Waking up came in stages — if, indeed, she’d ever truly slept at all. There’d been no dreams, no mid-sleep awakenings, no flirtations with insomnia. Cass had simply floated, adrift in a realm without consciousness or imagery. Slowly, though, consciousness came back, like waves lapping at a sandy beach, tickling her toes and fingers as the sea washed in and out. The wet sand had shaped itself to her body, and extracting herself from its sucking grasp required effort. Slowly, she sat up, blearily opening her eyes to find herself back in the bedroom, covers still half holding her down. When did I go back to sleep?

Cass tried to extract herself further, but her heavy limbs made the work difficult, as did the strange feeling that they weren’t quite listening to her, almost like she was underwater and there was far more resistance than there ought to be. She struggled against this bizarre force, against gravity, against forgetfulness, until the door slid open and Tsuga walked in — then, memory at least came rushing back.

“How do you feel?” she asked, kneeling down next to the bed.

“Hhhh…I’m…mad at you?” Finding the words wasn’t difficult, but getting her mouth around the words took effort, just as moving her limbs did. “You…you drugged me.”

“You were having another panic attack,” Tsuga said gently. “I was concerned you’d overstress your heart.”

“Not panic,” Cass mumbled. “Just… meltdown.” She remembered that vividly now, even if whatever drugs Tsuga had put in her system made her mind evaluate them without the emotional weight she knew the meltdown had carried. She was angry with Tsuga, yes. This was a fact, much like the fact that she was going gray, or that her hacked birth-control implant itched. “What is this?” she said, waving her hand around in front of her. “Feels weird.”

“You’re probably still feeling the effects of the Class-E xenodrugs in the inhaler I used on you,” Tsuga explained. “It’s for eliminating anxiety. Unfortunately, all the varieties we currently know to be safe for terran use have side effects. Are you feeling uncoordinated?”

“Very. Don’t like it.” She struggled to push herself back against the headboard — the support would make this easier. Make her less wobbly. “Still mad.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Tsuga said. “But after what happened to you, I couldn’t let you stay worked up like that. Arvense specifically said no excitement–“

“Not about that,” Cass interrupted, rubbing at her eyes with one hand. “You lied to me. And you stopped treating me like a person.”

“You are recovering from a very stressful event,” Tsuga said. “Naturally, how I treat you while you recover will change. I do not think a terran would have plied you with what you consider to be bad news either.”

“A terran wouldn’t be trying to make a pet out of me,” Cass grumbled. Maybe the Class-E was wearing off, or maybe she was just learning how to think around it. Or maybe the subject just made her angry enough to push through it.

“I told you,” Tsuga said, “I have no intention of doing that.”

“Bullshit.” Cass glared up at her. “You’re a terrible liar, Tsuga.” Being upright definitely helped clear her head.

“I’m not lying,” she insisted gently, looking away into the corner.

“You have no intention of making me your floret?”

“Correct.”

“But you want to. Because otherwise, why would you treat me like this? Why would you, all of a sudden, go from what we had to whatever this is?” She gestured between the two of them. “It’s not just I got dosed with the wrong drugs and had a panic attack. You didn’t do this when my leg was messed up. On some level, even if you aren’t willing to admit it, you want this. You want me to be your floret.”

Tsuga’s needles all stood on end, rippling like a storm had suddenly begun to blow through the room. Slowly, she calmed them, and seemed to take a deep breath and let it out slowly. It was the most terran she had ever managed to look. “Yes,” she said quietly. “I do want that. But it won’t happen. It never would have.”

“Then why are you acting this way?” Cass finally managed to kick the blankets away. Tsuga hadn’t undressed her, so she was still wearing the same slacks from before. Whenever that was. How long was I out?

“I have been…pretending,” she said, still unable to look back at Cass.

“Pretending?”

“Just for a few days,” she added quickly. “It was…this is the closest I will probably ever come to owning a floret, Cass. I wanted to pretend it was real. It was selfish of me, and I got carried away, and I’m sorry.”

The Class-Es must have been slackening their hold on Cass’s neurology, because she felt like someone had dumped ice down the back of her neck, the skin going taut and clammy. “This whole time,” she said, her voice not quite catching, “I’ve had you down as opposed to this whole asinine idea of domesticating terrans.”

