Night came and went. Cass laid on the pillowy, floral sofa in Polyphylla’s common room, not wanting to go back into Leah’s room, not after what had just happened there. Dinner, a compiled turkey sandwich, sat like a brick in her stomach as she stared up at the phantom moonlight and failed to sleep for hours. Her mind reeled with questions that she had no answers for. ‘She asked me to’ — what the fuck does that even mean? From her office, Polyphylla’s voice, too distant to make out meaningful words, could occasionally be heard. Eventually, Cass drifted off out of sheer fatigue, and dreamed of the hot press of bodies in a souk in Zerqamîsh, voices that reminded her of the accent her mother never quite managed to shake when she spoke Farsi, the accent she’d half-handed down to her daughter in a few phonemes and phrases.

She woke to early-morning light streaming into the common room in thick columns, and the uneasy ache of having slept in an odd place and in an odd position. She stretched out her stiffness — her shoulder still hurt a bit — and sat up. She could hear Polyphylla from the other room. She’d said she’d be working all night, but Cass hadn’t really believed it. Then again, she wasn’t entirely sure Affini needed to sleep. She climbed down from the sofa, used the bathroom, splashed water from a basin fed by a tiny waterfall on her face, and got a hot steaming mug of tea out of the compiler. Then, as unobtrusively as she could, she took a seat at the entrance to Polyphylla’s office, staring in.

Polyphylla stood in front of her desk, where Leah lay prostrate on some kind of thick, cushy blanket. Her eyes were open, but she seemed miles away. Every screen was lit up, and Polyphylla was tapping away at a terminal. “Recite,” she said. “Series sixteen. Begin.”

“A painting of eleven cookies,” Leah said. Her voice was distant, dreamy, unconcerned. Better than when Cass had last heard it, but still strange and a little off-putting. “A big, blue anchor. A spectrum jelly birthday party. An elevator full of cakes…”

“How many cakes?”

“…fifteen cakes. A rhinoceros dancing on a transit platform. The Big Ring at night. A chocolate bar with caramel and sea salt. A fish…a fish….”

“Skip.” Polyphylla marked several notes in her tablet.

“Four blue birds flying in a circle. A piano with 85 keys.” She continued to recite for several minutes, without further interruption. Polyphylla seemed to relax when she reached the end.

“Good girl, Leah,” she said, her voice thrumming as she held the violet flower against Leah’s face . “Now, it’s time for you to rest. Let those pretty eyes slip shut, and take a deep breath, and let it out slowly.” Cass watched Leah’s chest rise and fall, the breaths slowing as she drifted off. Polyphylla gently lifted her off the desk, cradling her in her arms, and turned to face Cass. “Thank you for not interrupting,” she said. “I’m done for now. How is your shoulder feeling?”

“It’s fine. Is she going to be okay?” Cass asked, her voice still froggy from hours of disuse. She coughed to clear her throat and took a sip of tea. “What was all that?”

“Through hypnosis, I committed a series of images to Leah’s long-term memory,” Polyphylla said. She crossed the office, passing by Cass. “Each is associated with a particular mnemonic landmark, or more specifically, with the reinforcements around those landmarks. This is all very non-technical language, you understand?”

“Right,” Cass said, getting to her feet and following. “But what do they mean?”

“The images themselves are meaningless. Its just a way for me to test her mnemonic equilibrium. If she has difficulty recalling an image, it implies dysfunction in the reinforcements around a particular landmark, so I know where the issue is and can direct my efforts appropriately.” She took a seat on the sofa, laying Leah down on her lap and stroking her hair. “Poor petal…”

“But she’s going to be okay, right?” Cass started trying to climb up one-handed, but Polyphylla offered a few vines, and after a moment of hesitation Cass accepted the help.

“She’ll be fine. She’s doing much better now than she was last night, that’s for certain. The fish is always a sticking point, and I’m still not entirely sure why. I put her back under to give her mind a chance to integrate the last of the patches I applied, but she needs to eat. In a little while, she should be well enough to be awake long enough for that. But that depends in part on you,” she added, giving Cass a hard look. “No talk of violence, of abandonment, of being lost, or of being upset with her for any reason. Am I understood?” Cass nodded — Polyphylla’s tone brooked no disagreement, and in any case she didn’t want to cause Leah any harm. “Good. Have you eaten?”

