“None taken,” she said with a grin. She still hadn’t forgotten about their kiss, but she didn’t see a reason to bring it up now. In any case, Falconi wasn’t in any shape for that sort of a conversation.

Following a quiet evening, she and Falconi retired to their respective cabins (and Itari to the cargo hold) for the night. The black casing that now covered Kira’s room made it feel heavy, ominous. But safe too—there was that—and the vines and flowers helped mitigate the heaviness. She worried about the air vents being blocked, but then she realized the Soft Blade would surely see to it that she had enough oxygen to keep from suffocating.

“I’m back,” she whispered, running a hand along the ridged wall.

The wall shivered slightly, like skin crinkling in the cold. And Kira smiled a small smile, feeling an unexpected sense of pride. The room was hers and hers alone, and although it was mostly the work of the Soft Blade, the growth was still a part of her, birthed from her mind, if not her flesh.

And she remembered the dream she’d had during her long sleep. “You were trying to protect me, weren’t you?” she said, somewhat louder than before.

The greenish lights in the room seemed to pulse in response, but so faintly that it was hard to be sure. Feeling more comfortable, she moved to the bed and secured herself to sleep.

4.

Late next morning, over twenty-four hours after they had emerged from FTL, Kira and Falconi gathered in the galley to wait for the possible reply from the Knot of Minds. Itari joined them, taking up a position atop one of the two tables. The Jelly held itself in place with the small grasping arms that unfolded from its carapace.

Falconi was lost in his overlays, and Kira was watching a vid—one of the newscasts the Wallfish had picked up before leaving Sol—on the holo-display built into the table. The vid wasn’t very interesting, so after a few minutes, she turned it off and fell to studying the Jelly across the room.

The dusky, autumn colors of Itari’s tentacles were solid now, unshifting, though that would change were its emotions to rise. Kira found it interesting that the Jellies not only had emotions, but that they weren’t entirely alien to her. Perhaps, she thought, they were easier for her to understand because of the Soft Blade’s time spent joined with the graspers.

Graspers … Even in the small moments the xeno was inside her mind, it shaded her thoughts with meanings from another era. Once that had bothered Kira. Now she acknowledged and accepted the fact without judgment. She was the one who would decide the worth of things, not the xeno, no matter how strongly she felt its inherited memories.

A continuous cloud of scents emanated from the Jelly. At the moment, they were subdued—just a general I am here, like a low hum in the background—interspersed with an occasional spike of interest-driven odor, spicy and somewhat unpleasant.