“What?” Tsuga turned her head to stare at Cass. “No! Domestication is an unalloyed good for every species we have ever encountered, Cass, both in the societal and in the individual sense. I know your ideological background makes it difficult for you to accept, but we have a great deal of proof to the contrary.”

My ideological background?! The Class-Es were definitely giving up the ghost, because those words took the taut skin around her neck and shoulders and sank their teeth into them — her muscles clenched and held on for dear life. “So you’re telling me that you absolutely, totally, one-hundred-percent agree with this bullshit? Then why no florets? You’re two thousand years old, that’s plenty of time. Why not have the courage of your convictions, Tsuga?!”

“Because you are all so fragile and I cannot understand why this doesn’t bother anyone else!” Tsuga thundered, rising to her feet and pacing around the room. All the anger was driven from Cass and replaced by a kind of awed fear — Tsuga was holding nothing back, letting herself fill the space as much as she wanted, larger and more looming than Cass had ever seen her before, four and a half meters, maybe even five. It was as beautiful as it was terrifying. “Every time I learn about a new sophont species I learn about all the myriad ways you can simply break! Take terrans, for example! Your circulatory system is a nightmare! And your combination airway/digestive tract? How you choke to death so infrequently is an utter mystery to me! And let’s not talk about your immune system, which seems to be the only thing that wants to kill you as much as you want to kill each other!”

”Tsuga–“

“It’s not just terrans, either! What about rinans? They’re so small and sweet but what if you loose track of them and they get underfoot?! Spectrum jellies? What if you hug them too hard and rupture their swim bladder?” She made the chainsaw-cricket noise again, much louder this time, and Cass winced. “Their biosphere’s hereditary molecule is so flexible that frankly it’s a minor miracle that their species persisted long enough to employ teratogenic biological weapons at all!” She stopped, her needles all standing on end and vibrating.

“Look, Tsuga,” Cass said, after giving her a moment of silence, “I’m sorry I yelled, okay? And… I know working in archaeology was a lot, but–“

“This isn’t about xenoarchaeology,” Tsuga hissed. “Being confronted with how fragile you all are didn’t help, but I have always felt this way. Every time I realize something bad can happen, it’s like I have to stop and figure out all the ways that something bad might happen, iterating endlessly. And I always, always find worse things than I think I’ll find when I start out. And when it comes to the thought of caring for a floret…” She shuddered, nearly coming apart. “All I can think of is the myriad ways I could make a mistake and cause instantly-fatal harm.”

“…you spiral?” It was a familiar enough feeling for Cass, but she would never have credited the enormous alien tree with the same kind of insecurity.

“It made me very good at xenoarchaeology, mind you,” she added, seemingly ignoring Cass. “Very good. And it serves me well enough in planetology. Planets have all kinds of ways they can go wrong.”

“Tsuga, have you ever talked to anyone about this?” Cass was starting to realize that her evaluation of Tsuga had been completely wrong from the get-go — that her treatment of Cass as something approaching an equal was more a result of stand-offish anxiety than anything ideological — but that didn’t mean she wasn’t concerned about her. Regardless of her reasons, she’d still been better to Cass than any of the other Affini. “Like, to get some help?”

“I am an Affini,” Tsuga said bitterly. “I help others. I am not supposed to need help. So no, I haven’t. It’s bad enough they think I’m broken for not taking florets, I don’t need them realizing just how broken I really am!” She paused again, and finally looked down at Cass. “I… oh. I’m… I’m sorry, I’m probably frightening you, aren’t I?” She let out an audible sigh and began compressing herself back down into her usual, merely gigantic shape.

“I mean, less frightening, more stunned?” Cass said. “I just– you know, you come off like someone who’s really on top of shit.”

“Yes, I do my best to cultivate that appearance,” Tsuga said. “Sometimes I even fool myself into actually being on top of shit.” Cass couldn’t suppress a snicker, which drew a confused look from Tsuga.

“Sorry,” she said, grinning. “It’s just weird to hear you swear.”

“Well, it’s what you said, so I said it,” Tsuga replied, shrugging. “And I am entirely too unsettled to care about propriety right now. Shit, fuck, fuck, ass, fuck, shit.”

Oh no. Cass laughed. “No, stop, that’s too silly.”

Tsuga smiled and knelt down next to the bed. She was getting better at that — even the razor-sharp thorns she had for teeth weren’t quite unsettling anymore. “Fuck, ass, shit, fuck.”

