Cass let out a sigh as she stepped out of the communal meeting space. The Affini had some way of making the inside of a building feel as fresh and airy as the outside, so she knew the sense of a breeze and comfort as she did so was purely psychosomatic, but feel it she did. Six straight hours of arguments over amendments, all chipping away at the central issue of Elysian autonomy, would do that to a person.

“Good job in there today,” Raeburn said, following her out and giving her a gentle shoulder-check. “Damn glad to have you back.” She was looking even better than she had the first time Cass had seen her, and she was putting on weight again. The rough years on Solstice still showed in her crow’s-feet, grey-white hair, and lined forehead, but who knew? Maybe, in time, that would all fall away too. With the Affini, it was anyone’s guess.

“Thanks. Feels good to be back in the saddle.” It didn’t — it was stressful and she was already sick of banging her heads against the statist wall — but she wasn’t going to undermine Raeburn’s morale by admitting it. “I can’t believe they’re still fighting us over this. It was one thing when it was just us on Solstice, but considering no one is going to be strictly autonomous for a long while, it feels awfully silly of them to insist on centralization.”

“And who the hell thinks a state where a third of the people ostensibly in it don’t want to be is going to work?” Raeburn shook her head. “They got along just fine under a confederal model before, don’t see why it’s such a problem now.”

“Still too statist for me, but I’d take it over this,” Cass grumbled. This round of negotiations was beginning to look a lot like the last one, the one that had ended in tens of thousands of deaths and three years of winter. At least this time, she was fairly certain that wasn’t in the cards.

“My little radical,” Raeburn said, grinning. “And yet somehow you keep getting put in charge.”

“I don’t want to be in charge. I don’t want anyone to be in charge. We just keep getting stuck in situations where we need someone to be able to make snap judgements. Or where we need to present a unified front against imperialism, even if it’s soft and cuddly plant imperialism.”

“It’s definitely not where I saw the revolution going,” Raeburn admitted. “Well, we’ll muddle through. We always do. We’ll get this autonomy thing settled, we’ll hunker down and wait out the Affini, and then we’ll finally get started on making this shit work.”

Cass nodded, but she wasn’t so optimistic — statists, and the hardcore Leninist contingent now ably represented by the weedy but focused Mycek in particular, were loath to allow any deviation from a centrally-controlled vanguardist core. Liberalism, socialism, Bolshevism; they are three brothers who go their different ways to grab power over man. The lesson of the Makhnovshchina was never far from her mind of late, as it had been the day of the Pillar of Fire — coexistence with statists wasn’t an option. Sooner or later, they’d turn on you.

Ironically, the only thing keeping them from doing so was the Affini themselves. Neither of them had any leverage, but Cass felt as though no one was willing to acknowledge it at the negotiating table. They had lost. The revolution was irretrievably fucked. The Affini weren’t going anywhere. The best they could do would be to keep the spirit of revolution alive against the vain hope that an empire that had endured for far longer than settled human civilization would someday recede and collapse — that someday, in the distant geological future, whatever was left of humanity after the Affini had their way with them would remember what it was to be free.

Cass had always known she would probably never live to see a truly free world. That was the lot any revolutionary accepted when they took up arms in the name of justice. But to stand there, staring up at the sunline and the curving sky, and to know that even her distant descendents might not know that world was a heartbreaking weight. I fucked up. I don’t know how I could have not fucked up, but I fucked up.

“Cass?” She paused, looked down at Raeburn, who was looking at her concerned. “You okay? You just zoned out for a solid minute and a half.”

“…thinking, sorry,” she said, looking back up at the sky.

“Ahhh. Say no more. Want some alone time?” Raeburn had seen this all before, before the revolution, during it, and after it ever so briefly. She had seen it on and off the job, in the cold outside and in the warmth of a shared bed. Few people really got Cass, but Raeburn had always been one of them.

“…maybe.”

“Which means yes,” Raeburn said, chuckling. “Alright. Take care of yourself, okay?” Cass nodded, listened to her go, and let out the breath she’d been holding. At least now she didn’t have to maintain the facade of the great revolutionary, the lie that she could save the day, the absolutely perfidious bullshit that she had some kind of a plan like she always had. Now she could allow herself to feel the weight on her, and feel how much it ached.

