Thyrsiflora's office was cozy, even a bit small, a little nook tucked away in the corner of her broader practice with thick, heavy sheaves of ivy that swept down and sealed it off once she and the affini were inside. Thyrsiflora took great care with her enormous wooden antlers as she settled herself into her chair, and gestured with a vine for Haven to take a seat on the terran-sized chair opposite. Between them was a little coffee table, on which sat a tray with a steaming kettle and a teacup atop a saucer. "Sit down, and if you feel like it, pour yourself some tea. Normally, I'd give my patients a low-yield Css-D xenodrug with it, but given your neuromycelial bridge's reaction to the tricosapeltaric acid, I think it's best if I refrain from giving you psychoactives for the time being."

  "Uhm. Okay?" Haven sat on the edge of the soft and incredibly comfy chair. "What would that do?"

  "Helps my patients be honest with me, and with themselves," Thyrsiflora said, smiling. "It can be challenging, even scary, to own up to things one knows about oneself but would rather not think about. Having a little neurological lubrication involved in the process makes it easier to get to the root of a problem. But not to worry, little one. You strike me as a very honest little creature, and I think that, in the meantime, we'll be able to have a productive dialogue even without that assistance."

  Haven reflected on what a tremendous monster she was, able to convince even the Affini she was a good person.

  "Now, from what little time I've had with you, and from my reading in your files, you seem to be carrying a tremendous amount of anxiety around with you," Thyrsiflora continued, shifting in her chair with a sound like wind rattling branches in a forest, crossing her legs and letting one wooden hoof dangle in midair. "Given what you've endured, that's no surprise, of course, but as part of the process of acclimation to the Compact, it's best if we try to find the exact sources of the anxiety. Then, we can address them both internally, through cognitive exercises, as well as externally, through behavior modification and eventually xenodrug supplementation if necessary. Do you follow so far?"

  Haven nodded. They were going to get inside her head, find out how horrible she was, and then it'd all be over. She wished she was under Tara's desk again, or even just doing paperwork for them.

  "Good girl," Thyrsiflora said with a smile. "Now, for starters, I'd like to know what you consider to be your baseline level of anxiety, the day-to-day resting average, so to speak, on a scale of 1 to 10. One represents total serenity, being at peace with oneself and the universe, et cetera, while 10 represents the worst anxiety you've ever felt."

  If the sarcotesta could sweat, Haven was sure she'd be sweating bullets right now. "Uhm. Three?"

  "I see." Thyrsiflora pulled a tablet from inside of her and began taking notes on it. "Interesting insight, given your rather high average cortisol numbers. May I make a supposition? Would you say that you have learned to function despite the stress you feel? What I mean to say is, do you feel that you are able to cope with it?"

  "I guess so," Haven said, looking down at her hands folded in her p. "A lot's happened. And before- I wasn't exactly happy before, even if I had money." There was no amount of money that could ever make it okay for Haven to be Haven.

  "Scarcity trauma is rarer these days, but I've treated many cases of it, and not just in terrans," Thyrsiflora said gently, reaching out with a vine and resting it on Haven's knee. "I promise that you will, in time, adjust to not needing to be concerned about the retive value of things for the purposes of trade."

  Haven's gut clenched. "Things are definitely better now. For everyone." Apart from the fact that she was still alive.

  "It's good to hear you say that. You'd be surprised how many terrans I interviewed early on who pitched the most terrible fits about being given something without an expectation of bor in return. The idea that access to plenty without wealth derived either from bor or birthright is some kind of moral failure was shockingly common in your species. Given your background, would you say that your trauma revolves primarily about the need to maintain that wealth?"

  Haven felt the disapproving gre of her father on the back of her neck. "Yeah, that was...something he talked about a lot."

  "He?"

  Shit. "My dad," Haven said. "He didn't think I had 'business sense.' Whatever that is. I probably don't."

  "Mmmmhm." More notes on the tablet. "He dispyed a strong desire to inculcate those values in you?"

  Haven nodded. "I had- have? A bunch of sisters, but he wanted a son, and, well, I never told him I wasn't one, because he wouldn't have taken it well, and-" It was amazing how her throat could feel like it was closing up and cutting off her voice when she wasn't even breathing with it.

  "Patriarchal hypercompetitiveness culture," Thyrsiflora said, nodding. "Lines up with my notes from Records & Rituals on the man." Her vine coiled around Haven's leg and tightened just a little. "Are you feeling quite alright, little one?"

  "I'm fine," she lied.

  Thyrsiflora did not seem convinced. "Pour some tea. I've checked, and it's well within what your digestive system can handle."

