Attorney Mensah, by contrast, arrived during daylight hours, and his visits were always very professional, efficient, and to the point. Some mornings it was five minutes: just a quick status update on the citizenship application or some document requiring my thumbprint on the holo-tablet's authentication panel. Other mornings stretched longer, Rosalia and I sitting across from him at the common room table while he walked us through legal language projected on the suite's display surfaces in dense columns of Imperial legalese that Rosalia translated into concepts I could actually parse.

  "Processing is on schedule," he said during one of these longer sessions, swiping through a stack of forms with practiced ease. "Barring complications, you should have your citizenship confirmed within days. Not weeks. And with Captain Ventari's current involvement, I consider complication very unlikely."

  I was starting to like Mensah. He didn't waste time, he didn't dramatize, and he treated the labyrinthine Imperial bureaucracy as a set of problems to be solved.

  It was during one of these longer visits that he dropped something unexpected, casually, almost as an afterthought, while reviewing a set of authorization codes on his tablet.

  "I've been asked to compile a detailed report on your situation," he said, not looking up. "Your arrival at Varkesh Prime and the circumstances of your asylum claim. The request came from within the foundation. Most of it standard documentation, but there was also a request for a detailed report on you specifically, with my personal assessment of your situation. Which, despite being perfectly legal, is exceedingly unusual."

  "Who requested it?" I asked.

  "The report has been requested by the Shin Saimdang Foundation. Their headquarters on Huzen7B, specifically. I don't have a name, but it comes from the chairman's office." He said it the way you'd mention a large corporation taking interest in a news story, like it was noteworthy but not alarming. "It seems you have caught the interest of the highest ranks of my bosses."

  The name hit me hard.

  Shin Saimdang Foundation. Claire's foundation. The organization she had built in Life Among the Stars. It was her in-game legacy, a humanitarian and research institution she'd poured hundreds of hours into developing, named after the Korean artist and scholar she'd admired since childhood. And it existed here. In this universe. A real institution with real headquarters on a real planet.

  I already knew there was a chance that Claire was here, in this universe. I appeared in Hyperion Deep; my in-game base of operations. Claire's had been her office in the foundation's headquarters. It made sense that she would appear there.

  Hope rose. If someone at its headquarters was asking about me by name, it had to be her.

  I was about to ask for more information, but instead I clamped down.

  The psionic field. My uncontrolled, unsecured, constantly-broadcasting emotional field. I could feel it trying to flare, trying to push the hope and excitement outward like a signal beacon, and I grabbed it with every technique Cornelius had spent weeks drilling into me. Breathe. Center yourself. Build a wall around your thoughts. I did my best to hold my expression neutral, nodding at Mensah's comment as though it were mildly interesting and nothing more.

  "Interesting," I managed.

  Mensah made a noncommittal sound of agreement and moved on to the next document.

  *Great, Nico. This time, you managed to not *

  Mensah finished the session, collected his materials, and left with a pleasant nod and a promise to return the following morning with the final set of authorization forms. The door closed behind him, and I waited , making sure he was gone.

  Cornelius spoke first.

  "Better," he said. Simple, direct, warm. "Much better."

  I looked at him.

  "I felt it," he continued, setting down his reading tablet. "The spike. Your hope and excitement. But the shielding held. The broadcast was contained. Muted." He paused, considering. "I caught it because I'm trained and I was paying attention. Mensah did not."

  A quiet pride settled into my chest. Small victory. Every bit of control was another step toward being able to exist in this universe without broadcasting my secrets to every psionically sensitive person in the room.

  "Thanks," I said. "I've been practicing."

  "It shows." He picked up his tablet again.

  Rosalia was already looking at me. She'd been quiet during the exchange with Mensah, but her eyes had sharpened at the Foundation's name, and now she waited with the patient focus of someone who'd already assembled most of the picture and wanted the remaining pieces.

  "Claire," I said. "I told you about her, about the foundation in the game. Same name, same mission, same headquarters planet. If it exists here..."

  "Then she might too," Rosalia finished. She nodded slowly. "It would be consistent with everything else. Your skills transferred. Your ship design transferred. If her organization transferred as well... yes. It's reasonable to hope."

  I could hear the genuine support in her voice, the willingness to believe alongside me. But Rosalia was incapable of leaving a hope untempered by reality and pragmatism.

  "However, Huzen7B is on the opposite side of the galaxy," she said. "Conventional travel would take decades. The hypergate network could shorten that to weeks, but hypergate transit requires both significant funds and a licensed authorization. Neither of which we currently have."

  "I know," I said. "I've already looked into Shin Saimdang. What Mensah said is more a confirmation of my hopes. But it doesn't really change our plans. Get citizenship, become a mercenary, then try to climb the ranks until I can go there."

  "And maybe, if she hears about me through Shin Saimdang, she can try to reach out," I added.

