Oatmeal. Yogurt. Toasted walnuts. Coffee. The valley spreading out before her — or, at least, spreading out on the absurdly-high-definition vidscreen masquerading as a window by the kitchen nook. Trish sat at a table sized for her, on a chair sized for her, staring out the “window” at the shifting rockgrass, watching it wave slowly back and forth in the wind. Something was moving in it, always in her peripheral vision — she could never quite catch it with her gaze, no matter how hard she tried, and–

  “Solstice to Auntie Trish~” Piper said, poking Trish in the shoulder as she took a seat opposite her in the kitchen nook. “Just tuning out and enjoying the scenery a little?”

  “Hm?” Trish blinked and looked up at Piper, Her hand was poised, halfway from bowl to mouth; when she took the spoonful of breakfast, it was lukewarm. She wondered how long she’d been starting out the window. “I suppose.” She took another spoonful. The rest of her breakfast was still warm, at least. “Sleep well?”

  “Yeah! Your guest room bed is really comfy. Ooh, coffee.” She leaned over the carafe and took a deep sniff. “Mmm, is that the blend from Scoparia’s?”

  Trish nodded. “It was pretty good. The compiler knew which one I meant when I asked.”

  Piper poured herself a cup. “So…still up for the party?”

  Trish took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “On the one hand, it feels like a lot to jump into all at once. On the other hand–” She shrugged. “Might be nice to get out and do something different.”

  “Right on!” She took a big sip of coffee and set the mug down. “Aaaaand you get to see Lay~”

  Trish rolled her eyes. “You keep saying it in that tone of voice. We’re just friends.”

  “So far.” Piper stuck out her tongue and ughed. “C’mon, it’ll be fun! I didn’t even know florets could unionize.”

  Trish snorted. “As far as I can tell from what Lay’s told me, the Terran Florets Union is mostly an excuse to have parties. It’s not like they’re going on strike for more xenodrugs.” She finished her cup of coffee, set it down, and gnced at the carafe. She could probably stop at one, given her age and the tachycardic episode she’d recently had.

  “A Terran Floret strike would be terrible, Cliff’s would be closed!” Piper said, ughing. “Oh, hey, before I forget, I had something I wanted to give you. Wait just a second?”

  “Sure.” As Piper slipped out of the nook, Trish returned to her breakfast. It all felt bizarrely normal — the new hab on Parthenocissus, the tentative reconnection with Lay, the strange way her wardship had ended. It made her want to second-guess things, to try to dig for what was really going on. Something moved in the windowscreen, drawing her eye for a second.

  She was overthinking it, honestly. She’d just been through a lot, and it was normal to have somewhat unsettled feelings in the wake of it.

  “Hey, back! Sorry that took so long,” Piper said, taking a seat opposite Trish once again, this time clutching a satchel from which she produced a book. “I got it done yesterday but I was so burnt out I just came in and fell asleep, you know?” She slid it across the table. It had the same textured bck cover Trish used for her books, and a familiar embossed title in gilded letters: Freedom’s Ember . Trish knew what ought to be below that: “Cass Hope.”

  That wasn’t what was written there. Instead, she saw “Lay Sequi, First Floret.”

  “You made a copy of Freedom’s Ember .” Trish reached out and took it, feeling the weight. It was heaver than usual, thicker, though that might just be down to overuse of binding materials — it was an easy mistake for a beginner to make. She opened the book and began to page through it. The title page was different, too: “ Freedom’s Ember , Second Edition, by Lay Sequi, First Floret. Edited by Trisha Serrano and Piper Raeburn.” Something itched in the back of her mind, and she flipped through the novel. It was, indeed, a bit amateurish in its construction — the pages had a tendency to turn in clumps — but it was sturdy enough that it’d st a few years or regur reading without any repair work.

  She got to what was meant to be the end. There were still pages to turn. “You put the third book in.”

  “Yup! Annotated and everything, just like you did for the first two books!” Piper said, grinning. “I could probably do a better job of it, to be honest, but y’know, I’m heading back down to the pnet soon, and I wanted to be able to give you this before I did. And Lay, too! I have another copy in here for her.” She patted her satchel. “I’ll do a real second edition, with better annotation and binding and everything, obviously. But these are special, for you and Lay.”

