Chapter 7: "Training Days"
The summons came at 0630, before Connor had finished his first cup of coffee. His communicator chimed with the particular cadence reserved for priority messages from the hangar commander's office, and the text was brief: Commander Vale. My office. 0700.
Connor read it twice, set down his coffee, and started getting dressed.
Captain Kastor was already behind his desk when Connor arrived, and he did not invite Connor to sit down. That was the first sign. The second was the datapad lying face-up on the desk between them, displaying what appeared to be a transcript of a conversation, Connor's conversation, in the corridors of Q Hangar, reconstructed from the accounts of at least a dozen witnesses.
"Close the door," Kastor said.
Connor closed it.
"Tell me," Kastor began, his voice carrying the particular calm that experienced officers used when they were deciding between disappointment and fury, "that I did not read a report this morning that my most promising squadron commander went to Q Hangar last night and wagered his position on an exhibition match with a beast-folk technician."
"It wasn't exactly a wager on my position, sir-"
"What was it, then? Exactly?"
Connor stood at attention and chose his words carefully. "I made a personal agreement with Tech Specialist Longwhisker regarding the upcoming exhibition between A-09 and Q-05. If A-09 wins, I'll recommend him for a transfer to A Hangar. If Q-05 wins, I'll request a transfer to Q."
Kastor stared at him for a long moment. "A transfer to Q."
"Yes, sir."
"You. A Hangar's youngest squadron commander. The pilot I told, to his face, not two days ago, that he would command this hangar within a decade. You want to transfer to Q."
"I don't want to transfer to Q, sir. I don't expect to have to. A-09 will win the exhibition."
"Then why make the bet at all?"
It was a fair question, and Connor didn't have a good answer for it. The honest answer involved reincarnation, a tabletop game, and a best friend from a previous life trapped in the body of a four-foot mouse, and that was not an answer he could give.
"I was challenging Tech Specialist Longwhisker to accept a transfer up," Connor said. "He refused. The bet was the only terms he'd accept."
Kastor leaned back in his chair and regarded Connor the way a surgeon might regard a particularly interesting tumor. "Do you know what this looks like, Commander?"
"Sir?"
"It looks like an A Hangar officer went slumming in Q Deck, got talked into something stupid by a clever beast-folk, and is now the subject of a rumor that has spread through approximately fourteen of the twenty hangars on this ship in less than twelve hours." Kastor picked up the datapad. "I have had inquiries from three other hangar commanders this morning. Captain Wells from D Hangar thinks it's hilarious. Commander Okonkwo from Q Hangar wants to know if I'm aware that one of my pilots is fraternizing with his technicians. And Captain Zhao from J sent me a message that said, and I quote, 'Is your boy alright?'"
Connor's jaw tightened. "I apologize for the attention, sir."
"The attention is the least of it." Kastor set the datapad down. "Connor, I can't stop you from making personal agreements on your own time. And I can't stop you from filing a transfer request, that's your right under fleet regulations. But I want to be very clear about what happens if you do. You don't go to Q as a squadron commander. You don't go as a lieutenant commander. You go as whatever Q Hangar has room for, which, given your qualifications, would be a shuttle pilot. You'd be starting over. Everything you've built, everything your family has built for three generations, gone."
"I understand, sir. But it won't come to that."
Kastor studied him for another long moment, then exhaled. "Win the exhibition, Connor. Win it decisively. And then we can pretend this was a colorful anecdote about a young officer's confidence rather than a career-ending lapse in judgment."
"Yes, sir."
"Dismissed."
His parents' quarters were on C Deck, comfortable but compact, the lived-in space of two career officers who had spent more years aboard the Enforcer than off it. Connor's mother answered the door in off-duty clothes, her dark hair pulled back, her expression suggesting that the rumor network aboard a carrier ship operated considerably faster than light speed.
"Come in," Captain Shivali Gaba said. "Your father's making tea."
Commander Andrew Vale was indeed making tea, he nodded to Connor, poured three cups, and set them on the small table where the family had eaten most of their meals for twenty years.
They sat. Connor's mother folded her hands around her cup and looked at him with an expression he recognized from every significant conversation they'd ever had, open, patient, and absolutely certain that she already knew what was going on.
"We heard about the bet," she said.
"I figured."
"Your father pulled Longwhisker's service record."
