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She needed to be able to tell herself it was not vengeance that brought her here, but simple math. Arianrhod’s life used resources better reserved for others whose simple existence was not a threat.
    Caitlin took a breath of dusty-smelling filtered air, and thought about the irrevocability of her decision. It still didn’t seem slight, even when balanced against the limited and irretrievable resources of her world. But everything was in her head—atmospheric pressure and composition, wildly fluctuating heat in the habitats where the air wasn’t simply frozen in plate-fragile shingles to the bulkheads—and the simple fact that Arianrhod had tried to kill Caitlin’s daughter. The world—the corners of it she could reach—stretched into her, gave up its information as the ghosts of sensations laid over her own. She wore it as an armature over the mind-wiped armor. This was new and alien, this sense of her world present and immanent.
Implied
.
    She felt the gaps in the awareness as well, the broken and simply missing bits of the world, the ones with which all contact had been severed. They achedstrangely, a numb kind of pins-and-needles emptiness that unsettled her to the core.
    So this was what it meant to be the Chief Engineer of a restored world. Restored and crippled in the same blow, and Caitlin was old enough to find the irony bitterly amusing.
    The price—in lives, in materials, in the integrity of the world—had been too high. But it had been paid nonetheless, and now the debt must be serviced.
    Inside this pod slept a woman Caitlin had known for centuries, beside whom Caitlin had worked, whose child Caitlin had adopted as her own before that child gave up her life and her existence to stop Arianrhod’s plan. Merely by living, the woman in this pod consumed resources better put to use by those who had
not
betrayed Engine, and Caitlin, and Samael, and the very iron world that cupped them in its warm embrace, holding the Enemy at bay. A woman whose body contained carbon and salt and organic compounds. She could be useful, repurposed as part of the air they breathed, the walls that kept them.
    Caitlin didn’t need her hands to change the tank settings any more than she needed her eyes to see inside. But there was a certain dignity imparted by being physically present when she made this choice. An acknowledgment that it was momentous.
    And that, she hoped, was the difference between herself and her father.
    She rested her fingertips on the override.
    “Chief Engineer?”
    A familiar voice, but full of unfamiliar inflections. She jerked her hand to her side, torn muscle and stressed bone protesting, and turned on the balls of her feet. Beneath her opened visor, she looked out at the dark curls and arched brows that had once belonged to her half brother.
    But Oliver Conn was dead, and the person who wore his resurrected body now was someone from the Moving Times. She had never known Oliver: he was a Conn, but he was a young Conn, and Caitlin had been dead to her family for three or four times his life span. Still, he bore the family stamp, so for a moment Caitlin wondered why it was that all her siblings had chosen to look so like Alasdair their father, the dead Commodore.
    Whatever evils Arianrhod and her daughter Ariane had accomplished, they had at least succeeded in destroying Alasdair. The act might have bought them more sympathy from Caitlin if they had not tortured, crippled, and nearly killed Perceval to do so.
    “Chief Engineer?” the young man who had been Oliver Conn said again.
    Caitlin realized she had been staring. “Yes?”
    The resurrectee swallowed, eyes wide. Did she awe him? Was it cruel of her to find it funny if she did? “Prince Benedick sent me with a message. He asks that you return to Central Engineering as soon as possible.”
    Not
as soon as is convenient
, which is what Benedick would say if it truly were not urgent. He
would
send a messenger rather than calling her directly.