June, 1096

Opal. I'm starting with her this time.

The air in the high-security ward hasn't changed in two months, but she has. Erika has been watching her closely and says the news is good: Opal is more responsive. She recently asked for something other than the nutrient pouches, which is an appetite coming back.

Today is the 10th of June, my scheduled weekly visit. I sit by her bed with a book of Rim Billiton folklore, open to a tale set on one of the rare coastal platforms of her homeland, where the salt air is supposed to smell like old metal and the sea.

As I read, the ghost in my head shifts. She murmurs that I'm from Rim Billiton too, that I should know the smell of that salt air. It's absurd. I'm a Sarkaz from the Kazdel outskirts.

I ignore the static in my skull and focus on the girl in the bed. Opal is looking at me — not with the hollow void I first met, but with a tired curiosity.

"What…" she begins, her voice still thin as glass. "What is your name?"

I smile at her. "I'm Lethe."

Erika comes in with a tray, and the smell of soft noodle soup cuts through the sterile air.

"Lunchtime, Opal," Erika says gently.

She sets the tray on the bedside table, then turns to me. "You too, Lethe. Go eat. I'll see you at dinner tonight."

"Yes, Erika. See you later." I nod.

I gather my Arts Unit from the floor and shift my hands on the black shaft.

"I'll see you next week, Opal," I say, giving her a small wave.

She doesn't speak, and she doesn't look up from the blankets over her lap. But as I step back toward the threshold, her chin dips a fraction. A nod.

It's a victory. I hold onto it as the heavy doors seal behind me.

My slate chimes in my crossbody bag. A calendar notification: Routine Check-up, Dr. Warfarin's Laboratory. The warmth goes out of the morning, and something cold settles in my stomach in its place.

Ten minutes later I'm backed into the corner of the stainless-steel laboratory with my knees pulled against my chest.

"Honestly, Lethe, it's been months. You'd think a creature of your pedigree would build up at least a marginal tolerance to a simple needle." Warfarin sighs, rolls her eyes, and paces toward my corner.

I press back against the freezing metal wall. "Please…"

She doesn't break stride. She plucks my arm out of its coil, unwraps a lollipop one-handed, and shoves it into my mouth. Artificial grape floods my tongue.

Before I've finished registering the candy the needle bites into the crook of my elbow. I whimper around the plastic stick, eyes shut, gripping the edge of the examination chair while my Originium-laced blood fills the glass vial.

"There. Try not to squirm," Warfarin drawls, withdrawing the syringe with practiced speed and pressing a cotton ball down onto the puncture. "Hold that. Don't bleed on my floor."

I press down, shivering, while she turns back to her centrifuges and monitors.

"Well, little anomaly," she purrs a few minutes later, swiping through the floating data. "You remain terrifyingly stable. Your cell-Originium assimilation hasn't crept up a single decimal. For a Sarkaz who inhales trauma every day, you're the picture of health."

I take the lollipop out of my mouth. My fingers are still unsteady. "Dr. Warfarin…?"

She doesn't look away from the screen. "Spit it out."

"I think… I think the rocks in my head are making things up again," I confess, and the admission tastes sour. "When I was reading a Rim Billiton story to Opal today, my brain told me I knew what the coast there smelled like. It sounded like… a girl. She calls herself Iori. But I'm from the Kazdel outskirts. I've never even been to Rim Billiton. Is the infection getting worse?"

Warfarin stops tapping the glass. She turns, and the amusement goes out of her face. She steps forward, pulling up a scan of my brain on her slate.

The silence stretches. I brace for the worst.

"No," Warfarin says, and lowers the slate. "Your Oripathy has not progressed. The localized Originium density in your temporal lobe is registering as less active than your baseline in April. You are burning fewer calories, so to speak."

She crosses her arms and looks down at me with a shrug. "Oripathy-induced hallucinations are a textbook symptom, especially in heavily infected memory centers. Your brain is misfiring, stringing environmental context clues out of the book you were reading and labeling them facts. Don't worry your little head about a phantom voice claiming to be a beachgoer."

She turns back to her desk and waves her left hand in a shooing motion. "Just keep doing your job. But if this 'Iori' starts telling you to sabotage the landship's engines or bite an Operator, do be a good girl and tell me."