Connor looked at his father, who shrugged without apology. "My son makes a public wager with a Q Hangar tech, I'm going to want to know who the tech is. It's a good record, actually. Impressive, for his position. He advanced faster than most, and his supervisors consistently rate him above expectations." He paused. "Interesting coincidence, he has the same birthday as you."
Connor blinked. He hadn't known that. May 17th, 11,032. The same day. He filed it away and kept his expression neutral.
"He's clearly intelligent," his mother continued. "Charismatic, by all accounts. Popular in Q Hangar." She took a sip of tea. "And apparently quite handsome, for a mouse."
The shift in her tone was subtle but unmistakable. Connor felt something cold settle in his stomach.
"Mom-”
"Connor, I understand." Her voice was gentle, the voice she used when she was trying to be kind about something she considered a problem. "It happens. More often than people talk about. Some officers develop... attachments to beast-folk. There's nothing wrong with it, as long as it's handled discreetly."
"That's not what this is."
"Your cousin Geoffrey has been in a relationship with a beast-folk woman for almost three years now. Did you know that?"
Connor stared at her. "Geoff? No. I didn't."
"Because he keeps it quiet. That's how these things work. You can have your feelings, but you cannot make them public, and you absolutely cannot make bets in crowded corridors that put your entire career on the line because a clever young mouse looked at you the right way."
"Mom, I'm not-" Connor stopped. The denial was automatic, reflexive, and it died in his throat because somewhere between his mouth and his brain, a door opened that he hadn't known was closed, and behind it was a truth so obvious that he couldn't believe he'd missed it.
He thought about Ravi in the storage alcove, cross-legged on the floor, ears perked, grinning Tyler's grin with a face full of whiskers. He thought about the way Ravi's voice shifted when he was excited about something, higher, faster, his hands moving. He thought about the handshake, and the half-wave at the lift, and the way Ravi had looked up at him and said don't rescue me with an intensity that had nothing to do with hangar transfers.
Oh.
Oh.
"Connor?" his mother said.
"You're right that it's not worth throwing my career away over," Connor said carefully. "And I'm not going to. A-09 will win the exhibition, and that will be the end of it."
His parents exchanged a look, the silent communication of two people who had been married for twenty-five years and could hold entire conversations without speaking. His father reached over and squeezed his mother's hand.
"Win the match," his father said. "We'll talk about the rest later."
Connor called a full squad briefing for 0900 the next morning. His squad assembled in their ready room with the particular energy of people who had heard rumors and wanted to know which ones were true.
Lisa Geiger arrived last, settling into her chair with the unhurried grace of someone who wanted everyone to notice she wasn't in a hurry. Jeremy Haskins and Karl Levitt sat together, as usual. Hamilton and Durst, the bomber crew, had brought coffee. Nathan Smith, the shuttle pilot, sat slightly apart from the others, still navigating the social geography of a squad he'd belonged to for less than a month.
"Alright," Connor said. "Exhibition schedule. We've got F-14 next week, C-04 the week after, and Q-05 in three weeks. I want to use the first two matches as prep for the third. We're going to train harder than we have been."
Lisa raised an eyebrow. "For Q Hangar?"
"For all three."
"Connor, F-14 is a formality. C-04 might make us work for five minutes. And Q-05 is-" She waved a hand. "Q Hangar hasn't won an exhibition above L Deck. Ever. We could fly the match asleep."
"We're not going to fly it asleep. We're going to fly it at our best."
"Why?" The question came from Karl, who rarely spoke in briefings and apparently felt strongly enough about this one to break the habit. "What's different about this exhibition?"
Connor could feel the unasked question underneath, they'd all heard the rumor by now. He met it directly.
"I made a personal agreement with one of Q-05's crew. The details aren't relevant to how we fly the match. What is relevant is that I expect this squad to perform at its highest level, and right now, we're not there."
"We're A Hangar," Lisa said. "We're there by definition."
"Then you won't mind proving it in simulation. Briefing room two, 1000 hours. Full tactical sim."
He loaded a standard A Hangar scenario first, a rescue operation, their squadron jumping to support an O Hangar beast-folk squad that had been ambushed on patrol. The setup was familiar, pristine ships, reliable intel, clear tactical superiority. They knew where the enemy was, they knew what they had, and they arrived fresh with full ordnance.
The squad performed well enough. They eliminated the pirate force in eleven minutes with no losses, textbook flying and clean targeting. The O Hangar squad, what was left of it, survived mostly intact.