  “Thank you…” Trish stared down at the book, at the text on the page in front of her, text that she hadn’t read, hadn’t looked at, hadn’t allowed herself– no, hadn’t been allowed to think about for the better part of sixty years.

  I know what you’ve just read may frighten you. It may seem like an impossible task — and that’s because it is .

  But you mustn’t despair — not for the sake of the cause, but because I do not want you to despair. It’s unnecessary.

  You know now that we cannot meaningfully fight the Affini save in our own hearts. Now I must expin to you that, even if we can fight them there — which I am not, at this time, entirely certain is true — that such a fight is unnecessary .

  To keep the ember of freedom alive is a noble effort. To cultivate it, that others you shall never meet might bask in its warmth, is to remember what it is to be human. But you must accept the reality that neither we nor our distant descendants shall ever need the fme that the ember you cultivate might one day kindle.

  You must learn to accept that the Affini will never abandon us to such a fate. You must learn to accept that we can be human alongside them, that we can thrive alongside them. I have taught you how to fight a battle that will consume your entire life. Now I must give you that life back.

  Trish took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and closed the book. The heat in her face and the stinging in her eyes subsided. There would be time to read it ter.

  “So… I did okay?”

  “Well.” Trish smiled and met Piper’s eyes. “You need to practice binding, and the typesetting is a little off-kilter in some sections, but for a first attempt? Yeah. You did pretty good.” She set the book down, id a hand atop. “Thank you for this. I mean it.”

  “Well, I know it’s important to you,” Piper said, “and I wanted to do something nice for you since you showed me something really fun to do. I mean, driving around in a mobile hab, meeting all kinds of people, listening to their stories and writing them down — it seems like a pretty cozy way to live. Maybe in a few years I’ll see about getting a shuttle license and take it interstelr. There’s so many people out there, and I bet there’s so many really interesting stories. Too many to ever hear all of them, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to try.”

  Trish couldn’t help but smile. “That’s the spirit, kiddo.” She had a good head on her shoulders. She was going to be alright.

  She finished her breakfast, and Piper finished her second cup of coffee. They set out together, and rode the train from the first ring to the third, the sweeping vista of Parthenocissus turning around them as they slid through microgravity transition zones. The third ring was broad, lightly poputed save for clusters around transit stations — Trish had been there several times to visit Lay, and knew the character of the pce.

  What she found on the far side of the train ride was nothing like what she expected — even the pza outside the transit station was full of terrans, affini, and a handful of other xenos here and there, milling back and forth, chatting to one another as they slowly made their way for the park where the party was being held. Trish could see it, not far away, down the hill from where the station stood, a sprawling maze of tents, kiosks, and other temporary constructions. “Wow,” she said, “they really went all-out. Is that… is that a ferris wheel?”

  “Sure looks like it!” Piper said. “I definitely wanna go up in that. Maybe find someone cute to make out with in it, even!”

  “I doubt you’ll have trouble finding a willing participant,” Trish said, smiling. “Go on, run your little heart out, I’ll do this at my own pace.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m a big girl, I can take care of myself. I’ve even got the paperwork to prove it.”

  Piper ughed. “Yeah you do!” She threw her arms around Trish and hugged her tightly. “Kay, but message me if you need anything! See you ter, Auntie Trish!”

  “See you.” She watched Piper filter off into the crowd, and braced herself to do the same. She didn’t usually spend time around so many others — sixty years of being a loner was hard to unlearn. She kept her eyes on the curve of Parthenocissus, and that helped. The light from the sunline glittered off the ke a little further up spinward, and it reminded her that it was good for her to get out and relearn how to rex around others.

  So she mingled, such as she was able. Mostly, that involved walking around and seeing the sights, which, more often than not, involved catching a glimpse of two or more florets engaged in trysts only somewhat out of sight. That was something she’d never entirely gotten used to, either, but then, she’d also never been surrounded by it on such a scale.