I nod slowly, clutching my slate against my chest. If this "Iori" ever tries to make me do something that breaches my contract, she'll have to be removed. It's just the Oripathy stringing nonsense together. She talks too much anyway.

I slip out of the laboratory, the doors hissing shut behind me on the centrifuges.

Before my sneakers can carry me down the main corridor toward the cafeteria, a hand catches my sleeve. I look up into a pair of bright, determined eyes and long Cautus ears.

Amiya doesn't give me a chance to ask. She pulls me off the main thoroughfare with a conspiratorial smile, through a maze of quieter hallways, until we reach a secluded off-duty break room.

Sitting at the small round table inside is Rosmontis. She looks up as we come in, her ears twitching a greeting.

In the exact center of the table is a pristine cardboard box.

"I had a special delivery come in today," Amiya says, dropping her voice into an excited whisper as she pushes me into the chair next to Rosmontis. She opens the box, and the smell of baked cinnamon and caramelized sugar and warm pastry floods the room.

An entire, perfectly baked apple pie. I stare at the golden crust.

"Woah," I breathe. "But… doesn't the landship cafeteria bake apple pies? Why did you need one delivered?"

Amiya pulls a stack of paper plates and forks out of a cabinet, her smile turning fond. "Because the Sankta who delivers for this logistics company knows absolutely everything about apple pies. She says this bakery makes the best of the best in all of Lungmen, and she's never wrong about desserts."

A Sankta. Static crackles in my mind, and Iori misfires again — an absurd image behind my eyes of a girl with bright red hair, a glowing halo and a submachine gun, grinning over a box of pastries.

I wince and shake my head to wave it away. Warfarin was right; my Oripathy is throwing random pictures at me to fill the gaps. I put my attention back on the real world, and on the warm slice of pie Amiya slides onto a plate in front of me.

I pick up the plastic fork. The first bite is heaven. The cinnamon and sugar melt on my tongue and wash out the metallic dread of the check-up. It's sweet and warm and empty of every flavor I usually swallow.

It's also against every one of Erika's nutritional mandates for my stunted, recovering body.

I take another enormous bite and look between Amiya and the quietly munching Rosmontis, and give them a sugar-coated smile.

"Please don't tell Erika," I say around the pastry. "Or she's going to make me eat nothing but steamed broccoli for a month."

Amiya giggles. "I won't," she says. Two simple words.

After the pie, Amiya heads back to the upper decks with Rosmontis following her, and I make my way to my own work with a belly full of sugar.

The Convalescent Garden is quiet today, without the bouncing energy of its usual younger residents. Podenco is off fulfilling her logistics duties, and Lisa is caught up in her own treatments and Arts training. Only Miss Lena is at the far end, sleeves rolled, repotting something with her back to the door.

It isn't entirely peaceful, though. Prowling the perimeter of the medicinal herb beds is a fellow Sarkaz Medic. Hibiscus.

She hums an upbeat tune, her purple hair bouncing as she shakes a translucent bottle of thick swamp-green sludge. She's hunting for victims — patients — to test her latest "nutritionally complete" smoothie on.

My stomach recoils. I can smell the raw kale and the concentrated bitter root from across the room. After Amiya's secret delivery a few hours ago, drinking whatever biological warfare is in that shaker bottle is the last thing I want.

I duck behind a broad-leafed fern and wait for her energetic footsteps to pass before slipping deeper into the secluded seating areas.

Sitting on one of the curved, golden-brown benches is a Sarkaz mercenary. He looks like the kind of man Terra chews up and spits out: scarred, his armor battered, exhaustion pulling at the corners of his eyes. He's staring up at the glass canopy.

I approach slowly, lower my Arts Unit until the base rests on the floor, and give him a polite bow.

"Excuse me," I say, my voice chiming in the quiet. "Would you like to tell me a story?"

He drags his gaze down to me. He takes in the dark grey jacket, the black band at my neck, the twisted petrified branch I'm holding. His eyes narrow at the silhouette.

"I know what you are," he rumbles, in a voice like grinding stone, and a dry chuckle comes out of his chest. "A Djall. Haven't seen one of your bloodline since the old days in Kazdel. You want a story? Fine. Eat my nightmares, little empath. Take the edge off."

He doesn't wait for a prompt. He leans back, closes his eyes, and starts talking about a mud-soaked trench, the shriek of Originium Arts, the hollow thud of a friend hitting the dirt.

