But the expected summons never came. One by one the lights flickered and faded, leaving the ancient reliquary cold, dark, and dead. Dust gathered. Stone shifted. And overhead, the patterns of stars slowly changed, assuming unfamiliar shapes.

A fracture then …

Falling. Softly falling within the blue-black reaches of the swelling sea. Past lamp and sway, through wafts of heat and chill, softly fell and softly swam. And from the folds of swirling darkness emerged a massive form, there upon the Plaintive Verge: a mound of pitted rock, and rooted atop that rock … rooted atop that rock …

Kira woke, confused.

It was still dark, and for a moment, she knew neither where she was nor how she had gotten there, only that she was falling from a terrible height—

She yelped and flailed, and her elbow hit the control panel next to the pilot’s seat. The impact jolted her back to full awareness, and she realized she was still on the Valkyrie and that the Bach was still playing.

“Ando,” she whispered. “How long was I asleep?” In the dark, it was impossible to tell the time.

“Fourteen hours and eleven minutes.”

The strange dream still lingered in her mind, eerie and bittersweet. Why did the xeno keep sending her visions? What was it trying to tell her? Dreams or memories—sometimes the difference between the two seemed so small as to be nonexistent.

… then flesh parted from flesh. Another question occurred to her. Would separating from the xeno kill her? That seemed like one possible interpretation of what the suit had shown her. The thought left a sour taste in her mouth. Surely there had to be a way to rid herself of the creature.

Kira wondered how much the Soft Blade really understood of what had been happening since she found it.

Did it realize it had killed her friends? Alan?

She thought back to the first set of images the xeno had forced upon her: the dying sun with the ruined planets and the belt of debris. Was that where the parasite came from? But something had gone wrong: a cataclysm of some sort. That much made sense, but beyond that, things grew indistinct. The xeno had been joined with a grasper, but whether the graspers had made the xeno (or the Great Beacon) wasn’t clear.

She shivered. So much had happened in the galaxy that humans were unaware of. Disasters. Battles. Far-flung civilizations. It was daunting to consider.

A tickle formed in her nose, and she sneezed hard enough to bang her chin against her chest. She sneezed again, and in the dim, red light of the cabin, she saw curls of grey dust drifting away from her, toward the shuttle vents.

Cautious, she touched her sternum. A thin layer of powder covered her, same as when she’d woken on the Extenuating Circumstances during the grasper attack. She felt underneath herself; no depression had formed. The xeno hadn’t dissolved any part of the chair.