Cass shook her head. “Just the tea.”

“Alright, I’ll make breakfast for you both in a little while. How do you feel about waffles? They’re Leah’s favorite.” She softened, smiling down at the girl in her lap. “She thinks they’re funny, and she likes all the little holes to put things in. I think she’d very much like to wake up to waffles.”

“Waffles are fine,” Cass said. She couldn’t help but smile a little herself — that sounded very Leah. “Now, are you going to explain her to me, or not?”

A ripple seemed to run through Polyphylla as her vines flexed and shifted. “I’m still not entirely sure where to start.”

“Try the beginning?” Cass suggested.

“Her beginning, or the beginning of our time together? Well, I suppose the second one is probably a better introduction to her particular difficulties,” she said. “I met Leah a little over three years ago now, very early on during the Terran Pacification Program, when we captured her ship, the Tranquility. They were still trying things like invading our ships when we caught them,” she said, chuckling a little. “They hadn’t quite realized how futile their fighting was. Then again, some of them still haven’t.

“Leah was, at first, just one of many patients, a little more problematic than the others but very much the type: angry, violent, boorish, and highly xenophobic. Certainly a candidate for domestication even if she hadn’t been actively trying to cause harm, but the sheer number of terrans we took when we captured Tranquility and her sister ships, which were troop carriers, meant that we were very backed up when it came to haustoric implant surgeries, so we did our best to treat them through other means until we could get them all implanted. I’m very pleased to say we had quite a few successes on that score, but Leah was not one of them. She seemed to actually get angrier the more we tried to help her.” She paused for a moment, idly stroking Leah’s hair, and let out a very human sigh. “I wasn’t the one who prepared her initial psyche map, nor was I the one caring for her at the time. I might have seen the signs.”

Cass waited a moment before prompting her. “What signs?”

“The self-hatred, of course,” Polyphylla said. “All that anger and xenophobia was just externalized self-hatred, and she hated herself more than I think I have ever seen a terran hate. All the care and help we offered her just made it worse, because she was absolutely convinced that she didn’t deserve it. Worse, her facade made it difficult to spot the spiraling until it became outright suicidal ideation.”

“…she tried to kill herself?” Cass said, staring, trying to square it in her head. None of this, she thought, sounds anything like what she said about there not being a real Leah underneath it all. She seemed to be describing Leah’s polar opposite, if anything.

“And very nearly succeeded,” Polyphylla said, quietly, not taking her eyes off Leah. “She managed to convince Alnus, the Affini watching over her, to let her help with the cooking, and so got access to a knife. The minute he looked away–“ She shook her head. “She made a very deep wound, but he got to her quickly and used a vine as a tourniquet. I took over her care after that. I don’t blame Alnus, but he felt horrible about letting it happen, and he couldn’t continue with her. She needed specialized care, anyway.

“At the time, we didn’t have access to the Accord’s records beyond what we were able to pull from a few planets and ships, so the Office of Transitional Neoxenoveterinary Archeobureaucracy didn’t have anything on her — I had to work from scratch, putting her in a deep trance and combing through her memories.” She finally looked up at Cass. “You are a complicated little terran, Cass, but compared to Leah, I think your problems are very straightforward.”

“Skip the editorial commentary, please,” Cass said. “I have my problems, and I handle them just fine. I don’t need help with them.” The last thing she needed was this alien poking around inside her head.

“Fine,” Polyphylla replied. Cass was shocked — she’d expected more of an argument. “There was a lot to sift through, of course. Memories are complex and interconnected, and one can rarely work in a linear fashion.” She paused, her form tightening for just a second. “What I am about to tell you, I have placed a Sophont Wellbeing hold on — the information is protected from casual searches, and only I can authorize its release. If you share this information with anyone else, I will be extremely disappointed in you. Under no circumstances is Leah to hear any of it.”

“R-right,” Cass said, her breath seizing in her chest for just a moment as she withered under Polyphylla’s stare.

Polyphylla took a moment to compose herself, vines stroking Leah’s hair all the while. “Leah either got lost or was abandoned by her parents at an early age — even now, with Accord records to sift through, the details aren’t quite certain. From there, she went into an extremely neglectful foster home, and eventually spent most of her time living on the streets. She was routinely abused by virtually everyone in her life to one degree or another, and further abused by your economic system and your government. This all taught her, at a very deep and fundamental level, that she was not valued, that she was not loved, and furthermore did not even deserve to be loved at all. I have been trying for three years to negate that impulse, but so far it has always found a way to resurface. It is very deeply ingrained.”

