For the past ten or fifteen minutes, Quinn had alternated sitting on her hands and pacing back and forth across the room at various intervals. She wasn't quite sure why Tillie coming to her room made her as nervous as it did; it wasn't even her real room anyway, right? And yet somehow she found her stomach boiling inside her, and every silent minute that went by made it roil harder and faster. But at the same time, it wasn't a bad nervousness, not really. Quinn wasn't too terribly used to the feeling of 'anticipation.' A pilot's lot was by nature unfriendly, after all, and her decidedly atypical childhood only compounded that. But it was the only word Quinn could think of to describe how she was feeling.

Clothed again in her new dress—who could blame her for wanting to show off to Tillie?—she rechecked for the umpteenth time everything she'd gathered from the workstation that the Casobani had gifted her: pens and notebooks, reams of extra paper both blanked and lined, and of course the laptop computer, which lay plugged in on the new low dresser that now served as a nightstand. After the childhood she'd had, with no contact with anything outside her one small room, she was nothing if not a skilled typist. She'd tried to look up some stuff about modiology on her own so she could impress Tillie when she got here, but she didn't make sense of most of it and so she gave that up before long (not to mention she ran across a few papers with the names Locke and Sansean Loughvein emblazoned on the front, and frankly didn't want to deal with it on her own). Satisfied again for the moment, she sat back down, watching the stars swirling out of her window.

And then jumped a foot in the air with an EEP! as the silence was shattered by a loud and elaborate pattern of knocks, and her heart jumped into her throat.

"C—coming!"

She whacked the button and the door slid open, revealing Tillie, holding an intimidating-looking stack of books. Mouth suddenly dry, she let Tillie in and winced at the sound of that many books being plopped down. Those must be heavy.

"So! Uhm! Don’t be intimidated by all the material." Quinn's lip quirked into a little half-grin. "I didn’t know what you might be interested in so I just brought a bunch of different stuff. Actually, where did you want to start? You don’t have to know anything specific, but if you have any vague ideas of what you might like to know, it’ll help me sorta, uhm! Steer, y’know?"

Quinn opened her mouth to reply, how does my Savior work? But before any sound came out, Tillie finally seemed to notice what Quinn was wearing, and the half-grin turned into a full bright smile as she gave a gentle twirl. "Isn't it? It just seemed like everyone on the Ange dresses so nice all the time, I wanted to fit in." She paused a moment before adding, "...And I never get to wear anything like this!"

Another moment to bask in the glow of Tillie calling her pretty before she gave her head a little shake and focused back in again, sitting down on her bed and opening up her laptop before turning to ask her first question: "Can you tell me how Ablaze works? How did they turn it from a Modir to a Savior?"

“Oh,” Tillie chirped, face pinching quizzically as she hunched down and danced her fingers down the spines of the bookstack. She plucked one vertebra free, a thin book titled: ‘Metamortality: The Human Link’, and popped up with the wide smile back on her face. “That’s a good place to start! Easy enough, too. Uhm! Here,”

She flipped through the various dog-eared pages, colored tabs, and post-its scribbled over with illegible shorthand, and turned the book to her opened to a diagram of a Modir’s head. The skull was cross sectioned to depict the brain, which, for the most part, resembled what anyone might think of when they pictured one. The only anomaly, aside from the size, was a dark, spherical object at the back, bridging the fissure between the hemispheres. A tally marked it quite clearly as: cockpit.

“So,” she said, plopping down beside Quinn with the book on her lap. “I think a funny way to look at it is like this: when you’re in it, it’s a Savior, and when you’re not, it’s a Modir! ‘Cause, see, you know how Modir can regenerate basically anything, right? Well, they say brains are the exception, but that’s not really true. A Modir’s brain can regenerate, if it’s conscious, it’s just that usually any real damage is enough to put it out for good. Disrupts the Circuit.”

She tapped the cockpit on the diagram. “That’s where the tricky part comes in. We can’t cut too much, or it’s actually dead and it’ll just melt, like what happens when one loses an arm or a leg. So, we cut just enough to fit the cockpit, and then that’s where you come in!

“Pilots can actually slot in to the Modir’s brain, and neurologically close the little gap we make for the cockpit. See, Modir can’t function without the Circuit, so think of yourself like a drawbridge that’s a little bit thinner than the rest of the road. When you’re connected, the bridge is down and traffic can get across, just a lot slower than usual, then when you disconnect, the bridge is up and traffic stops! Sort of.” She giggled anxiously—metaphors were never her forte, and she found herself suddenly thankful she wasn’t doing this in front of a class. “Basically you’re a buffer for the Circuit, and the longer you’re connected, the clearer that signal gets. That’s why you don’t stay in for too long at a time. Completing the Circuit is pretty much just like bringing the Modir back to life.”

