revik didn’t get that time alone with me he’d wanted, either.

Well––not for hours, anyway.

We spent the rest of that day having our light examined by every seer on the infiltration team, along with Kali, Uye, Wreg, Loki, Neela, and a number of others with high sight ranks on the military side.

Honestly, they didn’t tell us much I didn’t already know.

Balidor confirmed I’d replaced entire structures in Lily’s light with my own, and that I’d done essentially the same to Revik, only with structures much higher up in his light. They agreed the solution wasn’t a permanent one, or even a wholly ideal one, but it bought us time.

More importantly, it bought Revik and Lily freedom from the tank.

Revik and I moved our things to the ship’s flag cabin, which had a private construct already. The flag cabin had always been intended for Revik and me, although this past week was the first time we’d actually slept in it.

Next door to us, a smaller cabin was given to Lily.

It connected to ours via a door between bulkheads, but lived inside its own construct. Even with the separate constructs, I could feel her all the time now.

That thread to her never got broken.

I still struggled with some of what caused my shutdown after Sri Lanka.

I struggled with Revik knowing my parents, with Dalejem leaving Revik to work for my mother, with my parents being in California all those years, with whatever the hell happened between my mother and Revik that still had my father watching Revik like a hawk.

I couldn’t tell which part of it bothered me more: the stuff with Revik, the bullshit secrets for all those years, or my mother apparently instructing Dalejem to leave me under a fuckingoverpasswhen I was too young to even crawl.

Plus, there was that whole other aspect of Revik’s life he’d neglected to tell me about.

“How many men have you dated?” I asked him one of those nights. “And why haven’t you so much asmentioneda single one of them to me?”

That made him roll his eyes.

And okay, probably deservedly.

He told me, though.

“None apart from Dalejem,” he said, shrugging with a hand. “Well, Terry. But you already knew about that.”

A flicker of shock hit my light. “I did?”

Revik turned his head on the pillow, staring at me. His German accent grew more pronounced. “Allie! How in the gods did you not know about that?”

“I don’t know,” I said, clicking in annoyance. “Maybe because you nevertoldme?”

But Revik seemed to think the fact he and Terian dated should have been obvious.

He claimed it was nothing, that he only called it a relationship because they’d been exclusive for part of it. According to him, apart from Dalejem, his relationships with men had been entirely about sex.