It had been decades since Cass had last been in space, and then she hadn’t had the benefit of riding in the control cabin with a panoramic viewscreen. She watched as the shuttle lifted noiselessly away from the surface, as the horizon began to curve, and as the grey-blue sky gave way to the inky, star-flecked void. Gravity gave up its hold, and for a brief moment she felt her gorge rise, the way it had so many years ago when the Accord had unceremoniously shipped her hundreds of light years from home. This time, she mastered the reflex. So, thankfully, did Nell and Blaine. Whether the Affini could vomit, she didn’t want to think about, but they seemed unaffected as well. Then, a gentle gravity returned, pushing her back into her seat and calming her stomach for a bare moment.

“Oooh! There she is!” Pisca had a hand around Blaine’s shoulders, and was pointing with the other. “See that? That’s the Tillandsia!” In the distance, a point of light was sweeping in a slow arc across the stars. Cass felt a surge of vertigo as her brain once again started trying to figure out which way was down.

The vertigo only grew worse the closer they fell toward the point of light. First, it resolved into an oblong shape – then, a tapered cylinder with strange projections from one end. As it grew larger, details emerged one by one, until she felt she could no longer keep track of it all – the gently spinning, leaflike projections, the coiled and tentacle-like vines, the series of tapered bells eloquent of rocketry. There was so much of it that she could stare at it for hours and still not see the whole of it.

And then it got bigger.

And bigger.

And bigger. Soon it filled the panoramic window entirely, the gaping maw at the front of the ship looming like some kind of benthic apex predator whose distended jaws would swallow the shuttle like a minnow – which, in short order, it did. The darkness completely encompassed the shuttle – as big as it was, it was nothing compared to the ship it had just entered, a mote of dust trapped in a sunbeam.

As Cass’s eyes adjusted, the shuttle passed by larger ships carefully moored in the incomprehensibly huge docking bay, some the equal of many a terran warship, but still infinitesimal by comparison to the ship they hid within. Poetry was her escape, her mind desperate to ground itself against the onslaught of wonder and apprehension with the cool and comfortable strokes of rote memorization.

(–where Alph the sacred river ran / through caverns measureless to man / down to a sunless sea.)

By the time Cass pulled herself out of her reverie, the shuttle was already touching down in a brightly-lit alcove, which easily encompassed it – then, it and the entire shuttle began to slide down yet further, winking safety lights the only illumination in the gargantuan shaft. Arriving below did did her no favors, though, for as she stumbled down the shuttle’s stairway she lifted her head to the sky and saw the ground instead. The gently curving flight deck – if you could call something so enormous a deck – wrapped all the way around, and Cass could see shuttles just like the one she’d come from sticking to the distant ceiling like flies. She could see shapes, people, moving between them, almost impossible to make out. Her head swam, the gentle tug of gravity somehow worse than the forever-falling terror of zero-gee.

She fell to hands and knees, emptying her stomach onto the glistening, chitin-like decking. The left knee screamed out a protest, and the sour taste of vomit only made her body want to bring up more. She felt someone pull her hair away from her face, felt a cool breeze across her cheeks – it helped, a little.

“Are you alright?” Tsuga asked. Cass glanced up and saw the enormous tree-like xeno kneeling beside her, a cluster of vines wrapping around her hair and holding it back. She just as quickly looked back to the floor, having caught another glimpse of the impossible ceiling. Her mind knew what was going on: just like human vessels, the Affini clearly created artificial gravity with centrifuges. Her stomach, however, was not interested in the science, and her inner ear was siding with her gut. This centrifuge, they insisted, was too damned big to be real. Obviously, the central nervous system, jackass tyrant that it was, had decided to eat something it shouldn’t have, and it was up to the stomach, once again, to make sure that fateful snack didn’t kill them all by hurling up the offending poison.

“Oh, I was worried this might happen,” Polyphylla said. “Ms. Hope, if you need to close your eyes, that’s perfectly alright. It takes some terrans a little while to acclimate to the scale of our shipboard habitation rings. Not that this is a habitation ring, of course,” she added. “Those are below, past that bulkhead. We’ll take an elevator down, and maybe the larger rings won’t bother you quite so much.”

