The blue flowering growth outside the shield seemed dimmer, as if in mourning after the loss of Piero and Rayan. Rosalyn had met Misato briefly on her way back from the lab. The engineer was doing her best to patch up JAX, but it wasn’t looking good. They needed far more replacement parts than they had available on the ship, and she would spend the rest of the night trying to 3-D extrude replacements, though it wasn’t the best solution. His hard drive hadn’t fried, which was something, but that only guaranteed that he could be put into a new body and retain the information, images and data he had already processed.

At that, the two women had exchanged a long look. When they had access to a signal again, they needed to get that information back to HQ. Merchantia—hell, GATE and the government—needed to know what had happened here so it never transpired again. JAX had recorded so much of the struggle, but Rosalyn couldn’t help but be thankful that he hadn’t been around to record the deaths among the crew. Nobody needed to see that. Rosalyn herself wished she could scrub it from her mind.

She had left out the part about her family business potentially being in league with ISS, Beta Tech and Merchantia. And Piero. Rosalyn couldn’t make heads or tails of it herself; she definitely did not want to dump that mess into Misato’s lap until it made marginally more sense.

Damn. She should have just gone through the trouble to suit up and get those whiskey capsules. It was the only way she was going to get rest, she thought, because she was too keyed up and too close to bad memories to turn her brain off. A sour taste filled her mouth, bitter and familiar—it was so like the nights just after Glen attacked her. She had tried every drug and every drink in the universe, even experimental ones, but nothing worked. Her nights were spent tossing and turning, dipping into twilight sleep only to come awake gasping and sputtering seconds later. Sometimes, after dawn, her body finally relented and let her grab a few thin hours of rest, but she never felt really awake, suffering on top of suffering, the booze and drugs giving her jarring hand tremors.

And there was something more, something that bit at the back of her brain, a bug bite that wasn’t satisfied no matter how much she scratched. Because, really, she didn’t even know where to begin scratching. It was a puzzle app glitching out, and with no base image to use as a comparison. The blue woman. Her family’s company. Piero. The little fragments of poetry that she knew she knew.