Ocean's Echo (The Resolution Universe)

by Everina Maxwell

He no longer paid attention to Tennal, as if Tennal had just winked out of existence now that someone had leverage over him. Surit, not for the first time, felt a deep unease about the observational skills of his senior officers. A lit fuse didn’t stop being a lit fuse just because it had decided to burn politely.

Part of Tennal was enjoying himself immensely. He hadn’t considered it might be possible to cause more low-level chaos with a rule book than without.

Occasionally Tennal caught himself speculating about whether he still had a chance with Surit. Not when Surit came out of the shower or stripped down to his underwear to sleep—Tennal knew what a set of good abs looked like; he could find those anywhere—but when Surit absently passed him the water jug at breakfast, hair askew on his forehead, listening to whatever Tennal was complaining about, or said, “Tired?” with casual concern when they came back in late—then, Tennal was in unexpected trouble.

That was the thing about Surit: he had high expectations, and you found yourself living up to them.

He’d thought he was in trouble when Tennal had been a ranker on the Fractal Note. Surit hadn’t been able to look away from the controlled chaos then, and he hadn’t realized just how much that was Tennal being discreet. Now Tennal had a hundred places to channel his energy and Surit couldn’t look away. They were working together, they were rooming together, and every time he turned around, there was Tennal—unpredictable and razor-edged, crackling like the end of a live wire. Surit worked in a universe of fixed possibilities. Tennal was a chaos event. Surit was drawn to it like a gravity well.

Tennal didn’t make a habit of being afraid. He had always dealt with problems by making himself into a bigger problem. There was no point worrying in advance about what would happen, especially if it was going to happen to someone else.

Tennal saw— In the middle of the flag chamber, among military types Surit knew well, Tennalhin Halkana sat crackling with energy like an exposed wire. Surit had met him once and now meant to ignore him, but he was impossible to ignore: a barbed comment for every argument, a knife slid into every weak point, an upturned nail in every path. Surit had tried to look away. That hadn’t worked.

The void called to him from beyond it, no longer inviting but a great threatening storm. He thought about how the universe was mostly nothing but humans made up stories about the things that were there and pretended they were more important than the crushing weight of the nothing.

“I’m personally considered a leading light in the field of maladaptive coping mechanisms, but it’s amazing how I never managed to brainwash hundreds of people and take over the government.”

If you’d asked him what made normal people clean up their act, he wouldn’t have said spite, but if it worked, he’d take it.