I know how it feels when only one thing is real.
Seeming

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Edna St. Vincent Millay

It's been a week and a day since she lost track of time. No one here will afford her the luxury of eye contact, let alone the literal or figurative time of day, but she's glimpsed the date on her intake forms, stamped in reverse on the wrong side of a screen, scanned in the seconds before she was steered away down flat-lit corridors into a solitary ward with a single window too small to admit fantasies of flight. She's slept since then--or lost a few more hours, at any rate, between the setting and rising of Abraxas' sun behind the barred fraction of a skyline she can see from her cell--so she must have been admitted yesterday. A week and a day, then, since the last time anything made sense.

"I know it's getting late," the captain said, waving her toward an unoccupied cubicle at the far end of the station floor, "so I won't keep you for long. I'm sorry to take up your time with such an unprofessional request."

"Not at all, sir." Melisse followed him behind the partition into a closet-sized space crowded with surplus UMN terminals and filing cartons, yellow-grey under a tacky film of dust. "If there's anything we can do to ensure your peace of mind while you're off duty, then it's our duty to make that happen. Besides ...." She hesitated, skimming the labels on a rack of archival storage drives dated a few years prior to her graduation from the Federation Police Academy on Fifth Jerusalem. They'd been with the department for longer than she had. The irony was dull--half the equipment in the station was older than she was, or at least had more seniority on the job--but she quelled a tense laugh. "We're practically a family here."

"Yes." He lowered his head until the fluorescent panels in the ceiling cast hard shadows under his eyes. Melisse bit her tongue, certain that she had offended him--the captain had a real family now, one he was about to make official, de jure as well as de facto--but the corners of his mouth bent upward in an intimation of warmth. "Yes, I'd say that we are. In a way, that might be my fault, for asking so much of you and the others. I apologize if I ever made you feel that it was more than you could handle, or more than anyone in your position could reasonably be expected to take on."

"No, sir." Melisse hoped she had imagined the bittersweet inflection of his voice, the strain of unaccustomed sentiment. More likely she had projected her own anxieties onto the captain's impassive calm, as if he were a mirror rather than an opaque and impenetrable monolith. Still, it wouldn't be the first time she had seen him shaken. "I mean--that's not what I meant. I don't feel that way at all. It's just that ... that I look up to you, we all do, and I don't want you to worry about anything while you're away. So if there's something on your mind, then please--"

"Ah, well ...." He drew in his bottom lip and glanced sidelong, rubbing the back of his neck with the palm of one hand at his collar. "Normally I wouldn't bother you with something as mundane as this, but Dr. Rozas suggested that I get a second opinion if I couldn't make up my mind about it, and ... so ...." He caught himself and turned his head to look in her eyes. Now she knew she hadn't imagined it: he was fraying, friable, fallible in a way she hadn't seen him before their transfer to Abraxas and the start of their investigations here. "Sorry, uh ... this might be a strange thing to ask, but you said you had pets before, didn't you?"

She has a visitor. She's not supposed to have visitors--not in this condition, not until she's stable, whatever that means when the world has splintered around her--but he's here now, unheralded and uninvited, yet not unwelcome. His is the only living face she recognizes anymore, the only ally she has left above ground. Everyone else she knew on this planet is dead or buried, one way or another, a cadaver or a ghost.

Lactis stands without ceremony, the door sealed behind him. Melisse never heard it open. He carries something under one arm, draped in a grey blanket, a rectangular container too small to conceal a body, too large to smuggle past the front desk unchecked. They must have let him in. Someone, somewhere in the institution, must have allowed this breach of isolation for her own good--

A crease appears in his brow as he makes eye contact. He sets the draped box on the floor at the foot of the undraped bed (no sheets, they said, until she's off suicide watch, as if she hadn't already watched a suicide or several point-blank), straightens with an exhale or a sigh. The line in his forehead deepens and she realizes she's thinking aloud, under her breath; he's heard everything that crossed her mind since he crossed the threshold. She bites her lip and shrinks in place, seated on the edge of the bare mattress, palms spread flat against her thighs, shapeless in sterile green scrubs. "Hey."

