The thought was more terrifying than death itself. If she were just killed, she would still be who and what she was until the end. But if the Seed consumed her, she would be facing the destruction of her self long before her mind or body ceased existing.

Then the heavy hands of Falconi’s exo were on her, and he was lifting her back onto her feet, speaking to her in soothing tones: *Hey, it’s okay. We haven’t lost yet.*

She shook her head, feeling tears forming underneath the xeno’s mask. “No, I can’t. I can’t. I—”

He shook her hard enough to get her attention. The Soft Blade reacted with a mild ripple of spikes. *Don’t fucking say that. If you give up, we might as well already be dead.*

“You don’t understand.” She made a helpless gesture toward the misbegotten shape hovering in her overlays, even though Falconi couldn’t see it. “That, that—”

*Stop it.* His voice was stern. Stern enough that Kira listened. *Focus on one thing at a time. We need to kill Ctein. Can you do that?*

She nodded, feeling a measure of control returning to her. “Yeah.… I think so.”

*Okay. Then get it together and let’s put down this Jelly. We can worry about the nightmares afterward.*

Kira’s gut still twisted with fear, though she tried to ignore it, tried to act as if she were confident. She banished the feed from her overlays, but in the back of her mind, the image of the Maw remained, as if burned into her retinas.

At Kira’s internal command, the xeno propelled her to the front of the airlock. “Let’s do this,” she said.

2.

Outside the Wallfish, in the alien storage room, shadows spun as the Battered Hierophant spun, and yet because of the alien ship’s gravity field, Kira felt none of the rotation. The shifting light had the brutal, hard-edged starkness peculiar to space, and its movement produced a strobe-like effect that was disorienting.

“Stay close,” she said.

*We’re right behind you,* said Falconi.

Unwilling to waste even a single second, Kira started across the strobing storage room. The cycling shadows made her dizzy, so she focused on the decking between her feet and tried not to think about how they were spinning through space.

As she moved among the rows of translucent globules—each of which was at least four meters in diameter and filled with strange, frozen shapes—a fist-sized explosion took out a chunk of the one by her head.

There was no sound, but Kira felt a spray of shrapnel ping the hardened surface of the xeno.

*Cover!* Falconi shouted.

Kira made no attempt to hide. Instead, she reached out with the xeno and ripped up the pearl-white decking, tore at the nearby globules and the stem that connected them, and compacted all the material into a shield that protected not only her but also the crew behind her. Same as she’d done on Orsted. Only now she felt confident, self-assured. Compared with before, commanding the Seed was effortless, and she had little fear of losing control. As she willed, so it was.