"Good work," Connor said in the debrief. "How many O Hangar pilots did we lose?"
"One was already down before we arrived," Hamilton said. "We saved the other five."
"Three," Connor corrected. "Two more went down during the engagement because we prioritized the pirate ships over covering their escape vectors. We treated the rescue as a secondary objective."
"It is a secondary objective," Lisa said. "We were there to eliminate the threat."
"The threat was to the O Hangar squad. If they're dead, we haven't eliminated anything."
Lisa's expression tightened but she said nothing more. Connor pulled up the next simulation.
"Let's try something different."
He'd spent two hours the night before accessing Q Hangar's training database, it was available to any officer, though he doubted many above D Deck had ever looked at it. The simulations were nothing like A Hangar's. Where A Hangar scenarios started clean and ended decisive, Q Hangar scenarios started broken and got worse.
The simulation loaded. Connor watched his squad's faces as the parameters populated their screens.
"What is this?" Jeremy said.
"Q Hangar training scenario. You're returning from an engagement. Your fighter's taken damage, port targeting array is degraded, missile count is down to one, and your fuel reserves are at thirty percent. The bomber has expended sixty percent of its ordnance. The shuttle's sensor range is halved."
"That's not a starting condition," Lisa said. "That's a failure state."
"It's the starting condition for most Q Hangar patrols. They're assigned to smaller carriers operating at the edge of the system, hours from reinforcements. They don't get to start fresh." Connor keyed the scenario. "You receive a distress signal from a civilian transport. It's an obvious trap, the signal is coming from an area with known pirate activity, and the timing is too convenient. But the transport is real, and there are six hundred people aboard."
"So we call for backup," Karl said.
"Nearest reinforcement is an hour away at full burn. The transport doesn't have an hour."
The simulation began. Connor watched from the command console as his squad, A Hangar's elite, the best of the best, flew into the scenario with the confidence of pilots who had never started a fight already bleeding.
It went badly.
Lisa pushed too hard on the intercept, burning fuel she didn't have, and flamed out twelve minutes in. Jeremy lost his remaining missile on a decoy. Karl collided with an asteroid, not fatally, but enough to knock out his already-degraded targeting system. Hamilton tried to lay down suppressive fire and ran dry in eight minutes. Smith panicked and broke formation.
The pirates destroyed the transport. Three of Connor's six ships were disabled or destroyed. Total mission time, nineteen minutes.
The debrief was silent.
"That's what Q Hangar trains for," Connor said. "Every day. They start with less, they fly against worse odds, and they have to make decisions that we never have to make because we always arrive with full tanks and clean ships." He paused. "We're going to run scenarios like this every day until the exhibition. I want this squad to be able to fight from behind, not just from ahead."
Lisa stood, her jaw set. "Permission to speak freely, Commander."
"Granted."
"This is absurd. We are not Q Hangar. We are not going to be Q Hangar. Our job is to fly A Hangar missions, which we do exceptionally well. Running beast-folk simulations where we start half-dead and fight with one hand tied behind our back is not training, it's humiliation."
"The O Hangar pilots in that first scenario would probably call it something else," Connor said. "Sit down, Lieutenant."
Lisa sat. The room was very quiet.
"Same time tomorrow," Connor said. "Dismissed."
He took the standard lift down that evening, riding it past the painted walls and the bare metal and the narrowing corridors until the doors opened on Q Deck's familiar warmth and noise. He'd changed into off-duty clothes, no rank insignia, no hangar patch, but it didn't matter. Word traveled fast on a ship this size, and his face was apparently now known in Q Hangar. Beast-folk stepped aside as he passed, some with the automatic deference he was used to, others with something more like curiosity.
He found Ravi in the common area, setting up for the evening's game session. The cargo bay had been arranged with more care than the last time Connor had seen it, someone had dragged in additional seating, and the makeshift platform where Ravi ran his games had been fitted with a small shelf for dice and papers. A dozen players were already gathering, a mix of beast-folk and lower-hangar humans, settling into seats and pulling out character sheets.
Ravi looked up as Connor entered and hopped down from the platform.
"There he is. The man who bet his career on a card game."
"It's not a card game."
"Try explaining that to A Deck." Ravi grinned and reached into a cloth pouch at his belt. "I made you something."