"Melisse, I'm so sorry." He braces to approach her but doesn't--afraid she'll bite, or snap, or lose what's left of her mind, maybe. "I heard what happened after your deposition, and--"

"In-ter-ro-ga-tion." She labors to articulate the syllables, slurring when she has to raise her voice. Not that anyone listened when she made herself clear. Speaking up only gets her punished, or pathologized; the truth is a sickness. "I'm in the doghouse now. See?" It's not funny, but she hears herself laughing and can't seem to stop to catch her breath. "All I had to do was read from a script, say it happened the way they said it happened, and I'd be free to go. No further questions, Your Honor." She drums a fist on the mattress, banging an imaginary gavel. Entirely imaginary--she testified for a week and never saw a lawyer, let alone a judge.

"I'm sorry." He's starting to sound like the captain, and it's not just the repeat apology. His voice sinks into a lower register, distorted by whatever's making her tongue feel stiff and heavy, something in the air like molten glass, but cold. "You did the right thing, Melisse. What they wanted from you, what they're doing to you now--that was wrong. It's still wrong."

She twists her head to stare at him, to confirm he's still who he was at the beginning of this conversation, that his face and his intentions haven't changed. "Careful what you say in here. Room's bugged." She winces, palms at her eyes; they're wet and stinging with the smoke of scorched electronics and burning fuel. "God. Bugs."

He's silent through the roar of combustion in her ears. When he speaks again his voice is thin and flanged, with a trace of synthetic sharpness. "I know. There was nothing we could have done, but ...."

"It's not okay, Lactis." A lurch of rage contracts her solar plexus like a fist to the gut and she's on her feet swinging, swaying to the window. "All of them, they--" The window is there to remind her that she can't escape. The skyline flickers, shifts invisibly, an unchanging mirage. This sliver of the night view of Archon is hers alone. She might as well enjoy it, without him. She might as well stare at the cinderblock wall on either side of it, without him. Everything's the same sallow grey at this hour, whatever time it is, whatever time is.

"Melisse." Lactis sounds like himself again, half consoling, half negotiating for her sanity, as if she's taken herself hostage, as if any part of her remains within reason. "I'd like you to try to listen to me, as closely as you can. I want to help you, but I'm going to need your help."

She peels away from the window, and her gaze falls on the draped box at the foot of the bed. Lactis kneels beside it, smoothing the blanket with one hand. Melisse staggers along the bedside, catches herself before she stumbles over the box. "What's in there?"

Lactis shakes his head, lowering his voice as he raises his eyes to meet hers. "Who."

"Cats," she said, reeling from the collapse of the range of questions she had expected into the one he'd asked. "I used to rescue them. Where I grew up, my home planet, there were strays and feral colonies all over our district. Most people saw them as a nuisance, but then they'd turn around and pay a fortune for some custom-engineered designer breed of the same animal. I guess it felt like injustice. Maybe ... that was the first time I realized that something in the world was unfair, and that I wanted to do something about it. That I could do something, even if it didn't amount to very much." She stopped herself abruptly, too late. She had barely answered his question before proceeding to several others he hadn't asked.

"I see." The shadow of a smile returned to haunt the corners of his mouth, and he nodded. "It doesn't surprise me that you've been compassionate as well as conscientious from an early age. Did you ever worry that you wouldn't be able to care for them?"

"All the time, sir, to be honest." She sensed a cautious probing around soft edges, for a way to pose a heavier question gently. "That's part of the responsibility, the ... duty you have, to protect that life. Whether it's a person or something else, any life you save is ... well, I'm sure you understand, sir."

"Yes." He nodded again, more slowly this time. "I learned a similar lesson myself, a long time ago." The burden of that other question, as yet unasked, seemed to wear on him, slowing his speech. "But I never had a real one. We just ... couldn't afford that sort of thing, not ...." He cut off with an inhale. Whatever he'd been about to reveal must have been out of code, too personal for his profession. "My father surprised me for my birthday one year. I was barely old enough to remember the day I got him, but I do remember growing up with that dog. An early-model synthetic, a Vector Series 4-R10 Cyonoid. Not very sophisticated by today's standards, but to me, he was just as good as the real thing. I thought he was the best." The captain's expression faded with his voice, and his eyes firmed as he shook his head. "Sorry. I'm getting distracted. What I wanted to ask was, given your experience, do you think that's an appropriate level of responsibility for an eleven-year-old boy?"