The air turns sour, thick with rusted metal — survivor's guilt with the terror still live underneath it.

I clench my jaw and press my palm against the smooth black shaft of the Arts Unit, visualizing the channel opening, bracing to siphon it out of him.

But the moment the connection clicks open, something goes wrong. The staff doesn't pull. It pushes.

A hum shoots up the petrified wood, bypassing my empathic Arts entirely and striking straight into my mind. The humid, lavender-scented air of the greenhouse is torn away.

My breath catches, and the world dissolves into a hallucination.

I'm standing in a landship corridor, but it isn't the bright, bustling Rhodes Island I know. The air is colder and heavier. The lighting is dim, throwing long bruised shadows across the floor. Translucent plastic sheeting hangs off unfinished ceiling panels like synthetic cobwebs. The bulkheads are stripped to raw dark metal, with no white paneling anywhere, no blue-and-white rook. It feels like the skeleton of a war machine, quiet and waiting.

Then a Sarkaz woman steps into the corridor.

She stops a few paces in front of me, looking down at me, her expression gentle. A smile touches her lips — so full of warmth and sorrow and unconditional love that it aches in the center of my chest.

Who is she? The adult inside me, the ghost of Iori, lunges for the lore. I know this face. I know I know this face. I dig my mental fingers into the archives of a past life for the name, the history, the context of the plastic-draped hallways.

My fingers close on empty air. She's a stranger.

Before the panic can set in, a second figure steps into view.

Walking past me, toward the smiling woman, is a tiny Cautus girl. Her brown hair is shorter, her oversized jacket swallows her frame, and her long ears twitch as she reaches up to take the woman's hand.

Amiya.

The vision holds for one breathless second — a snapshot of a forgotten era trapped inside the petrified wood of my staff — before the connection snaps shut.

I gasp and stumble backward. My tail smacks against the wood of the bench and my knees buckle. The plastic-draped corridor shatters into the bright, humid canopy of the Convalescent Garden.

The mercenary opens his eyes and lets out a long exhale. The tension has gone out of his shoulders. He looks at me and gives me a weary, grateful nod.

I stand there shivering, my hands gripping the Kazdelian artifact hard enough to whiten the knuckles. Ms. Closure's warning comes back to me. That stick is worth far more than you are.

Whatever Dr. Kal'tsit handed me is dangerous.

I don't wait for the mercenary to say anything else. I pull the Arts Unit in against my chest and stumble backward, and the noise of it brings Miss Lena up from her repotting at the far end of the garden.

"Lethe?" She sets the trowel down. "Is everything—"

"I need a moment, Miss Lena." My voice comes out trembling and far too high, and it's the worst lie I've told her, because it's the only true thing I've said all day. "I'm sorry. I need a moment."

She doesn't ask again. She takes one step toward me with soil still on her gloves, and whatever she sees in my face stops her where she stands — and that, more than anything else in this garden, tells me how bad I must look.

I turn and run. My sneakers slap against the smooth floor of the Convalescent Garden, the sound sharp under the glass canopy, and then I'm out into the metal corridors of the landship. My breath comes in short hitches that burn my throat. My tail lashes behind me and throws off my balance, and I don't slow down.

I weave through the logistics Operators and the passing Field Ops, blind to all of it.

"Lethe?"

The voice is warm and immediately alarmed. Erika. I blur past her near one of the triage intersections, and I see her light purple eyes go wide, her hand reaching out to catch my arm.

"Lethe, wait! Where are you going?"

I can't stop. I don't have the breath to explain that the rocks in my head and the old staff in my hands are doing something together, and it's showing me things I'm not supposed to see.

I push until my lungs burn and my legs ache, then skid to a halt deep inside the Medical Department.

In front of me is the reinforced blast door of Dr. Kal'tsit's office. The air here is freezing and sterile and empty of the landship's usual chatter.

My hand hovers a pace from the digital chime panel. My fingers are shaking hard enough to blur.

Should I?

Before I can touch the glass, the intercom crackles.

"Come in, Lethe."

Her voice is calm. She didn't need me to ring. PRTS tracked my sprint across the ship, and she has been watching me hyperventilate outside her door for the last thirty seconds.

The door hisses open.

I step into the office. The lighting is crisp and unforgiving. Kal'tsit sits behind her enormous desk with a mountain of datapads and paper reports arranged neatly around her. She doesn't look up; her pen keeps scratching across a document.

