The three ships used RCS thrusters to slow themselves as they approached the docking ports Kira had grown for them. In the velvet background, swarms of her drones flew past, busy as bees. Her attention was as much with them as with her visitors, but Kira couldn’t help but feel a strange tilting sensation in her core.

Was that unease? It surprised her. Even with everything she had become, she still wondered what Falconi would think of her.

And not just Falconi. When the airlock to the Wallfish opened, the entire crew came trooping out, including Nielsen—still wearing a bandage around her ribs—and the Entropist, Veera. They brought with them Trig’s cryo tube, mounted on a rolling pallet, which pleased Kira to see.

The Unrelenting Force disgorged Admiral Klein … and with him an entire troop of UMCN Marines in full power armor. Likewise, a group of armed Wranaui accompanied Lphet as the shoal leader left its ship. Nearscent of concern and curiosity emanated from the graspers. Among them was Itari, and also a single human: Major Tschetter, her expression unreadable as ever.

“This way,” Kira said, and lit a line of emerald lights down the corridor facing them.

Both the humans and the Wranaui followed her lead. She watched from the walls and the floors and the ceiling, for she was all of those and more. Falconi looked uncertain of himself, but she was glad to see that he seemed whole and healthy and that his shoulder injury no longer pained him. Klein showed no emotion, but his eyes darted from side to side, watching for anything unexpected.

Aside from the Marines, all the humans were wearing skinsuits with helmets firmly attached. The Wranaui, as usual, made no concessions to the environment, trusting their current forms to protect them.

As the visitors entered the presence chamber she had created to receive them, Kira shifted her view back to the flesh she had formed for herself, that Klein, Lphet, and Falconi would have an image of her to look at. It seemed the polite thing to do.

The chamber was high and narrow, with an arched ceiling and a double row of columns grown of nnar, the coral-like excrescence she knew of from Qwon (and was fond of because). Walls were framed with spars of polished metal, dark grey and adorned with lines of blue that formed patterns of meaning known only to the Old Ones … and now her. Filling the frames were great curving sections of wood and vines and dark-leafed greenery.

And those were from her that was Kira. Also the flowers that rested in crannies dark and shadowed: drooping flowers, with purple petals and speckled throats. Midnight Constellations, in memory of her home and of Alan—of all that she had once been.

She had repeated the shape of the flowers on the floor, in fractal spirals that coiled without end. And the sight pleased her, gave her a sense of satisfaction.

Among the spirals stood one of the crystals she had made of Ctein: a frozen flame of faceted beauty. Life arrested, yet still reaching and yearning.