As Quinn leaned in closer to Tillie so she could get a better look at the diagram, there was an almost haunting feeling to looking at the illustration, at the innocuous little object that was the cockpit here. It seemed so...little. So insignificant. Just a blot of ink on a sheet of paper. I sit there, she thought, almost disbelieving. That's where I sit when I connect. Despite the gray matter surrounding her in the cockpit, it was sometimes all too easy to forget that she was inside of, and connecting to, a Modir's brain. Sitting back up, she tapped out on the laptop: I'm a brain drawbridge.

On that note, actually...

"And some people are drawbridges that are wider than others, like me and Dahlia?" she asked, taking out a sheet of paper and trying—with minimal success—to replicate the diagram, "and that's why we phase faster. Is that right?"

It was as she was finishing her rough sketch and labeling the cockpit with 'Drawbridge' that she made a sound of muffled realization: But Roaki doesn't phase even though she can still close the circuit. So...? Curiosity piqued, she tried to work her way around it so she wouldn't need to say straight out that Roaki couldn't phase. It wasn't her place to reveal. "I remember hearing that some people can't phase at all, though, I think? What kind of drawbridge are they?"

“Yeah!” Tillie beamed at Quinn’s conjecture, and inwardly exhaled a little sigh of relief. Okay, so she could explain things without tripping over herself and getting it all wrong—that was good! But it still wouldn’t do to leave things half-correct, or only partly described. She chewed her lip for a moment, contemplating how she could convey herself without sounding like a graduate thesis.

“Well—kinda. Uhm! You got the right idea, phasing is definitely tied to your connection. See—and forgive me for getting a little more complex—phasing is like a secondary thing, and we’re not…actually super sure how it works. The way you said it, y’know, with everyone having different sized bridges, that’s more or less one of the prevailing theories, revolving more around the idea that everyone has a different baseline connection. The other one is more like…everyone starts with the same connection, and the variance is just how fast the bridge expands.

“I lean a bit more towards that one cause it makes phasing a bit more concrete. Uhm! Everyone phases differently, right? So I like to think of it like, everyone’s connection clears at different rates, and also, everyone phases at a different point in that clearance. It also stands that once you do pass that point, your clearance rate speeds way up! And we don’t really know why that happens, either.” She flipped the cover over, tapped the title. “That’s where the ‘meta’ part comes in, I guess. And the ‘human’ bit.

“‘Cause Modir, y’know, they don’t phase. That’s a Savior thing—a human thing. But it’s also clearly something the Modir are inherently, physiologically capable of. There’s something unique about your place bridging the Circuit, some way you fit in, that allows it. Isn’t that so cool? It’s like our species were made for each other!” She blinked, and her excited smile withered a bit. “Eugh, uhm! Now that I say it out loud, actually, it sounds kinda creepy. Maybe don’t think of it that way.”

Tillie was grateful when the subject veered, though she did find the change odd. No phasing? She didn’t dismiss the idea outright, but she did spend several moments racking her brain, searching for anything she might have read that would support Quinn’s question.

Eventually though, she shook her head. “Hm. No, I…hmm. I don’t think so. At least as far as I learned, phasing is really a yes-no thing. Granted, some people are really small bridges—or slow-growing bridges, if you prefer—uhm! But those people generally don’t get cleared to pilot even if they technically can. I guess it’s theoretically possible for someone’s phasing point to be so close to the Circuit closing they would never know, but, I’ve never heard of a pilot who couldn’t phase.”

Quinn winced ever so slightly. Okay. That tack didn't work. Bringing it up as a hypothetical was clearly a non-starter. So the only way she would get an answer is if she revealed the secret, which she was LOATH to do. But at the same time, she was so curious...but it was such a betrayal of trust...and it had taken Roaki so long to trust her at all to begin with. She closed her eye for a moment, trying to imagine the look on Roaki's face when she found out Quinn had told someone, and the thought made her cringe. Okay. Got it. No.

So instead, she frowned slightly and looked up at the ceiling. "Are you sure? I could've sworn I heard Besca mention a pilot who couldn't phase at all once." Technically true, but evasive enough for plausible deniability.

But that's as far as she went on that, because her brain had glommed onto something else Tillie had said: that phasing was a physical trait that Modir had, but somehow couldn't use, and it needed a human to get it running.

She wondered if Dammerung could phase.

It wasn't human, that was certain. But it was more human than any other Modir thus far, right? It was the only one who had EVER spoken, and it spoke with his voice and used his weapon so there was clearly something of him left inside. Right?

She wanted so desperately to ask Tillie. But the whole incident was classified. If she let it slip—even just to Tillie—then Besca would be furious, she knew. And there were few things in the world that she wanted less than for Besca to be mad at her. "So when I phase and I hear little voices deep down, those are the voices of the circuit talking to me, right?" She jotted a few lines out on the nature of phasing next to her poorly-sketched brain: drawbridge goes down fast and lets in traffic. A moment passed before she spoke again: "why does modium melt?"

Then, oddly enough, she smiled.

