"That's the one," says Palamedes with a snap of his fingers, when Harrow mentions the other Gideon. He sees the flurry of emotions cross the girl's face, but knows better than to comment. Clearly the relationship between Harrow and her fellow Lyctor had been complex. "Quite the coincidence, isn't it? I assume you had no idea?"

Though he still has plenty of questions about Pyhrra, Gideon the first, and whatever was going on aboard Mithraeum, they aren't actually his priority at the moment. Pal smiles a little, his expressed laced with sadness. "You started it," he says, half a joke. More seriously, his gaze soft, he continues, "You kept her alive. Were the circumstances ideal? God no, but they weren't of your making. I wasn't supposed to spend eight months clinging to sanity on the edge of the material universe while Camilla was left to glue back together a fraction of my skull." He makes a helpless gesture, something briefly flickering through his grey eyes that betrays his own guilt at what he put his cavalier through.

But he quickly returns to Harrow, to kindness and logic. "Nothing happened the way we would have wanted to. But that's because we were all told to take a vacation to a haunted house on an abandoned planet, where, unbeknownst to us, we were then expected to kill each other.

"Given the variables at play, I think we did all right. We deserve top marks in for ingenuity, at least."