Something scuffles under the blanket, inside the box. The bars of a cage rattle. Pressing his left index finger to his lips, Lactis folds back the blanket with his right hand to expose the side of a kennel carrier. Eyes like yellow-varnished melon seeds peer back at her, and a damp nose pushes at the grate. A plumed tail waves in a blur of white and auburn.

"How did you ...?" Melisse drops to her knees, steadying herself against the foot of the cot as the room lists off-center. "I thought they took him as evidence when they searched the apartment."

"Yeah." Lactis slips his fingers between the bars for Nex to sniff at. Melisse wonders whether a dog can tell the difference between humans and Realians, but Nex is a Realian, too. Maybe he senses that Lactis is made of the same stuff. "They seized everything, stripped the place bare. The Archon PD homicide division had him in a storage locker for a couple of days, boxed up with the rest of the 'evidence.' An organic one might not have survived that kind of neglect, but this little guy is built tougher than he looks. Right, Nex?"

The dog laps at Lactis' fingertips with an emphatic wag of his backside. Melisse extends a hand toward the bars of the crate. "But how did you get him back? Weren't you--"

Recalled to Vector Industries for maintenance. She's heard it so often in the past week that it no longer sounds like a slap in the face; it barely registers that he's not supposed to be here, that this meeting is impossible. A defect in his central nervous system. The domain shift at the time of the incident appears to have compromised the fidelity of his observational subroutines, creating inconsistencies in his database that could present as false memories. Do you know what happens, Ms. Ortus, when a Realian begins exhibiting symptoms of delusional psychosis? Did you know that their minds can get sick, just like ours do? Fortunately--or perhaps unfortunately, for us--it's much easier to diagnose and repair a synthetic brain than it is to heal a human psyche.

Nex nips her with his front teeth, catching her fingers in jaws too small to do any harm. With her nerves on ice, it doesn't feel like much of anything. A dull pressure, like a needle she wasn't bracing for.

"They haven't revoked my security clearance yet," says Lactis, and she's already forgotten what she asked, or why. "Incidentally, that's how I got in here. I'm afraid I can't stay for very long, so ...."

"For Joaquin?"

He nodded. "Dr. Rozas and I have discussed it at some length. We both agreed that he's mature enough to handle caring for a pet with our help. Even so, I wanted to make sure that I was doing the right thing."

"Hence the second opinion." Melisse tried not to blush as she smiled. Flattery wasn't like him; if the captain had come to her for advice, he meant it. "Well, that makes three out of three, sir. It's a valuable experience to have at his age. I'm sure he'll do fine."

"Thank you, Melisse. I'm sure you will, too." He peered past her, to the floor outside the cubicle. "Of course, I'll be on call around the clock should an emergency arise. It doesn't even have to be an emergency. If there's anything you think should be brought to my immediate attention, at any time, don't hesitate to--"

The frantic whir of a motor preceded a thud as something steered into the cubicle partition, with a digitized yelp of dismay. Melisse flinched as the rack of storage drives teetered and a few volumes clattered onto the tiles. Frowning, she stepped into the corridor. "Bugs! What are you doing wandering around back here? You know how the captain feels about eavesdropping."

"It's all right," said Jan behind her, stooping to replace the dislodged optical drives. "I shouldn't have been so secretive about it."

Melisse glared at the robot's face panel, which displayed a distinctly sullen arrangement of pixels. "Anyway, you're supposed to be recharging, aren't you? What would Erich say if he knew you were up so late?"

Bugs' inflexible frame appeared to sag, his shoulder joints rotating into a shrug with an approximation of a human sigh. "That it's past my bedtime," he recited in a flat singsong, "and I can't expect to do a full day's work on anything less than a full battery." He pantomimed rolling his eyes, cycling through a sequence of frames that reminded her of the archetypal paddle-ball computer game from Lost Jerusalem--the paddles moving in unison, the ball somewhere off-screen. "Hey, how come Erich gets to go home early while you two have to finish all the work? I thought the captain was officially on vacation. Don't you need a full battery, too?"

Emerging from the cubicle, Jan made a sound that was as close to laughter as Bugs' affectation had been to a sigh. "That starts tomorrow, not tonight. Besides, I'll sleep better if I can make sure everything's taken care of before I leave."