  Having something to do was a relief. It wasn't quite Secretary Mode, but she'd been given a task she could do, and that was better than simply sitting there feeling the tide of misery slowly rising up to drown her. She carefully poured tea into the cup, lifted it with the saucer, and took a small sip of the steaming amber liquid inside. It was bright, floral, and rich with warm spices. She felt it slipping down her throat and felt a little of the tension go with it.

  "Better?"

  "A little."

  'You're doing very well, Haven." Thyrsiflora gave her leg a little squeeze. "Especially for someone so undermedicated. Please let me know if this becomes too much for you. I am monitoring your vitals, and if necessary I can give you another dose of tricosapeltaric acid to head off another anxiety attack."

  "I'm okay," she lied again.

  "It will take time to shake off the madaptive values old Terran culture burdened you with," Thyrsiflora continued, her foliage ruffling in an invisible breeze. "Terrans have this particur psychological issue, you know, where the first thing you are taught, even if it's incorrect, will tend to be the information you retain best. Even if presented with irrefutable evidence that the information is incorrect, you will often reject that evidence at an emotional level before you even attempt to interrogate it, let alone integrate it. You are, as a species, so ready to bond with others that you even bond with things you've learned, and view new information as an attack on it, and therefore upon yourself. Did you know that, flower?"

  "No, but it sounds pretty familiar," Haven admitted. "Once my dad had an idea, you couldn't convince him otherwise no matter how wrong he was. Which is how I ended up here, I guess." The memory of the stinging punch in her leg, the iron-hard grip of sedatives slowly turning out the neurological lights, was still fresh in her mind.

  "But now that you're here, you're safe." Another vine joined the first, giving Haven's thigh a comforting stroke. "And we have quite a lot of experience in treating Terran hyperdefensiveness around erroneous conclusions and ideologies, you know. I personally have quite a bit of experience in it. So you're in good vines. Now, your father has come up twice. Let's talk about him a bit more."

  Trish's gut was still churning, hours ter. An unpnned visit from Haven and her datefriend hadn't helped, no matter how well the kid seemed to be doing for herself. A shower hadn't helped, nor had a change of clothes after. She'd tried to eat a bit of toast, to give her stomach something to settle around. That hadn't helped either.

  Babysitting?!

  The word was still rolling around inside her head like an antique pinball machine, ricocheting off bumpers and setting bells dinging and lights fshing seemingly at random across her brain. She'd id down on Scoparia's oversized couch and switched her wallscreen on to a collection of animated Solstice vistas. She recognized most of them. Here, the gentle motion of water slipping over falls; here, false oaks shifting in the wind. Even if she couldn't smell them, it was familiar. This had helped, a little, but the underlying discomfort was still there, her gut still churning.

  "Are you quite sure I can't give you something for this?" Scoparia said, hovering nervously over her like a mother hen.

  "If I'm going to get through this, Scoparia, I need to be able to feel it," Trish replied, not lifting her head from the pillow, not looking away from the screen. She hadn't for almost half an hour, now.

  "You still haven't told me what it is." Scoparia crouched down next to the couch, reaching out to stroke Trish's hair. "Did you have a fight with Piper? Is that what this is about?"

  "It wasn't a fight." She paused. Something inside her was bothered by the idea of being dishonest about this. Fuck it. She can look it up on their panopticon if she wants to. "No, it was a fight. But not a bad one. Just...I don't understand her. Maybe I can't understand her."

  "I think that's quite unlikely," Scoparia said. "You are a very intelligent little creature, you know. If there's nothing else I've learned over the course of this wardship so far, there's that. I think there's very little that gets by you."

  "You know about her parents?" When Scoparia nodded, she continued. "She goes to see them. Babysits them."

  "...and you were unaware of this?"

  "She certainly didn't advertise the fact," Trish grumbled. "And I don't know how she can stand to see them like that." The anger fred up, punching through the discomfort and anxiety, and she looked away from the screen at Scoparia for the first time. "It shouldn't have happened."

  "Their domestication?"

  "That, but specifically the way- You know," she said, pushing herself back up to a sitting position, "I don't know why I'm talking about this with you, you're just going to cim it's for their own good to have had their brains turned to mush. Hell, you probably want to even argue about the mush part."

  "I think it's a less than useful term, and I think it's a cruel thing to say about a floret." Scoparia didn't move, kept her voice even, but Trish could tell she was unhappy with her. It was the way she stayed perfectly still, her face unmoving in even the tiniest way.