“Stop!” Cass protested through her laughter, tears escaping from her eyes as she hugged herself. “You’re gonna ruin it if you keep doing it!”

“Fine,” Tsuga said. “I will only curse when I particularly need to cheer you up.” She watched Cass as she slowly regained control of herself, the laughter subsiding into the occasional cackle as she wiped her eyes. “Please don’t tell anyone about that,” she finally added. “About my losing control like that. Or about what I said.”

Cass looked up at her, finally managed to take a deep breath. “I spiral too, sometimes. That’s why I melted down. I know what you mean, about people being fragile. For me, it’s more like…there’s so much that could go wrong, so I should do it to make sure it goes right. And if something does go wrong, especially something dangerous or really bad, I should be the one to fix it, so no one else has to. Which is why I’m here, instead of freezing my ass off back down there where I probably should be.”

“You shouldn’t have to shoulder that kind of burden,” Tsuga said — but she didn’t immediately insist that the Affini should. Progress, maybe? Something had passed between them, Cass could feel, with the mutual sharing of vulnerability. Maybe the situation wasn’t completely unsalvageable.

“Maybe I shouldn’t,” Cass replied, “but I do. Because someone has to. Listen, I won’t tell anyone, okay? But only if you go back to treating me like a person. And don’t keep shit from me! I am also a practiced expert at seeming like I’m on top of said shit, okay?”

“Very well,” Tsuga said. “But may I say something that might somewhat irritate you before we consider the agreement in effect?”

Cass gave Tsuga a long look. “I reserve the right to get annoyed, then, if not outright mad.”

“Acceptable,” she said. “I only wanted to say that you were a very good imaginary floret.”

Cass rolled her eyes, but couldn’t help but smile. “Yep, called it. I’m annoyed.”

It was odd how something as simple a preparing for a meeting transformed a space. The day before, this had been the common room of Tsuga’s hab, a place Cass felt, more or less, comfortable in. Once she and Tsuga had ironed out their difficulties, things had more or less returned to normal. More or less: Cass had not forgotten the fact that Tsuga had confessed to wanting to domesticate her, and that little burr remained under the surface of every interaction they had. Tsuga was good at hiding it, but Cass could see it emerge now and again, now she knew to look for it. Still, the important thing was that Tsuga wasn’t acting on it. She could moderate her impulses. That made her hab a safer place than anywhere else on the ship.

But the meeting changed that. It was no longer just Tsuga’s hab — it was a battlefield now. No bullets would fly here, no bombs, no tripwires, no directed-energy weapons, but it was here that the fate of her people on Solstice, and those who had been abducted from there, would be decided, and Cass was not coming to battle unprepared. She had pored over the treaty between the Accord and the Affini, the treaty that dissolved the Accord and formally set the Affini over all humanity, and she’d studied the military campaign (not that the Affini called it that, which made it annoying to find records on at first) that had brought it about.

And she knew the Affini, now. They were arrogant, unwilling to compromise, and obsessed with their florets. Their advanced technology made that a dangerous combination, but as Tsuga had said, they weren’t gods — and to Cass, that meant they could be beaten. Now, after all her work, she finally had a foundation to build a defense on. All that remained was to join the battle that had begun the moment the Affini had set foot on Solstice.

When the door slid open and Polyphylla and the Captain walked in, Cass stood — not out of respect, per se, but to show that she could, that she wasn’t still laid up and easy to walk all over. Another two days of recovery had made her able to get around on her own, but standing up was still a non-trivial effort. “Captain,” she said, crossing her arms and standing as steadily as she could.

“Captain,” Andoa replied, smiling. It was odd — e was much better at smiling than Tsuga was, but somehow it came off as less comforting, more predatory. The captain had the energy of a caged tiger pacing, waiting for those silly bars to stop getting between em and lunch.

“I’m very happy to see you up and about,” Polyphylla said, smiling down at Cass. “You gave us all quite a scare, you know.”

