The long artificial sun that ran down the center of the cylinder reflected off the surface of the water ahead of Haven, dotted with what must have been a thousand little sails in every color imaginable. She stood on tiptoe to look over the oversized railing, watching one of the nearer boats tack into what must have been the direction of the ship's Coriolis wind. She'd known the ship was enormous, but actually seeing it had humbled her in a way she wasn't prepared for; without the sarcotesta doing the standing and walking for her, she'd probably have fallen right on her ass. "Is it some kind of regatta?"

  "I'm afraid I don't know that word, little one," the affini standing next to her said.

  "Boat race."

  "Ah! No, I don't believe so. Although that does sound like fun, does it? I'm not certain there's anything like that scheduled on Parthenocissus, or down on Solstice for that matter, but perhaps we could organize one! Start a trend!"

  Anix Glycyrrhiza, Tenth Bloom (she/her) — an affini of slightly-greater-than-average height and a frame covered with fluffy, feathery grasses, some worn loose, others braided into cords and knots. She'd arrived in Haven's room, introduced herself, and expined that she would be Haven's veterinary guardian for the duration of her medical wardship. "Not to worry," she'd added with a strangely cheerful note, "I'm well-versed in terran care, and I've read all about this new technology they've got you all wrapped up in." Then again, perhaps it wasn't strangely cheerful; Haven had only met a few affini so far, and they'd all seemed to be like that.

  "I mean, I don't know a lot about sailing," Haven said. The regattas she'd been to — the Northwest Passage Cup, the Barents Regatta, Alert Week — had been more about showing off the ultra-expensive racing yachts her father had pissed away a measly few trillion on, and had been crewed and raced by actual sailors. She'd barely set foot aboard most of them.

  "I dare say you know more than a lot of terrans did sixty years back," Tara reminded her. She was leaning against the railing next to Haven, tall enough she didn't need to stand on tiptoe to peek over it. "Though, by now, who knows, if you don't have to be ultra-rich to do it."

  "Which is a much nicer state of affairs, I think we can all agree," Anix said. "It really is a lovely view, isn't it?"

  "Yeah," Haven said. "It's nicer than any O'Neill cylinder I've ever been inside of." They'd always had a smell to them, like something was just on the verge of going sour but hadn't quite reached the point yet — internal ecologies and recycling systems that were never quite up to the task of removing the smell of things living and dying in an enclosed space. Tilndsia had none of that. The air was as fresh and the breeze as soothing as any she'd ever felt.

  "She is, indeed, a fine old ship," another voice said — an affini, who casually strode up and leaned against the railing next to the three of them. This one was even fluffier-looking than Anix, their vines loaded down with bnkets of feathery mosses. The urge to reach out and touch it was overpowering. "I shall miss her quite a bit."

  "Andoa, what a surprise," Anix said, her voice making it perfectly clear to all and sundry that it was no surprise to her at all. "To what do we owe the pleasure of your presence?"

  "You thought you could come aboard my ship and not have me immediately sprout up next to you? Hm?" The new affini gnced down at Haven and Tara. "And these must be two of our rescues, yes? Perhaps some of the very st wild terrans who will need to be rescued. Imagine that."

  "Indeed. Harn Hudds-Friday, Tara Dvoretskaya, this is the Captain of the Tilndsia, Andoa Macranthera, Fifth Bloom, pronouns e/em/eirs. A very old friend of mine."

  "Well, not as old as you, anyway," e said, their grin full of needle-sharp thorns. "Delighted to meet the both of you, of course, and to see you up and about. You in particur," e added, staring directly at Haven with a six-eyed gaze. "You had practically the entire ship knurling their vines into knots waiting for updates on your condition, you know?"

  "Yeah, I've been hearing that a lot," Haven said, unsure if she was being sufficiently polite to someone who was the captain of a starship this impressive. I don't know why any of them care about trash like me. They should have left me in the fucking freezer.

  "Well, it was quite the gripping saga, you know? Of course, all the medical details were carefully obfuscated for the sake of your privacy, but nevertheless, if it wasn't for the evacuation, I dare say you might have received one or two Notices of Intent to Domesticate — and you very likely will over on Parthenocissus. That's what all this is about, incidentally," e added, gesturing at the sailboats in the sea. "I couldn't help but overhear your earlier conversation."

  "Wait, they're all leaving the ship?"

  "Oh yes. It's time for her to rebloom — to reconstruct and refit herself, become an entirely new ship, much the same way we Affini do when we get a bit long in the branch. Everyone down there, well, of course they could just take the transit system, like you are, but for many of them, Tilndsia has been their home for a bloom or more. Even if they choose to return to shipboard life, and not all of them will, she won't be the ship they left, not entirely. This is their way of saying goodbye."

  Haven thought it over. It made sense. There were pces she regretted not saying goodbye to — pces that were certainly gone now. The code on the gun range has definitely changed. Scratch that option. "Are you going to take a sailboat too?"

