Chapter 16: The Last Honest Conversation Between Father and Son

The orbital station kept its own weather.

Not in any meteorological sense — the atmospheric processors were too precise for that, the humidity held to a decimal, the temperature gradient controlled to within margins that made seasons irrelevant. But there was a quality to the light in the private residence that Kael had noticed across many visits and never named until tonight: it shifted with the station's rotation relative to the system's primary star, so that the long windows that dominated the eastern face of the residence moved through a slow cycle of amber to deep copper to something approaching purple that had nothing to do with the time the station's clocks kept and everything to do with where they were in space. It felt, in the evenings particularly, like weather. Like the suggestion of a sky that was not there.

His father had chosen this station specifically. Kael had never asked why and was only now, standing at the window with a glass of Tharran red he had been carrying for twenty minutes without drinking, beginning to understand that the choice had been aesthetic as much as strategic. The man who built infrastructures in the dark had also, apparently, needed a window that moved.