She could practically feel Quinnlash smiling inside of her too. Spending time with someone she liked was just what she needed after the past day or two she'd had. Warm and fuzzy inside, she let her eye close for a moment before reopening it and falling to the side, leaning up against Tillie's shoulder.

This was nice.

Tillie frowned in thought, tongue pressed against her teeth. Well, if Besca Darroh had mentioned it, then surely there was more to the theory than she thought. RISC’s commander might have put her lab coat aside, but in the few and admittedly brief conversations they’d had together, Tillie was acutely aware that the woman’s passion for modiology had not withered over the years. Tillie respected everyone, but she super respected commander Darroh.

“Y’know, why don’t I look into it a little, hm? I never gave it a whole bunch of thought, but, uhm! It could be fun poking around in shelved theories! I’ll let you know if I come across anything interesting, how about that?”

With her fun little side-project established, she turned her attention to Quinn’s next questions. These didn’t surprise her much. Speculation on Modir and the Circuit was wildly popular all over Illun. There were hundreds of years of theories and stories and films all centered around the idea of what exactly it was humanity was dealing with. It fascinated her, too, and she felt bad that she wouldn’t be able to give her a real answer.

“Well, uhm! That’s sorta out of my wheelhouse. See, modiology is split into two big fields, two sides, y’know?” she held up her hands parallel to each other. “You have this side of the singularities—us—and you have that side of the singularities—them. I study the ‘us’ side. I can tell you that modium melts, and to a degree I can tell you how and under what conditions; which, by the way, happens at a molecular level and to any bits of the Modir that become disconnected from the brain. I can tell you that regeneration happens ex nihilo and basically in the reverse.” she giggled. “And, up until you came along I could have told you that regeneration is a static process that returns each Modir to their ‘template state, without variance. Buuuut, now we have Ablaze and we get to study this whole new exciting theory on it!”

She paused, only just noticing that Quinn was leaning into her. Uh oh, was this her way of telling her to scoot over? Maybe she didn’t like someone else crowding her bed; Tillie could sympathize, she was very particular about her own spaces. Quinn was a nice girl, surely if she was annoyed, she would have said so. Tillie held on to that hope, and decided it was best to carry on with her explanation until instructed otherwise.

“But when it comes to that side—the why side, I’m kinda in the dark. I’d say we all are, for the most part. The Modir aren’t really forthcoming with information, and the few times I can think of, ever that people go into the singularities, they don’t come back. Unfortunately pretty much all of our knowledge about the Circuit comes from psychological evaluations of pilots, and, I mean I only studied it a bit in undergrad and, don’t get me wrong they’re super interesting, but they’re also not really reliable. No one knows what the Circuit is, just that it’s there.

“Sorry I couldn’t be much help.” She smiled again. “Actually, it’s kinda funny. You probably know more about it than I do. Technically, that makes you a modiology expert too!”

As Tillie's explanation went on and on, Quinn found that she began to understand it less and less. She'd learned a little bit of science from mom back in Hovvi; so she knew more than she perhaps otherwise might've, and understood most of what Tillie had said prior. The drawbridge thing, the two different sides of modiology, all of that. But that only lasted up to her tangent about how modium melted. She blinked a few times as she tried to follow it, looking for context clues.

And she did find some, enough to understand what was being said in the loosest way. But, at the same time, there were some things she simply didn't get. Perhaps she knew at least some of the words in isolation, they sounded a little bit familiar. But being strung together so fast was a lot to take, and one phrase in particular stumped her entirely.

What she was saying was interesting, honest. The two different kinds of modiology, the why escaping Tillie, and of course the bright and cheery assertion that Quinn was an expert in modiology too, because she was a pilot. Modiology, she decided, was kind of cool.

But still, she didn't understand, and it was bothering her more than she'd like to admit.

So, hungry for warmth and comfort as she always seemed to be, she leaned a little heavier into Tillie's shoulder and the smile dimmed as she plucked anxiously at her dress. "I'm, um, I'm sorry. But...what does ex nihilo mean?" She swallowed hard, trying to beat past the embarrassed lump in her throat. After she invited Tillie to her room to talk about modiology with her, there was something a little humiliating about not getting it. "In fact, could you...explain that whole melting thing again? It sounded cool, but...I didn't really understand the words..."

Oh, whoops. Right. Tillie let herself go and for a moment she’d forgotten that this was a complex and still not entirely understood field of science, through which many of its most capable scholars traveled blindly by hope and intuition, and Quinnlash Loughvein was sixteen. It seemed teaching was more difficult than Tillie had thought. But, oh well, who did anything perfectly on the first try?

“Oh gosh, uhm! My bad!” she broke into another giggling fit. Best to laugh it off, right? The last thing she wanted was for either of them to take this too seriously. Learning was supposed to be fun! The only reason Tillie was here was because she enjoyed learning, it was only fair she at least try to give Quinn the same experience.

“I know it’s a lot. Trust me, hoo boy, the first exam I ever took, I was totally lost. Ex nihilo is just how we classify the regeneration, it just means that something comes out of nothing. Cause, y’know, it’s not like the Modir body is eating anything, or sticking pieces back on. It sorta just happens out of thin air. Isn’t that neat? What else can do that, y’know?