Everything she had done was pointless. Everything she was doing in the ceaseless meetings, debates, and negotiations was pointless. Nothing she did would ever matter, because the Affini would simply do whatever they wanted regardless, and nothing the self-styled government-in-exile of Solstice said or did would have even the slightest influence on events. She’d have better luck making change by convincing Tsuga of something and having her talk to the Captain on her behalf — and even Tsuga was committed to the concept of domestication, of stripping freedom from humanity in the name of safety and comfort.

What was left to her save a life of trying to stay one step ahead of that? What was the purpose of meaningless jockeying over autonomy when the Affini would never allow her or anyone else to be truly free in the first place? Was this Your plan? she half-thought, half-prayed. And if so, why dangle hope in front of us only to take it away in the end?

There was another, more prosaic question as well: When did the sunline get so dim? It was dark enough now she could see right past it to the part of the ring opposite. Funny — when she’d first gotten here, that view had made her sick to her stomach, and now she was able to wrap her head (or, more specifically, her inner ear) around it just fine. The woods creaked gently in the artificial breeze around her, and she almost didn’t notice when one of the trees stepped out and approached her.

“There you are,” Tsuga said, kneeling down next to her. “I’ve been sending you messages. Did you leave your tablet somewhere?”

“….hmm?” Cass glanced at Tsuga, remembered the little mini-tablet in the pocket of her jacket, and pulled it out. Sure enough, she’d missed almost half a dozen messages from Tsuga, not to mention a few others as well. “…sorry. Thinking.”

“Thinking?” She held one hand out behind Cass’s back, and she leaned gratefully back into it. The pressure was comforting, warm, undemanding. “About what?”

“This. Everything.” She let out a sigh and let her eyes slip closed. There was a burning behind them, but she forced it back out of habit. No matter that no one was watching that cared, she couldn’t shed tears. Not now.

“I take it you didn’t have a particularly productive day at your meeting?”

“Hard to have a productive day when everything about it–” She stopped, shook her head. “No. Never mind.”

“Tell me.” Her voice was gentle, filling in the gaps in the soft sounds of the ship’s woods.

And it was all she needed to hear — Cass found the words ready to spill out of her. It was easier, somehow, to vent to this massive alien plant than it was to friends and comrades. “I just don’t know how to live anymore. Everything I prepared myself for is gone. The only fight left is one I can’t win.” Fight back, the voice in the back of her head demanded. Don’t you dare lie down on the job. Fight back!

“And you feel the need to fight?” Tsuga’s voice was warm, kind, comforting — she asked, even though she clearly knew the answer.

“I know I can’t win,” Cass whispered, “but I can’t stop fighting either. I’ve been fighting since I was old enough to even know about the fight. I’ve defined my entire life according to that struggle.”

Tsuga was silent for a moment. “And if I told you that you no longer needed to struggle?”

“I can’t just stop fighting. It’s not something I know how to do. And–” Cass swallowed, choking back the beginnings of tears, sucking down a long sniffling breath. “I don’t know anything outside of it. I don’t know who I’d be without it. Not anymore.”

“Then we’ll find out together,” Tsuga said gently, applying just a bit more force to Cass’s back — not enough to overbalance her, but enough to say “I’m here.” It was enough to rip a few tears from Cass. “No matter what, I will be here to help you discover yourself, and I will delight in meeting whoever you turn out to be.”

“I can’t,” Cass hissed, turning to look up at Tsuga, at her big blue eyes shining in the dim light of shipboard evening. “I don’t– I feel like I’m clinging to the edge of a cliff, and you’re telling me to let go!”

Something in her eyes flickered, and Cass felt a soft rumble somewhere below her range of hearing. “If I am asking you to let go,” Tsuga said quietly, “please trust that I will always be there to catch you. You don’t have to do this alone. You never did, and you never will.”

The dam burst inside her heart, and Cass found herself being scooped up into Tsuga’s arms as she began to sob. Distantly, part of her hoped that there weren’t any terrans around to see it — what a disaster that’d be. Tsuga rocked her gently as she wept, and as her mind separated into two camps, diametrically opposed.

What the fuck are you doing? one cried. Stop crying, you coward! You’re playing right into their hands! There’s always a way to fight back, so fight back! You didn’t just lie down and die for the Accord, why would you do it for the Affini?

But there’s no point, the other responded. Fighting them is a pointless, purposeless act. If you fight, you’ll just end up like Nikolai, like Nell, like Aletheia. Nothing will be accomplished, nothing gained. Everything has been for nothing.