Cass nodded. It was a sad story, to be sure, even in the loose sketch Polyphylla was offering. She had known families that troubled back in Zerqamîsh, but the ummah, the whole community, had at least tried its best to help them. Zakat was one of the Five Pillars, no matter how much the Accord had tried to extirpate any kind of community feeling, especially among religious communities. Without that aid, who knew how bad things could get?

Polyphylla continued: “Eventually, she was convicted of debt-crime, which is a concept I am still aghast at, and forcibly enrolled in a penal battalion of the Stellar Marine Corps — and whatever cruelties your world had seen fit to visit upon her before did nothing to prepare her for what they would do to her.” She scooped Leah up cuddling her close and squeezing her gently. “My poor petal. They’re the ones that taught her to hate others as much as she hated herself. They broke her in so many ways, and that was the only thing she could hold onto. They made her do such awful things, and she internalized all of their nonsense for the sake of survival.”

Cass swallowed heavily, trying to keep her breathing under control. “What fleet was the Tranquility assigned to?” The odds were so long — the Accord was massive, and the likelihood that it had been a part of the fleet that had fired the shot that destroyed Landfall were absurdly remote, but she had to know.

“I don’t remember the specific fleet, but I know it was part of the strike group assigned to what you call the Corvus Sector, if that helps.”

Cass let out a sigh of relief, and felt her eyes’ burning urge to well up in tears. The far side of the Accord. Leah had been a Stellar Marine, the boot on the neck of humanity. It hadn’t been by choice, but to hear Polyphylla tell it, she seemed to have embraced the life, for her own sake if nothing else. Class consciousness could be fostered in anyone’s heart — even Nikolai had come a long way from the shitty, violent screw he’d been when he’d been captured — but if Leah had been part of the fleet that made the Pillar of Fire, Cass wasn’t sure she could bring herself to forgive her for it.

“Like I said, she’d internalized their worldview — that’s why it was so hard for her when we captured her. When she acted out, we only showed her love and care in return, and she couldn’t understand it. Eventually, though, she did realize that we were acting in earnest, that we meant what we said, and that we genuinely just wanted to help her. Then she began to question her own worldview, her own actions, and rather than blame those who forced them on her, she blamed it on herself, and turned all the hate she’d learned back in on herself again. She essentially suffered a total collapse of her understanding of herself.” She paused, finally seeming to notice Cass’s emotional turmoil. “Are you alright?” Polyphylla asked, reaching out with a single vine but refraining, thankfully, from actually touching Cass with it.

“I’ll be okay,” Cass said, her voice a strained whisper. “It’s just a lot to hear.”

“I know. But the important thing is, she survived it, and she made it here to me, and I dug and I dug and finally, at long last, I found her beneath all of that armor she had to put up to protect herself.” She planted a gentle kiss on Leah’s forehead. “This sweet girl, who just wants love, and to love others. To laugh, and play, and just to be. But she didn’t know how to be that kind of person. No one ever gave her the chance, and she didn’t believe she could ever be that person after what she’d done. But even still, even if she didn’t think she deserved it, she wanted it so, so badly. So I helped her.”

“You wiped her memory,” Cass said, fingers clutching tightly around the rapidly-cooling mug of tea. She understood why someone who was suicidal might ask for something like that — it was the one kind of suicide the Affini seemed to respect.

“Not completely, noI m,” Polyphylla said. “Something that drastic would be like taking a hammer to a glass sculpture, and anyway it wouldn’t solve the problem. Every time you think something, a given thought, you make a neural connection. The more you think that thing, the stronger that connection becomes, and the less calorically intensive it is to think that thought. The brain, as an evolved organ, always wants to take the path of least resistance, and so is more likely to find its way down that path. That’s how any biological neural network functions. Even if I were to wipe Leah’s episodic memory, those paths would still remain. The trauma would still be there, and she would still find her way into it, except now it would be wholly without context and even more terrifying. In order to eliminate that, I would have to completely wipe all of her episodic and semantic memory, and a good bit of her procedural memory as well. There’d be nothing left but fragments, some of the trauma would probably still linger, and she would no longer be Leah in any meaningful sense.”