“I’ve had worse,” Cass said. “So, let me guess, this is about–“ She paused as something else pushed its way through the open door of Tsuga’s hab. If it was an Affini, it was unlike any Affini Cass had ever seen. It was more tree-like than Tsuga even at her most disassembled, more dynamic than Polyphylla had been when she’d been desperately clinging to a heater on the surface of Solstice. It was a tall cylindrical thicket of vines, stalks, and leaves that lurched along on at least a dozen claw-like roots, like the legs of some algorithmic horror movie insect monster. It had bent halfway to squeeze through the door; once it was through, it straightened, and dozens of thin, spindly limbs slipped out — some held ledgers, others writing implements, yet others seals and stamps of various kinds. Between the thick, bright green stalks, Cass could see individual eyes moving, no two of them looking in the same direction. “What the–“

“Lenta, I think you might be overwhelming our little xeno friend,” Polyphylla said gently. “Might you assume a somewhat less busy shape?”

“The clerk has received your request and will comply,” the new Affini said. It began to compress and reshape itself, making a more-or-less terran-looking torso for itself. Vines wrapped around clusters of roots to form legs, and its upper limbs consolidated themselves in a like fashion. It still had too many legs, and at least five or six arms that migrated around in an eerily fluid fashion. Its head was less a head than a tripartite series of bark ridges holding several eyes each. It made no effort to shape a mouth. Its voice remained the same oddly harmonious cacophony of tones, like several voices speaking over one another with just a slight delay between them. “Has the clerk achieved a sufficient degree of morophological stasis?”

“Uh.” Cass swallowed. “Y-yeah, sure.”

“Excellent. The clerk’s efficiency should remain minimally disrupted.” It scribbled down something in a ledger, stamped it, then closed the ledger and shoved it into the thicket of vines in its chest. “The clerk is Lenta Saccharum, Seventh Bloom. Specified pronouns are they/it.”

“Nice to meet you?” Cass said. Damn. Settle yourself. It’s just a giant alien plant. Not like you’ve never seen one of those before. Either this was a brilliant ploy by the Captain to unsettle her, or once again the Affini just didn’t grasp that they could be utterly bizarre sometimes. For her own sake, Cass resolved to count it as the latter.

“Lenta is, among its many other roles, the head of our Ad Hoc Office of Terran Adaptation and Assistance for Solstice,” Andoa said. “I thought it might be best to have it present for our meeting.”

“The clerk is pleased to meet the small, adorable xeno,” Lenta said. “It has seen much documentation regarding her. It also assisted in the preparation of the Terran Standard English, Non-Floret translation of the Treaty on Methods, Limitations, and Procedures for Human Domestication, requested by the aforementioned small, adorable xeno. This was a very enjoyable diversion, and the clerk is grateful for the opportunity.”

“Y-yeah, thanks. It was…a lot.” Cass took a deep breath, forced calm on herself. She could get freaked out about Lenta later. “So, let me guess,” she said, turning to the Captain. “This is about your efforts to abduct the entire population of Solstice not going as well as you hoped?” Lenta opened a ledger and began to furiously scribble.

“I would object to the term ‘abduct,’ but otherwise, yes,” Andoa said. “From what we’ve gathered from the little cuties we’ve managed to rescue–“ E leaned hard on the word.”–thus far, you’re something of a strategic mastermind for the whole affair. That this plan is all your idea, your design.”

“I can’t claim total credit for it,” Cass said, shrugging. “Others had plenty of input, and local collectives implemented it in their own way — which, for the record, I’m not privy to the details of. No one at Bulwark was in total possession of the facts. The entire point of our collective was to be the canary in the coal mine.” When she got three puzzled looks (and one whatever-the-hell Lenta’s face(s) meant), she sighed and added, “Early warning system.”

“Aaah,” Andoa said. “Well, given what you’ve been through, that makes a certain degree of sense. If your former government was willing to deploy relativistic kinetic strikes, centralized settlement and governance does indeed seem like a poor way to go about things.”

“No kidding,” Cass replied. “Following contact, all collectives are to retreat to shelters designed to conceal their presence. Operations can take several courses from there, but the primary goal is to make any invasion as expensive and time-consuming as possible. You’ve probably already worked that out, but just in case you haven’t, there’s a freebie.”

“Working in the context of the enemy you faced previously,” Andoa said, nodding, “it’s an entirely reasonable strategy. One can’t help but wonder, though, why you feel the need to employ it against us. Shall we sit? This may take some time, and I’m keenly aware that you’re still recovering from a shock to your system.”

“Sit if you like,” Cass said. “I’m fine.” She was not, in fact, fine: her legs were starting to ache. This was preferable to taking Andoa up on eir offer and looking weak because of it, though. Polyphylla and Tsuga did settle in on Tsuga’s sofa, but the Captain remained standing, as did Lenta (though Cass wasn’t sure if sitting was something Lenta was interested in or even capable of in its current shape). “To answer your question, we’re doing it because you’re unwilling to negotiate.”