A third voice joined the fray: “Shhh, shhh, I’m here,” Tsuga whispered. “It’s alright. You’re safe. I’m here.” And somehow, that voice was the stronger, her inner turmoil receding as she listened to the gentle rumblings inside Tsuga, to the melodic shifting of her voice. She sucked up a sniffling breath and clutched at Tsuga’s vines, warm and firm. “Would you like something to help you calm down? Nothing heavy, just a little Class-E.” A vine, its tip a slowly unfurling flower, drifted into view. “One breath, in and out, without holding it. That should take the edge off.”

Cass stared up at the flower for a long moment, blinking away her tears. Are you out of your mind?! she demanded of herself, both camps coming together at last to agree on this one thing. The last thing you need right now is to be drugged! But again, something spoke louder than her mind, drowned out its objections. It was the ache in her heart that reached out and took the flower, pressed it to her face, and pulled in a deep breath. Even before she exhaled she could feel the lightness settling throughout her body, the gentle waves of her feelings lapping at her as she receded away from them. “Aaah…”

“Exhale, now,” Tsuga said, her vines tightening and forcing the breath from Cass as she withdrew the flower. “And in. Good girl. Just relax. I’m right here.”

“Uh-huh,” Cass murmured, her head lolling against Tsuga’s chest, her eyelids growing heavy. Somehow, she was getting used to the floaty feeling that Class-E gave her — it didn’t feel quite so wrong as it did in the wake of her panic attack or the meltdown. Here in Tsuga’s arms, all she felt was comfort, with every part of her body and mind.

“You look like you could use a good meal and a nap,” Tsuga said, rising to her feet. Cass felt the motion as if a whirlwind were carrying her off into the sky. “Let’s get you home, shall we?”

“You’re too good to me.” She managed to force her eyes open, turned her head to look up at Tsuga. Why is she so damned pretty?

“No such thing,” Tsuga said. “You deserve all this and more.” She set off, the motion of her stride like a boat at sea, rolling back and forth slowly, easily. All the stress and strain had fallen away, and her heart was light as a feather. The sunline swung back and forth above, dimming slowly as night set in aboard the Tillandsia, and Cass could only just manage to keep her eyes tracking it.

A girl could get used to this, she thought, and for the first time nothing inside her warned against it.

It was chilly, still, even as summer began to take hold. The snow might have melted off in the lowlands, but up here in the hills it still hid in shadowy patches. The air was thick with the cloying scent of false oak, and years of deadfall crunched under Cass’s feet as she walked through the woods.

Not much farther now. She stopped, waited for silence to fall, then whistled out a sharp call, a recognition signal common to Bulwark. She listened, then made the call again. This time, the response came, a single whistle, and Cass immediately gave the countersignal, two descending tones. She pressed on in the general direction of the whistle she’d heard, though if her quarry was playing by the rulebook Cass had taught her, she’d have changed position.

It gratified her no small amount that she had — she heard the snap of a twig to her left and froze. There, hidden in a dugout between two false oaks, was a disheveled-looking Trish, a carbine braced against her shoulder, staring down the barrel at her. “…Cass?” she said, and Cass could tell from her voice that she didn’t quite believe what she was seeing.

“Hi Trish,” she said, smiling and turning her head, lifting her hands out of her pockets slowly. “Good to see you.” In a heartbeat, she had a pair of arms around her, squeezing tight, and Cass returned the hug. She clearly needed it. “Just you out here?”

“Just me,” she said, nodding and releasing Cass. “Holy shit. Okay, come on, we’ve got to get back to the cave. If we stay out too long, not even the tree cover will hide us.”

“Lead the way,” Cass said, and Trish set off without delay. Cass followed her through the woods, down a ravine, and up the side of a stream that was swollen with glacial runoff. The ravine eventually tightened, and they were forced to pick their way through the stream itself, hopping from rock to rock, until they came to the mouth of a cave that was little more than a crevasse.

“In here,” Trish said, squeezing in. When Cass followed, she found a wide chamber behind it, bitterly cold but relatively dry, and a tunnel leading further back into the hillside — Cass could see a tent pitched there, and a camp that had clearly been in use for some time. “Home sweet home,” she added, taking a seat on a camp stool. “Sorry I don’t have much to offer. I only run the stove in the afternoons, when the temperature hits peak.”