  "Please, Scoparia, expin to me how going from an adult, a respected member of their community, active in organizing and local politics and more, a fully realized person — how going from that to drooling and scribbling in coloring books and talking like a baby is an improvement?"

  "I have of course looked into their cases while familiarizing myself with yours, and by all accepted metrics, they are far happier this way than they were before," Scoparia said. "I understand that from your perspective it may seem like a radical and precipitous change, but I assure you that no affini is cavalier with the treatment of their floret. If regression was the course pursued, it was the course necessary to ensure their happiness, and it is their happiness that is most important for their owner, Trish, not yours."

  "What the hell kind of happiness is that?" She pinched the bridge of her nose and rubbed at her eyes with thumb and forefinger. "Do you think it makes anyone around them happy, to see them like that, to know what's been done to them?"

  "Individual domestication decisions necessarily must be made with the individual's interest in mind," Scoparia said calmly, "but we do evaluate community as well. Koer herself signed off on their domestication, you know."

  Trish felt as if she was about to be sick. "I knew that, yeah," she whispered. "We had a fight over it, I remember that. Not much else, to be honest, I wasn't exactly my best self at the time."

  "I can imagine," Scoparia said, shuffling to the side and taking a seat on the couch next to Trish. "You have a tendency to catastrophize, Every negative quality of a situation, from your perspective, is magnified. This certainly feeds into your distrust of domestication and your problems with florets — you find it almost impossible to see the many positives that come with it because you hyperfocus to exclusion on what you believe are negatives."

  "Being reduced to toddler-level intelligence is pretty fucking negative, Scoparia," Trish said, gring up at the affini.

  "From your perspective, I'm sure it is," Scoparia replied, draping a vine across Trish's shoulders. "But from Rod and Meg's perspective, it seems to have been a tremendous relief."

  Trish looked away. This was not what she wanted, or needed, to be hearing right now. The wallscreen was pying a vista from the north end of the Elysium Valley, near the old salt mine that had been one of the big st stands of the independent resistance on Solstice. Trish hadn't been there; she'd gone to ground in a cave, and it was only Cass Hope herself coming in to get her, to tell her that the fight was over, that had gotten her to give herself up.

  Stars, I wish she'd stayed in the cave with me. Maybe then she wouldn't have been brainwashed. But Trish knew that was a fantasy. If anything, it'd have probably gotten both Cass and her brainwashed even sooner, and she'd have spent the st sixty years without a thought in her head, the property of an alien. She shivered.

  "Are you cold? I can raise the habitat's temperature, or compile a bnket for you. Perhaps some hot cocoa?"

  "I'm fine." She was not fine. "Why do you do it?" she added, not taking her eyes from the gently shifting image on the wallscreen. "Why do you always go overboard with everything?"

  "Because you deserve the effort," Scoparia said without hesitation. "You deserve every st little mote of love we can give you."

  "And if we don't want it?"

  "Oh, Trish," Scoparia said, chuckling. "Who doesn't want to be loved?"

  Trish was in the process of formuting a reply — and being distracted by the gentle shifting of rockgrass in the wallscreen — when the Hab AI spoke up. "Guess who's got a visitor? It's you!"

  "Hm. I'm not expecting anyone," Scoparia said, rising from the couch. "Just a moment, Trish. I'll be right back."

  "Right," Trish muttered, shaking her head to try to clear it. Her thoughts were foggy, had been all day. Maybe she needed more sleep, or maybe she was dehydrated — who knew. She was pretty sure she hadn't been dosed, at least. She took a deep breath, tasting the heavy floral scent of Scoparia on the air, and letting it out slowly. There was something familiar, tickling at the back of her mind, in the scent, but she couldn't scratch the mental itch before Scoparia returned with another affini in tow.

  The new affini was taller than Scoparia by half a meter or more, angur ptes of bark stitched together with vines and foliage. They looked put together slightly wrong, not quite lopsided but decidedly asymmetric, their eight-eyed gaze — four on their head, and two on each side of their body — fixed entirely on Trish. "Visitor, huh?" she said. "You want me to take a walk or something?"

  "Quite the contrary," the visitor said. "I'm here to see you." They smiled, and it was just as not-quite-right as the rest of them. "Don't tell me you don't recognize me."

  "If we've met, I don't remember it," Trish said — but the moment she took her next breath, that familiar scent came back, stronger than before. "Wait-!"

  "Hello, Trish," Koer said. "I wondered how long it might take for you to realize to whom you were speaking. And though we said our goodbyes, it seems I'm not quite finished with you, am I?"

  Post Chapter