Nasu was a washed-up has-been by the time she met the Yith. She was a cargo passenger on the Ibn Al-Farid on its return journey across the Second Crossing, from Ganymede to Polyport on Titan. The ship was old and badly kept. Lights didn’t work. The service corridors held rats and lost strigoi runaways and other, worse things. Passengers came on as cargo. There was air, water and food, but little else in the way of comfort. The crossing was long and the ship was slow. Yet Nasu had nothing but time.

The strigoi in the service corridors avoided her. She had no interest in data vampires. Her node was poisonous—she’d made sure of that long before. And she seldom murdered anyone these days.

Terror, Rohini said, was art: if a bomb went off in a crowded market and there was no one to broadcast and amplify the experience, did it really go off? Terrorartists used pain and death as their paint, people as their brushes, and the experience itself became their canvas. Which was a bad analogy, Nasu always felt. But there it was. It was that realisation—of terror as media—that led to the Terrorartist Manifesto and Rohini’s subsequent work. Nasu eventually chose a different path.

The Yith blocked her way one day when she was walking in the outer rim corridor of the ship. He was a tall, large man, with dull dumb eyes and a body that had begun to rot. The man was clearly dead—Nasu knew death. Yet somehow the man was still standing.

“Well, well,” Nasu said, “what are you, then?”

The Yith said nothing. It opened and closed its mouth.

“Are you trying to talk?” Nasu said. “Are you dead? You are very odd.”

She came closer, opened its mouth.

“No biting, please,” she said, as it tried to snap at her. A walking corpse. This was interesting. She examined the back of the man’s neck. His node protruded out of his broken skin, a small orb and filaments that intertwined into the nervous system and the brain. A standard node—but this one pulsed strange code. Corrupted. She could taste it on her tongue, the strange metallic flavour of it. She reached and gently touched it.

Too late, she realised something was riding the dead man. She’d learned the word for it since—a Yith, they called it in the Outer System. The rider on the human’s flesh felt her touch, turned its attention on her, engulfed her mind as though she were a sparrow’s egg, and made her see.

She saw the huge pulsating tendril-clouds in the Oort, black against the faraway stars, each the size of planets, hidden out there on the far edges of the solar system.

She felt terror. She felt awe.

Who made you? she whispered.

A mental shrug. They did not know, or care. Carelessly, the rider reached into her mind.