  "In my own time. I'll be staying behind with a small caretaker crew, to see her to this system's Kuiper Belt. We'll find her a nice chunk of cometary ice to mine for votiles, and then we'll leave her to her rest and rejuvenation." E smiled. "I mean for my little boat to be the st to sail those waters, just me and Nell, the st two to remain aboard Tilndsia as she was. Ah, what a fine little ship she is. What adventures she's had — and what adventures yet to come!" E straightened. "Well, I think I've maundered enough for right now. I should go and oversee the logistical crosschecking. Wouldn't want anyone to leave anything treasured behind."

  "My Andoa, ever fastidious about the logistics of it all," Anix purred, her grasses shifting very much against the breeze.

  "Well, I have a fine mentor in that department," Andoa replied, winking with three of eir six eyes. "Fare well, to you Anix, and to the two of you as well. I would wish you good fortune and happiness, but you live in the Compact now — those come gratis." With a slight bow and a whispering sound of leaves on leaves, e left, leaving the three on the overlook to watch the sailboats below. They lingered for a while before calling the train. Though none said it aloud, it seemed only right.

  When the sun rose on the campsite, Trish was already up and moving, her little fuel-free camp stove doing some kind of fifth-fundamental-force violence to physics to generate heat via an induction coil, with which she was heating up water for breakfast. She could have built a fire, and regurly did to keep the skills sharp, but the rest of the time she spared her back and yielded to convenience.

  By the time the oatmeal was prepared, spiced and garnished with a few slices of applenot to give it a tart edge, Piper was sleepily emerging from the mobile hab, covering her yawn with a hand and all but colpsing in the spare wn chair. After a few days on the road, this had all become routine for her. "Morning," Trish said, not looking up as she spooned out a helping of the simple fare into a camp bowl and held it out to Piper. "Yogurt's in the stasis cooler, if you want it."

  Piper mumbled something unintelligible through another yawn and took the bowl, munching absent-mindedly on it while staring at the horizon. Only after she'd finished it, and tipped it into the decompile bag, did she properly articute herself. "We got time before we pull up stakes for today?"

  Trish, who was already making coffee over the camp stove, chuckled. "Yeah, take your time. You stayed up te again, didn't you? Looking over all the bookbinding equipment." That at least, had been a promising sight — Piper had been downright eager to learn a new creative skill. One of those good things about the Compact that one had to regurly remind oneself did not excuse or justify the bad.

  "Mmm." She yawned again. "At first, yeah. Then I started looking at all the other books you've got back there, y'know? Regur little library. You don't mind that I looked through that, do you?"

  "Of course not," Trish said. She had lots of books back there besides completed copies of Freedom's Ember waiting to be handed out or shipped out-system. Some were philosophical works that Cass had referenced, things that were useful in Trish's process of editing and compiling the hastily written notebooks into a more complete form. For Cass Hope, "hastily written" still meant it was an incredibly dense and tightly structured wall of words — she'd cited philosophers that Trish had never even heard of with frustratingly casual ease. Some of those referenced works weren't even in English; those had been a real pain in the ass to track down transted copies of, sometimes multiple editions to be sure a particur word or phrase wasn't a transtor artifact or mistake.

  There were other things there, too — Trish's history of Solstice, for instance, which she'd spent ten years compiling the details for, and all the notes on the original Quaker settlers who had built up the Elysium Valley before Osbourne-Crke leveraged a hostile takeover of the system, starved out the Quakers, and turned the entire pnet into an open-air prison. The history of the prison era, and the Revolution, she'd pulled from hundreds of oral accounts, conducted across thousands of interviews as she drove back and forth across the settled regions of the pnet. Apart from providing a useful cover — not that, as she now knew, it had worked or mattered — it gave Trish a strong sense of satisfaction to have ensured that the feelings of the people from that era, before the Affini came, were not swept away in the transformation that had taken pce.

  The bookbinding workshop in the back of the mobile hab was the heart and soul of Trish's entire operation on Solstice, and though she kept it as organized as possible, the sheer amount of information stored on paper in that room made it a bit of a cramped disaster area. It was unavoidable. The coffee finally finished burbling in the mocha pot, and Trish poured Piper a cup, which was gratefully accepted.

  "Cool, gd to hear it." She took a sip, let out a sigh of appreciation. "Some people can be really particur about their stuff, you know? Anyway, I stayed up way too te reading," she added with a ugh. "I mean I guess I should have figured you had the Cass Hope originals back in there, but it was still really something to see them."

  "Mmmm." Sixty years out of date, only their high-quality Affini manufacture kept the two notebook volumes of Cass's original manuscript intact, dog-eared and tabbed with sticky-notes as they were. "You were careful with them, I hope."