“Little one, being unwilling to negotiate away your safety and well-being is not the same thing as being unwilling to negotiate,” Andoa said. “There are many things we can negotiate about. I’m sure Lenta would be delighted to assist.”

“The clerk would be pleased to offer any assistance required in the drafting of a domestication treaty specific to the terrans of the planet Solstice,” Lenta said with what Cass could only assume was meant to be a cheerful tone.

“But that’s the thing: we don’t want or need domestication,” Cass said. “Either in the societal sense or the individual sense. We will happily take assistance, especially in form of technology — our goals are the same as yours, we talked about this.”

“Yes, communism! I’ve been reading up on that, you know? At once an idea very ahead of its time and yet mired in your pre-spaceflight past. Not just the parts about linen, mind — very much a reaction to your nascent capitalist system.”

“You’re talking about Marxism. I’m not a Marxist, I’m an anarcho-communist. Marxist analysis is a useful tool, but Marxism still ultimately just leads to statism, and statism inevitably degenerates into oppression and tyranny.”

“Aaaaah, might this be the root of your objection to domestication?” Andoa said, grinning eir predator’s grin again. “I read some of your Berkman on Tsuga’s recommendation. Very interesting, but again focused very tightly on the particular conditions of the era it was written in.”

Cass shrugged. “Philosophy builds on the philosophy that came before it. Marx was in dialogue with Kant, who was in dialogue with Locke, and so on down the line. Now we’re in dialogue with them. It’s not their fault they were working with an understanding of the world that didn’t include digital computing or strange-matter manipulation. The core ideas are still valid and carry forward.”

“Well put, well put. For instance, the axiom, ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.’ An admirable position for a terran of the time to arrive at, and one that, I think you’ll agree, describes the Affini Compact rather well.”

“The material conditions of your society vs. the Accord, or vs. what we have on Solstice, are not the issue,” Cass responded. “If it was, I’d have no objections to your proposed evacuation. The issue is that you’re essentially demanding we give you absolute power over us, and answering reasonable concerns with ‘well, just trust us.’ I’ve read the treaty, and while it’s horrifically impenetrable and at least three times as long as it needs to be, I was able with no small amount of effort to follow it.” She tapped the heavy binder that lay on her table twice. “I have bookmarks, and I have notes.” Cass heard a soft, high-pitched noise that seemed to come from Polyphylla, but she ignored it.

“I’m not certain the word ‘reasonable’ describes your concerns,” Andoa said. “You seem to envision us as some sort of uncaring tyrants here to trample the proletariat underfoot and exploit them mercilessly, which is a step up from the sort of thing I’m used to hearing out of the mouths of feralist terrans, but still quite far from accurate. Surely you’ve seen that we’re not, I don’t know, ‘sending you off to the mines’ or whatever the popular new accusation is.”

“You’re forgetting that I’ve seen you do it,” Cass said, glaring up at Andoa. “I was there when you reached into Nell’s head and started messing around with her mind!”

“The clerk is unfamiliar with the event in question,” Lenta said, eliciting a slight jump from Cass. She’d almost managed to forget it was there, it vanished into the background so readily.

“Cass’s comrade, Nell, used a very unkind word to refer to florets,” Polyphylla said. “At which point the Captain employed a rapid induction to entrance her and insert a very straightforward block to prevent recurrence. It was precise, limited, and non-self-reinforcing. I very much doubt it will have any lasting effect beyond, hopefully, discouraging her from saying that awful word again.”

“You call screwing around with someone’s free will limited?” Cass said, staring at Polyphylla.

“It was a fairly restrained correction,” Tsuga said. “Though I know it probably doesn’t seem that way to you. And while I’m not the expert on terran psychology that Polyphylla is, based on experience with other species I agree that it’s unlikely to have any lingering effects on her.”

“Unless she’s frightfully susceptible to hypnosis, I expect the block’s already lost most of its oomph,” Andoa said. “It’s not as if I domesticated her on the spot. That will happen later, given what she’s been up to down on the surface.”

Half a dozen thoughts instantly leapt into Cass’s mind, smashing into one another and leaving her brain in total gridlock. After a moment, she regained control of her mouth. “What do you mean?!”