  Not all of them were having sex (or something like enough to sex that Trish couldn’t tell the difference). Some were staffing kiosks, which offered snow cones, fair food, or carnival games that, Trish presumed, wouldn’t be as rigged as the genuine historical article. Some were pying games of tag, or what seemed like a game of capture the fg, except there didn’t seem to be any sides and the interest was less in the fg than the floret running with it. And some were simply sitting around, like the red-haired floret sitting under a tree, plinking away at a harsh-edged arpeggio on a guitar. She gnced up as Trish walked past, her eyes blown out on xenodrugs. “Waaaait,” she said, “Trish?”

  She paused. “I’m sorry… do I know you?”

  “Oh holy frost it is you!” She grinned and got to her feet with such nguid ease that she seemed to flow rather than simply stand. She slung the guitar behind her and embraced Trish without hesitation, squeezing her tightly. She smelled of a pine forest, spicy and sharp. “You don’t recognize me, huh?”

  “No, but–” She paused, her mind ticking away, trying to dredge up a name from ancient memory. “You’re not…?”

  “Aletheia Chlorosar, First Floret? Roots, I haven’t seen you in forever , you look amazing! ” She backed off a little, still holding onto Trish, and looked her up and down. “Really amazing!”

  “I look like an old, tired mess,” Trish said, still trying to wrap her head around the fact that this bombshell who couldn’t be more than 35 was dorky little McCracken from Bulwark.

  “You look hot as rot~ ” Aletheia countered. “I’d do you in a heartbeat. In fact–” She bit her lip and gnced behind her. “What do you say?”

  For a long moment, Trish simply did not know what to say. She was being actively propositioned, out of nowhere, by someone who was, by looks alone if nothing else, completely out of her league. That she was a floret only added a somewhat uncomfortable twist to the matter. “…maybe another time?”

  “Awww, fine.” Aletheia ughed and shook her head. “Good for the ego to get shot down every once in a while, you know?”

  “It’s more that, I don’t know, I’m going through a lot right now, and–”

  “No no, it’s fine, really.” She gave Trish a pat on the shoulder. “But, dirt, it is really good to see you. I’m Pinecone on the net, send me a message sometime and let’s catch up! Oooh, and I’m doing a concert next week, you should come! Trust me, that song sounds way better with the sound system properly hooked up.”

  “The song?”

  “Yeah! I mean I mostly do floretcore,” she added, taking a step back and sliding the guitar back into her hands, “but every so often I find a cssical piece that just grabs me by the colr, you know? It’s just an old vac-worker’s shanty, but it sps! Seriously, listen!” She began pying the sharp-edged arpeggio again, this time singing over it: “C’mon! C’mon! C’mon! Let’s go space truckin’!”

  “That’s…certainly something,” Trish said, but she couldn’t help smiling. Damn, never knew she had a voice like that. “Where’d you find it, anyway?”

  “Oh, Jess showed it to me, she’s big into history.” She paused midway through the arpeggio. “Or was it Jenny? I think it was Jess. Anyway, you can go ask if you want,” she added, pointing with her chin across the park. Trish followed with her gaze, not having much trouble spotting the gaggle of chromed-out florets lounging in the shade of a massive, misshapen hillock that wasn’t a hillock stars preserve it was NOT a hillock .

  “What is that ,” Trish whispered.

  “Huh? Oh. Oh that’s just Miss Gallica,” Aletheia said. “You never met her, I guess. She stays in a lot, y’know, because she’s so big. She gives the best full body hugs, though, she just kinda picks you up and holds you in the palm of her hand and squeezes you. Go say hi, you’ll love her!”

  “I think maybe I’ll leave them be for now,” Trish said, swallowed heavily and trying not to think about how this Gallica was about three or four times the size of her mobile hab, maybe bigger.

  Aletheia giggled. “You’re not scared of Miss Gallica, are you? She’s super nice!”

  “Scared is maybe not the right word,” Trish said, and her brain began to come up with a list of perfect homonyms for ‘scared,’ but the swishing of the wind in the trees reminded her that no affini would ever harm her. “But also, I think I could stand giving those four a miss. They’re– well, they’re a lot all at once.”

  “Psh. You’ve never been in an orgy with them,” Aletheia said, rolling her eyes. “ Attachments this, cognitive overys that, take me apart Allie please take me apart . They’re adorable, and all four of them are a joy to tease, but yeah, a lot is a good way to describe them.” She sucked on her lower lip again. “A lot of fun to take apart. And I did put my travel toolkit in my gig bag.”