"Really?" Bugs emitted a humming noise, an indication that he was parsing the captain's words through several layers of abstract analysis deep within his neural net. "Well, all right. But you'd better take care of yourself, too. We wouldn't be a team without our captain." The processor hum quieted, and his face panel cleared. "Are you really buying a dog for Joaquin?"

"Gotcha," said Melisse. "The captain never said what kind of pet he was going to buy. So that means ... you've been spying on his browsing history again, haven't you?"

"H-hey!" Whereas, a moment before, he had managed to shrink with contrition, now he seemed to draw himself up in affront. "You don't know that. It is a dog, isn't it? Erich told me Joaquin really wanted one. He said if I was good, maybe I could have a pet of my own someday."

Melisse exchanged a glance with Jan, who shrugged. "I don't remember telling Erich anything like that," said Jan, "but I guess I could've mentioned it at some point. He's got a good memory for those kinds of details. A little too good, sometimes."

"Tell me about it." Melisse rolled her eyes and grimaced. "I thought Lactis was supposed to be Mr. Enhanced Memory. I'm sure he doesn't appreciate being shown up by an ordinary human."

"What? Erich's not ordinary," said Bugs, pouting. "He's extraordinary, just like everyone else here."

"Right." She patted the upper curve of Bugs' hull plate as if ruffling a child's hair. "Did Erich tell you that, too?"

"No way!" He modulated his voice to a squeal. "It's my joke. It's true, though. I couldn't say it if it wasn't."

"All right, now." Jan stepped past Melisse and put his left hand on Bugs' right shoulder. "We're all working too late for our own good, so let's call it a night and get some rest. Melisse, you can go ahead and sign out. I'll just keep Bugs company while he goes into sleep mode, and then I'll head home."

"Yes, sir." She saluted out of habit, but now the formality seemed out of place. Maybe we really are a family.

"Did he really say he'd get you a pet?" said Jan, steering Bugs toward the maintenance lab while Melisse headed back to her desk.

"Oh, yes. He promised." Filtered through the white noise from the ventilation ducts, the robotic voice sounded indistinguishable from a human child's. "You can check my memory banks if you don't believe me. I marked it for long-term storage with my most cherished moments."

"Well, then, I suppose we have no choice. Have you given any thought to what kind you want?"

"I've researched it extensively," said Bugs, "and I've concluded that I'd like to have a bunny. Do you think Chief Sean would let me keep one at the station?"

The door to the maintenance room sealed behind them, punctuating their conversation with a hiss of equalizing pressure. Melisse smiled, shaking her head as she cleared the day's work from her desktop.

I'll burn into your memory that you're nothing more than a machine.

"Ms. Ortus, you've stated here that the Murdock Industries Type SY-810 combat support unit previously deployed with the 1875th Special Operations Command Detachment initiated a self-destruct sequence in an attempted extrajudicial execution of the suspect. Can you explain what you meant by that?"

She stares as if they've asked her to translate what she's written into a language she's never heard before. "I meant exactly what I said. It was a suicide attack."

"You're saying, for the record, that the robot 'killed' itself."

She dodges the miasma of air quotes, the sneering inflection bending her own words back toward her like reflections in a carnival house of mirrors. "He told us he wanted to die together with his former operator. He did it because he loved Erich, because he wanted to save him--to save all of us--from Voyager."

A throat clears like a gunshot. "Ms. Ortus, you've testified previously that your colleague Erich Weber and 'Voyager' were the same individual. Are you now indicating that this was not the case?"

You're a gentle person. If I had met you twenty years earlier, maybe ....

"No. They were. Are." She wants to push over the table and scream into the record he's still out there, Voyager still exists and he's out there somewhere, not alive, not human, but something worse, something more than what he was, and the ones who let this happen are there too, and you're doing their work for them whether you realize it or not but they don't even speak the same language, all their words of reason and reassurance are false friends. "But to Bugs, to us, the Erich we knew wasn't the same as Voyager. It was ... I guess you'd call it cognitive dissonance between his true self and the identity he fabricated to deceive us, but it wasn't just that. It wasn't that."

But fate is cruel.

