He didn't need to be delayed. If Holden had told him he needed time, Jedao would have given him time. He wants to get out of here; he doesn't want this to be adversarial. But he appreciates the game, feels - both touched and a little wary, as though someone had started speaking to him in Shparoi out of nowhere.

But he plays - enjoys it, both the difficulty level and the finicky details of the setting, appreciates it more as he realizes how much Holden is using it to communicate. He loses spectacularly a few times, wins by the skin of his teeth once he gets the hang of the little idiosyncrasies. And then he tries losing in new ways, unashamedly completionist, tries to find all the weird penalties and possible outcomes and game-breaking scenarios, which is how he stumbles on the open borders win condition, which makes him laugh. Not subtle, but it's clearly not meant to be. He digs into the code after that, learns more about what mattered to Holden enough to specify in the reskinning job, and what was part of the base, starts fiddling around with a mod that would let you actively play as heretics instead of just collude, but you have to watch out for rivals and infighting, and sometimes they splinter mid-game - he saves his code when he gets Holden's message and knocks two minutes later.

I'm here.