“Apart from running away and sending a transmission that, I suspect, was a coded message inciting others to do the same? That alone would mean we’d need to take a close look at her, but following that, she fired on several members of the rescue team that subsequently located her and even resorted to using explosives in an extremely dangerous way. She’s a danger to herself and to others, and when we find her, she’s going to be domesticated.” E leaned in close. “That’s another one of those non-negotiable things, before you complain.”

“And that’s it?” Cass said, glaring up at em. “No trial, nothing?”

“There’ll be an inquest, certainly,” Andoa said, “but considering we have clear records of her lobbing grenades out of a moving vehicle, the outcome is rather a foregone conclusion.”

“And you wonder why I see you as a tyrant. You’re sentencing her to… to personality death for defending herself!”

All the Affini were silent, and for a moment Cass felt a horrible fear that she was next in line for something precise, limited, and non-self-reinforcing. When the Captain knelt down, that terror redoubled, but when e spoke, eir voice was calm and measured.

“I know that you know that what you just said doesn’t describe florets at all,” e said. “You’ve met quite a few despite spending a good deal of your time on the ship recovering in one way or another.”

“Spying on me, are you?” she spat, somehow managing to quash her fear.

“I’m merely interested to know how you’re getting along, and I ask after you.” E let out a very convincing sigh. “You seem to conceive of domestication as some kind of punishment, when it’s the furthest thing from it. Perhaps it’s unavoidable, given your own experience of being punished for behavior your government deemed undesirable.”

“I’ve met florets who are kept so doped up, they don’t know whether they’re coming or going,” Cass said. her fingernails began to dig into the palms of her hands — when had she clenched them into fists?

“Some florets are very highly medicated, yes, if we determine they need it to be happy. Some are given hypnotic reinforcements and blocks. Some require deep psychological reconstruction work. None of that is personality death. We have xenodrugs that can do that, certainly, but we do not employ them liberally. When you see a floret, you are seeing a sophont whose owner is carefully managing their experience of the world, and altering that experience as necessary to ensure the floret’s well-being and self-actualization. It is not a punishment, and it never has been. It is an act of love.”

Cass’s stomach curled up into a tight little ball of dread. “I believe that you believe that,” she said quietly. “Now, you need to believe that I believe that’s all bullshit. You tell yourself that to facilitate what you do. Self-deception is the engine-grease of empire.”

Andoa gave another sigh and shook eir head. “I’m just not getting through to you, am I?”

“Cass, the Captain is telling the truth,” Tsuga said. “None of us wants anything bad to happen to Nell, not even by your definition of ‘bad.’ We just want to ensure she’s not going to hurt herself or anyone else.”

“Everything she did, she did in self-defense against invasion and conquest — which is what this is, no matter how you try to spin it.” Thanks for all your help, Tsuga, she grumbled to herself. “We have the right to self-determination, and the right to resist anyone who tries to take it from us. There’s our starting point. You said you were willing to negotiate? Let’s negotiate. All our cards on the table: You’re too advanced, too well-supplied, individually stronger than we are. I’m probably missing a few other advantages, but suffice it to say we can’t stop you from doing what you’re doing. Aggression on our part would be a pointless gesture. Eventually, you’ll track down every surviving terran on Solstice.”

“Yes, that’s about the size of it,” Andoa said, making a gesture to continue.

“But you don’t control the timeline on which that happens,” Cass said. “We control that. We can drag this out for years. Possibly decades. We can force more and more of your resources to be expended on locating and detaining fewer and fewer terrans — resources that could go elsewhere, to terrans or to other species who need it far more than we do.”

“Oh my,” Andoa said. Eir voice was absolutely unconcerned. The pivot had not gotten the reaction Cass had hoped for, but she pressed on.

“Our demands aren’t unreasonable. We want autonomy, and whatever technical assistance you’re willing to offer, with an emphasis on compilers with which we can produce other needed tech and supplies. We also want amnesty for all actions taken in resistance to your abduction program. I’m willing to offer domestication on a purely voluntary basis. I don’t like it, but both sides being unhappy is the essence of compromise, right?” She felt sick making the offer, like she was sacrificing half of her people for the sake of the other half, but she knew the Affini would never agree to anything that didn’t include them getting their all-important florets. Hopefully the carrot would outperform the stick.

“Petal, it is not safe for you to remain on that planet.”

