It's always Empires. Paul, who has already begun to despair of them, watches Ezra not-breathe, and holds his tongue.

"I'm sorry," he says, simply, but there's an empathy there that doesn't quite avoid the brush of knowledge through it. Paul glances down at the tidepool, where strangely shaped crabs scuttle over sand, stopping here and there to sift for morsels of debris left behind by the storm.

He doesn't say they were brave, or died well. (That's never changed anything for him.)

"Did knowing help?"