Horror rose in the back of Cass’s mind. They get bigger?!

“Close your eyes,” Tsuga insisted. “I’ll carry you.” She felt more vines wrap around her body, felt herself lifted into the air before she could protest., and squeezed her eyes shut. Tsuga cradled her in her arms, and once the movement stopped, it was tolerable – her bark was roughly textured, but not so much that it hurt, and her gentle swaying paradoxically soothed her reeling sense of balance. She risked opening an eye for a moment, saw Blaine and Nell little better off, but at least they’d kept their feet and their lunch. She let her eyes slip shut again as Tsuga began to take her long steps, each pace followed by seeming eternity, the lull strangely hypnotic before footfall jarred her back to wakefulness.

It was only when she came to a stop that Cass opened her eyes again, blinking as she took in the “elevator” that Tsuga and the others were standing in. It was utterly enormous, the size of a small theater, with glassy sides that showed the shaft outside it. The motion shifted suddenly, sliding laterally, and without conscious thought Cass gripped Tsuga’s arm, her eyes slamming shut again. “It’s just matching speed with the habitation ring,” Tsuga said. Gravity slowly pressed down on Cass, pushing her deeper into Tsuga’s arms, and through her eyelids she could perceive a sudden brightness.

“Oh shit,” she heard Nell say. With some trepidation Cass opened her own eyes. Beyond the window was a world in miniature, five rings curving around the inside of a cylinder that stretched into impossible distance, all filled with greenery and even forests – more, perhaps, than the urban areas. Urban areas, in a starship. A long, softly-glowing pillar stretched down the central axis, like a silvery line scratched in the universe, lighting the whole expanse as if by moonlight.

(And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills / where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; and here were forests ancient as the hills / surrounding sunny spots of greenery.)

“What was that?” Tsuga stroked Cass’s head with a vine, and she couldn’t stop herself from flinching. Had she recited that out loud instead of just thinking it?

“Probably quoting Shakespeare again,” Nell said. It was odd to hear her voice coming up from below.

“Coleridge,” Cass grunted.

“What?”

“Kubla Khan. Coleridge.”

There was a moment of silence. Then, Nell said, “What does coal have to do with any of this?”

Cass didn’t answer, too lost in thought. Not of the stately pleasure dome, nor even the unfortunate albatross, but of the hard and fast numbers and equations of physics. She was no professional, but she’d had plenty of time to read and digest all manner of books in her twenty years on Solstice. She had a lay understanding of the kind of energies necessary to travel faster-than-light, and of the engineering challenges of doing so with successively larger and larger starships. The requirements, both in terms of energetic input and degenerate matter necessary to punch a hole in space-time large enough for this leviathan were astronomical – on the order of capturing the total energy output of a main-sequence star for a few brief seconds. And that was without considering the complexity of the calculations for a ship this large to go anywhere near where one wanted, and the metallurgical advances needed to keep a ship this size from tearing itself apart not just during a jump, but even just drifting in orbit like it was doing now.

As the elevator slowed, mere moments from touching down on the edge of the nearest ring, Cass came to three realizations. The first was that the Affini were terrifyingly advanced, far more than a simple electrodynamic flight system like the shuttle’s had implied. They clearly had an understanding of physics that let them play with energies on a scale terrans could scarcely comprehend, let alone equal. In every physical science, they were leaps and bounds beyond humanity – it was obvious just from the view out the window.

That led to the second realization. We never stood a chance, Cass thought. The Cosmic Navy, the force that had wiped out Landfall and killed so many of her friends and comrades with a single shot, mighty and implacable in any direct contest of arms, was so obviously and utterly outclassed by the Affini. Any stand-up fight against them was doomed to fail. She was shocked it had taken the Affini three years to beat the Accord.

(Weave a circle round him thrice / and close your eyes with holy dread, for he on honeydew hath fed / and drunk the milk of Paradise.)