“Smart,” Cass said, nodding and taking a seat on a convenient stone. It was what she would have done. With a little bit better supply line, some more thermal masking, this could be a new beginning, the part of her that still thought in terms of tactics and logistics in the revolution’s name thought. I wonder how many we could hold here without the heat bloom giving us away? “What’s your plan from here?”

“Shit, I don’t know,” Trish muttered. She wasn’t quite gaunt, but she was getting there, thinner than Cass remembered her. “I’m pretty sure they’ve got half the people in the valley at this point, maybe more. I see their ships going up and down all the time. Just surviving for now, I guess. What about you, what are you doing here? How’d you get away from them?”

Well, that was Trish — she didn’t waste time. Best to follow her lead and just tear the bandage off. Cass took a deep breath and said, “I didn’t. They asked me to come talk to you.”

For a moment, Trish stared, uncomprehending — then, a darker look came over her. “Fuck,” she hissed. “I should have checked the back of your neck. I always thought Nikolai was full of shit about the whole wormhead thing.”

“Don’t call them wormheads,” Cass said. “It’s not a worm, anyway, it’s a kind of plant, and in any case I don’t have one. You can look, if you like.” She reached up and pulled her hair away from her neck.

Trish hesitated, then shook her head. “No, I trust you. Probably stupid of me, but I trust you. Why’d you go turncoat, then?”

“I didn’t,” Cass said. “We just lost, that’s all.” It galled her to say it, and though it was true, there was still a part of her looking for a way out, a way to fight back. There had to be a way, there was always a way.

“What do you mean, we lost? I’m here, and there’s others. The plan’s still working!”

“It’s not. It never did. It never would have. We lost the moment they arrived. It just took me until now to realize it, and in the meantime I put you and a lot of others through a lot of pointless suffering. I’m sorry.” Fight back, you fucking coward!

“No, no, no,” Trish said, standing up and pacing around anxiously before wheeling angrily to face her. “You don’t get to just say we lost and I’m sorry, Cass, you need to explain this shit to me! You’re coming down here and saying, give up, let the plant aliens abduct you and melt your brain and use you for whatever the fuck comes next!”

“They don’t– look, all they want is to take care of us,” Cass said. “Just like they said when they first arrived, though honestly, for a species that’s been at this for as long as they have, they can be really dreadful about explaining what they mean themselves. Maybe it’s an ideological blind spot, maybe it’s part of the game to them, I don’t know.”

“Fascinating, but not really an explanation,” Trish said, crossing her arms and glaring.

“The point is, they want us to take care of us, individually as florets and collectively as a species. It’s their primary motivation, and I thought I could use that. I thought I could use us as leverage, and that’s why I called for Case Dandelion. The more effort and time they had to spent on rooting us out, they less they’d have to spend finding and helping other sophonts. Do you follow?”

She was silent for a moment. “Yeah, that makes sense, I guess,” she admitted. “So why give up?”

“I underestimated them, both their capabilities and their willingness to expend an absurd amount of effort on a relatively small number of people. To put it in perspective, Tsuga told me that once, millions of Affini spent over a decade trying to save less than a hundred individuals from extinction — and when they couldn’t, they spent another decade and a half resurrecting the species using cloning.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I’ve no reason to disbelieve it,” Cass said, meeting Trish’s eyes and holding her gaze there. “They mean to take care of us, and they mean to do it whether we want to or not, and they’ll expend whatever effort is necessary to do so, no matter how onerous or seemingly wasted it might be.” What had seemed like a path out of the trap had, in fact, been the trap itself — humiliating and frustrating that she hadn’t seen it. “If there was just one of us down here, just one, I think we’d see the exact same degree of effort on their part to find them.”

“…fuck,” Trish whispered. Cass could see the anger and frustration turn to a fearful acceptance on her face. She’d had years to learn. “No leverage, then?”

“No leverage,” Cass said, shaking her head. “And if there’s a way out of it, I can’t see it. Believe me, nothing would make me happier than you and I bolting, finding somewhere they haven’t sniffed you out, and putting together some kind of resistance, but it wouldn’t change anything.” It made her sick to say it, sick to give in, but seeing how Trish was living had only hardened her resolve. Bulwark had been bad enough, the last thing Cass would do was make her endure more of this.