"Ms. Ortus, I'm going to have to ask you again to compose yourself before we proceed with the interview. Please try to cooperate this time." There's a silent shuffling of holographic screens across the room. "Now, the manufacturer's specifications for the Murdock SY-810 indicate several things which would appear to contradict your testimony. First, that the unit's generic personality interface was optimized for simplicity, obedience, and ease of use. Its core system is an artificial intelligence that is functionally equivalent to the cognitive competency of a six-year-old human child. Even if the unit had the capacity to simulate complex emotions and to establish pseudo-familial attachments with its human operators, the emergence of anything resembling suicidal ideation would be exceedingly unlikely from the standpoint of developmental psychology. Secondly, and more to the point, in compliance with Federation law, no such models currently in service are equipped with a so-called 'self-destruct' function. Further, all SY-810 units contain multiple redundant overrides and safety mechanisms installed for the express purpose of preventing self-destruction, whether due to human error on the part of their handlers or to an internal malfunction. In other words, Ms. Ortus, we have no reason to believe that the unit assigned to your department could have carried out the actions you claim to have witnessed, nor expressed the highly sophisticated motivations you ascribe to it. Could it be true, then, that your distress over Mr. Weber's deception led you to externalize your own feelings of betrayal and ambivalence onto the SY-810 unit--effectively dissociating from your emotional state in order to carry out an unlawful assignment given to you by the late Captain Sauer?"

Melisse stares into the cone of the overhead light, a panopticon built for one. "He killed himself."

"Yes, Melisse. He did." Lactis' affirmation is hushed, his eyes pained. "You witnessed it. We both did. You weren't making anything up."

She laughs, dragging her fingers through Nex's coat. "Tell that to the judge, jury, and executioner. I don't even remember what I told them to get out of there--whatever's on the record, that's the truth now."

"No. You know the truth." He's looking straight at her, into her eyes, but there's no connection. Her sockets feel hollow, acid-scarred like corroded battery contacts. Something gazes through her. "And soon you're going to be the only person alive who does. That's why they're trying so hard to make you forget. But you have to remember. You've been given a terrible and precious gift, Melisse. If you protect it, someday you'll see justice done."

"Fuck justice." She withdraws, pulling her knees into her chest and burying her face against the stiff scrubs. "What good is justice if everyone who deserves it is dead?"

"Not everyone," says Lactis. "You deserve justice more than anyone, now."

She hugs her knees closer, digging her fingers into her thighs. "Maybe I should be dead. I should've taken the captain's bullet. I don't want to keep remembering. I want to blow it all out of my head, like he did."

He's silent, and she doesn't look up, convinced she's lashed out enough to drive him off or make him vanish like the hallucination she suspects he is. Instead she hears the sliding of a latch, the muted rattle of a cage door swung open, the click of trimmed claws against the cold linoleum.

"Ms. Ortus, how well did you know this man?"

There's a screen between her and her audience now, a hologram not quite life-sized of the largest figure in her life. She doesn't remember his face that way, not anymore. She remembers what the pistol round left of his skull, the blue of his eyes washed out against the red of the sclerae, and that's all she sees, now, when she closes her own eyes. But he used to look like that. She used to think she knew him, as much as anyone seemed to know him, as little as there was to know.

"We had a professional relationship," she says. "He didn't share much about his personal life, but he was always honest with us, with his subordinates, about things that mattered. Everyone trusted him."

"Did you?"

She doesn't hesitate. "Yes. Absolutely. With my life."

"And in your opinion, Ms. Ortus, would you say that he trusted you?"

This time she stalls. "I .... He ... knew that I was less experienced than the others, that I made some mistakes under pressure, but I'd say that that was a fair assessment of my abilities at the time. I think ... he trusted me to do what I felt was right in the moment, and he thought I had potential, and ... and he believed in that, in me, unconditionally." She wants to say more, there's so much more that she needs to speak into memory, but her voice frays as the back of her throat tightens, and she can't go on, not like this, not here. Everything she wants to say belongs in a eulogy, not a witness statement, and he didn't even get a funeral before they collected his remains for recycling. There's nothing to bury, no ashes to scatter across a world that was too briefly his home; what's left of him is property, warehoused in cold storage at the disposal of a biomedical research firm. A part of her that hasn't died yet wants to hope that some remnant of the captain's mortal form, a scrap of tissue or a fragment of his genome, might be granted an afterlife, a posthumous second chance at salvation. It's some consolation, when she remembers the way he looked on the cathedral floor, to know that they won't bother trying to revive his body with its neural memories intact. The captain was thorough; he took care of that, as best he could, leaving too little of his organic central nervous system for any miracle of science or medicine to reconstruct. Not without exorbitant expenditures in nanosurgery, and they wouldn't waste that kind of money on a dead man.

