Several of the other officers asked questions generally pertaining to the execution of the mission, but one element seemed to be missing from the discussion as a whole. While just now he wanted to invite Vrain to stick his head up a cow’s bung, this was still a Célestial mission. Pardons and forgiveness would be easier to obtain for those he cared about if Dok and the shard were recovered and the Craton Auroborea reached than if they lost both to the Skaladin. Isabelle needed Vrain to succeed.

Bitterlich left as soon as the meeting broke up and flew to the Thunderclap. If he was to be dispatched, he would do so on his own terms as much as possible, which meant taking with him Malgiers, a squad of marines, and Rebecca.

Isabelle glided into the gyre of the everdream. Ghost shards whirled by on an intangible wind, each illuminating only itself. Even here, her fever burned, and she felt like nothing more than a sack of skin filled with stinging nettles.

Isabelle wafted alongside her past lives. From each jagged pane came a different voice, the various members of her ancestral chorus. Her confusion and fear drew them like moths to a flame, and they had answered her mood if not her questions. Long had she resisted facing them, integrating them, but now she had no choice.

Any full-blooded Fenice would have dived into her everdream as a first reflex, to interrogate her past lives, embracing them as chapters of her own life.

Has this ever happened to me before?

The ghost shards flocked toward her question. The smaller, lighter ones came first and fastest, twisting and tumbling until they joined her in her orbit far from the center of the gyre. Like so many excited dogs they danced about her, each yammering their own fragmented answer, bewildering taken together.

A great need emanated from them, a hunger to partake in the “I” of identity, to perceive the world through her, to sense themselves and one another as part of a whole.

I am whole! Isabelle insisted, and the eager pack scattered, still orbiting but at a safe distance. I am complete. Adding more minds to the mix could not make her any more herself than adding more water to an overflowing cup could make it more full.

Yet her head pounded as if a pack of amateur stonemasons were using it for practice. Her teeth were hot coals sunk in their sockets. Was it better to die whole and herself, or to be possessed by the ghosts of murderers, thieves, traitors to kings and causes long extinct? If she took this path, she lost Isabelle.

If she died, she lost everything.