“Wait, they know I’ve been camped here?” Trish said, her eyes going wide. “Why didn’t they come in and get me?”

“They know you’re a risk-taker from the way you drove out of Twin Creeks, and they were afraid you might have had a grenade or two, and that they wouldn’t be able to get to you or knock you out before you pulled the pin. If one of those went off in here, you’d never survive. And you’ve apparently been very good about hunkering down anytime one of their ships is even remotely nearby — good opsec,” she added, smiling. “They had some plans for how to get you that mostly involved getting the most cold-adapted Affini they could find to sit down out there and wait you out.”

“Or send you in, apparently.”

“Oh, no, I had to fight them on that,” Cass said. “They were so afraid you were going to shoot me. But I thought you might prefer this, considering that if they try to take you, I know you’ll fight back, and they’ll probably domesticate you for it.”

“Fuck that,” Trish hissed, shivering both from the chill of the cave and and her own disquiet. “Fuck that entirely, they don’t get to just… decide that!”

“Unfortunately, they do,” Cass said, “because we can’t stop them. The best we can do is try to ride it out, and maybe find a way to live without them around afterwards.” She wasn’t confident about that — the Affini were busybodies and pests, totally unwilling to not stick their noses or vines or whatever into everything — but she had to hold out hope, both for Trish and for herself. “Everyone they’ve captured are putting together a government in exile aboard the ship. Issue demands, state positions, that sort of thing. I don’t know how much they’ll respect it, but it’s something.”

“A government in exile, huh? And you’re, what, throwing big cartoon bombs into the middle of it, I bet?” Trish said, snickering a little despite everything.

“Something like that,” Cass said. It was good to see a smile on Trish’s face. “Hoping against hope that when we’re rid of them — if we can be rid of them — we won’t recapitulate the same statist nightmare we fought to overthrow.”

Trish laughed. “Yep, you’re definitely Cass and not some weird alien plant clone.”

Cass hadn’t even considered weird alien plant clones as a possibility, and for a brief moment tried to reevaluate her strategy in light of the idea. Affini would never send florets into a dangerous situation, so she’d dismissed the idea of infiltration outright almost as soon as she’d learned that, but a wholly original duplicate? Well, if they’d balked at Cass coming to talk Trish down, they likely wouldn’t be willing to create life just for that purpose (and anyway, if they could, they wouldn’t need to domesticate the universe). But, if they could somehow generate a plant clone that was a philosophical zombie, that acted and talked and behaved like the original but was totally non-self-aware, then maybe they’d be willing to–

“Cass? Hello?” Trish was leaning in close. “You okay? You tuned out hardcore, there.”

“S-sorry,” Cass said, shaking her head to clear it. She filed the thought away for another time — it probably wouldn’t be useful, anyway, she reminded herself. A very loud part of her continued to demand immediate investigation of the possibility, but she pointedly ignored it, just as she ignored it when it demanded that she and Trish run and hide and rebuild a resistance against the Affini.

That voice had been louder and more insistent than ever after Tsuga had drugged her out of a panic attack a few days before, and while she’d avoided any further repeats she’d been on edge ever since. She remembered how still and peaceful she’d felt on the Class-E, and how easily she’d accepted another hit of the Class-A flower Tsuga had offered her later in the evening. She remembered how wonderful it felt to be held, touched, stroked, to have her body ensnared in half a dozen coiling, constricting vines that wound her in a close, comfortable embrace. It felt good. It felt right. For the first time in a long time Cass had felt like she belonged where she was. Now, in the sober light of day, Cass felt a terrible horror knowing how close she had come to giving up everything. If Tsuga had asked her to be her floret when she was like that, she might well have said yes.

Now more than ever, she had to be careful. One slip and she might be back on the xenodrugs, and then who knew what she might agree to — and without her, who knew what would happen to her people? “Just thinking,” she finally said, looking back up at Trish. “Strategy. How to persist and resist without fighting, without any means of retaliation, without leverage. It’s all about strength of will, about not giving in. They’ll offer you everything you could ever want, and you have to be strong enough to say no.”

“Oh, is that all?” The smile fell away from her face. “Fuck, Cass. This is fucked up.”

