Graveyards, he thought. He could feel the echo of a graveyard in his brain. He could feel remnants of his kin on the nearest planet and on other bodies. Whole collections. And others, not yet excavated from the bones of the rock. His kin threaded through the whole sector in their graves. The remnants of their bodies had given him these abilities.

He was not really one of them. He was a mayfly who had tried to become something larger. This was not real. This was not an escape.

A set of slow ticks passed while his consciousness spun.

Back on the spaceship, the thing that had been him lay on a bed in a miniature room, with only one other creature beside it.

“Tennal,” the creature said. That was it. That was his name. Surit—Surit—had his head in his hands. “I can feel you out there. Please come back.”

The moment he let himself think the word Tennal, he snapped into an orbit around his body like a magnetic field.

The creature called Surit looked up, as if he’d felt something. “Tennal?” he said, and waited for a reply. When he didn’t get one, he looked back at the body, like it had Tennal in it, and rested a hand on its chest. The hand shook. “Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?”

Tennal had been asked that before. But this was different. He had to think like a mayfly creature again to realize why: Surit was the first person who’d said that to him expecting he might answer yes.

And that was when he knew, with a resignation like the weight of the ocean, that he was going to come back.

Tennal funneled himself back into his body.

Or he tried to. As he pushed into the corridors of his mind, he realized, in a panic, that he was trying to funnel a lake into a cup. His mind had lost the shape of its human brain. It had spanned stars like a nebulous cloud, and he’d lost parts of himself to that swirl; he’d already forgotten the parts that hadn’t been important.

His lungs took a heaving breath. Surit’s eyes widened, and he grabbed Tennal’s wrist. The core of Tennal was suddenly present in the tiny bunk room he shared with Surit, the thin whine of ship systems in his ears, the familiar astringent smell of clean linen in his nose. He nearly choked. His tongue was thick and sandy in his mouth, the tiniest piece of organic matter, and yet these tiny movements that kept it out of his airway were all that kept this body alive. Surit, I’ve lost it. I’ve lost—He couldn’t remember what.