“With the appropriate technical assistance, there’s no reason we couldn’t construct shelters that would be up to a reasonable standard,” Cass retorted.

“It’s much simpler to just move you up here,” e said. “You’ll have access to medical attention, compilers, and every other basic amenity, with the appropriate supervision that advanced technology requires. Once we fix the climate and repair the ecosphere, you can move back down there, into nice safe habitats, again, with all the proper amenities.”

Cass shook her head. “That’s a non-starter. If we all come up here, you can do whatever you want and we’ll have no recourse. We won’t have any leverage to keep you honest.”

“You have no leverage to begin with, little one,” Andoa said, patience and condescension melding in eir voice. “It may take us years, though I doubt it. My only care is that some of your comrades down below might get ill or suffer accidents before we can rescue them, and you are making that more likely by resisting us.”

“None of that is your concern!” Cass protested. “And it never was! We’ll take care of them, if you just take the damn deal! Some florets is better than no florets, isn’t it?”

“Captain,” Tsuga said, “I think I may see the misunderstanding, and I may have a solution.”

“If you can help her understand her position better, Tsuga,” Andoa said, rising to eir feet, “I would be eternally grateful.”

“I briefly discussed my previous career in xenoarchaeology with her a few days ago,” Tsuga went on, her needles flattening themselves against her bark. Polyphylla draped a few vines around her, perhaps to comfort her. “Specifically, the nature of the work, studying sophont species we were too late to save. Cass, would it be safe to say that you understand our primary goal to be preventing the extinction of other sophont species?”

“Yes, I get it. You want to keep us from wiping ourselves out. I understand why that’s a big thing for you,” Cass said. “I read the treaty, too, and a couple of commentaries on it I was able to dredge up. I get that the Accord doesn’t get to self-govern because they fought a knock-down, drag-out war against you, and frankly, I wouldn’t have trusted anyone involved in the Accord’s upper echelons with power anyway. But we’re not like that, and you don’t need to waste your time on us. We agree with you about everything but this floret business, so give us what we need and then leave us alone! We survive, we’re autonomous, everyone’s happy!”

“Aaaah, I see,” Andoa said, nodding. “A simple misunderstanding.”

“Cass,” Tsuga said gently, “you are missing something very critical–“

“I know, I know,” Cass interrupted. “Florets. Biological imperative. I get it. I said I was willing to allow voluntary domestication — we’ll make a list and send it on up to you, and you can pick up your volunteers.”

“Don’t interrupt, little flower,” Andoa said sternly. “Your understanding of our motives, and subsequently our actions, may be flawed, but that’s no reason to be rude.”

“It’s alright,” Tsuga said. “But Cass, you are still missing the bigger picture. Did I say that right?” she added, glancing at Polyphylla.

“Oh, yes, very good!” Polyphylla said, smiling.

“The bigger picture?” Cass glared up at Tsuga. “What do you mean, bigger picture?”

“Survival is a prerequisite,” she said. “Not an end state. We set our sights far higher than that.”

Cass froze, staring at Tsuga. Oh. Shit. Her eyes went wide as the pieces of the puzzle suddenly slammed together in her head.

“Aaaaah,” Andoa said cheerfuly. “There we go, I know that look on a terran.” E paced in a circle around Cass as e spoke, smiling down at her. “Naturally, Cass, you’re right: we want to prevent extinction of adorable little xeno species, and we certainly enjoy taking florets from said adorable little xeno species and making them endlessly happy, but we don’t stop there. You all matter to us. Do you understand now?”

Cass had no answer, only the cold sweat that had broken out across her skin. A single thought was jammed in the gears of her mind, locking out every other potential avenue of consideration.

I fucked up. I fucked up. I fucked up.

She had completely underestimated how powerful the Affini obsession with florets was, how all-encompassing. It wasn’t just preventing extinctions and taking as many florets as they felt like — it included all potential florets as well, regardless of whether they wanted to be florets or not. They belive that it’s their responsibility to make every living being in the universe happy, one way or another. How had she not seen it? All the details were there. Her brain simply hadn’t joined them up properly.

There was no way out of this. There was never any negotiation possible beyond a polite fiction, because the Affini would never settle for anything else than absolute power to spoil Solstice rotten. Fighting them was completely impossible, and dragging things out for leverage was meaningless. She was fucked. Everyone down on Solstice was fucked. Everyone throughout the Accord was fucked. Everyone, everywhere, was fucked. She felt, only distantly, her knees buckling, and strong vines catching her before she could tumble to the ground.