"Dr. Kal'tsit…" My voice cracks, and it sounds very small in the room.

I step forward, holding the black staff in both hands like a shield.

"When I asked Ms. Closure about this Arts Unit a few months back, the Originium in my head misfired." I swallow hard, my chest heaving. "The ghost in my head… Iori… threw a word at me. It said this staff had something to do with 'Babel.'"

Kal'tsit's pen stops.

The silence afterward is absolute, and the room feels several degrees colder for it.

"And I just used it," I push on, the words tumbling out. "I tried to siphon a mercenary's trauma in the garden, but the staff pushed back. It didn't pull his nightmare. It showed me a memory. A landship, but older. Dusty, stripped down to raw metal and plastic tarps."

Kal'tsit lifts her head. Her green eyes lock onto mine, unreadable.

"I saw a Sarkaz woman." A tear gets out before I can stop it. Just remembering that smile brings up a grief that isn't mine. "She was so kind. And… and Amiya was there. But she was just a tiny girl."

I wait for her to speak. To diagnose the hallucination, or demand the staff back, or for the shadows behind her to twist and tear open as Mon3tr is summoned to silence an anomaly that knows too much.

Kal'tsit stays silent. She just looks at me, like she's putting me on a scale — me on one side, all the trouble my sick brain could cause on the other.

Then the air in the room shifts.

It's a physical sensation, a drop in pressure right behind my shoulders. It feels like standing at the edge of a cliff in the dark.

I flinch, a gasp tearing out of me, and whip my head around.

Standing between me and the sealed blast door is a tall Sarkaz woman.

She's cloaked in dark, utilitarian combat gear, and her presence is so dense and so muted that she seems to absorb the harsh light of the office. Her face is hidden in the shadow of her hood, but the intent coming off her is unmistakable. An apex predator, refined down to the essentials.

My heart stops, and my tail wraps around my legs in a tight coil.

Has she always been there? I didn't hear the door, or a single footstep. She materialized out of nothing, between me and the only exit.

Kal'tsit sets her pen down on the brushed steel of her desk. Her expression doesn't move — not at the ghost, not at the artifact, not at the vision.

"What are your opinions, Ascalon?" Kal'tsit asks, and the measured calm of it drains the threat out of the room. Whatever nonsense I just spouted is evidently not grounds for my immediate execution.

The pressure behind me shifts. Ascalon steps forward, moving so quietly she seems to glide over the metal floor rather than walk on it, and comes to stand beside the desk with her face still half-hidden under the hood.

"A spy would not do this," Ascalon rasps, in a voice like dry leaves scraping stone. She glances down, taking in my shaking frame, the monitor, the petrified branch in my hands. "An infiltrator who stumbles onto the most highly classified secrets of Rhodes Island does not run to your office in a panic to report it. They hide it. They transmit it."

She crosses her arms, the dark fabric of her gear shifting without a sound. "By all intents and purposes, Kal'tsit, she is what Warfarin diagnosed this morning. A confused child. Her Oripathy is causing severe cognitive misfires, her mind is fracturing, and it has built this 'Iori' persona to filter the hallucinations."

Her gaze drops to the Kazdelian artifact in my hands. "But her resonance is strong. She is a pureblood Djall holding something steeped in old Sarkaz memory. The staff is not showing her the future, or your secrets. It is echoing the past, and her diseased brain is trying to make sense of the static."

I stand there while the most dangerous woman I've ever seen picks me apart piece by piece, without ever raising her voice. And I think she's right.

I'm Lethe. I'm a Sarkaz girl dying of Oripathy, and Iori is just a name the crystals in my head made up, so all of this would be easier to swallow.

Kal'tsit looks at me for a long time, watching the panic drain out of my shoulders and leave nothing behind but compliance.

"The artifact is a relic," she says at last. "It has absorbed fragments of residual emotional data over centuries. Your empathic Arts, uninhibited by the limiter matrix while you are channeling, accessed that data."

She leans forward and folds her hands on the desk. "That concludes the explanation, Lethe. It brings us to your ultimatum."

I swallow hard.

"No one is to know of these visions," Kal'tsit says. "You are forbidden from discussing what you saw, the name Babel, or anything else the staff shows you, with anyone. Not Amiya. Not Erika. Not Perfumer."