  “Well, you have fun with that,” Trish said, “I think I’m going to do try to find something to drink that doesn’t have drugs in it.”

  “It’s a party,” Aletheia said, giving Trish a Look. “Why would you want to stay sober?”

  “Because I’m trying to ease myself into things as opposed to bellyflopping right into them.” She paused, halfway through turning around. “It was good to see you again though. Allie?”

  “My friends and lovers call me that,” she said. “You call me Allie.” She winked, and pyed the shanty’s arpeggio again as Trish walked away. It followed her back into the crowd, back into the rows of stalls and tents, until it faded into the white noise of sophonts having a good time.

  Before too long, she came to a broad table loaded down with snacks — cookies, pastries, buns, meat pies, built-your-own-taco ptters, and more — and a massive bowl of what looked like it had once been punch before it had been drained. A tall, burly man in a colorful floral-print shirt was hefting a cooler and slowly refilling it. “It’ll be just a sec,” he said over his shoulder, “and then it’ll be good to go again.”

  “No worries,” Trish said .”Though, what’s in that?”

  “Just fruit,” he said, finishing off the pour, “but if you want to spice it up, there’s some xenodrug tinctures here, and a couple drops should do you.” He slowly eased off, stoppering the cooler and setting it down on the ground with a light grunt.

  “I think I should be fine without getting totally bsted,” Trish said, stepping forward just as the man turned to face her.

  “Ah, bit of a lightweight, are y–” He froze. She froze. A long moment passed between them. “Wait. Trish?”

  It was Nikoi. Not quite as Trish remembered him — he was cleaner cut than he’d ever been at Bulwark, and the beard and his sideburns had a bit of grey in them, but it was him, no question. And to look at him, he was significantly more sober than she’d ever seen him whenever she’d been forced into Arvense’s clinic for checkups.

  She turned to walk away, but he caught her by the wrist. “Wait.” His grip was gentle, and he let go almost immediately, as if her skin might burn him. “Please.”

  Trish didn’t know why she stopped. Maybe it was tent anger, spoiling for a fight. Maybe it was the pleading tone in his voice. Maybe it was the big Terran Florets Union banner fluttering in the breeze, reminding her that she was safe here. But she stopped, and looked back at Nikoi. “What?”

  “I just– I promised myself– No, I should start at the beginning,” he said, sighing. “Master kept me super, super high for those first few years.”

  “I remember,” she said. Every time she’d come in, he’d been there, so high he could barely sit up, standing guard at the desk and ever-eager to push the Good Times button. She suppressed a shudder.

  “And by the time he started titrating me down to a level where I could, you know, think , well, we were already gone. We weren’t even in the Orion Arm anymore. And now that I’d unlearned all the awful stuff I’d been taught in the Accord, Master started teaching me how to be a better person. And part of being a good person is apologizing.”

  Had Koer kept Nikoi’s mail away from her too? “If you sent me anything, I never got it.”

  He shook his head. “No, see — I wanted to. I really, really wanted to. But I like I said, it’d been years . Getting in touch with you then just to apologize for having been awful — it’d been years for you. You’d probably moved on and totally forgotten about me by then. I was worried it’d just be reopening old wounds just to make me feel better about myself, and that wouldn’t be right. But I still owed you an apology, even if it felt wrong to reach out just to make it, so I promised myself that if I ever just happened to run into you, I’d apologize then, because, well, the damage would already be done. Am I making sense here?”

  “I suppose? But, listen, you don’t have to–”

  “I was horrible to you,” Nikoi said. “I felt threatened by you because you were obviously way smarter than me, and you were confident and didn’t just cower when I yelled and threatened. I didn’t know how to deal with that, and feeling anything other than anger made me feel like a failure. You weren’t the only one who made me feel that way, but you never flinched. So I just kept doubling down, over and over, getting worse and worse…” He sighed. “And I’m sorry. I should never have done it, and not knowing better is no excuse. Everyone else at Bulwark was capable of basic decency, I could have learned it from any of them. It took Master breaking me for me to figure that out.”