  I smiled. "I have to believe she is searching for me too..."

  Then came another evening when off-duty Seraphine visited. She was in a strange mood. Not angry. She felt more frustrated, tired, and full of unspent energy.

  She swept into the suite in designer clothes that Rosalia identified with a raised eyebrow and the murmured name of a label I didn't recognize, and I once again found myself navigating the challenging problem of where exactly am I supposed to look.

  Seraphine was wearing something that, by my Earth standards, was... a lot. Deep cleavage held in place by what had to be anti?grav pins or smartfabric that clung like it had opinions of its own. Panels of material that seemed to float a millimeter above her skin, anchored by invisible fields rather than seams. Her hair was loose, but some strands were threaded through tiny autonomous rings that made them drift and curl around her head like they were alive.

  Her Eluan ears, already striking, were outlined by faint holo?lines, a soft band of dim light tracing their upper edge and then continuing along her cheekbones and jaw. Advanced makeup, half?lightshow, all of it designed to emphasize the angles of her face and make her look even more alien and unreal. She had very clearly worked on her appearance before coming here.

  What she was wearing would have been considered aggressively revealing by Earth standards. It was expensive, intentional, and apparently not unusual to anyone in the room except me.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  Rosalia gave her a long, amused look. "Planned to go clubbing and decided to grace us with your presence instead?" she asked, voice light.

  Seraphine's smile sharpened. "I've spent the last few days doing extra work, planning a complicated raid on two pirates' bases with limited resources. And because this outpost's government is in disarray, every official who needs to make a decision, any decision, seems to think they need my approval first... I had planned to blow off some steam at a respectable establishment, known for its discretion," she admitted. "Unfortunately, a few hours ago, I signed the order to close a private venue that was believed to have served as a meeting place between co-conspirators against Nicolas, without reading its name. Imagine my frustration when I realized I'd closed the very place I'd planned to spend the evening at..."

  We found her situation hilarious. I started laughing, and Rosalia and Cornelius joined in. Seraphine initially looked at us angrily, then, she sighed and I saw a smile starting to form.

  "Yes. I admit it is a little funny," she said, holding her thumb and index a small distance apart.

  "Just see it as a new fun story you'll get to tell sometime in the future," I proposed.

  She looked at me for a moment, then started to laugh.

  "Hot damn. I needed that. Thank you! But I think I need alcohol even more. And no, before you propose, not wine. Wine is for old people. Let's have some proper drinks!"

  Within minutes, room service had brought a whole buffet of snacks, most with shapes and colors I would usually not associate with food. And alcohol. A lot of alcohol. Bottles in every shade and silhouette.

  "Is there something we can actually do tonight?" I asked. "I'm going to lose my mind if I spend another evening just sitting here."

  Cornelius looked up from his drink. "The entertainment system has a karaoke function," he said, with the mild tone of someone suggesting tea.

  Seraphine's head snapped toward him. Her eyes lit up.

  "Oh," she said. "Oh. This is perfect!"

  She was at the entertainment console before anyone could object. Within two minutes, she had the holo-display configured as a lyric projector, the suite's audio system calibrated for vocal amplification, and a queue of songs loaded that she was already scrolling through with the speed and decisiveness of a tactical officer planning an assault. More drinks appeared. Snacks materialized on platters. Her excitement was contagious. Cornelius and I set out to move some furniture around and have enough space to sing and dance between the couch and the holo display.

  Cornelius volunteered to go first.

  He was terrible.

  Not mediocre, not passable, not endearingly rough around the edges. No. He was terrible. He had no pitch and his sense of rhythm was aggressively off. He chose something dramatic. An Imperial ballad about a hero's journey through hyperspace, all swelling melodic lines and emotional crescendos, and he delivered every note with absolute, unwavering sincerity and not a single one of them in the correct key.

  It was magnificent. Everyone was laughing, not at him, but with the infectious joy of watching someone commit so fully to something they were so comprehensively bad at. Cornelius didn't care. He sang with his eyes closed and his hands raised and his whole body invested in the performance, and when he finished, he opened his eyes to applause and grinned like a man who'd just aced a landing approach.

  My turn was less catastrophic but more awkward. I could carry a tune and I had decent rhythm, which was immediately undermined by the fact that I didn't know a single song in the queue. Imperial pop culture was a blank spot in my education. I read lyrics off the holo-display in real time, stumbling over words I'd never seen, mangling pronunciation in ways that made Rosalia wince and Seraphine cover her mouth. I made it through two songs on enthusiasm and stubbornness, and when I sat down, Cornelius patted my shoulder with the gentle encouragement of someone who'd just watched a child's first recital.

  Then Rosalia stood up. She scrolled through the song list with unhurried deliberation, selected something I didn't recognize, and waited for the opening notes.

  Then she sang.