  "Oh yeah, absolutely," Piper said. "The first two, anyway. Why is the third one way less banged-up? And how come you've got it in the back of one of the drawers?"

  Trish froze halfway through pouring herself a cup of coffee. "What did you say?"

  "I asked why the third volume of the original is in the back of a—"

  "Did you read it?!"

  "Uh, yeah? It's weird, none of that stuff was in the copy that Dad gave-"

  "You forget absolutely everything you read out of that book!" Trish said, gring at Piper. "Cass didn't write that!"

  "Uhh..." Piper looked confused. "It was like, totally the same handwriting, Auntie Trish."

  Trish sighed. "Yes, I know. She did write it, but it wasn't-" She shook her head. "They domesticated her, Piper. They took her and they broke her. She wrote that after they got to her. After she'd been domesticated. It's just the regurgitated propaganda they filled her brain with. That's why it's not in the book. I wouldn't taint her st work with...with that."

  Piper looked at Trish, down at her coffee, then back to Trish. "Seriously? Because, y'know...it makes a lot of sense. Honestly, it makes more sense than the book ever did to me."

  "It's propaganda, Piper, it's supposed to feel like it makes sense!"

  "Okay, but Auntie Trish, like- the book is all never trust the Affini and they're out to get you and stuff, and like, the third book is way more chill about it! Like, I know you and Grandma are still upset over Mom and Dad but they're still there, and they're happy, and to be honest the only reason they're florets-"

  "You don't know what you're talking about," Trish snarled.

  "-is because they stressed so mulching hard over the stuff in the book that they basically had a nervous breakdown over it!" Piper said, talking over Trish. "I mean, you think I don't feel responsible? I'm pretty sure me not being all gung-ho for feralism didn't help. I spent like, an entire year kicking myself over it until I realized that they're better off this way. They're happier this way. They're not worrying themselves sick about me, about generations of Raeburns yet to come, trying to build up this weird all-encompassing feralist ideology that's supposed to somehow st for hundreds of thousands of years or something? To st longer than the Affini do, when the Affini are already way better at everything that we can even think of doing?" She shook her head. "The third book makes way more sense."

  "Piper." Trish finally set the mocha pot down, turned her chair, and leaned forward to stare right into Piper's eyes. "It's propaganda. That's what it's supposed to do. And this is well-written propaganda. I won't lie, the first time I read it, it almost got me for a day or two. But then I gave it more thought. I took a step a back, and saw the grander shape of this thing. When someone is turned into a floret, when they put the haustoric impnt in, that's it. They have total control. The person that was in there, if they can be meaningfully said to still be in there, isn't in charge of that body anymore, isn't even in charge of their own mind. I've seen revolutionaries who'd sooner die than give in to oppression turned into simpering little fuckpets who happily parrot their captor's own ideology of imperialism, in the space of just days. The Affini are incredibly good at subversion. Of course the propaganda makes sense. It's meant to. You need to take that same step back and look at the big picture. Look at who really wrote those words. Look at what ends those words serve. Look at where it all leads. Look, damn it!" She wiped her stinging eyes on her sleeve. "We've lost too many good people to them...."

  Piper had not once looked away, had not once closed her eyes to Trish. Now, as she trailed off, Piper set her cup of coffee down on the ground, stood, and crossed to her, crouching and putting her arms around Trish in a warm, gentle hug that slowly tightened. "Sorry. I didn't mean to dig up all that hurt."

  "I'm fine," Trish grumbled.

  "You're really kinda not. But that's okay. It's okay to hurt. I didn't realize you were still hurting this much over Mom and Dad." The hug sckened, and she leaned back a bit to look Trish in the eye again. "I still think the third book makes way more sense, and I think it's something other people should get to read... but I'll sit back and think about it some, if you want. I mean... it's been in that drawer for what, sixty years?" she added with a slight smile. "I think it can wait a bit more."

  "Just don't let them into your head, Piper," Trish said quietly. "Once you do, it's damn near impossible to get them out again. And you're at a disadvantage, there. You don't even know what things used to be like without them around."

  "Sure I do, Auntie Trish," Piper replied with a grin. "I read your other book, you know. I don't think Grandma likes that I know she knows how to make pipebombs, though," she added with a ugh, and Trish couldn't help but smile along with her.

  You poor kid, she thought, a thought that stayed with her as she and Piper leisurely cleaned up the campsite and began to pack up the mobile hab. You poor kid. How the hell are you supposed to fight back against this thing when you can't even really grasp what you're fighting for? It was the one fw in Cass's pn, really, and one that she'd recognized herself — future generations had to care, had to carry on the fight, or the pn would never work. That was why Trish had held back the third volume; it was the thin end of the wedge. Learning to accept the Affini was no different than accepting what they did, and Trish could never accept that. Especially not after they'd done it to Cass.

  She and Piper were almost finished when the shuttle swept out of the sun, sailing up the valley towards them.