(They won't, she reassures herself again, because if they did, he might remember.)

A slide advances with the swipe of a control pad. A tranche of documents replaces the holographic image of the dead man. An autopsy report: suicide. An application for the legal adoption of his stepson, pending approval. A marriage license. A transcript from the Federation Police Academy. A letter from a guidance counselor in a high school district on a planet she's never heard of--addressed, for some reason, to Sean McCallum. A birth certificate, amended later with a different name and designation. Low-resolution portraits, captured by a prior generation's hologrammetric scanners, of his biological parents, whom she's never met, who are, she has just learned, both deceased. He looked like his mother. His mother looks tired--Melisse has seen the same grey crescents under the captain's eyes--and her file notes a psychiatric diagnosis.

"Ms. Ortus." Behind the slides, a condescending cipher. "Have you considered the possibility that Captain Sauer may have viewed your relative inexperience and your novice status as assets rather than liabilities? That is to say, was he not in fact taking advantage of your willingness to carry out illegal and unconscionable acts of terrorism against the Galaxy Federation and its citizens, abusing your absolute trust in his authority to coerce you into a morally injurious position?"

The screen blurs, rendering the text illegible. Her ears are ringing. "Excuse me?"

"Ms. Ortus, a warrant was issued and you were subsequently placed under arrest for violating the codes of engagement during a hostage crisis, and for conspiring with anti-UMN terrorists. Not only did you and your colleagues resist arrest, you then escaped from detention and proceeded to conduct an unauthorized 'investigation' which led to the deaths of multiple persons, including several members of your own department and the entirety of the Pilgrimage Council, which latter may be construed as an act of war by an agent of the Federation against the Immigrant Fleet. Those are, to put it altogether too mildly, serious charges, with serious consequences for a bright young lady such as yourself. Now, this is your last chance to set the record straight. All you have to do is state that you were exploited by a superior officer with a documented history of mental instability, who coerced you into acting against your better judgment, and--"

"No."

The screen flickers. "Ms. Ortus, again, we urge you to consider--"

"No." She scrapes back the folding chair and stands, gripping the edge of the table not for balance, but to stop herself throwing it across the room. It's light enough, a card table in a house of cards that's been stacked against her from the beginning. Even if she succeeds in bringing it down, they'll clear the board and reshuffle the deck and deal again until she folds--but she has nothing left to wager, no more losses to cut. "That's not what happened. You know that's not what happened. The investigation was shut down prematurely. The real anti-Federation terrorists are the politicians who covered up the truth. You want names? Here's one: Dmitri Yur--"

"Strike that from the record. You've been warned before, Ms. Ortus. Conspiracy theories will not be entertained here. Return to your seat at once."

But fate is cruel, and I met Yuriev first.

She lifts her head from her knees as Nex trots toward her, tail swaying high over his back in a tentative salute. He pauses to bow and stretch, curling out his tongue in a yawn, and Melisse understands at once why he's here, now, with her.

Someone really loved you.

She hasn't spoken aloud this time, but Nex straightens and regards her with his head angled to one side, ears twitching like the wings of an idle butterfly, the namesake of the breed he's modeled after. He seems to know instinctively what she struggles to apprehend in words.

Someone loved you. For a moment or an hour or a few days or a lifetime, and that was forever, brief as it was.

Melisse unfolds, lowering her knees to the floor and crossing her legs in front of her. Nex bounds into her lap, wagging his body with redoubled fervor as he licks the salt from her face and nibbles the ends of her hair (unwashed, uncombed for days, neglected like a synthetic dog in a storage locker). She brings up her arms to encompass his range of movement without confining him, imposing no cage but the assurance of a horizon.

Clouds obscured the night sky over Archon when she left the station, and a mist of rain had soaked into the pavement. She checked the time on her phone's lock screen and headed for the public transit stop at the end of the block.

"There you are." Mikhail rose from the bench as she approached the stop. Beaming, he stepped out from under the overhang and unfurled an umbrella with a flourish. "What took you so long? Other than the captain being a hard-ass control freak."