The third realization fell into place shortly thereafter. It’s a good thing we never planned on making it a stand-up fight.

There was a train – that much Cass remembered – but the odd, echoing rumbles from inside Tsuga kept lulling her half to sleep, half consumed with thoughts as she picked apart the implications of the Affini’s technological advantage. She jerked back to awareness of her surroundings, and there were trees outside rushing past the window. Again she drifted off, and this time when she came back there were buildings. Asleep again, and again aware, jarred by footfall as Tsuga carried her. Though the ground vaulted up to become the ceiling (or the sky – Cass still wasn’t sure how to think of it), her inner ear had finally broken with her stomach and defected to her brain’s side, and she no longer felt as if she was about to return to dry heaves. She started following the other rings, their rate of spin subtly different, and drifted off a final time, only to come back to herself when Tsuga carried her into a brightly-lit building.

“Huh?” She tried to sit up, and remembered that she was in Tsuga’s arms, lashed down by vines. Only now did she realize that some time must have passed, and she felt her face grow warm with embarrassment that she’d drifted off. She hadn’t descended that deep into hyperfocus for a long time. “Put me down, please. Where are we?”

“The veterinarian,” Tsuga said. “You were due to come here anyway, to ensure you aren’t carrying any pathogens that might spread among the terran population aboard. Are you feeling more acclimated? Do you think you can stand?” Cass nodded; Tsuga gently unwound her vines and set her down on the ground. Her knee immediately began to complain, shoots of pain rocketing up her leg, forcing her to lean against what looked like a perfectly ordinary reception desk to take the weight off of it. It was one of the few normally-scaled pieces of furniture in the place, she couldn’t help but notice as she grimaced and let out a hiss. It was warm here, much warmer than on Solstice. The temperature change must have aggravated the joint.

Nell paid Cass’ pain no mind. “The vet?!” she spat angrily. “You told us we were going for a medical checkup, and you take us to a vet?”

“Where else would we take you?” Tsusa said. “Sophonts go to the vet for this sort of thing.”

“Indeed they do,” came a deep, croaky voice from behind the desk. Cass looked up and saw another Affini, this one broad and hulking, a damp hill of moss and vines that was only vaguely terran-shaped; his “head,” such as it was, was little more than a hillock atop his wide shoulders, from which hung two thick agglomerations of vines that looked almost nothing like arms. “I’ll assume these are our three visitors, but it looks as though this one’s volunteered to go first if she’s having acute pain.” Before she knew what was happening, Cass found herself being hoisted into the air once again, enfolded in the, yes, definitely damp arms of the newcomer.

“I’m fine,” she protested, still clenching her teeth as the sudden, jarring motion of being lifted set off her knee again. “It’s nothing! Put me down.”

“Hi, fine,” the Affini rumbled as he carried her behind the desk and down a long corridor, “I’m Arvense Telmatei, Fifth Bloom, he/they.”

Even though her pain, Cass felt her thoughts jar to a halt. Does he seriously think my name is ‘fine?’ He is an alien, after all. “N-no, my name is Cass. Cassandra Hope.”

“Mmmm. Well, that does spare me the trouble of asking,” Arvense said, turning the corner into an honestly-almost-stereotypical exam room, but built to the same massive scale as everything else. Instruments and drawers lined the walls, and an elevated platform occupied the center of the room. Arvense set her down upon it, then turned and began tapping away at a tablet. “Hmmm,” he said a moment later. “No, that doesn’t make sense. There are seventeen Cassandra Hopes listed, but all of them are accounted for and none have ever been to Solstice.”

“Oh,” Cass said, laughing a little at herself. “Sorry. That’s a revolutionary pseuedonym. It’s just been so long that I– okay, try looking under Layla Al-Tabari. You seriously have the entire Acccord’s population database?”

“Lifted it right from your central servers,” Arvense said cheerfully. “Paperwork is our speciality, you know, and the Office of Transitional Neoxenoveterinary Archeoburaucracy is very good at their job. Hmmm. Well, plenty of Leyla Al-Tabaris, but again, I don’t see how any of them could be you. Is there any other name they might have you down as?”

