Oh, how I missed the rest of myself. I couldn’t rest or comfort one body while sending another to do my work, not anymore. I slept alone, mostly only mildly envying the common soldiers on Mercy of Kalr their small bunks where they slept all together, pressed warm and close. They weren’t ancillaries, it wasn’t the same, wouldn’t be, even if I’d abandoned any pretense to dignity and climbed in with them. I knew that, knew it would be so wholly insufficient that there was no point in wishing for it. But now, this moment, I wanted it so badly that if I had been aboard Mercy of Kalr I’d have done it, curled up among the sleeping Etrepas Ship showed me, and gone to sleep myself, no matter how insufficient it would be. It would be something, at least.

A terrible, terrible thing, to deprive a ship of its ancillaries. To deprive an ancillary of its ship. Not, perhaps, as terrible as murdering human beings to make those ancillaries. But a terrible thing nonetheless.

I didn’t have the luxury to consider it. I didn’t have another, less angry body to send into the meeting with Captain Hetnys. Didn’t have an hour, or two, to exercise, or meditate, or drink tea until I was calmer. I only had myself. “It will be all right, Fleet Captain,” said Mercy of Kalr in my ear, and for a moment I was overwhelmed with the sensation of Ship. The sleeping Etrepas, Lieutenant Ekalu half awake, happy and for once utterly relaxed—Seivarden in the bath, singing to herself, my mother said it all goes around, her Amaats, Medic, and my Kalrs, all in one jumbled, inundating moment. Then it was gone—I couldn’t hold it, not with only one body, one brain.

I had thought that the pain of losing myself, of losing Lieutenant Awn, had—not healed, exactly, I didn’t think it would ever do that—but that it had receded to a tolerable, dull ache. But just seeing Basnaaid Elming had thrown me off-balance, and I had not handled it well. And had, as a result, not handled Lieutenant Tisarwat well, just now. I knew about the emotional upheavals of seventeen-year-old lieutenants. Had dealt with them in the past. And whatever Tisarwat had been, whoever she turned out to be, however ancient her memories or her sense of herself, her body was still seventeen, her reactions today very much those of someone in the last throes of adolescence. I had seen it, known it for what it was, and I ought to have responded more reasonably. “Ship,” I said, silently, “was I smug when I thought I’d sorted out Seivarden and Ekalu?”

“Maybe just the tiniest bit, Fleet Captain.”