Her look hardens and pins me where I stand. "The only personnel cleared to hear what you see are myself, Dr. Warfarin, Closure, and Ascalon, should you ever encounter her again. If the artifact pushes back and reveals anything else, you will cease your palliative care immediately and report it to me. Is that understood?"

"I understand," I say, and my voice steadies in the cold air of the office. "I'll report everything."

"You are dismissed, Lethe. Erika is waiting for you outside."

I give a stiff, obedient nod and turn around. Ascalon has already gone back into the shadows, dissolved into the dark corners of the office.

Erika is pacing in the corridor outside.

"Lethe!" She rushes forward, her hands hovering as though holding me too tightly might break something. Her light purple eyes are blown wide, scanning me for injuries. "What happened? You ran out of the garden so fast, and then you locked yourself in with Dr. Kal'tsit… Are you in trouble? Are you hurt?"

I look up at her and my grip on the staff loosens. Warfarin's logic and Ascalon's settle into my chest together. The idea that I'm secretly somebody from another life, stuck in this body, is gone. I'm just Lethe, a sick Sarkaz girl.

"I'm not in trouble," I murmur, and it comes out small and tired. "It was just… the ghost in my head acting up."

Erika freezes. The feathers near her temples lie flat against her skin and her hands drop to her sides. "The… ghost?"

I nod and let my eyes drop to the white toes of my sneakers. "I had a check-up with Dr. Warfarin this morning. She said my Oripathy is causing severe cognitive misfires, and that my brain is hallucinating to cope with the infection. And just now, another Operator — Ascalon — explained that this staff," I lift the artifact a little, "is full of old Sarkaz memories. When I used it in the garden, my Oripathy-laden brain couldn't handle the static. It made up a persona to filter it."

Erika stares at me, and the burnt edge of her panic goes over into sorrow. "Lethe…"

"I've been hearing a phantom voice ever since you pulled me out of the ruins," I confess, and the words come out unsteady in the quiet corridor. "She calls herself Iori. Sometimes she tells me things, or tries to give me memories of places that don't exist. I was just… I was too afraid to tell anyone until this morning."

I look back up at her with hot tears prickling at the corners of my eyes.

"I didn't want you or Dr. Kal'tsit to think I was crazy." My voice breaks. "I was so scared you'd lock me in the quarantine ward forever."

Then I'm buried in the soft fabric of her uniform.

Erika walks me back to my own dorm room.

It's quiet, the ceiling lights dialed down to a dim, soothing amber.

She has been holding me a long time, her hand stroking my hair in a slow rhythm, careful around the sensitive bases of my horns.

Miss Lena sits near the foot of my mattress with her hands folded in her lap, and the calm of her steadies the room. Amiya stands close by, her long ears drooping with concern. They both hurried over the moment Erika brought me back, and between them the room has become a bubble of Rhodes Island's kindest people.

I lean my head against Erika's collarbone, my tail curled against my leg.

I feel so stupid.

When I first woke up in the Kazdel ruins, the phantom voice was so loud. It whispered constantly, filling my fractured mind with static and paranoia. It told me to be terrified of Dr. Kal'tsit and Dr. Warfarin. It talked me into hiding the hallucinations, into pretending my brain wasn't misfiring.

I should have told them the truth on the first day. Dr. Warfarin is frightening and her needles hurt, but she stabilized my Oripathy. She gave me the medicine that keeps the glowing black crystals in my brain from spreading. If I'd been brave enough to mention the ghost earlier, maybe her science could have taken the voice out before it got this bad.

"You should take a few days off, Lethe," Lena says, her voice soft in the quiet room. "Stay here in the dorms. Rest your mind, and let us bring your meals to you."

Erika nods, her chin resting against the top of my head. "Yes. Absolutely. No Convalescent Garden until you feel steady again."

"I agree," Amiya adds, with an encouraging smile. "Your health comes first."

The suggestion is meant to be comforting, and it goes through my chest like a spike of cold. I open my mouth to argue and find I have nothing to argue with.

Amiya steps forward and crouches beside the metal frame of the bed so we're at eye level. Her blue eyes hold no pity in them, only something shared.

"You are not crazy, Lethe," she says, resting her hand over my trembling fingers. "I know how overwhelming the static can be. I'm an empath, too."

