But she wasn’t about to give up. Not now. Not after everything they’d been through. Not with everything that was at stake.

“Alright, you big ugly,” she muttered, gathering her strength. “Let’s get this over with.”

Then Kira saw it: the smallest of tears in the armored skin of one tentacle—the same tentacle, she guessed, that had been holding the rocket. Falconi’s attack had done some damage after all. The tear appeared like a thin crack in the surface of cooling lava, open to reveal the heated flesh within.

Hope blossomed within her. Small as it was, the crack was an opportunity, and in an instant, Kira imagined how she could use it to kill Ctein. Doing so would be risky, terribly risky, but she wouldn’t get any better chance.

Her lips twitched with an approximation of a smile. The solution wasn’t to stay away—it was to embrace Ctein, regardless of the cost, and join herself to it in much the same way she was joined to the Seed. The solution was in the melding of their bodies, not in the separation.

Kira willed herself forward, and the suit responded with a hard kick from whatever thrusters it had constructed on her back. It drove her toward Ctein at over a g of acceleration, causing her to bare her teeth and laugh into the void.

The Jelly raised its tentacles, not to block her but to catch her in a cradle of grasping flesh. She corkscrewed around two of the tentacles and then latched onto the one with the tear.

At that point Ctein seemed to realize what she was doing, and it went mad.

The universe spun around Kira as the Jelly slammed its limb against the Hierophant. She managed to harden the suit an instant before they struck, but her vision still went black for a moment, and she felt slow and disoriented.

The tentacle started to rise again. If she didn’t act fast, it would beat her to a pulp; that she knew, sure as entropy. And though she hated the thought of dying, she hated the thought of letting Ctein win even more.

She could feel the tear underneath her belly, a small patch of softness on the otherwise hard surface of the tentacle. So she stabbed, she jabbed, and she twisted as she drove the suit’s fibers into the wound. The tentacle convulsed, and then it whipped from side to side in a frantic attempt to shake her loose. But there was no getting rid of her. Not now.

The flesh of Ctein was hot against her blades, and globules of ichor spurted forth and coated her skin with a thick slime. Kira extended her reach within the creature, extended and extended until she found the bones at the center of the tentacle. Then she grabbed the bones and spread the flesh, forcing the tear to split and widen, and she poured the Soft Blade into the body of the alien.

The tentacle coiled around her, dark and moist and clutching. Claustrophobia clogged her throat, and though the suit continued to provide her with air, Kira felt as if she were on the verge of suffocating.