Cosmosis

Visible

Serralinitus insisted that soldiers accompany us into the borough.

The community surrounded the reactor and military base on two sides. I’d seen it a few times before, but the snow and ice today made it feel a bit more ‘Earth-like’ than ordinary. The general grid layout of the roads felt a lot more familiar when the alien details of the buildings were obscured. If you ignored the color of the sky peeking through the clouds, it could have passed for an Earth city so long as you didn’t look at any one building too long.

Funny thing was, more than a third of the borough was brick, which should have been another point in favor of being similar to home. But the bricks were the wrong shape and color. Still rectangular, but the dimensions were slightly altered, and their color was an earthy yellow instead of red. It was just one more thing I filed under ‘dissonant similarities’ in my psionic journal.

This wasn’t the first alien thing that fell into an uncanny valley. After a few months of stumbling across odd Earth-adjacent things, I knew it wouldn’t be the last either.

Tasser, Nai, and I were still joined by our chaperone, a Casti officer who I’d learned was named Yakne.

He wasn’t fond of me, that much was clear. Serralinitus had told me that Nai wasn’t the only alien who didn’t like my presence on the base, but I was surprised to learn that he didn’t like Nai any more than me.

Still, the Ase’s orders had been clear, and our chaperone would give us space to open the shelter.

Most of Demon’s Pit, both the borough and adjoining base, rested on some flatlands that sat just above sea level at high tide. Closer to the sea to the east the slopes leading down to the water were covered in massive pieces of ice. To the north, the slopes shifted into the rocky coast that Demon’s Pit garrison and reactor sat on. To the south of the borough, there was a gentle hill rising maybe a dozen feet above the surrounding terrain, and that was where this particular shelter had been built.

It was one of the oldest structures in the borough apparently, built back in the days before even the reactor. According to our dour chaperone, there were a few assumptions inherent to its design that betrayed its age. For one, it had been built on a hill to avoid flooding that just didn’t happen.

Despite being so close to sea level, the whole of Demon’s Pit enjoyed particularly good drainage—one of the appeals for the logistics of managing a fusion reactor. The flatland only rested a dozen or so feet above the water. But in this case, at this latitude, that was enough. And when this bunker had been built, the settlement just hadn’t been around long enough to know that flooding wouldn’t be a major concern.

Of course, that didn’t mean water wasn’t a problem.

I hadn’t seen the bunker at first, even from just a few feet away, because the trapezoid-shaped portion that peeked out from underground was completely covered in snow.

Ordinarily, shelters had to be ready to open themselves. Asu Yakne told us that nearly every exterior door in the borough had at least some countermeasure against icing. Heating coils, hydrophobic material treatments, he even described some kind of sound device that vibrated the door in such a way to shatter any ice loose.

This shelter had apparently even been retrofitted with an internal heating mechanism.

“Except it needs to be activated before the door freezes over,” Tasser said. “It prevents ice buildup, but the entrants forgot to activate it.”

“And it can’t be activated now?” I asked.

“The door controls lost power, we’re not totally sure why. An engineer said it might have been metal contracting with the cold. Whatever happened, we still have a lot of time. The shelter ventilation is still clear, and we’ve got a line of communication. The shelter itself has power, it’s just the door mechanism that’s totally screwed,” Tasser said.

“Alright,” Nai said. “Tasser, they already gave you the details?”

“Most,” he answered. “You want to ask more?”

“I can’t make out much like this,” Nai admitted. “Too many material changes.”

Wait, was she…?

I pushed a tactile Cascade into the ground via my feet and felt Nai’s own colossal cascade saturating the snow and ice underfoot. Powdery materials and liquids both hampered the spread of the cascade, and mine hit its limit after just a few inches into the ground. I could barely make out the first layer of frigid ground beneath the ice.

“You should get used to doing that constantly,” Nai advised. “Doing anything else is like walking around with earplugs in for no reason.”

“Tactile cascading…” I said, “it’s just ‘almost’ every Adept that can do it, not every single one?”

Nai nodded. “Even the ones that don’t have their own extrasensory tricks, and the smart ones never stop deploying them.”

“So if we’re assuming psionics are that kind of ‘extrasensory trick,’ I shouldn’t, say, ever have my radar turned off?”

Nai gaped at me, implicitly not dignifying the question with an answer.

“Just…just stay here with Tasser while I find out more.”

She walked away and I gave a very unsubtle glance toward the crowd of Casti personnel who had stepped back from the shelter. They had set up a few collapsible tent-pavilions next to their vehicles. Strewn about were all the tools you would want to break through snow and ice like this.

The borough personnel had given us a wide berth when we’d arrived, but the crowd hadn’t stopped looking at us once.

Funny thing was, it seemed like there were still more eyes on Nai than me…

Still, even with the snow and being a couple dozen meters away, I caught a few hushed words from Casti staring at me. Adept. Alien.

‘Hue-mon.’

That last one almost made me say something, because it meant somewhere the word had gotten into the Casti public.

The soldiers on base had gone through a similar phase for the first few weeks I’d been around. But on a military base, it was a pretty closed community. It was small enough that the whole of the group eventually adapted. But the Casti public?

I was going to be seen as a novelty for quite some time, wasn’t I?

“Why is the door so huge?” I asked Tasser.

It wasn’t a hatch or sealable door. I’d expected the door to be something analogous to the doors between bulkheads on a navy ship. But instead it had a massive sliding door like you might find on a small airplane hangar.

Except this one was seven inches of steel, sealed under half that much ice too. The first Casti to investigate the still sealed shelter had cleared away snow, chipped at the ice, and exposed the panel of buttons that operated the door.

“To accommodate vehicles,” he said. “It’s an old design. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t even invented for this planet.”