“For awhile there was this theory that the Modir could summon replacement cells to rebuild from. You know how you draw your cannon out? We thought it was like that, just on an iiiiiitty bitty scale. But we can read weapon summons, the same way we can read the energies of a singularity opening, and there’s no spike during the regeneration process. So actually, we don’t really know much about it.

She shrugged, just a bit embarrassed. That was the way it was with modiology; sometimes the facts presented themselves with no explanation, and absolutely refused to budge for reason. The Modir said it could regenerate from nothing, and the laws of nature had yet to prove they could refute the claim.

“As for the melting, well, like I said, I couldn’t tell you why. But if you cut a piece off of a Modir, or a Savior, it’ll break down like ice, or wax. Turns into liquid modium. Can’t change it back, can’t slather it onto the body again. You either bag it for research, or you destroy it. It’s neat to watch under a microscope, actually—and through a few layers of hazard gear.

“As far as anyone can tell, it just happens to anything that isn’t attached to the brain, or attached to something attached to the brain. It’s like without the head, it doesn’t know it’s supposed to be a body! Could be the modium’s just rotted them so much, or…” she snickered, eyebrows shooting up. “Maybe the Modir are secretly just big, nasty cans of soup!”

Quinn's face cleared up considerably as Tillie backtracked and began to explain things again, and a little more clearly this time. Ex nihilo just meant it came out of nowhere. Wasn't eaten by anything, wasn't summoned out of mini singularities: it just happened. It was an exceptionally strange concept for Quinn to wrap her head around; but then again, most things to do with Modir were a little tricky for her to wrap her head around anyway, that was just how bizarre they were.

And now she had to get in one, of course.

With the newfound clarity of meaning, Quinn made sure to write down everything important that Tillie said, so she could read back over it later. The fact that pieces chopped off of the Modir immediately melted was more than well known to her—she'd been on both ends of Savior-on-Modir combat enough times to know that, at least, if not too much more—but it was still so strange, she didn't get it in the slightest bit.

Modir, she decided, were weird.

But then, out of nowhere, "Maybe the Modir are secretly just big, nasty cans of soup!"

Quinn couldn't help it any more than she could help breathing: at the sudden joke, she burst out laughing. She wouldn't have found it funny in most situations; but here, now, filled with stress in a foreign country isolated from everybody—ALMOST everybody—she knew and loved? It was about the funniest thing she'd ever heard, and the release of tension could practically be HEARD independently in that frayed Quinnlash laugh. Her body, already leaning, went almost limp, and she just about flopped into Tillie as she laughed harder at the stupid joke than she had any right, and for longer.

When it had finally passed, she peeled herself off Tillie and sat up again, still choking back giggles. “Sorry, sorry!"

At length, it passed completely, and she exhaled a long breath. "It's just...been a long couple days, you know?”

Tillie could have died happy knowing she made Quinnlash Loughvein laugh at a joke. Not even a joke, really, just a silly little thought. But even if it wasn’t that funny, she found herself laughing right alongside her. It seemed she hadn’t been annoying the pilot after all, and the relief of that realization just made laughing easier. It was nice not to worry, to just cut loose and enjoy herself in the moment. It reminded her of her early undergrad years, and getting locked out of the dorms on rainy days. It reminded her of…

Well, she was having a good time.

Gosh, and she’d been so anxious about coming to the Ange. She hadn’t been anywhere but Runa for almost ever, but Casoban was turning out great! The people were polite, the crew were kind and the scientists just as invested in their work as she was. And she got to do this—hang out with her favorite pilot ever.

She owed the commander big time.

“Oh no,” she said, rubbing the happy ache out of her cheeks. “I totally get it! Uhm! This is a lot of fun! I really appreciate the opportunity to share this stuff, especially with a pilot. It's important, for sure. Do you have anything else you wanna know about?”

"Uhhhh..."

Did she have any more questions to ask? She hadn't even asked much already, but she knew almost nothing about modiology. Her only experience was practical, which was...different. Which was to say, she didn't really know where to start. She wanted to learn more, but she wasn't quite sure where to go from here.

"Maybe..." What did Tillie know the most about? She'd mentioned knowing about 'this side' of modiology, the what and not the why. So asking a why wouldn't be very useful at...

Well, she might ask one more why. Because something that Tillie had mentioned in her first wordvomit, Quinn did understand: that every Modir, Savior or no, was supposed to return to its 'template' state. Except Ablaze. And she'd mentioned that it was a new theory that needed studying. Which meant there were people studying it, right? Even if it was only her.

Quinn pondered how to say it for a moment, then: "You said that there was a new thing to study because of Ablaze. It's the eye thing, right?" She hummed low in her throat, then added a page break to her document before writing a new line: The Eye Thing. That done, she returned her gaze to Tillie, face writ with curiosity and more than a hint of trepidation. "Does anyone know why it isn't regenerating yet?"