“Cass?” Andoa’s voice, and eir face looming overhead. “Cass, are you alright?”

“I believe she needs a break,” Polyphylla said. She too came into view, that same look of concern on her face, half-masked by the long red petals that hung from the vines that served as her hair. “Sometimes, when psychologically taxed to an extreme, terrans can ‘lock up’ like this, particularly those of outlier neurotypes, and especially the one which Cass belongs to.”

We’re fucked. We’re all fucked.

“I should get her back to bed,” Tsuga said. Cass felt herself shift, and before she knew it she was in Tsuga’s arms — she would know that feeling anywhere, after the last few days. Somewhere, beneath the horror and self-recrimination, there was the small and comforting thought that Tsuga probably knew exactly how she felt right now.

“Wait a moment, please,” Andoa said. Distantly, as if down a long tunnel, Cass saw em reach out and lay a hand on Tsuga’s shoulder. “It might be better for her to have specialist care and observation. Given her psychological state, and that she’s clearly not letting go of her feralist ideology easily, I think Polyphylla should look after her for a little while.”

Cass felt Tsuga’s vines tighten around her, but her mind was still too far gone to really process the words she was hearing. “You want to remove her from the habitat she feels most comfortable in while she’s having a crisis?!”

“The Captain has a point, Tsuga,” Polyphylla admitted. “She’s a very complicated little terran — and I do have experience with terrans, especially ones who require intensive support and analysis for psychological reasons. I think she’ll be alright, and she’ll have a playmate to keep her company at my hab. Not to mention providing a good example for her.” She glanced at Andoa. “I presume you intend for this to be a formal wardship, Captain?”

“Just so. Lenta, would you draw up the appropriate paperwork for little Cass here?

Tsuga watched the door slide shut, her last glimpse of Cass still all but catatonic in Polyphylla’s arms cut off, leaving her alone with Andoa. She didn’t turn to face the Captain so much as simply let her form flow to face em, rippling and shuddering as she strained to keep her emotions under control.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Andoa said, raising a hand to preempt the yet-inchoate protests Tsuga was struggling to give form. “And before you get upset, I am not taking her away from you. In fact, I encourage you to go spend time with her. I can’t imagine Polyphylla or Cass will complain.”

“Then why?” Tsuga growled, a thundering, cracking noise like an elder tree finally tumbling to the forest floor. “How am I deficient?!”

“You aren’t deficient,” Andoa said, sighing. “But you’re not experienced with terrans specifically. Polyphylla is. You’ve been in the galaxy less than six months, and she’s been working with terrans since the start of the cotelydon program. If anyone is going to be able to sort out whatever’s keeping Cass tied down to these feralist ideas of hers, not to mention persuade her to give us any helpful information about where all the terrans are hiding, it’s Polyphylla.”

“She’s not a danger to herself,” Tsuga hissed, a noise like water droplets skittering across the hot skillet Cass had showed her how to work.

“But her feralism may be a danger to others,” Andoa said. “Others on the surface, and others here. My vines are knotted on this, Tsuga, but it’s temporary. We’ll do this by the book. Once Polyphylla makes her report, Cass can come back home to you. You filed that Notice of Intent, right?” It was a rhetorical question — Tsuga was sure Andoa knew full what the answer would be.

“I… haven’t, yet,” Tsuga said, the seething anger turning inward. I can’t. I’m not good enough, I’ll break her somehow.

“Well, I suggest you get that done,” Andoa said. “It’ll smooth things over when the time comes, but regardless, I’ll make sure it’s known that she’s spoken for. No one’s going to poach her from you.” E reached out with a few vines, interweaving them with some of Tsuga’s own and letting their weight still them from their anxious coiling. “I want her to stay with you, Tsuga — I like the two of you together. You fit. It’s honestly very sweet.”

“I’m not so sure,” Tsuga muttered. Take her now.

“Then let me be sure for you.” E gave Tsuga’s vines a gentle squeeze. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed the difference in you since our little grey-stripe came aboard. You two are good for each other. And ask yourself this, Tsuga: if you don’t want this, and if you don’t believe you’re the best thing for her–” E grinned and leaned in close. “-then why are you so mad at me right now?”

She had no answer.