“Hammer to a glass sculpture,” Cass echoed. “Right. So what did you do? Because she sure doesn’t act like a fucking jarhead.”

“Language!” she hissed, twisting her arms in ways that would have shattered bone to cover Leah’s ears as quickly as she could.

“She’s unconscious,” Cass said, rolling her eyes.

“Nevertheless!” She gently laid Leah down in her lap again, vines fussing over her hair, her dress, her collar. “To answer your question, instead of eliminating those pathways, I isolated them. It required a great deal of extremely intensive mnemonic engineering. Think of it like…like hydroengineering, I suppose. Large dams and aquifers, changing the course of rivers. By constructing channels for her thoughts, and by constructing bypasses on routes representing trauma, her thoughts tend instead to avoid them. This is what I mean when I say ‘mnemonic equilibrium.’ Unfortunately, overpressure — here representing stress associated with particular memories — can still force the issue. This is why the watchdog subroutine exists, to eliminate that stress before it can trigger that overpressure. This is a very odd metaphor, and I hope you understand what I’m saying.”

“I think I get it,” Cass said. “So you didn’t wipe her memories, you just made her not think about them.”

“No, the episodic memory I did remove a great deal of,” Polyphylla said, looking down and tracing lines on Leah’s forehead with a vine as she spoke. “Just not all of it, and not in large swathes when I could avoid it. I tried my very best to keep as many of her memories intact as I could without leaving her anything that might stress her mnemonic equilibrium. Especially the happy memories, which she does have. She remembers that she’s from Vancouver-Victoria, for example, and she remembers playing in the park in winter when it was cool enough to stay outside for long periods of time. She remembers her first kiss, which was not easy to keep considering how that relationship ended, but it was important to her nevertheless. Things like that.”

“So how much of her is her?”

“I keep telling you,” Polyphylla said, affecting a sigh, “all of her is her. She remembers her childhood more or less intact, and a bit of her adolescence, and a very little bit of her young adulthood. All gently adjusted, of course, otherwise they might cause dysphoria or confusion. Then, there is a…very large blank, unfortunately, until I started taking care of her. There wasn’t much I could salvage from her time in the Stellar Marines. But, I did find a solution to that, which is, every so often, to let her mind fill in those gaps with memories of things we’ve done together, suitably modified to suit the context.” She seemed to slump just a little, her form losing just a touch of definition, her eyes flushing with violet streaks. “It’s a little sad, not being able to let the first time we did something together be the first time she’s gotten to do something, but it helps stabilize her, and that keeps her happy, and that’s all that matters.”

“So… she’s her,” Cass said, looking down at Leah, her face an innocent mask of sleep as she lay in Polyphylla’s lap. “Or at least…something like herself, anyway.” Her gut clenched in a way that had nothing to do with hunger, and she felt a heat spreading across the back of her head, climbing inch by inch up her scalp.

“She is, to the best of my ability to recreate, who she would be if she’d been allowed to grow into the person she most wanted to be,” Polyphylla said. “She is still a work in progress, even after all this time. But I will never, ever stop trying.” She looked up at Cass, met her gaze. “We all want that, Cass, for every xeno — for you to be you, the best you, the you that makes you happiest. Everything else is just aesthetics or logistics.” She paused, and smiled. “Or flirting. There’s a lot of that, too.”

The heat wasn’t going away, and her stomach wasn’t settling itself. Cass had the uncomfortable feeling of pressure in her head that came of having to reevaluate things in a hurry, the sensation of the current model of reality not quite meshing with what was going on. If she is herself…but then…even so… She squeezed her eyes shut and forced a handful of slow, even breaths.

“Are you alright, Cass?” Polyphylla asked. Cass nodded. She would be okay. She just needed to process things. New thoughts, new models, the new status quo. “Okay. Would you mind holding Leah? I think she’s had long enough to internalize my mnemonic patches, so I’m going to give her the counteragent.” She felt a soft, sweet-smelling weight deposited gently in her lap, and of her own accord her arms rose to support it. “She should wake up just about when the waffles are ready, and after last night I would very much like her to wake up in the arms of someone she cares for.” Cass heard the soft rasping of leaves on leaves as she rose, and the soft thumps of her footsteps. She opened her eyes to find Leah, still asleep but lightly stirring, curling up with her head on Cass’s shoulder. The thin red collar around her neck caught the artificial morning light, and shone beautifully. There was a tightness in Cass’s chest, and her arms squeezed just a little bit tighter.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I haven’t been fair to you.” Love rests on no foundation, she recited to herself. It is an endless ocean, without beginning or end. “I don’t know what this all means, or what I’m going to do, but I know that much.”

