Naysha had come back down from the hub a few days earlier.
Her orders had sent her up to the orbital hub as Ning's had, but rather than being sent out to the frontier, she had been assigned to the defensive patrols that guarded Truimal itself, flying in rotating shifts around the planet and its moon. It was real combat duty.
The patrols had engaged Mekharan scouts twice in the past month alone. But it kept her close to home, and between her rotations, she was given short stretches of leave on the planet below.
She had arranged one of those stretches to fall on the last few days before Ning left. Ning had not asked her to, and she had not mentioned that she had done it on purpose, but he knew all the same.
On his last evening at the academy, she found him in the dormitory and told him to come to the training yard.
They had not sparred together since before he had gone up to the hub.