Cass sighed. Of course the central bureaucracy had refused to honor the name change. Even if she hadn’t been a convict, they probably wouldn’t have – it was the kind of bureaucratic hatefulness the Accord seemed to thrive on. Still, it had been years since she’d heard the name, much less spoken it herself. She’d honestly almost forgotten it.

“Mmm, I see. Let me try coming at it from another angle. Ah-ha. Well, that was much easier. I have here an Al-Tabari who arrived on Solstice some twenty-three years ago. May I assume that’s you?”

“Yes, that’s me,” she said, feeling as though a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. How was it that an alien intuitively understood dysphoria when half the terrans she’d met looked at her as if she’d grown a second head when she tried to explain it?

“I’ll go ahead and add a note that the name of record is incorrect,” he said. “And alas, not much in the way of medical information attached to this file.”

“I’d have had to see a doctor regularly for that,” Cass replied, massaging her knee. The pain was receding, but still very insistent on making itself felt.

“Well, that’s not acceptable,” Arvense said, tucking his tablet halfway into his chest and letting the moss and vines slowly absorb it with a series of squelching noises. “Rather than a single pathogen check, I think I ought to do a full workup. You’re clearly not in good health, Cass, and that’s leaving aside the acute pain in your knee. How long have you been having that?”

“A couple years,” Cass said, shrugging. “It’s just getting old. We do that. I assume you do too.”

“Oh, we do, in a manner of speaking,” he said. “Still, if you have a chronic complaint, I really should take care of it.”

“Look, it’s fine, honestly. It just does this sometimes. It’s not a problem.”

“Mmm, well, in my experience, the terran knee is a very problematic little joint,” he said, wiggling his head-blob up and down in what must have been intended to be a nod. “But if nothing else, I admire your good cheer. If I had an osseous endoskeleton with a primary load-bearing joint whose associated tendon system was horrifically prone to lasting injury, I’d be hopping mad about it.” He paused a moment. “Nothing? No? Hmm.” He rubbed his practically non-existent chun.

Cass stared up at him. The way he was talking, it was almost as if– “…you’re telling jokes?”

His silvery eyes lit up with shades of brilliant gold. “Yes! I find that terrans respond extremely well to humor, florets particularly. It’s fantastic for stress relief. I believe the terran term for it is ‘bedside mansion.’ Something to do with dollhouses, I suppose. Idioms so rarely translate well. In any case, I’ve had great success with humor. You, on the other hand, you’re a very tough egg to crack! I might have to break out the really funny jokes. I know a good one about three feralists who walk into a bar together – but, no, I should save that for when you’re really blue, so don’t hold your breath.”

Now that she knew to be listening for jokes, Cass got it straight away, and let out a little snort.

“There we go!” Arvense said, clapping his hands(?) together with a wet thump. “Feeling a little more at ease?”

“Strangely enough, yes, a little,” Cass admitted. “I didn’t expect to have a comedian for a doctor.”

“Veterinarian, my dear, veterinarian. A doctor knows one species– that is to say, Affini– and a host of various compatibility issues grafts might have. A veterinarian, on the other hand, has to know the intimate details of biology, biochemistry, kinesics, and everything else having to do with health care for not just one but every possible species of sophont they’re likely to encounter. I’ve treated terrans, rinans, beeple, spectrum jellies – once, I even got to work on a regtath whose owner was passing through. It turns out it had an allergy to turmeric! It was quite a challenge getting to the root of that problem.”

“Ha ha,” Cass said, rolling her eyes but giving Arvense a smile. She didn’t want him to think she hadn’t got the joke again. “Fine. Veterinarian. I suppose you want me to strip off?”

“If you’re comfortable with it,” Arvense said as his vines rummaged through the drawers. One withdrew what looked something like an IV kit, but grown instead of plastic. “I’ll also need to borrow a little bit of your blood. Don’t worry, I’ll put it right back where I found it.”

