“Since we arrived? Uh, thirty minutes, give or take. I came right over.” Falconi licked his lips. He still looked queasy. Kira recognized the symptoms; recovery after cryo was always a bitch, and it only got worse the longer you spent in the tube.

She took another sip of water.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Okay.… A bit strange, but I’m okay. You?”

He stood. “Like twenty kilos of shit stuffed into a ten-kilo sack. I’ll be fine, though.”

“Have we picked up anything on the sensors, or—”

“You can see for yourself. The system was definitely inhabited at one point, so there’s that. You didn’t send us nowhere. I’m going up to Control. Join us there when you can.”

As he walked to the open doorway, Kira said, “Did everyone make it?”

“Yeah. Sick as dogs, but we’re all here.” Then he left, and the door swung shut behind him.

Kira took a moment to gather her thoughts. They’d made it. She’d made it. Hard to believe. She opened and closed her hands, rolled her shoulders, gently tensed muscles throughout her body—stiff from the past few days of hibernation, but everything seemed to be in working order.

“Hey, headcase,” she said. “You in one piece?”

After a brief pause, Gregorovich answered. Even with a synthesized voice, the ship mind sounded sluggish, groggy: “I was in fractures before. I am in fractures now. But the pieces still form the same broken picture.”

Kira grunted. “Yeah, you’re fine.”

She tried to check her overlays … and nothing came up. After two more tries, she blinked, but she couldn’t feel the contacts Vishal had given her. Nor could she feel them when she touched the tip of a finger against her right eye. “Crap,” she said. The Soft Blade must have removed or absorbed the lenses sometime during the past few weeks of her long sleep.

Eager to see the system they’d arrived in, she dressed, splashed some water on her face, and hurried out of the cabin. She swung by the galley to get some more water and grab a pair of ration bars. Chewing on one, she climbed up to Control.

All the crew was there, and the Entropists too. Like Falconi, they looked haggard: hair tousled, dark circles under their eyes, and a hint of nausea in their expressions. Sparrow looked the weakest, and Kira reminded herself that the woman had gone through surgery before entering cryo.

Everything that had happened in 61 Cygni seemed distant and hazy now, but Kira knew that from the point of view of the crew, they had just left the system. For them, it was as if the last three months didn’t exist. For her, the months were far more real. Even when in her artificial slumber, she’d retained a sense of the passage of time. She could feel the hours and days stretching out behind them, as tangible as their trail through space. 61 Cygni was no longer an immediate experience. And Adra before that even less so.