Leah stirred in her arms again, her eyes fluttering open for a brief moment. “Cassie…?” She scarcely had time to focus her eyes before her eyelids drifted back down.

“Hey,” Cass whispered, smiling. “Good morning.”

“Nnnnfsleepy,” she mumbled, burrowing into Cass’s shoulder.

“Rest as long as you need to,” Cass said, stroking Leah’s hair with one hand. “There’s no rush.”

<Pinecone has joined #orientation. Yay!>

<Pickledancer> Allie! Hey!

<Pinecone> Heyyyyy

<EternalWeekend> yesssss now we can finally hear what happened!!!

<Pickledancer> Yeah, spill, what did she say?

<glowpocket> please say allicass real, I need this in my life

<Pinecone> Uuuugh I don’t think it went super well?

<Pinecone> We did talk! but she was really stressed out so it probably wasn’t a good time

<Pickledancer> :(

<Pinecone> And she’s living with the prettiest girl ever right now and I feel like I’m so out of her league!

<EternalWeekend> liiiies

<@RosaElectrica> I would like to remind you, Allie, that you are in fact terribly cute and extremely in her league.

<Pinecone> Yes, Miss Gallica. But still! She’s there all the time and I’m not and I think they already might have something going on and uuuuugh

<glowpocket> okay but did you say the L word

<Pinecone> I tried but she wouldn’t let me!

<glowpocket> whaaaaaaaaat

<Pinecone> She said I didn’t know her well enough, but I spent three years at Bulwark with her and she basically kept me alive before the revolution and aaaaaaaaa

<Pinecone> I just wanna smooch her ;-;

<glowpocket> boooooo

<Pickledancer> Hey, don’t worry, okay? It’ll work out

<Pickledancer> You’re really cool and you’re super cute

<sudont> Wait, you were at Bulwark Pinecone? Do I know you?

<sudont> (This is Forsythe)

<Pinecone> OMS GREG hi!!!!!

<Pinecone> <—— McCracken!!! (she/her pls, I’m going by Aletheia now!)

<sudont> Whoa. Okay! Uhm, congratulations?

<Pinecone> Thaaaanks! When did you get here? I heard everyone was hiding

<sudont> Just a couple days ago. And yeah, we were, but they found us pretty quickly.

<glowpocket> so new he’s still got that fresh from the compiler smell

<@RosaElectrica> We were helping him get acclimated to the overnet just a little while ago. I gave him command line access to his hab’s systems so he could play around with them and see the file structure.

<sudont> Which I do appreciate. Anything’s better than maintaining the same █████ radar array for three years running

<sudont> …I thought I disabled that. Is there a server-side censorship daemon?

<@RosaElectica> There is. There are florets in here whose owners don’t want them exposed to foul language.

<sudont> Ooof. okay.

<sudont> Pinecone: I just scrolled up and reread all of that. You’ve talked to Cass? Is she okay? I mean, I know a lot of what Nell said wasn’t very accurate, but uh… I still worry, you know?

<Pinecone> It’s complicated :<

The hab was so quiet. For the first time, that bothered Tsuga. There were none of the little incidental sounds a terran made as they went about their day — no little footsteps, no grunt as they climbed up onto the sofa, no yawns, no softy muttered obscenities when they tripped over their own tiny feet. Pisca and Aletheia had offered to stay again, and Tsuga had been very tempted to take them up on it, but she had instead demurred. I need to get used to this again, she’d told herself. Someday, Cass will either be living on her own, or she’ll have an owner, and either way she won’t be here. She had thrown herself into her work and tried very hard not to think about it. There were reports to write about the atmospheric desaturation process, and her expertise in that kind of work was very much applicable.

Which made the blank page in front of her all the more infuriating. She’d been getting more work done when Cass was here, when she was obsessively taking care of her and pretending that she was her floret, than she was now, with no distractions and nothing else to do with her time.