Deep inside her, a long, long way down...she felt something stirring.

“Oh gosh, I wish!” Tillie said, and an excited gleam glinted to life in her eyes. “I’m serious, we’ve never seen something like that in a Modir before. They’ve all got template states they return to whenever they’re damaged, always. Arm off? Fine. Leg off? No problem. Even head injuries—like with Dragon’s jaw—boom! Like nothing ever happened.

“But Ablaze…it’s unprecedented. The earliest ideas were that the Modir had some brain damage from when it was captured, but nothing came up on the initial scans, or the secondaries. And besides, it wasn’t a random thing, y’know? It didn’t just fall out outta nowhere. It happened as soon as you connected. For some reason, Ablaze mirrored you.” A wide grin split across her face. “Isn’t that so cool? Centuries of pilots getting the feedback from their Saviors, and you’re the first one to do the reverse! Some countries still don’t believe it, they think we’re just using a patch to cover it up.

“It’s huge, though. It could be the secret to cutting off the Modirs regenerative powers, maybe even more. Imagine if we could find some way to harness that sort of process, weaponize it. We could fight the Modir without the Saviors. All the little places across Illun that can’t afford a pilot program could start defending themselves too.”

She blinked, remembering suddenly that she was not, in fact, alone in her room, monologuing to her posters. “Oh gosh, uhm! Sorry, rambling. It’s still way too soon for anything. For all we know, you just got the first anomalous Modir, which, even if it doesn’t go anywhere, is still super cool!”

Time passed, and though Quinn wasn’t filled with many more questions, Tillie volunteered a handful of new topics. She explained a bit about energy-reading, tracking singularities and the like, then jumped to how the speed of movement that Modirs possessed was still an inexplicable mystery to the entire field. At length it devolved into fringe, if enthusiastic theories and failed attempts at turning complex mathematical formulas into analogies. Eventually, however, their time ran out.

There was a bell chime, then from speakers in the hall outside, a gentle, automated woman’s voice said:

Curfew is now in effect. Non-pilot personnel please exit the floor.

“Oop,” Tillie said, hopping up onto her feet and checking her phone. “Holy moly, I had no idea. Look at that! Time flies, huh? This was so much fun, really—I hope you had a good time too. I’d love to do this again some time, when we’re both free, but in the meanwhile, y’know, you’re totally free to hold on to any of these. I sorta brought them along just in case you wanted to—I’ve got them all on digital anyway, so I won’t miss them!”

She began to gather up some of the less-entry-level books. Not that should would mind if Quinn asked for those, too, but she figured they’d work up to them over time.

Curfew is now in effect. Non-pilot personnel please exit the floor.

“Alright alright, I’m going,” she giggled. “Wouldn’t wanna get us in trouble. Wanna walk me back? I think I need your clearance to use the lift anyway.”

At some point during their study session, Quinn had excused herself to take the dress off so as not to mess it up or something, hanging it up and reclaiming the ubiquitous t-shirt and sweats. So when the curfew announcement suddenly chimed out—she definitely jerked and made a surprised half-sound, what, it had really been that long already?—she was more than happy to take any excuse to spend as much time with Tillie as she could.

"Uh huh, for sure! I'd love to do this again!"

So, walking over to the door, she slapped the button and waited for Tillie to leave before she hopped out herself and let it close behind her.

They walked back in companionable silence. Every so often one of them would say something and the other would respond in turn, but there was something about the hushed ivory halls that seemed to exert a hush on whoever walked through them. Even Tillie.

So instead of speaking, Quinn mulled over what she'd learned. It was...a lot. The text document was more than a few pages long, and there was a disorganized pile of scribbled-over scratch paper clustered around her bed like a nest. Energy. Singularity energy. Weapon-pulling energy. Modir regeneration. Whatever was going on with Ablaze's eye. It was an interesting way to think about it: her—her...?—just doing to the Modir what Modir had always done to their pilots instead. She wasn't sure whether to be proud, intrigued, or terrified; but she found it...slightly off-putting, all the same.

The walk passed quickly enough, lost in thought as she was. In fact, she nearly missed the lift altogether, pitched backwards, and conked her head on the wall. But with that embarrassment out of the way, she looked up into the glass globe that hung above the polished steel door, similar to the one in front of her room, and as it lit up green, the door dinged open. As Tillie boarded, Quinn waved back with enthusiasm to mirror Tillie's own until it finally slid closed, and the silence asserted itself once more.

Heaving a drawn-out sigh, she began the trek back to her room again.

...Felt a little longer that time.

The Ange hung, poised above Illun like a sleeping whale. Though time was scarcely concrete in space, as the cycle of night closed around the station, its levels fell into a calm, solemn quiet. Lights dimmed in the shopping centers, their stores shuttered, the walkways void of civilian and crew alike. Only in the sparsely-lit halls of the labs, and the medical wing, and the offices of those with the schedules of owls, did the faintest proof of life remain.