The examination was, for as methodical as Arvense made it, surprisingly brief. He examined every square inch of her, working her knee gently to test range of motion and making a note of every scar, from the bullet wounds to the surgical – the unlicensed physician she’d had snip her had done the best with what Cass could source, but he’d left his mark nonetheless, and Arvense was duly horrified. “Going to have to fix that. And this is coming out,” he’d added, tapping the catheter port for her PVC birth control implant. “You’ve actually had this for wenty-two years? Unbelievable.”

All in all, not too different from the few doctor’s visits she’d had growing up, if one discounted the fact that said doctor was a shaggy mass of plant material. The IV line, despite its odd appearance, worked much the same way – out, into some inscrutable machine, and back in, while Arvense hmmed and nodded over his tablet. “Well, no wonder you’re having joint problems,” he said as Cass pulled her clothes back on. “Your hormones are a mess.”

Cass shrugged as she started to pull up her trousers. “Menopause happens. I just jumped the gun a little.”

“Well, we’ll fix that. Don’t pull those up just yet, though,” he added, pulling open another drawer and removing a sealed canister. “We’re going to do something about that knee.”

“I figured it was a ‘take two and call me in the morning’ situation,” Cass said, eyeing the canister warily. “What’s in there?”

“This, my dear, is a symbiotic support organism.” He opened the canister and pulled out a mass of greenish fuzz, which he unrolled into a broad, thin mat of what looked like moss. Without hesitating, he began to wrap it around her left knee. Almost immediately, it went cold, and Cass couldn’t help but jumping. “Don’t worry, it’s just an anesthetic,” Arvense said soothingly, giving the moss another wrap and tapping it gently. “Otherwise, it’d sting quite a bit as it works its way in there to start repairing the joint.”

Cass flexed her knee experimentally, learning the feel of the strangely stiff moss. She winced a little – the joint still hurt. “I just wear this, and my knee gets better? You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe that.”

“There’s nothing quite like treating newcomers,” Arvense said, producing what was clearly supposed to be a smile. “So full of doubts, and so astonished when it all works as advertised. But given the abuse you’ve all suffered – and you in particular – I suppose I can’t be too surprised. Anyway: this will help support your knee and prevent further injury, as well as repairing damaged tissue. I want you to stay off it as much as possible for a few days to let it do its work. Moving around a little is fine, but no long walks! Understood?”

“I am here to investigate your ship, you know,” she said, pulling her trousers up over the weird mossy bandage. “Though, it’s a lot bigger than I was expecting. We all thought it’d be some cramped cattle-car.” The trip out to Solstice, wedged into a so-called sleeper pod in a low-gravity cargo bay for three weeks, was engraved in the special part of Cass’ brain reserved for nightmares. It was the same for many of her comrades.

“Oh, no, never,” Arvanse said sternly. “We believe in having lots of room to moo-ve around. In all seriousness, I do admire your pluck, but your health must come first.”

“I was chosen for this job, I can’t just not do it,” Cass protested.

“I’m sure a clever little sophont like you can figure out a way to do your work while also not aggravating a chronic injury,” he replied. “And I’m also sure whoever’s looking after you will be happy to help.”

“I’m a grown woman,” Cass said, gauging the distance from the top of the exam table to the floor. “I don’t need looking after.” Before she could push herself off, a few of Arvense’s vines wrapped around her and deftly set her on the floor. “Thanks,” she mumbled, trying very hard not to get worked up over the unexpected touch. The exam hadn’t been fun, but she’d known what was coming. It was always like that with doctors – you just had to grit your teeth and endure it.

“I’d be happy to do it myself, of course,” Arvense said, “but alas, I don’t think you’d find me a very good assistant. I’m kept very busy by your adorable peers.”

“Mmm. You mentioned there were Terrans aboard,” Cass said as she took a few cautious steps. The mossy knee brace did help. “All pets of yours, I assume.”