I blink at my CEO and friend.

"Living every day hearing and feeling the emotions of everyone around you is hard," Amiya goes on, steady and sincere. "And for a Djall, having your Arts brush against residual memories makes it heavier still. It's terrifying when your own mind feels crowded."

She gives my hand a squeeze.

"But you're just adjusting. You'll get used to it, and we're going to teach you how to manage the noise," she says, her ears perking up a little. "We aren't going to lock you away because your Arts are difficult to carry. Rhodes Island is here to help you."

The weight of the confession finally breaks. I put my face in my hands and my shoulders shake as the exhaustion and the relief come out together.

"Thank you," I sob, and the words tear out of my throat. I look up through the blur at Amiya and Lena and Erika, the three of them anchoring me to this world. "Thank you. Thank you, everyone."

Amiya smiles, her eyes kind and free of pity. She gives my hand one last squeeze and stands up.

"Get some rest, Lethe," she says. "You have been incredibly brave. I need to get back to work now, but we'll see you tomorrow." She turns and slips out of the dim dorm, and the warmth of her stays behind.

Miss Lena lingers a moment longer. She offers a serene smile, then steps away from the foot of the mattress and leaves me in Erika's arms, the door shutting behind her with a soft click.

The room falls quiet.

Erika doesn't break it. She holds me against her side and combs her fingers slowly through my tangled grey hair.

Under the rhythm of her hand and the honey of her, the exhaustion finally claims me. The static fades and I go down into a deep sleep.

When I open my eyes, the dim amber of the night cycle has already shifted into the crisp white of the morning cycle.

The door of my dorm opens just after I finish getting dressed. Erika comes in with a small metal tray, and the recycled air of the room warms with the smell of breakfast. She sets it carefully on my nightstand: a ceramic bowl of oats dotted with plump dark blueberries, and a cold glass of milk beside it.

"Good morning, Lethe," Erika says. Her voice is soft, but there's a serious undertone in it that makes me pause.

I look up. "Good morning, Erika."

She doesn't hand me the spoon. She sits on the edge of the mattress instead, her eyes on mine.

"I have some news," she begins, keeping her tone level. "Dr. Warfarin and Dr. Kal'tsit have reviewed your recent episodes. They've advised that you're not to work for the time being."

My heart stalls in my chest.

"No, wait," I blurt out, the panic coming up hot in my throat, my fingers grabbing weakly at the fabric of her coat. "I need to work, Erika! If I don't work, if I'm not useful, Dr. Kal'tsit will think I'm broken. She'll lock me back in the quarantine ward. I can't be a liability…"

"Shh," Erika murmurs. She presses a finger to my lips and stops the spiral there, then takes my hands in hers and gives them a firm, grounding squeeze.

"You are not a liability, Lethe," she says, and her expression softens. "And this wasn't a punishment from Dr. Kal'tsit. Miss Lena actually brought the idea up."

I blink, and the hammering in my chest slows a fraction. "Miss Lena?"

Erika nods, a warm smile touching her lips. "She went to administration on your behalf. Amiya reviewed the request herself and approved it this morning. They want to give your mind the time it needs to stabilize, without the strain of siphoning other people's trauma."

She reaches for the bowl of blueberry oats and hands it to me with medical authority.

"You're still completely free to go around the landship," she says, in a tone with no room in it. "The cafeteria, the garden with Lisa and Podenco. But no work. No palliative sessions. You can still feed through your staff on the gentle feelings, and that's all. That's an official order from the CEO herself."

I don't protest any more, and dig into the warm oats.

I scrape the last of the sweet, purple-stained milk out of the ceramic bowl, the spoon clinking against the rim. Erika watches me finish, then gathers her slate to go. She mentions she has to get to the high-security wards for Opal's morning vitals.

As she reaches the door, guilt turns over in my chest.

"Sorry, Erika," I murmur.

Erika stops with her hand over the door's control panel and turns around, blinking. The feathers near her temples give a small twitch.

"What's that for?" she asks.

I look down at the empty bowl and twist the edge of my blanket.

"You're just so busy," I say, and the words come out heavy with shame. "You work so hard in the triage bays, and you have to take care of Opal, and I keep adding to your workload. I'm supposed to be an Operator helping you, and instead I'm taking up your time again."

The door is forgotten. Erika comes back to the edge of my recessed mattress.

