“Thank you for the tea. It was very nice of you. I mean it.”

The praise warmed Kira’s heart. “Any time. It was my pleasure.”

Nielsen smiled then—a genuine smile—and Kira smiled in return.

4.

Back in her own cabin, Kira paused in front of the mirror by the sink. The dim, ship-night lighting cast heavy shadows across her face, which made the kink in her nose stand out in high relief.

She felt the crooked flesh; it would be easy to fix. A hard jerk would return it to normal, and then the Soft Blade would heal her face the way it should have the first time.

But she didn’t want that, and now she understood why. The xeno had erased every mark on her body, every bump and line and freckle and odd bit of jiggle. It had removed the physical record of her life and replaced it with the meaningless coating of fibers that retained no stamp of experience. So much it had taken from her, she didn’t want to lose more.

Keeping a crooked nose was her choice, her way of reshaping the flesh they shared. It also served as a reminder of past sins, ones she was determined not to repeat.

Flush with that determination, as well as a surfeit of images from the system they’d arrived at, Kira threw herself down and—even after three months of mostly hibernating—fell asleep.

She and her joined flesh—not a grasper but a giver—walked as witness behind the Highmost among the field of ill-shaped growths: cancerous intentions that bore poisonous fruit. And the Highmost raised the Staff of Blue and said a single, cutting word: “No.”

Down the staff then came, struck the heaving earth. A circle of grey expanded about the Highmost as each mutated cell tore itself apart. The stench of death and putrefaction smothered the field, and sorrow bent the Highmost.

An earlier fracture: one of her siblings stood before the assembled Heptarchy in their high-arched presence chamber. The Highmost descended to the patterned floor and touched the Staff of Blue to the blood-smeared brow of her sibling.

“You are no longer worthy.”

Then flesh parted from flesh as the other Soft Blade flowed away from the staff, fleeing its power and leaving the body of its bonded mate exposed, vulnerable. For there was no denying the Staff of Blue.

Another disjunction, and she found herself standing beside the Highmost, upon the observation deck of an enormous starship. Before and below them hung a rocky planet, green and red with swarms of life. There was a wrongness to it, though—a feel of threat that made her wish she was elsewhere—as if the planet itself were malevolent.

The Highmost raised the Staff of Blue once again. “Enough.” The staff angled forward, a flash of sapphire light sent shadows streaming, and the planet vanished.

In the distance, well past the planet’s previous location, a patch of starlight twisted, and with it twisted her stomach. For she knew what the distortion heralded.…