“Oh, not all of them,” Arvense said as he peered into another drawer. “But most, yes. This is a front-line ship, after all. We spent much of the pacification campaign directly involved in domesticating your Cosmic Navy, and then quite a bit of time around Terra as well. You would not believe the things I’ve heard come out of such sweet little mouths. Now then,” he went on after extracting a vial and pressing the tip of one of his vines against the top, “this is a Class-G xenodrug. It’ll help get your hormone constitution back where it belongs, and it’ll stimulate regrowth of your gonads. Eventually they’ll take over secreting hormones, but in the meantime, weekly injections. Your arm?” As the vine swung towards Cass, she caught a glint of light along an almost hair-thin needle at the tip.

She stepped away immediately, almost not feeling the twinge in her knee. “You keep that the hell away from me! I had off-the-books surgery to get rid of those things, what makes you think I want them back?”

Arvense paused. “Did I neglect to mention that– I did, didn’t I? You will not be regrowing your former anatomy. You will be growing ovaries, like you should have had to begin with. If you want wider structural changes, for example a uterus or an active menstrual cycle, that would require a different xenodrug; this one is purely therapeutic.”

Cass stared up at the veterinarian, her jaw slipping just a little. “You’re going to give me a shot, and that’s going to make me grow ovaries.”

“Yes,” Arvense replied matter-of-factly. “I understand your Class-G analogues are very primitive, and I’m sorry you had to suffer with them for so long, but please understand that you now have free access to far superior medical options and healthcare than you did before. I suppose I should have been clearer to begin with, since in my experience, this is often the most difficult part for terrans to grasp: you will be taken care of. We don’t tolerate needs going unfulfilled. Now then: your arm?”

Almost mechanically, Cass raised her arm and rolled up her sleeve, blinking and staring into the corner of the room as she considered what Arvense had said. You will be taken care of. Well, that was a significant step up from the Accord, to be sure. As she felt a slight pinch in her arm, and a cool feeling diffusing throughout it, she began to lay out a list of questions she needed answered, based on what she’d just learned, everything from the structure of the Affini government to what exactly domestication entailed, and–

“There we are,” Arvense said, ruffling Cass’s hair with one hand(?). “Good girl, not a single complaint.” Immediately, Cass tensed up, her shoulders jerking painfully and her eyes squinching shut as the burning, tingling sensation of her scalp being massaged rolled down her neck and into her body like a waterfall of pure revulsion. She recoiled, tripping over her own feet and backing up against the exam table, flinching as she flicked her hands and rolled her tongue along the roof of her mouth, trying to feel anything else.

When she finally managed to force the feeling down, reaching up to run her fingers through her hair just to make sure the unwanted sensation was gone for good, she cautiously opened her eyes. Instead of the confused or irate walking mass of plant and damp she expected, she saw Arvense calmly tapping away at his tablet. “You might have told me you experience tactile hypersensitivity,” he said, glancing down at her. “That examination must have been absolute misery.”

It took her a moment to find her voice. Arvense waited. “Doctors… doctors are like that,” she managed to stammer out. “I expect it. It’s fine. I’m a grown woman. I can handle discomfort if I know it’s coming.” She swallowed heavily, the sour taste of anxiety flooding her mouth. “The… head… thing. It just surprised me, that’s all.” She sucked in a halting breath, and let it out in a slow hiss. Her pounding heart slowed down, beat by beat.

“And I’ve treated many terrans with similar traits,” Arvense said gently. “If I’d known, I could have performed the examination in such a way as to not cause you distress. Are there any other details I, as your physician, should be aware of?” Cass shook her head – though, she wasn’t certain what this weirdly affable xeno would consider to be important details. “Well, I think we’re done then. Let’s try walking as far as the waiting room. If you’re still experiencing pain, tell me.”

The walk back to the waiting room, short though it was, confirmed everything Arvense had told her about Affini medicine being leaps and bounds ahead of terran medicine. Her knee felt better, better than it even felt during the short months of summer back on Solstice. The brace was stiff, and tickled a little, but it worked, and worked well enough that Cass felt she probably could walk long-distance, even if she wasn’t supposed to.