"That's not nice," said Melisse, brushing past the outstretched umbrella. "We were just going over some last-minute administrative details."

Mikhail persisted, matching her stride as she passed the transit stop and hurried across the street. "And it took you that long? What'd he do, promote you to acting captain? Captain pro tempore? Captain Jr.?"

"I wish." She laughed, shaking her head. "I've got a long way to go before I'm up for that kind of promotion. Were you really waiting out here in the rain all this time? You clocked out hours ago!"

"Nah, I grabbed dinner in between. But hey, I could do with a drink about now. You eat anything yet?"

Melisse slowed and moved closer to his side as they crossed the next block. No one else on the street had an umbrella; it wasn't raining hard enough to merit one. "Spoken like a true gentleman. Well, if you have time, why don't we stop somewhere?"

"For you," said Mikhail, "I've got all the time in the universe."

She reached for his hand at the base of the umbrella.

She's tired by the time he's settled down, the weight and warmth of a small body curled in her lap, the rise and fall of his sides as he breathes. The sky outside the window hasn't changed, or maybe it has, imperceptibly. Maybe the entire world is stuck like this, the planet's rotation stalled at no discernible hour between night and day. Maybe she's dead after all, and this is what the last vanishing sparks across her synapses have unraveled into a pseudo-afterlife, in the fraction of a second as her perception of time coasts to a halt. That means she has all the time in eternity to think of worse alternatives, and by comparison, this isn't bad. Nothing hurts anymore, and nothing seems to matter; of course, it never did.

Lactis is still with her but not quite present, a lingering afterimage at the foot of her bed. She's startled when he moves again, when he speaks after what felt like hours of silence, and she can't make sense of the words. He lifts Nex from her lap and eases them both onto the bed, one at a time. The mattress sags like a hammock when she sinks into it on her side, curled around Nex as the dog coils against her.

"Contraband," she murmurs when Lactis removes the blanket from the empty crate and tucks it around her shoulders. "I'm not supposed to have this." The fabric is thin but it feels heavy, a lead-lined mantle pressing her down into the hollow in the center of the bed. She imagines herself safe from X-rays, from prying gazes, from the cone-shaped light glaring over her incessantly between the gaps in her memory of the week before. She drapes one arm over Nex's back, smoothing his fur. "Can he stay?"

"For now," says Lactis, in a voice she's never heard before but that she recognizes, somehow. "There's a difficult path ahead of you, but for now, rest without fear." His hand brushes her shoulder and she feels a numbing coolness through the blanket. Behind her eyelids, phosphenes feather into frost. "When you wake up, the world will have forgotten and moved on from this moment, but your memory, the knowledge you possess, will remain uncorrupted."

"I'm so tired, Lactis." She presses her face into Nex's downy coat. "I'm just going to sleep forever."

"Sleep for as long as you must. They'll wait for you."

She claws herself back from the hypnagogic precipice and blinks. It's darker now, as if the blanket had smothered out the half-light from the cruel window. Lactis shimmers in soft focus, haloed. He appears younger and slighter than she remembers, but there's no mistaking the silver-white fringe of his hair, even though his eyes have changed. They're blue now, not a deep blue like the captain's but the luminescent cyan of a hologram. Were they always that color? How well did she ever really know him, or anyone? Like a family. "But they're dead."

Lactis withdraws a gloved hand from the blanket. "Alexei will wait for you. Set yourself free, then seek the nexus of all truth."

She narrows her eyes, but the blurred figure at her bedside never resolves into clarity. "You're not Lactis."

"No." He sounds apologetic. "But we've spoken. And this was his message to you."

"Wait." But he's faded by the time she's finished speaking, and the room is very dark. Her hands are numb, all sensation stripped from her skin, but she draws her arms around the space where Nex was and holds on until her consciousness subsides.

When she wakes it's too bright and too cold. The blanket is gone and her arms are wrapped around her waist.

How are you feeling today, Ms. Ortus?

It's the first time anyone who works here has spoken to her since her admission. She doesn't answer.

Good news. A preliminary brain scan and surface-level Encephalon analysis indicates you're responding well to treatment, but you might benefit even more from a higher dosage. Dr. █████ will be in later to discuss ....

Melisse stops listening. She curls her fists at her sides and waits to be left alone.

9 December 2022