He held out his hand. On his palm sat a small figurine, perhaps three centimeters tall, carved from what looked like hull metal but shaped with a precision that no tool could have managed. It was a human figure in armor, one hand raised with a weapon, the other resting on the hilt of a sword at its hip. The detail was extraordinary, individual plates of armor, a face with recognizable features, even a tiny rank insignia on the chest.
"Earth magic," Ravi said, watching Connor's expression. "Post-material shavings from the repair shop. Scrap that would've been swept up and recycled anyway, before you worry about the cost. I make them for all my players."
Connor turned the figurine in his fingers. The face looked like him, not precisely, but close enough to be intentional. "This is... Ravi, this is incredible."
"Don't sound so surprised. I've been making these for three years. The early ones looked like they'd been chewed." He took the figurine back, set it on the shelf beside a row of similar figures, beast-folk and human, warriors and mages and rogues, each one rendered with the same careful attention. "You're playing tonight. I already built your character."
"You built my character?"
"You'd have spent three hours on optimization and we both know it. I gave you a fighter with high tactical stats and a leadership specialization. You can argue about the details later." Ravi's whiskers twitched. "Come on, Mark. When's the last time you rolled a d20?"
Connor looked at the figurine on the shelf, standing among its companions. "About nine thousand years ago," he said quietly.
"Then you're overdue."
The game lasted two hours, and Connor lost himself in it.
It was different from the fragments he remembered, Ravi had rebuilt the system from the ground up, keeping the bones of what Tyler had always loved about tabletop games while reshaping the mechanics to suit a world where magic was real and space was the frontier instead of a medieval countryside. The setting was original, careful to avoid anything too close to their actual reality, and the adventure was a dungeon crawl through an ancient structure on a dead moon, classic enough to be comfortable, complex enough to be engaging.
Connor's character fit him like a glove, which of course it did, because Ravi knew him better than anyone alive. He found himself slipping into the rhythm of it, reading the situation, coordinating with the other players, making calls that balanced risk against reward. The dice cooperated more often than not, and the table responded to him the way people always responded to Connor when he was fully engaged, they followed his lead, trusted his instincts, played better because he was there.
The other players welcomed him with varying degrees of warmth. A few beast-folk were clearly nervous about having an A Hangar human at the table, but the game itself was a leveler, when you were arguing about whether to fight the guardian or try to sneak past it, rank and species mattered less than whether you had a good plan.
When the session ended and the players began packing up, Connor realized he was smiling. He couldn't remember the last time he'd smiled like that, unguarded, without calculation, the simple pleasure of doing something he loved with people who loved it too.
Ravi caught his eye from across the table and gave him a look that said I know without saying anything at all.
They found their way to the storage alcove again, it had become, by unspoken agreement, their place, the only space on the entire ship where they could talk without masks.
Ravi settled onto an overturned crate, feet dangling, and pulled up a display on a small personal tablet, standard issue for Q Hangar technicians, basic but functional.
"Something I want to show you," he said. "Have you been following the Redtail-Highpaw wedding?"
Connor shook his head. "Should I have been?"
"It's the biggest thing in beast-folk society right now. Hevpal Highpaw, the eldest son of the first recognized beast-folk noble house, is marrying Lady Kira Redtail. The Redtails are newer nobility, military family, their grandparents earned the title about forty-five years ago. It's a huge deal politically. The Highpaws are old money, very establishment, very 'keep your head down and serve the Empire.' The Redtails are military achievers. The marriage ties those two threads together."
"Okay," Connor said slowly. "Why are you telling me this?"
Ravi turned the tablet around. On the screen was a profile, Lady Kira Redtail, of Mount Haven on Dapple. Fox beast-folk. Pilot. The biographical details were sparse but included the basics, family history, house affiliations, military service record for her family.
And her date of birth. May 17th, 11,032 AD.
Connor stared at the screen.
"She has a twin brother," Ravi said. "Kai Redtail. Also born May 17th. Obviously."
"That's my birthday," Connor said.
"It's my birthday too."
They looked at each other. The alcove suddenly felt very small.
"Could be a coincidence," Connor said. "Thousands of people were born that day across the Empire."
"Could be," Ravi agreed. "But if it's not, if the birthday thing is a pattern, then Kira and Kai might be two of our group."
"Who?"