  “It’s–“ She paused, held the thought for a minute. “It’s fine, Nikoi. Stars, you couldn’t have been thirty yet, practically still a kid. Kids do stupid things.” Nearly 30 was not practically a kid by any measure, even when one was nearly a centenarian, but it was the kind thing to say to him in the moment. The sunline’s reflection, rippling in the surface of the punch, had reminded her to be kind. “Besides, I was pretty shitty right back to you.”

  “Heh, yeah, ‘cause I deserved it, the way I was acting,” he said, shaking his head. “Hey, what do you call someone who does brain surgery but never went to medical school?”

  “Huh?”

  “Good boy. That’s what Master calls me, anyway.” He crossed his arms and snickered. “That’s one’s a Nikoi Special, came up with it all on my own.”

  Jokes. He’d just unburdened himself of a half-century’s worth of guilt, and and switched immediately to telling jokes. “You definitely belong to Arvense,” she said, shaking her head — but she couldn’t help but smile, just a little. “He’s seriously got you doing brain surgery? ”

  “Well, yeah, you didn’t think I was just gonna sit out front pushing a button for sixty years, did you?” He shrugged. “I mean, sure, at first I was mostly just handing things to Master when he asked for them, and I just had to know what all the tools were. But you know how it is, the more you learn, the more you want to know, so I kept reading, I learned Affini so I could read the technical manuals, I started studying anatomy…and then, you know, once we ran into the phantoms and started working on the cotyledon program, I spent a lot of time learning about haustoric impnts and neurology. Honestly, between how long I’ve been at it and how much more advanced our medical science is, I probably know more about neurology than any neurosurgeon in the Accord did,” he added with a chuckle. “Gotta be careful not to get a big head about that.”

  Wait, phantoms are real? She dismissed the thought — old spacer’s tales weren’t relevant. “You seriously ended up becoming a doctor?”

  “Well. Vet’s assistant. Master does all the complicated stuff, but he lets me help and even handle simpler stuff on my own. And, yeah. I like it. I like helping people. I mean, you get it, you were a doctor, before Solstice. It’s like a puzzle, and you get to solve it, and it helps someone feel better.”

  “I haven’t been a doctor for a long time,” she said. Not much point to it , she thought to herself, but she knew the moment she thought it that it wasn’t true — here was Nikoi of all people, devoting himself to medicine even when the Affini had already eclipsed all human endeavor in the field. “But good for you. Really.”

  His smile faltered just a little. “Look, uh. I may not be the sharpest scalpel in the OR, but I know that one apology and one joke isn’t going to just magically fix things between us. I’ll give you some space, but thank you for listening. Are you, uh, living on Parthenocissus now?”

  “For a little while,” Trish said. “Maybe longer. I don’t know.”

  “Well, I won’t push things, but if you ever do want to talk, I’m here. See you around?” She nodded, and he left her there by the punch. A moment passed. She dled herself out a cup of the fragrant brew. It had a spicy undercurrent, but the sweetness was the star of the show. She felt a little of the tension in her shoulders scken, but only a little.

  Sixty years, or near enough. He’d carried that burden of guilt for sixty years.

  He’d been an asshole, to be sure. A mean, petty, rude, loud-mouthed, arrogant asshole. He had practically reached the point of self-parody by the time the Affini had arrived and everything had exploded. Trish could never understand what Nell had seen in him, and even she had cut him loose in the midst of that mad scramble.

  Nell. Trish smiled at the memory of her tearing into Nikoi in the freezing cold of pre-remediation Solstice. She would be back in the system, too, if everyone else was. Part of her wanted to look her up. Part of her was still a little afraid to. She remembered all too well what Andoa had done to her.

  She needed time to think, time to process. She also, her hip reminded her, needed to sit down. A solution to both was not far off — the pnners of the party (which, given that it was being put on by the Terran Florets Union, was probably none other than Lay herself) had erected and clearly beled a quiet tent, which wasn’t far from the refreshments and food stalls. Trish had never had occasion to use a quiet room, or anything like it, but then again, she’d rgely built an entire life around being able to pick up and be miles from any other sophont whenever she felt like it, so perhaps that wasn’t an entirely accurate statement.

