She wasn’t willing to give up, which meant she had only one chance. Hoping against hope that she wasn’t making a mistake, she fixed her goals in mind—smooth the melted wires, attach them to the closest neurons—and did her best to impress them on the Soft Blade. Then she released her hold on the xeno, as carefully as if she were letting go of a wild animal that might react in an unpredictable manner.

Please, she thought.

And the Soft Blade obeyed. It slid along the wires in an atomically thin film, moving metal, pushing aside cells, and realigning wires with dendrites.

Kira’s awareness of her body (and the growths in her cabin) faded; every bit of her consciousness was divided among the many thousands of monofilaments the xeno was manipulating. At a remove she heard Hwa-jung say, “Forty-five percent!… Forty-seven … Forty-eight…”

Kira blocked out her voice as she continued to focus on the task at hand. Wires, smooth, attach.

So many wires were connecting, Kira felt them like a wave of cold and hot prickles washing through her head. Tiny explosions popping off, and with each one a sense of expansion.

The feeling accumulated, moving faster and faster. And then—

A curtain swept back in her mind, and a vast vista opened up before her, and Kira sensed a Presence within. If not for her experience with the Soft Blade, the experience would have been overwhelming, unbearable—a behemoth weighing upon her from all sides.

She gasped and would have recoiled, but she found she couldn’t move.

Vishal and Hwa-jung were making noises of alarm, and the doctor said, as if from a great distance, “Ms. Kira! Stop! Whatever you’re doing, it’s upsetting his neurotr—”

His voice faded away, and all Kira was aware of was the immensity surrounding her. *Gregorovich,* she said, but no response was forthcoming. She pressed harder, attempting to project herself: *Gregorovich! Can you hear me?*

Distant thoughts swirled far above—thunderheads beyond reach and too large to comprehend. Then, lightning crashed and:

A ship rattled around her, and stars spun outside. Fire streamed from her left flank: a meteoroid strike near the main generator.…

Flashes. Screams. A howling across the sky. Below, a tortured landscape of smoke and fire rose toward her. Too fast. Couldn’t slow down. Emergency chutes failed.

Darkness for unremembered time. Gratitude and disbelief at continued existence: the ship should have exploded. Ought to have. Perhaps would have been better. Seven of the crew still alive, seven out of twenty-eight.

Then a slow agony of days. Hunger and starvation for her charges and then, to one and all, death. And for her, worse than death: isolation. Loneliness, utter and absolute. A queen of infinite space, bound within a nutshell, and plagued by such dreams as to make her scream and scream and scream.…

The memory began anew, repeating as a computer frozen in a logic loop, unable to break out, unable to reboot. *You’re not alone,* Kira shouted into the storm, but she might as well have been trying to catch the attention of the earth or the sea or the universe at large. The Presence took no note of her. Again she tried. Again she failed. Instead of words, she tried emotions: comfort, companionship, sympathy, and solidarity, and—underlying it all—a sense of urgency.