  The room went quiet. She wasn't just good. She was trained. Professionally. I leaned back on the couch and enjoyed the recital. The song she'd chosen was elegant; a slow, intricate melody that required precision and emotional range, and she delivered both with the effortless skill of someone who'd been doing this since childhood.

  Diplomatic education at the Imperial boarding school, I remembered. Of course. Voice training would have been part of the curriculum. Rosalia had rejected the princess, but she'd kept the skills.

  When she finished, the silence held for a breath. Then applause erupted. Genuine, surprised, warm.

  Seraphine applauded longest. And then she stood up, and it became clear that this was a competition she hadn't declared but fully intended to win.

  Seraphine could sing too. Her voice was different from Rosalia's. Less technically pristine, more performative. Her aristocratic education had clearly included voice training as well, but where Rosalia sang like a diplomat delivering a perfect speech, Seraphine sang like a performer. She chose something bold and energetic, and she didn't just sing it. She performed it. Movement, gesture, eye contact with the audience, the kind of magnetic stage presence that made you forget you were in a hotel suite and not a concert venue. She was good and she knew she was good, and the knowing didn't diminish the performance. It amplified it.

  The drinking accelerated. The line between "karaoke night" and "party" blurred and then dissolved entirely, and somewhere around the fourth round of Seraphine's "proper Imperial spirits," I made a decision that I would later attribute entirely to the alcohol.

  "I have something," I announced, scrolling through the entertainment system's archives with the focused determination of someone on a mission. "There's one song I heard and can sing. And dance to."

  I found it. A song close to one of Earth's big hits of my youth. It had the same rhythm and structure. The name, meant nothing, but in my mind it was, without a doubt: Gangnam Style.

  I hit play. And I danced, shouting the chorus instead of even trying to sing it.

  The choreography lived in my muscle memory. I threw myself into it with the total commitment of a man who had consumed enough alcohol to obliterate self-consciousness entirely. The galloping horse-ride. The whip gesture. The whole absurd, glorious sequence, performed in a luxury hotel suite on a space station thousands of light-years from the planet where it had been invented.

  For about twelve seconds, it was perfect.

  The room was a mess. Seraphine had her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking. Cornelius was laughing so hard he had his hands on his ribs like they were hurting. Rosalia was doubled over, one hand braced on the table, making a sound I'd never heard from her before; a high, uncontrolled laugh that was so far from her usual composure that it was almost its own revelation.

  I bowed. Nearly fell over again. Bowed more carefully.

  The drinking continued. And then Rosalia took the microphone and queued up a new song.

  The opening caught me off guard. No pounding beat, no bright synth line. It was a slow, haunting thread of sound, like a single violin drawing out a note that didn't want to end. The party had been going strong; everything so far had been upbeat, sometimes frantic, inviting dancing and shouting and carousing. This was... not that. Slower. Somber. Intimate.

  Seraphine leaned against me without warning, her shoulder pressing into my side, the top of her head coming to rest against my chest. Up this close I could smell her perfume, light and floral over the sharper bite of alcohol. She tilted her head back just enough to give me a devilish look, then fake?sneezed into my shirt.

  "Party?pooper," she murmured.

  I was about to respond when Rosalia started to sing.

  Eyes closed. Voice soft at first, then opening up into the melody like she was stepping into a familiar room. It was a lament. Sad, yes, but not theatrical. Honest. The kind of song you didn't have to understand the words to feel.

  The room stilled. Cornelius froze like a statue. Seraphine, head resting on my shoulder, went very still. My glass stayed halfway to my mouth. Rosalia just stood there with the mic held close, letting the song move through her, and it was like the whole suite was tuned to the same note she was on. No one said anything. No one needed to.

  When the last note faded, the silence that followed was automatic and respectful, as if clapping too early might break something fragile.

  Rosalia opened her eyes, wiped at her cheeks, and without a word went back to the console to queue another song.

  "That's all, maestra," Seraphine said as the next track began to load, her voice warm but deliberate. "It's beautiful, but you're going to make the men cry, and I refuse to be complicit in that."

  She was already at the entertainment console, queuing something upbeat with rapid keystrokes. She grabbed my arm, pulled me to my feet as the music shifted. I was unsteady enough that this nearly became a two-person collapse.

  "Dance with me," she ordered. "That's an order from a Fleet Captain."

  The party recovered. Seraphine kept the energy going. More drinks. She challenged Cornelius to a duet that was a war crime against music and they both loved it. She danced on the adaptive-surface furniture, which subtly adjusted its footing beneath her in a losing battle against physics and alcohol.

  The last thing I clearly remember is Cornelius carrying a bottle overhead like a trophy, Rosalia hugging a plant and telling a funny story like it was a tragedy, Seraphine's hand on my arm, the room spinning gently. Warm. Fuzzy. Comfortable.

  Then: nothing.