There was something else going on. The thundercloud of Oma’s presence piled up, rolling in on itself.

Oma laughed abruptly, as if she’d found that genuinely funny. She looked down at the box of remnants and casually dug her hand into it. Surit and Tennal flinched. “Ah, well, I suppose there’s no other—”

And between one word and another, her towering alien presence attacked.

The neat study and its heavy drapes and the scented night air fell away. The attacker and the thing that was Surit-and-Tennal were ripped away with it.

A planet had layers between it and the peaceful sea of space. The three mayfly bodies—Surit, Tennal, Oma—stood in a tiny stone box in the churning troposphere, the layer that clung to the surface rock of the planet, dense and foul with air. Those tiny bodies weren’t relevant anymore. Two warring consciousnesses, larger than planets themselves, shot out from the surface through heat and cold as ultraviolet rays scattered, through the plunge of the mesosphere, and through the thermosphere, where the messy planetary gravity finally released its hoarded air.

Once in true space, the planet of Orshan Central shrank into a glittering speck below. The star system unfolded around them.

The thing that had been Oma roared up opposite, as far away as the circle of orbit. Surit—and Tennal—felt an instinctive, terrible kinship with her. Oma was an abomination, one mass of hundreds of souls patched together, but Surit and Tennal were no less strange, and they understood what she felt because the same thing echoed in their genes.

But they had been challenged. Both they and Oma had the same inherited instinct. This was a duel.

Surit and Tennal had a single, unified presence, albeit in a dimension Surit didn’t understand. Out here, it was obvious that, as humans, they’d only seen a fraction of what space really was. Through the eyes of whatever they were now, there was no endless void here, no cold darkness between the stars. Space lived. It teemed with sleeting particles and cosmic winds. The fabric of gravity sang. A current cascaded from the sun like a river and joined the great dance between the slow planets.

They had lived like this, once. It took Surit a second to understand those weren’t his own memories. Those were the memories of a ghost of a ghost, imprinted on his genes and on his mind because humans had taken the remnants and used them on themselves. Surit was, by the standards of the aliens who had become the remnants, a monster. But maybe it was worth it—maybe it was worth being a monster—for this moment of glory. Chaotic space made sense now, like pockets of riptides within the water, beautiful and exhilarating. Above it all was the great spinning majesty of the galactic link, like a whirlpool in—

—a sea, Surit thought.