On the pilot’s floor, that proof was Quinn. In the dim lights and suffocating quiet, her footsteps were the only sign that anyone was here at all. Of course, the others must have been around, likely retired to their rooms, or perhaps sequestered away in the gym across the level. Either way, Quinn walked alone—or alone as she ever was, anymore. The day was behind her, and tomorrow had yet to rear its forbidding head. So, like the Ange, she too hung in limbo, drifting like the station itself.

Their side had rotated away from Illun, and through the windows she could see nothing but the blackness, pinpricked by so many microscopic lights. Something suggested, or rather, pleaded with her, to wait. To stop, and look. There bubbled up within her a wonderment, a familiar longing. Images, or more like emotional sensations eliciting the moonlit lake at Hovvi flashed within her mind. For the briefest moment, if she let herself imagine as much, she might have been able to believe she could feel a small, cold hand gripping hers, as she stared out into the infinite night.

Curfew is now in effect. Non-pilot personnel please exit the floor.

The robotic voice, soft and considerate as it was, still tore the silence apart with jagged nails. The stars were so beautiful. Lights in the dark. Such anintimate thing. In the glass she could see her reflection, and over her eyepatch, there hovered a particularly bright cluster of incomprehensibly distant and luminous secrets.

Curfew is now in effect. Non-pilot personnel please exit the floor.

There were no non-pilot personnel to exit the floor.

Curfew is now in effect. Non-pilot personnel please ‘decide where power lies.’

‘There is no king in the mirror.’ the gentle voice said, and its robotic edges frayed, gave way to something much smaller, and frailer. A young and quivering voice, speaking slowly and quietly, as if she did not wish to be heard by anyone else.

‘Only a throne, a crown, and a promise. And with great pains, I will see this done.’

The lights went out, and the long hall was plunged into darkness, broken only by intermittent panels of starlight. Silence’s reign was brief.

Curfew is now in effect. Non-pilot personnel please exit the floor.

Quinn, who was only ever as alone as she could be anymore, suddenly knew she was not alone.

Curfew is now in effect. Non-pilot personnel please exit the floor.

The darkness ahead of her led towards her room. Behind her, to the lift. The alien wonderment within her curdled, and what remained was the tiny imprint of a panicked voice that did not like the darkness behind her.

Curfew is now in effect. Non-pilot personnel please exit the floor.

It told her to Go.

The first thing that told Quinn something was very wrong was the voice.

It was someone—a voice—that she'd never heard before. And certainly a voice she'd never heard, or expected to hear, over the loudspeaker. Decide where the power lies. There is no king in the mirror. What? What on Illun was that supposed to mean? Kings? Mirrors? It sounded a bit like a poem, she thought, but...off. Wrong. Admittedly, her exposure to things like poetry and literature had been very limited, but there was something about it—some deep piece of her—that told her it wasn't supposed to be. Perhaps it was the tremulous quality of the voice, but she felt certain that it was...a message, maybe for her. A quiet message, like it didn't want something to hear.

A scared message.

Only a throne, a crown, and a promise. And with great pains, I will see this done.

More things she didn't understand. Kings, thrones, crowns, mirrors? She frowned. It was supposed to fit together somehow. Puzzle pieces, but they didn't make any sense. She tried to ponder what it could mean.

And then the lights went out.

Curfew is now in effect. Non-pilot personnel please exit the floor.

And Quinn suddenly had the terrible feeling of someone—something—behind her. An instinctual and crushing feeling that she wasn't alone. And whatever was here now was dangerous. Just like the voice, it was...wrong. The darkness stretched out, and it felt somehow like a living thing. Her breaths came short and sharp.

Go.

And all at once, galvanized by the sudden voice, she snapped into motion, and she ran.

She sprinted through the hall, driven onward by that horrible feeling of something. The lights came on as the power began to cycle, and she spared a moment to glance behind her.

It was still dark. And as she ran, the darkness raced after her, suffocating the fitful nascent light. She didn't know what would happen if the darkness caught up with her, but she was in no hurry to find out.

Doors flew past, and she kept her eyes glued to them as best she could. Everything looked the same here! And just as she felt herself flagging, felt the thing in the dark creeping up behind her: Quinnlash Loughvein. She skidded to a stop, nearly passing the door in her desperation, and at her gaze, it opened—thank god, THANK GOD that still worked—revealing the lights still barely working. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end. It was RIGHT BEHIND HER she bolted in and slammed the button hard enough to sting her hand. It shuttered closed again, and she raced over to the opposite wall, pressing herself to it as she stared wide-eyed in fear as the thing in the darkness...

...didn't follow.

But still, she could feel it. Waiting, hunting, just outside of her door. She knew, sure as anything, that if she opened it, whatever was out there would find her. Her breaths refused to slow. Her whole body shook. As tears began to stream from her eye, she hugged herself tight, digging tense clawed fingers into her biceps. Please, please, please, leave, go away, let it be over—

And then the lights flashed back on, bright enough to hurt her her wide, scared eye. The thing in the shadows was gone. And it was over.