"I don't know. Could be anyone. Could be Jason and Jessica, they were engaged, and if they came back as twins instead..." Ravi tilted his head. "They'd make a cute fox couple, honestly."
"They're twins, Ravi."
"Which makes the engaged thing awkward, yes. I acknowledged that internally." His whiskers twitched. "The point is, I don't know who they are. I don't have any way to find out without going to Dapple, and I've never left this ship. But someone from our table might be down there, living as beast-folk nobility, about to marry into the most politically important house on the planet."
Connor leaned back against the wall. "And someone else might be running a liberated asteroid mine in the Oort Cloud called Asheborne Downs."
"And two of us are sitting in a storage closet on Q Deck."
"It's an alcove."
"It's a closet, Connor."
Connor almost laughed. The weight of it, the strangeness, the impossibility, the sheer absurdity of two reincarnated college students hiding in a maintenance alcove on a miles-long spaceship nine thousand years in the future, pressed down on him, and laughter was the only response that made any sense.
Then the laughter faded, and what was underneath it was something else entirely.
"My mother thinks I've fallen for a beast-folk," he said.
Ravi's ears flattened slightly. "And?"
"And I told her she was wrong."
"Were you lying?"
Connor looked at him. Ravi sat on his crate, small and gray and sharp-eyed, his tail curled loosely around one leg, and he waited for the answer with an expression that was neither hopeful nor guarded but simply, precisely honest. Tyler's honesty. The kind that had always made Mark tell the truth even when he didn't want to.
"I didn't know I was," Connor said. "Not until she said it. And then it was, obvious. Like it had been there the whole time and I just wasn't looking at it."
Ravi exhaled. It was a small sound, quiet enough to miss if you weren't paying attention, but Connor was paying attention to everything about Ravi right now, and the breath carried about fifteen years of loneliness in it.
"I've been in relationships," Ravi said. "A few. Men, women, beast-folk, always beast-folk. They were good people, and I cared about them, but I could never-" He stopped, started again. "When you can't tell anyone who you really are, when the most important thing about you is something you have to hide, every relationship has a ceiling. You get close, and then you hit it, and then it ends." He looked down at his hands, turned them over, studied the small furred fingers that had once been Tyler Reed's. "You're the only person in this entire world who knows me. Actually knows me."
"Ravi, "
"I know. I know how it looks. I know what the regulations say, human and beast-folk can't marry. I know what your career means and I know what my family's future depends on and I know that this is possibly the most complicated thing either of us could do in either of our lives." He looked up. "But you asked, and Tyler never lied to Mark, so there it is."
Connor slid down the wall and sat on the floor, bringing himself to Ravi's eye level. They were close enough in the cramped space that he could see the individual whiskers on Ravi's muzzle, the way the fur around his eyes was slightly darker than the rest, the quick pulse in the vein at the base of one round ear.
"Tyler never lied to Mark," Connor agreed. "So here's the truth. I don't know what this is yet. I don't know what it can be, given everything between us, the species, the rank, the laws, all of it. But I know I've never talked to anyone the way I talk to you, and I know I came back to Q Hangar tonight and it felt like coming home, and I know that's not nothing."
Ravi's whiskers twitched. "High praise from a man whose actual home has real wood paneling."
"The paneling is overrated."
They sat in the quiet for a moment, the sounds of Q Hangar filtering through the thin walls, voices, footsteps, the ever-present hum of the ship's systems working harder down here than they had to up above.
"Tell me about growing up here," Connor said.
Ravi blinked. "On Q Deck?"
"On the Enforcer. As, as you. Not as Tyler."
Ravi considered this. He pulled his feet up onto the crate, wrapped his tail around his ankles, and settled into the particular posture of someone preparing to tell a story.
"Alright. So. I was born right here on Q Deck. My parents, Samantha and Jim Longwhisker, were regulated servants to officers on D Deck. Good positions, as these things go. My dad did maintenance on the gravity systems, my mom worked in the officers' commissary. They applied for military service for me when I was twelve, and I was accepted at fourteen. I have a sister, Amber, she's fifteen, and a brother, Sam, who's twelve. The plan, such as it is, is that my service record gets my kids into a higher position, and their kids climb higher, and maybe in three or four generations, someone in the Longwhisker family makes officer and we get a noble title." He paused. "That's the plan for most beast-folk families. Some make it. Most don't. Some families climb for generations and then lose rank over a single bad decision or a political shift."