“It’s very fucked up,” Cass said. “But at least it’s a comfortable kind of very fucked up. I will give them that. They’ll give you your own absolutely cavernous hab, bigger than Bulwark, with a 3-D printer that can make literally anything and access to every piece of media you could possibly want. They’ll give you all that by the end of the day and won’t expect anything for it. Really, if they weren’t so into keeping pets, I’d say they’re the perfect comrades. Hell, Nell does even with that.”

“….Nell is okay with it?” Trish said. “I refuse to believe that.”

“Nell is now the Captain’s personal floret,” Cass said, squashing the gut-wrenching feeling down and keeping it far away from her face. “An eager comrade of, as she puts it, the perfect revolutionary vanguard. Believe me when I say that they’re dangerous. They’re perceptive, insightful, and extremely persuasive. They’ll read you like a book, and then start making annotations in the margins, and if you’re not on guard at all times you won’t even notice until they’ve got a collar around your neck, at which point they’ll probably have you excited for it.”

They were both quiet for a long moment. “Fuck,” Trish muttered. “We’re really that boned, then?”

“We really are, and we always were,” Cass said, spreading her hands. “Sorry.”

She shook her head. “No. No, I know you. You did the best you could. Stars, I bet you’re all torn up inside even though you’ve got the whole Big Tough Stoic Captain thing on lock.” She smiled again, a gentle and honest smile. “You’re a badass, you know that, right?”

“I’m not a badass,” Cass replied, unhappy with how easily Trish had read her lingering discomfort over her many failures. “I just…do the things that need doing.”

“Yeah, that’s what real badasses say. If there’s one thing I learned before they threw me down this hole, it’s that it’s not the loud, blustery assholes you have to worry about — it’s the quiet ones. They’re thinking. They’re planning. When they come at you, they know what they’re doing, not just trying to play to an idea they have of themselves.”

“I’m not a badass.” Cass slowly stood up, dusting off her trousers. There’s no such thing as badasses, she thought, only people whose fuck-ups get ignored.

“You’re just the quiet one who’s always thinking, always planning.” Trish’s grin grew a little wider.

“We should go,” Cass said, ignoring Trish. “I don’t know how long they’re willing to wait with me in here with the potentially dangerous terran who might have a grenade.”

“Alright. Help me get packed up?” With the two of them, it was quick work, and before long they were picking their way out through the ravine, hopping from rock to rock. They said nothing. There was nothing left to say. Cass was leading her friend into the arms of the enemy, and while the alternative was worse, it did nothing to assuage her guilt, her shame. Even if it was the lesser of two evils, she thought, it was still a betrayal.

How many more times will I even get to walk on this planet? she thought to herself as she leapt from a large rock to the shallow mouth of the gully. There had been a time, when she was younger, that she couldn’t wait to get off Solstice, to hijack a ship, to fly it back to Earth and start the Revolution properly, to pull the Accord down piece by piece and watch it all burn. But now she was older, and though that anger was still there it had nowhere left to go. The Accord didn’t exist anymore, and the people responsible for its myriad evils were probably either dead or happily domesticated — that rankled, more than anything. She would never have her vengeance. There could never be a vengeance. The Affini wouldn’t allow it. The monsters who had murdered her mother, who had subjugated and abused not only their own people but an entire other sophont species, would live happy lives forevermore, doped to the gills on the finest xenodrugs the Affini had to offer.

But now, as she looked up at the grey-blue sky, she felt the strangest tie to the prison world she’d spent more than half her life on. The funky smell of the false oaks was already so familiar again she scarcely noticed it. There were only so many steps she’d take on it before the Affini closed it to her again, for years, maybe forever if they so chose, and it shocked her to feel an ache in her heart at the realization. To think, she’d miss this awful, miserable world that had killed so many of her friends and loved ones, that had been for decades an engine of misery and exploitation even fiercer than her homeworld.

She shook her head, needed to stay clear-minded. The fight wasn’t over, she told herself. She was no longer a young woman, no longer the bleeding edge of Revolution. The fight would go on long after she left the field of battle. She would have to pass that torch to others, teach them to stay free, to keep their thoughts their own, and to remember that a world without the Affini was still possible.

In that way, nothing had changed. It was the revolutionary’s lot to fight and struggle and die before the dawn came, to labor in darkness without ever knowing the light they sought to create. She was old, and she was tired. She had embers in her belly, not a fire — but embers could still kindle a flame. It was all she had to work with. It would have to be enough. The alternative, thought it loomed large in her mind, was unthinkable.