A soft chime broke through the oppressive silence, a signal that someone was at the door of her hab. She rose, pushing away from the desk and the frustratingly empty screen upon it, and made for the entryway — any distraction, at this point, was a welcome one, even the one she got.

“Tsuga,” Andoa said, smiling, eir eyes a calm and comforting blue shot through with veins of gold. Tsuga noticed at once that something about eir biorhythms was off, like a waveform experiencing interference that made it wobble and shake out of shape. “How have you been holding up?”

“Well enough, I suppose,” Tsuga said. She kept her vines still, not wanting her irritation at the Captain for taking Cass away to show.

“Under the circumstances?” Andoa added, eir vines shifting in an inquisitive way.

“To put it mildly, yes,” Tsuga admitted. “I…I miss her.”

“Of course you do,” Andoa said, a few of eir vines reaching up to stroke Tsuga comfortingly. “I’ll admit, part of why I’m here is just to check up on you, but I also want to bring you up to date personally on some new developments that I think you’ll be interested in. May I come in?”

Tsuga’s needles riffled — she’d completely lost track of where the conversation was taking place. “Of course,” she said, stepping out of the way. “Mineral water?”

“You know the way I like it,” Andoa said, grinning.

“Hard as it comes,” Tsuga said. “Right.” When she returned with the tumbler of water, she found Andoa seated on her sofa, arms spread across the back. She offered it to em, and e took it with a grateful nod, cradling it in knot of vines.

“Marvelous,” e said, slowly draining the glass. “Much appreciated. Have you been keeping up on the figures from the evacuation?”

“Only very vaguely,” Tsuga said, taking a seat next to em. “Estimated 10% at this point?”

“A little higher now, but close enough,” Andoa replied. “It’s more a question of the individuals we’ve been able to take off the surface. Before I get into that, though…” E grinned, wide and toothsome, the golden arcs in eir eyes flashing. “Do you want to see something that will, I’m sure, make you terribly jealous?”

“I’m not entirely sure what you mean,” Tsuga said.

“Well, perhaps it’s best I just show you, then,” e said. E began to unravel emself, splitting down the middle beginning at the crown of eir head and slowly working downwards. The two halves of em began to push away from each other, as if the Captain was being slowly torn in two — and then, all of a sudden, Tsuga saw what e had meant, and e’d been right. She was extremely jealous.

Nell’s head and shoulders emerged from the thicket of vines, fronds, and moss that made up Andoa’s body, embedded in it, bound with her arms behind her back, her mouth gagged with a thick knot of vines so that she could scarcely even make a sound — all that came out as she tried to struggle was a muffled cry, somewhere between a frustrated shout and a whimper.

“Doesn’t she look absolutely perfect?” Andoa said, eir vines squeezing Nell and earning another whine. Nell’s eyes caught Tsuga’s, and they were full of anger and pleading all at once.

“…yes,” Tsuga finally managed to say. She couldn’t deny it — it was such a marvelous and ingenious way to tease a floret. “Has she been implanted?”

“Oh, no no no no no,” Andoa purred. “We’re doing this the fun way. Isn’t that right, petal?” Nell made a pair of noises in short succession, as angrily as she could. “Oh, Nell, such language in front of Tsuga! Anyway, that comes tonight, my pet-to-be. I know you’re excited to try again, but patience.” E reached up with one soft, mossy hand and began to stroke her hair — it was so much fuller and glossier than it had been the last time Tsuga had seen her. She looked so much healthier overall, and it warmed Tsuga’s core to see that she was being well taken care of. “Sssh, shhh. You know you can’t get free, little one, so why struggle so much? Hmmm?” Eir vines tightened again, and Nell squealed helplessly.

Tsuga watched the display with a naked hunger in her heart. Things like this — an Affini playing with their floret — always gave her this feeling. Usually, without a pet of her own, the aimlessness of the desire simply made her miserable, but today that hunger found a target, and she found herself imagining Cass trussed up in such a fashion, Cass trapped like that inside her, squirming helplessly. “How, uhm.. how do you make sure she can breathe?” Tsuga managed to say.

“Oh, that’s easy,” Andoa said. “See this vine here, that crosses under her ribs? I can feel her diaphragm with that, every single breath. And these vines, up here by her nose? I can feel her actual breath across them, so I know her airway is clear.” Without a face, e couldn’t grin as a terran would, and so simply rippled eir vines, eir biorhythms thrumming in amusement. “Why, interested in some pointers? A lesson or two?”

