“There has to be a way to stop these things,” said Falconi. His voice was low, gravelly, as if he were suppressing an unpleasant emotion.

Kira lifted her head and let it bang back against the wall. In the two-and-a-quarter g’s, the impact was a hard, painful blow that made stars flash before her eyes. “The Soft Blade is capable of so much. More than I really understand. If it’s unbound and unbalanced, I don’t see how it can be stopped.… This situation with the nightmares is the worst sort of grey goo, nanobot catastrophe.” She snorted. “A real nightmare scenario. It’s just going to keep eating and growing and building.… Even if we kill whatever it is that Carr and the Jelly, Qwon, have turned into, there are still the other nightmares with the flesh of the Soft Blade. Any one of them could start the whole thing over. Hell, if a single speck of the Maw survives, it could infect someone else, just like at Sigma Draconis. There’s just no, no way to—”

“Kira.”

“—to contain it. And I can’t fight it, can’t stop it, can’t—”

“Kira.” The note of command in Falconi’s voice cut through the swarm of buzzing thoughts in her head. His ice-blue eyes were fixed on her, steady and—in a way—comforting.

She allowed some of the tension to bleed out of her body. “Yeah. Okay… I think the Jellies might have dealt with something like this before. Or at least, I think they knew it was possible. Itari didn’t seem surprised.”

Falconi cocked his head. “That’s encouraging. Any idea how they contained the nightmares?”

She shrugged. “With a whole lot of death is my guess. I’m not real clear on the details, but I’m pretty sure their whole species was endangered at one point. Not necessarily because of nightmares, but just because of the scale of the conflict. They were even fighting a Seeker at one point, same as us.”

“In that case, it sounds like Hawes is right; you need to talk with the Jelly. Maybe it can give you some answers. There might be ways we don’t know about to stop the nightmares.”

Encouragement wasn’t what Kira was expecting from Falconi, but it was a welcome gift. “I will.” She looked down at the deck and picked at a piece of dried food stuck in the grating. “Still … it’s my fault. All of this is my fault.”

“You couldn’t have known,” said Falconi.

“That doesn’t change the fact that I’m the one who caused this war. Me. No one else.”

Falconi tapped the edge of his cards against the floor in an absentminded fashion, although he was too sharp, too aware, for the motion to be careless. “You can’t think like that. It’ll destroy you.”

“There’s more,” she said, soft and miserable.

He froze. Then he gathered up the rest of the cards and started to shuffle them. “Oh?”

Now that she’d started confessing, Kira couldn’t stop. “I lied to you. The Jellies weren’t the ones who killed my team.…”