She heard the argument coming down the hall, long before she could pick out individual words. “–the same thing as capitalist production, the necessity to expand to acquire new markets, new resources, only you’re after other species to make pets out of them–”

Oh, lovely, Cass thought. They let Nell get started. She didn’t disagree with that particular point – it was a pretty accurate description of the Affini in terms of Marxist theory from what she’d heard of them – but Cass had argued with Nell enough times that she knew Nell had probably been to worse places and was intent on returning there over and over again before she let anyone get a word in edgewise. “Nell!” she shouted.

“–ultimately perpetuating the bourgeois– huh?” Nell blinked as Cass interrupted her, and glanced away from Polyphylla, who seemed to have an amused expression on her face for all that Nell was haranguing her about the plight of the proletariat. “Oh, good, you’re here, you can back me up! This demsoc has been useless!”

“Hey,” Blaine protested, without much enthusiasm.

“Explain to this wolf in sheep’s clothing that providing for basic needs is meaningless if doing so replicates class structures of capital!”

“Wait, I thought you made clothes out of sheep,” Polyphylla said, looking confused for just a moment. “And why is the wolf wearing clothes?”

“Nell, go with the nice comedian so he can make sure you don’t have typhoid or something,” Cass said, clapping a hand on Nell’s shoulder and steering her towards Arvense.

“Wait, comedian?”

“Well, I’d love to start with the joke about construction,” Arvense said, twisting the shape that passed for a mouth into a smile as he reached down to take Nell’s hand, “but I’m still working on it. So, how about this one?” He began to lead her away, and as he did so, he went on: “An Affini and her floret walk into a cafe together…”

Cass sat down next to Blaine and let out a sigh. “How long was she going?”

“About as long as you were gone,” Blaine said, scratching his head. “Sorry, I just– every time I tried to get her to calm down, she just got even more into it.”

“That’s Nell. She may not be wrong, but she’ll be not wrong in the most abrasive way possible.”

“That was meant to be abrasive?” Polyphylla said. “I thought it was quite cute, if a bit confusing.”

“Extremely cute,” Pisca agreed. Even Tsuga grunted her assent.

“You’re far more patient than I am, then,” Cass said. “What brought it on, anyway?”

“Polyphylla was explaining about how they’re going to set aside a place for us to stay, and then Nell started asking about their economy and rent and a whole bunch of other things, and honestly I’m not sure when it went from asking questions to Chapter 2 of Capital. It probably wasn’t actually Chapter 2,” he added, “but that’s as far in as I’ve ever been able to get.”

“That’s farther than most do,” Cass said. “Including many Marxists.” She had briefly tried to memorize the weighty tome, but it had defeated her, and there were more interesting works to commit to memory anyway.

“I’m clearly going to have to do some reading of my own,” Polyphylla said. “None of the contact briefing materials had anything about use-values or trade-values or any of what she was talking about in it, I’m somewhat embarrassed to say.”

“Considering the Accord does its level best to kill us whenever it can, it’s not exactly a popular ideology,” Cass said. “But I’d be happy to walk you through the basics with a dash less dogma. Maybe when I’m not so tired, though.” She’d leaned back against the plush backing of the bench, and the damned thing was so comfortable she felt herself starting to drift off again. She pushed herself back upright, willed herself to keep going.

“If you’re that tired, perhaps we ought to get you to bed,” Polyphylla said, her voice full of concern. “Would you like something to help you sleep?”

Begging off the Class-Z (whatever that was) had taken most of what willpower Cass had left after such a long day – which was how she ended up being carried again, drifting off again. Arvense had insisted, first of all, that she not walk all the way to wherever she was going, and second, that an Affini keep an eye on her to ensure there were no unfortunate reactions to the medications she’d been given. Pisca had immediately volunteered, and just as immediately been disqualified by the other two. Polyphylla had demurred, citing her own obligations and a nebulous statement regarding her physical condition (which Cass still couldn’t determine, having known about Affini for all of twelve hours).

And so, once again, she fell asleep in Tsuga’s arms, lulled off by fatigue and by the gentle echoing inside that massive chest, the bark rough but not uncomfortable. Her last thought before sleep claimed her was a grumpy reminder to herself: Don’t let them make this a habit.