"And you?" Connor asked. "Is that your plan?"
"It was supposed to be. Good technician, good match potential, I've got suitors, believe it or not." A faint smile. "Skilled earth-mage with a solid record, reasonably handsome for a mouse, charismatic, all his own teeth. Very eligible." The smile faded. "But it's hard to commit to a multi-generational plan for social advancement when you remember being a free person with a full scholarship to an engineering program. When you remember choosing your own name."
"Your name?"
Ravi's ears went flat. "Longwhisker. You know where beast-folk names come from, right?"
"I know they have an animal theme."
"Because the humans wanted it that way. When the Empire restructured things, two hundred and fifty years ago, beast-folk didn't have family names anymore, the first colonists had destroyed our culture so thoroughly that even our naming conventions were gone. So the Empire generously gave us new ones. With a rule, not a law, exactly, more of a friendly suggestion, that beast-folk surnames should have an animal theme. To distinguish us from human families." He said it without heat, almost conversationally, which made it worse. "Softpaw. Longwhisker. Redtail. Highpaw. Greenpaw. Mossfang. We can theoretically change them to whatever we want, but nobody does, because the social cost would be enormous. So every beast-folk family on this ship carries a name that was designed, from the very beginning, to make sure nobody ever mistakes us for human."
Connor had never thought about it. He had seen beast-folk names his entire life, on duty rosters, maintenance logs, medical records, and they had been as natural and unremarkable as the walls of A Hangar. Softpaw, the technician on the shuttle. Longwhisker. Names he'd read without reading, the way you read the labels on pipes or the numbers on doors.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I never-"
"I know you didn't. Nobody does. That's sort of the point." Ravi shrugged, a gesture that was pure Tyler, the way his shoulders moved. "It's not all bad, though. You want to hear the good parts?"
"Yeah."
"The magic." Ravi held up his hand, and Connor felt a faint vibration in the floor, a hum that was different from the ship's systems, deeper and more organic. A small fragment of metal on the floor, a hex bolt that must have rolled under the crate, rose into the air, spinning lazily between Ravi's fingers. "Tyler would have killed for this. Mechanical engineering was one thing, but reaching into a piece of post-material and feeling its lattice structure, understanding how the atoms want to be arranged, and then just... asking them to move?" The bolt drifted higher, rotated, and settled gently back to the floor. "It's the best thing about this life. Hands down."
"What's second?"
"The tail." Ravi's tail unwound from his ankles and waved behind him with evident enthusiasm. "I know how that sounds. But Tyler was a pretty boring-looking guy, and now I have a tail that I can actually control, and it is fun. The fur took some getting used to, the first year I kept wanting to shave, but the showers down here are designed for it. High-pressure water, high-velocity dryers, the whole system. Honestly, the showers might be the most luxurious thing on Q Deck." He paused. "The family is good, too. My parents are kind people. My sister is brilliant. My brother is annoying in the way twelve-year-old brothers are supposed to be annoying. They don't know about Tyler, obviously, but they know me, this me, Ravi, and they love me, and I love them."
"And the bad?"
Ravi's tail stilled. "The bad is the ceiling. The one I mentioned before. I know exactly how far I can go and exactly what it will cost and exactly how many generations it will take. I know that my children's children might, might, reach a position where they're treated as something other than a resource. I know that the magic I do, the work that holds this ship together, the post-materials that make FTL possible and hulls strong and uniforms into armor, all of it depends on beast-folk hands, and none of the people who benefit from it have to think about the hands." He met Connor's eyes. "You watched a mage rebuild your fighter. You told me it was impressive."
"It was."
"It was also invisible. The mage was invisible. You talked to the human technician. That's how it works in A Hangar. That's what you're asking me to transfer into."
Connor nodded slowly. He didn't argue. There was nothing to argue with.
They sat together in the quiet for a while, two people who had once been two other people, sharing a space that was too small and too warm and, for the moment, exactly enough.
"Three weeks," Ravi said eventually.
"Three weeks," Connor agreed.
"You're going to lose, you know."
"We'll see."
Ravi smiled. It was Tyler's smile, warm and certain and a little bit reckless, and it made something turn over in Connor's chest that had nothing to do with cracked ribs or career calculations or the vast machinery of empire that churned above and below and around them.
He picked up his figurine from the shelf on his way out. It fit perfectly in his palm.