  The moment she passed through the threshold of the quiet tent, the sound from the outside died away. Something about the fabric, or the way it was hung, seemed to devour sound, leaving the inside as hushed as a librarian’s dream. It was divided by hanging sheets into compartments, mostly isoted from one another, and in each were comfy pillows, pet beds, little tables and chairs — virtually every setup someone might need to be comfy. There was even a corner that hosted what looked like a high-tech tide pool, artificial wave-action making the water within gently slosh back and forth.

  At the moment, other than Trish, there was only one other occupant, a floret who had constructed a pillow-and-bnket fort in one of the tent’s alcoves. She gnced up briefly when Trish entered, but immediately looked back down at her tablet, totally engrossed by whatever she was watching as she retreated a little further into her fort and snuggled up to a plush … well, whatever it was, Trish wasn’t familiar with it. Something between a sea slug and a horseshoe crab, as far as she could tell.

  She found a spot for herself on something like a beanbag chair; it had the benefit of being next to a little coffee table she could rest her drink on. She pulled out her own tablet and called up the sophont search function. It had become something of a ritual over the past week and change since she’d been decred officially independent once again.

  Koer was still in the system, though not for much longer; the Cardiocrinum would be leaving within the day, no doubt for the frontier, where countless sophont species still required the attention of the Affini.

  She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

  Sixty years, he’d lived with it.

  This time, she pushed the CONTACT dialog box, and began to type.

  @flintsparking: I don’t hate you.

  @flintsparking: I just want you to know that.

  @DriftingWhisper: Why are you contacting me? This isn’t good for either of us.

  @flintsparking: Maybe not. But you’re going to be gone soon, and you were pretty set on me never seeing you again.

  @DriftingWhisper: It’s for the best.

  @DriftingWhisper: To be clear, I hate that it’s for the best. It is not what I want. But I cannot deny that I failed in my duty to you.

  @flintsparking: Your duty?

  @DriftingWhisper: To ensure your happiness. During and after your service.

  @flintsparking: I was pretty happy with my life, Koer, right up until the st couple of years.

  @DriftingWhisper: When I began to feel the weight of it all. When I began to lose control. When I failed in my mission.

  @flintsparking: Don’t spiral. You fucked up, sure. Fuck-ups happen. We’ll survive. You said so yourself. That’s the whole point of the Compact.

  @DriftingWhisper: I am aware. I still wish it was me taking care of you instead of Scoparia.

  @flintsparking: You do know I cleared my wardship, right?

  @DriftingWhisper: Did you?

  @flintsparking: All by myself.

  @flintsparking: All it took was talking to Lay, apparently.

  @DriftingWhisper: You cannot know how happy it makes me that you are speaking to her again.

  @DriftingWhisper: I’m so sorry for keeping you out of contact with her. I worried it would disturb your equilibrium. And you were doing such important work.

  @flintsparking: I’m the one who walked away from her to begin with. You don’t get to cim all the bme for yourself. We both fucked up, okay?

  @flintsparking: So you don’t get to keep me as a floret, so what? We had sixty years, more or less, of friendship. Even if you had ulterior motives, I actually enjoyed being around you. I liked talking with you. I liked sharing stories of what was going on in my life with you, and I liked hearing yours. I liked talking books with you. You didn’t make me enjoy those things.

  @flintsparking: I had a good life. It wasn’t what I pnned on, and I wasn’t fully aware of its dimensions, sure, and the st few weeks in particur have hurt, but I’m not going to forget the good things completely just because of that. I’m going to remember how beautiful that sunset was for the rest of my life.

  @flintsparking: Koer?

  @DriftingWhisper: I, too, shall never allow myself to forget that sunset.

  @DriftingWhisper: Thank you, Trish.

  >> DriftingWhisper is offline.

  Trish looked up from her tablet, sighed, wiped her eyes dry. She sat there, open to the silence and to her thoughts, for a long moment. When she felt the need, she quenched her thirst, until the gss of punch was drained. Then she tucked her tablet back into her pocket and stood up. She’d hidden in the quiet tent long enough.

  The whole point of a party, the sound of the tent’s fabric softly shifting in the breeze had reminded her, was to have fun.