She uncoiled herself bit by bit, and her body, no longer so tense her muscles ached, fell limp from relief. She slid down the window glass, falling to the floor with a thump. She stared at the door still. The fear lingered inside of her; both her own, and another. The instinctual fear of whatever had been out there. The escaping tension and fear bulged in her throat. She clenched her head between her hands like it would fall apart if she didn't hold it in. The tension in her throat grew too great to hold, and wrenched her mouth open.

Quinnlash screamed.

Camille had arrived first, bursting through Quinn’s door with rapier in hand. The twins followed, heads poking in, curious, concerned. The captain sent Sybil to let security down, and the two or three dozen soldiers set about clearing the floor.

When it was done, Toussaint came down to apologize. He said there had been some kind of flicker in the dorm’s power grid, coinciding with the passing of a nearby satellite, which during the flux had managed to accidentally cross its broadcast over the floor’s PA systems. Everything was fine now, he assured, and emphasized how there had been no danger, and that nothing important had been compromised and no danger had been posed. Just an odd little accident, and a—literal—cosmic coincidence.

That satisfied the twins, who regarded Quinn with a mixture of pity and concern, but left when the captain dismissed them. Camille was the last to go, and she did so quietly, casting only a silent look of mild disgust over her shoulder before Quinn’s door shut behind her.

Toussaint, for his part, raced to the bridge faster than he had moved in a good few years. When he reached the circular room at the Ange’s crown, he was red-faced and barely composed enough to keep from wheezing.

“Well?” he barked to the tables of analysts who ought to have been able to prevent anything remotely like tonight from happening. “I want to know who the fuck cracked our comms systems. Now.”

“We’re running a trace on the signal, commander.”

“Have you recovered the feed from the pilots’ hall?” He was answered with guilty silence, and his fists balled. “So we were hacked, possibly infiltrated, and you’re telling me we have nothing?”

“There was nothing, sir. The unauthorized message was triggered but sensors didn’t pick anything up. No life forms on that floor that weren’t the pilots.”

“So I’m to believe amidst this shit storm, that alone happened to be a coincidence? No. I’m giving Internal Security limited access to the dorms, and I want our camera feed’s contingencies to have contingencies. It’s bad enough someone spoke to our pilots, but god help me no one is touching them.”

He took a deep breath. Then another. The Ange’s doctors had warned him about stress, too bad his occupation didn’t care much for medical opinions.

“Get me that trace,” he snapped, and whirled for the door to his office. “I have to make a call.”

---

When next Quinn did sleep, and the blackness of the lake formed around her, it was off. Not in the typical way where the water was too dark, and the sky was poorly constructed, and the moon’s reflection didn’t always ripple when it ought to have. Rather, it looked hasty, haphazard. It had been thrown together at the last moment as if her familiar host did not expect her, or had not properly prepared.

There were gaps in the lake, like it had been sketched in with a pen thinning on ink. Water sloshed across these gaps, which were themselves nigh imperceptible, lacking in color and blankness alike, yet despite the innumerable holes the levels did not sink. The boat was similarly lacking, and though water splashed across the floor, it did not sink either.

Ashore, the town of Hovvi was a mass of blocky scribbles smeared into the dark, rocky landscape. Above, the stars were holes poked into the sky, and the moon looked flat, like it a sticker pasted onto a ceiling. Tonight, it had no reflection.

The two shadows swimming out to the buoy were pristine, though. Perfect as they were every night. They pulled themselves onto its muddled form and chatted away, unbothered, while the boat rocked gently in silence.

Quinn wasn’t given much time to ponder her surroundings, though, before a shape slammed into her. At first, it looked like nothing more than a shadow, until, slowly and as imperceptibly as the faults in the lake, it seemed to remember itself. She took form, arms wrapped around Quinn’s waist, and stared up into the eye of her older self. There was fear, and worry, and blossoming relief on her face.

“We’re still here!” she said, surprised. “You can still dream. You’re okay! It’s okay…”

Her head rested against Quinn’s stomach for a moment, until she finally pulled herself away. Her face screwed up with frustration then, and she cast her eyes down to the shallow water in the boat. Slowly, it began to drain, and the boards knitted themselves tightly together.

“Fear. Look what it’s done to us. How it hurts us. Our mind. We’re still scared.”

Quinn wanted to go to bed. She did. She was already exhausted. But she couldn't bring herself to turn the lights off, in case the thing in the shadows came creeping back under her door. She wanted to believe Toussaint. She wanted it to have been nothing. She so desperately wanted it to have been nothing.

She couldn't.