She leans over me and brushes the curtain of hair off my forehead, then bends down and presses a kiss to my brow.

"Stop thinking of yourself as a liability, Lethe," she murmurs against my skin.

She pulls back far enough to look me in the eyes.

"You are not a burden. Taking care of you isn't a chore; it's one of the best parts of my day," she says, and her voice holds the line like an anchor. "Nobody on this landship thinks of you that way. Not me, not Amiya, not Lena…"

A knowing smile touches her lips. "Not even Dr. Kal'tsit."

"Not even Dr. Kal'tsit?" I repeat.

Erika chuckles. "Not even her," she insists, dry about it. "Trust me, Lethe. If she really thought you were a liability, she would have tossed you off the landship a long time ago."

An image arrives, vivid and unasked for: Mon3tr materializing out of the dark corners of Kal'tsit's office, reaching down, picking me up by the scruff of my oversized jacket and yeeting me through one of the reinforced observation windows into the barren Terran wasteland.

It's absurd and morbidly funny, and the ridiculousness of it cuts through whatever anxiety I have left.

A real smile breaks across my face. I let out a giggle and the tension goes out of my shoulders.

"Okay, okay," I concede, nudging her arm. "You really do need to get back to work now, Erika. Opal is waiting for you."

Erika stands up, her eyes shining as the shadows clear off my face.

"I'm going," she says, heading for the exit. "You behave yourself today."

"I will," I promise, swinging my legs over the edge of the mattress. "Don't worry about me. I think I'll go bother Podenco or Lisa in the garden today. Or, if Rosmontis is still on the landship and not deployed, I might go visit her."

Erika gives me one last fond smile before stepping out into the corridor.

The days that follow blur together into a warm, humid haze of routine.

My mandated medical leave means my hours in the Convalescent Garden are no longer spent siphoning trauma out of exhausted Operators. I sit on the curved benches instead, knees tucked up, watching Miss Lena and Podenco work.

They speak a rapid, overlapping botanical language that is beyond me.

"The alkaloid yield from this batch of Lirium is far lower than expected," Miss Lena murmurs, her fingers inspecting a broad-leafed plant. "We might need to adjust the soil acidity. The Originium trace in the recycled water supply is likely throwing off the nutrient absorption."

"I could mix in some crushed basalt!" Podenco suggests brightly, hovering with a watering can. "Or maybe we increase the humidity around the terrarium to stimulate the spore pods?"

"Let's try the basalt first," Lena says, smiling serenely as she prunes a stem. "We don't want to induce a rapid rot in the root network."

I sit there on my bench blinking and nodding solemnly, pretending I understand a single word of their agricultural crisis.

Podenco, with her usual energy, tries to include me. She hands me a small trowel and sets out to teach me the delicate art of planting seedlings. I honestly try. But the spade-tipped pendulum swinging off my tailbone is a hazard in a greenhouse full of fragile flora.

The moment Podenco claps her hands and praises me for digging a perfect little trench, excitement flares in my chest and my tail gives a happy, involuntary wag.

Thwack.

The spade at the tip slices clean through a row of newly sprouted medicinal herbs, sending dirt and shredded green leaves across the pristine floor tiles. I drop the trowel, grab my rogue tail with both hands, hug it against my chest and apologize at length. Podenco laughs her bright chiming laugh, but we agree I should probably stay away from the fragile flower beds for now.

When the garden is quiet, Lisa visits me. She bounds in after her own shifts, nine tails swishing, and takes the seat beside me on the bench. She fills the humid air with stories from her daily life on the landship: complaints about the strict instructors in her theoretical Arts training, groans about the mountain of standard-issue homework the tutoring staff assigns her. I sit and listen and wonder what homework is. I've never seen any.

I do try to branch out. One afternoon I tap out a formal request to the administrative system for Rosmontis's schedule, to see if I can catch her for lunch in the cafeteria again.

Less than a minute later a harsh red banner flashes across my screen: DENIED. CLASSIFIED SECURITY PROTOCOL.

Shortly after the rejection pings, a direct message from Amiya arrives, full of soft apologetic words. She promises she'll ping my slate whenever she or Rosmontis is actually free to hang out.

I set my slate down on the bench and lean my head back to look up through the frosted glass canopy. The lavender-scented air of the garden washes over me.

It's a quiet existence, but it's mine.