“It…seems a bit advanced for me,” Tsuga said. “And an awful lot of work.”

“Oh, it is,” e agreed, “but very much worth it. Don’t be so hard on yourself, Tsuga, it’s a skill that anyone can learn!” E began to knit emself back together, Nell shouting into the vine gag and struggling helplessly all the while until Andoa’s torso finally closed around her again. “Aaaaah,” Ando said as eir head came back together. “Nothing quite like having an adorable little xeno inside you.”

“I’m glad to know she’s safe and being taken care of,” Tsuga said. “And I don’t know if you’ve checked in recently, but Aletheia is coming along rather well. Already calling Pisca ‘Mistress.’”

“The little red one?” E made a satisfied noise and relaxed back against the sofa. “We have the best job in the universe, you know that?”

“It does have its rewards,” Tsuga agreed. She paused for a moment, then added, “I take it this means that Cass’s information is of somewhat less importance?”

“Well, little Nell hasn’t told me too much yet, but we’ll get there. Yes we will,” e said, grinning down at eir chest. “You can wiggle all you want, petal, but you’re not going anywhere.” E glanced back up at Tsuga. “But you are right. I think we’ll get more out of her sooner than we will with Cass.”

“So we can cancel the wardship, then?” Tsuga worried she might sound too eager, but then again, she couldn’t afford to let such an opportunity to get Cass back — to get Cass safe, she told herself — go by without taking advantage of it.

“You really do want her back,” Andoa said. “Good. Then file that Notice of Intent to Domesticate, and we’ll get her right back to you — just as soon as Polyphylla finishes her evaluation. She is a feralist, you know. We can’t have her marching about the ship, crying ‘Florets of the Tillandsia unite! You have nothing to lose but your owners!’ Imagine how scared the poor little dears would be to hear something like that.”

“Well…” Tsuga couldn’t deny that Andoa was right — that did sound like something Cass would say. “Nevertheless, I have high hopes that spending more time with Leah, and hearing more about her from Polyphylla, might convince her to relent just a bit on the subject of florets — and that is her one, big complaint about the Compact.” With any luck, Polyphylla had taken her advice on that score. There was no way Cass would retain her animus about domestication once she learned just much love and care went into Polyphylla’s efforts to help Leah.

“You think if she comes to terms with the taking of florets, she’ll be alright on her own?” Andoa said, raising one mossy eyebrow.

“In all other respects, her politics align well with ours.”

“The same is true of little Nell here, and look what I’m having to go through with her, hmm?” e said, patting eir chest. “What a little fighter she is,” e added with a hungry undertone. “Oh, I just can’t wait for tonight. And I bet she can’t, either.” E chuckled and rose to eir feet. “Which is something I should go and start setting up. I’m glad to see you’re handling this brief separation well, though. A lesser Affini might have gone entirely to pieces in a situation like this.”

“It’s not as if Cass is my floret,” Tsuga said quietly, ignoring the twinge in her core.

“Not yet, anyway,” Andoa replied. “But all things in time, Tsuga.” E hesitated. “If you need anything, even something as simple as company, please reach out.”

“Thank you,” Tsuga said, after a moment’s consideration. “But I think I’ll manage.”

She remained seated, long after she and Andoa made their respective goodbyes, staring into the unseen distance. The hab was still and silent again. I can endure this, Tsuga told herself. She had endured it for Blooms. She could endure more.

Go to her and take her, her core whispered, like the echo of her own biorhythms against the walls, millions of years of instinct unwilling to play along. She needs you. Give her the joy and relief she deserves.

Tsuga found that she had no answer, no way to contradict that voice from inside. She wanted to take Cass, wanted to hold her close and never let her go, to ease the hurts she hid deep inside herself, to give her happiness unlike any she’d ever experienced before. Cass deserved it. She needed it. All that stood between the two of them was her own fear. Fear that she would make a mistake, fear that her inexperience with terrans would sour the entire relationship, fear that she simply wasn’t good enough for such a wonderful, magnificent little creature like Cass.

I want her, she thought. I’m afraid to take her, but I want her. And she doesn’t want to be taken, but she may need not have a choice, and she may well need it.

She would need to think on this some more. There had to be a solution — there was always a solution.