The darkness slinking down the hallway after her as she ran. The sick feeling in the pit of her stomach she'd felt standing in front of the window, knowing she wasn't alone. The strange broadcast over the PA, just before it. Quinn was the first to admit that she had a tendency to overthink and overreact to things. She could name several such incidents off the top of her head, she thought, as she sat perched on the edge of her bed, head still gripped—though more gently, now—between her hands. But...but this wasn't like those. She'd felt the thing looming just beyond her door as the lights wavered. She wasn't imagining this. She knew she wasn't. And so the darkness held a special fear for her that night.

As her mind wandered in an effort to not think about what had happened, she rewound to the expressions on the faces of the people that had stood in her door. The pity from Sybil. Cyril's concern. And, of course, the look on Camille's face. The utter contempt. I ruined it. I always ruin it.

And so the next 'morning' came and went with her still sitting on the bed, trying to distract herself with her phone. When she finally stood to find something to fill her hollow stomach, she could already feel the fatigue knotting weights to her ankles. Resigning herself to a miserable day, she cracked her joints, tossed her clothes off to replace them with a fresh set, then plodded to the door and slapped the button. Maybe she could get something from the vending machines. Despite the gnawing hunger, she simply didn't have it in her to go deal with all the people in the common area right now.

...or Camille.

---

That night, after the mercifully uneventful day, despite the fear that still bubbled inside her, she closed her eye...

...and opened it to the lake. She blinked a few times, taking in the strange atmosphere that permeated it. The gaps, the strange way the waves moved. The ankle-deep water in the boat that she couldn't actually feel. She cocked her head in confusion.

And then she was slammed into by a shadowy figure that, after a moment, resolved it—herself into the ever-comfortable Quinnlash. It was strange. She seemed so...worried. Almost afraid. Quinn felt—and then briefly acted upon—the urge to embrace her before she pulled away. It was...nice.

"We’re still here! You can still dream. You’re okay! It’s okay..."

The boat mended itself then, and the lack of water once more made sense. The reflection of the moon, though it was still haphazard, was now present. The buoy on which Dahlia and Safie clung resolved into a more reasonable shape.

"Fear. Look what it’s done to us. How it hurts us. Our mind. We’re still scared."

Fear.

Quinn hugged herself. Not hard or tight enough to hurt, she didn't dig her fingernails into her arms; but noteworthy still, given how detached negative emotions seemed to be within the dreams. She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again, and spoke a trio of strangled words:

"What was that?"

“It was dark,” the other her said.

She hopped up onto the boat’s railing, looking out over the lake and mangled shore. Every inch her eyes passed over gradually began to mend itself. The bottomless schisms knit themselves shut, the unseen gale quieted and the waves moved unbothered, until the water eventually settled into the familiar black mirror it was always. The moon’s reflection coalesced before the moon proper, but soon enough the sky did heal. Quinnlash reached up and pinched a few shivering stars from the blackness. They fizzled on her fingers, unfixable or excess, and so she flicked them into the water where they were quickly swallowed.

The restoration seemed to calm her, or perhaps it was the other way around. “It was dark,” she said again, steadily. “We’re not scared of the dark. It’s what the dark means, that’s what’s scary. It’s not about what’s in it, it’s about all the things that aren’t there. All the things outside of it we’ll never know. Darkness is a cage.”

Her eyes turned ashore, and up, to the cliffs where there was no house. Her face twited into a scowl. “We spent our whole lives trapped. Blind. Stupid. We escaped. Maybe it didn’t like that. Maybe the dark wants us back.”

Walking down invisible steps she made her way onto the deck again, and back over to Quinn. Her face was a portrait of determination, but there was doubt in the depths of her eyes, a seeking uncertainty.

“We’re happy now. We won’t go back. We’ll fight if we have to, we’re good at that—it’s what we were made for,” she said. “I don’t…want to be scared. We don’t deserve it.”

As the world around them righted itself at Quinnlash's ministrations, Quinn let her fingers slowly uncurl from her biceps, and her arms fall back to her sides as the remnants of panic and fear grew distant once more. She gave a soft groan and titled her head backwards, staring up at the uncanny stars as they folded themselves back into the midnight fabric of the sky, and the flat sticker of the moon warped and deepened until it felt right.

Something about the way Quinnlash spoke, acted, had a way of calming her down. She tilted her head back down and regarded her. Perhaps, she wondered idly, it was because it put her into the role of the 'elder sister' for once.

Despite that, when her younger self stared up at the empty cliff, she felt a shiver go through her, carrying in its wake a tangle of horror and fury and something else she couldn't quite identify. "Darkness is a cage," she breathed. Was that what the presence in the shadows last night was? Not a presence at all, but rather an absence?

"Maybe the dark wants us back."

She shuddered. But before she could respond, Quinnlash had stepped down from her perch, walked down the air, and looked up at her, once again meeting her eye. "We're happy now. We won't go back. We'll fight if we have to, we're good at that—it's what we were made for. I don't...want to be scared. We don't deserve it."

"No," she murmured softly in response, "no, we don't." She paused, a long pause that stretched the dream. When she finally spoke again, her eye went to the decking, and her voice was filled with a quiet desolation:

"I want to go home."