Herself at her exact age, dressed exactly as she was right now: the clothes the Thing had created for her, although she’d removed the insignia that had been placed prominently on every single garment.

Atlanta imagined that was a factory default; irritating that whoever the owner had been, they had not bothered to calibrate things to a more gracious setting. In the palace, it would have been automatic. No polite host made their guest advertise for them.

This self was where Atlanta located all calculation and data processing. It held the complex set of algorithms by which she’d learned to sort experiences, desires, results, and she consulted it for every major decision, recording the factors that had led to her decision, the outcome that had resulted from it, and what she judged had worked or not.

The third was what a child in an earlier age might have thought an imaginary friend: a figure from a favorite cartoon, the Happy Bakka, standing almost as high as her waist. Its fur was realistically textured, its eyes glistening with high-definition moisture. The skin had been a gift to her from the Empress, when Atlanta was only six, before she was even an heir, and she always kept it by her. She had never told the woman whose Empire she might inherit that she still used it on a daily basis. In it, she kept various random functions and reminders. It was prone to mystic poetry and scraps of nonsense. She’d found that interjecting such things into her deliberations often sparked a creative reaction that might not have occurred to her otherwise.

The Happy Bakka said, “It’s good to go with the flow.” It had said this several times now, and she gestured for it to be silent.

Child-self said, “You’re scared, but at least you’re not alone.”

“Not alone,” present-self echoed. Atlanta scowled. They kept repeating the same advice about optimism, and little else that was useful. What use were they? She reemerged from mental space to find the others had run out of questions for the Thing.

Niko stood staring out into the hallway as she thought, arms folded and brow creased. Dabry slouched against a wall, an upper left hand fiddling with a knife, rolling it back and forth along his knuckles. Thorn and Talon whispered to each other.

Lassite sat on the floor, hugging his knees to his chest, face lost within the folds of his hood, so still that he might have been mistaken for a statue. Milly sat doing some sort of mathematics in her head, using her fingers to tabulate something, nodding to herself while near her, Skidoo coiled, stroking the floor. Gio drank one of the salty liquid bulbs the ship provided and then sat sucking his fingers clean.