I put my hand on the panel, cascading touch into the buttons and wiring. One thing I had gleaned from our otherwise unproductive crack at Earth’s cellphones was sensing electrical current with my cascade. Normally switch buttons worked by completing a circuit. But, with tactile cascading, it was possible to tell if an incomplete circuit had any charge. If so, you could know that when you hit the button, the charge would follow the circuit and do whatever action the button was rigged to trigger.

There was not even an iota of charge in the panel’s wiring. The buttons were dead.

It wasn’t any new information, but I wanted to confirm it for myself—just to know I could.

Nai strode back up the hill and it was time for us to put our powers to work.

“So, why is this a two-person job? Seems like you could burn your way through the ice.”

“The ice isn’t the actual problem,” Nai said. “At least not this ice.”

She knelt down to put her hand onto the exposed metal surface, and this time I felt her cascade spread through the surface I was standing on.

“The ice froze one of the door mechanisms in place…it couldn’t move when they tried to activate the hydraulic. It snapped. Even if we melt all the ice, the door is still going to be jammed,” she said.

“According to the borough administrators’ blueprints, the piston is jammed so it can’t withdraw. Right now, the hydraulics are extended as far as they’ll go, but if Nai melts them some extra room to push into, we could try extending them further. It might at least clear the jam,” Tasser said.

Nai frowned. “Why is this a two Adept job then? I can carve out the extra clearance on my own while someone else hits the button.”

“There isn’t a button. Also, I’m not sure you could trip the circuit without destroying the whole box.” Tasser said.

Nai frowned, “What’s the smallest thing you can create, Caleb?”

“His intricacy is better than yours, take my word for it.” Tasser told her.

“How small can I make something?” I asked.

She nodded.

“I couldn’t tell you the numbers, but…” I thought of how thin I could materialize the pages of my journal. I held my palm flat and made a thin speck of paper, smaller than the width of a pencil. “How’s this?”

Nai held up her hand and created a small marble, perhaps a hair’s breadth smaller than a dime. But it was round and mine was flat…

She saw me staring at the pebble and seemed to rankle over it. “Congratulations, you can make things more precisely than me.”

Tasser held up a hand before the conversation could get any more sidetracked, “You can destroy the pressure contact and the failsafe, then Caleb can short the circuit to activate the hydraulic while you melt and soften the metal so it has that extra room.”

“It’ll have to be at the same time…” Nai realized. “If even a little ice slipped into the mechanism when the first part jammed, it could cool off and solidify the molten slag, and that’ll weld the whole door shut. Even just a couple seconds apart could be too much delay.”

“It [kinda] already sounds like we’re willing to ruin this door to get the shelter open,” I said. “If that’s the case, why not just melt a hole through the door?”

“Because there’s people inside,” Nai reminded me. “Melting all the way through the door could spray liquid metal, even if we don’t make any mistakes. It’s risky, and we’re not in that much of a hurry. They can still breathe, so the clock is about water.”

“Worst case scenario, we can always tube water in through the ventilation…” Tasser mused. “It would be tricky though.”

“So what do I need to do precisely?” I asked.

Nai looked to Tasser. “Which way is the circuit?”

“Buried under snow, plus a few inches of steel. Should be right about there?” We walked around to the far side of the shelter and Tasser pointed out a spot still completely buried.

“How many inches of steel?” she asked.

“Uh, at least two, but I don’t see—”

Nai cut him off by washing the area Tasser indicated in her signature flame. She didn’t sustain the burst for more than two seconds, but that was still enough time to completely vaporize the snow and most of the ice beneath.

“If you burn through the wall…” Tasser warned.

“I’m not that clumsy,” she retorted. “Two inches of metal is more than enough leeway, we’ll be fine.”

“Alright Caleb,” Nai said. “This is your spot. Cascade into the wall here, you should find a box.”

I put my hand on the now exposed metal. Surprisingly, it was still quite chilly to the touch. The fire might have melted the ice, but it had only barely warmed the metal.

“Have you got it?”

I shut my eyes to focus, once again trying to aim my greater psionic construct at my cascading sense of touch. Most of the functions I’d discovered about my first psionic creation had come incidentally when I’d been exploring other things. So it seemed like a good habit to get into.

Sure enough, right where Nai said it would be, there was a box the size of a paperback novel with a great number of cables coming off of it.

It was a bit like viewing a hologram in my head…through my hand.

“I think I have it...”

“Alright, pare down your cascade. Concentrate and restrict the area to just the box itself, you need as clear of focus on this as you can.”

“I…uh, I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Like this,” Nai said, pushing her own cascade into the shelter’s surface. Unlike before, it didn’t spread so rapidly, or in all directions. But rather, Nai shifted the volume that her touch cascaded through.

It wasn’t perfectly freeform, but inside the body of any solid, she could pick and choose what her cascade actually covered.

She demonstrated by narrowing her cascade almost to a beam, running right through the box I was currently perceiving, widening the beam to encompass a bit more, then narrowing it again.

Wait…

This too was familiar.

Doing my best not to interrupt my cascade, I dove into some of the older psionic pieces I’d pulled apart and set aside in my mind.

One of the oldest was tied into my Adept radar. Initially, the radar hadn’t covered a sphere. It had only been a disc, staying roughly level with my height. But I’d learned to change the shape of the radar’s volume, almost exactly like how Nai was right now with her tactile cascade.

Oh, that wasn’t a coincidence…

Just like how I could change the functional shape of my radar, I could do the same thing with my cascade. It didn’t need to spread out omnidirectionally from a point of contact. It was tricky, much harder than manipulating the psionic radar, but I limited the area of my cascade down to just the confines of the box, plus a thin thread running back to my hand.

Paring down the area of the cascade brought the details I could feel into sharper relief, if only just. I didn’t have a handle on just how far I could concentrate the cascade, but it seemed intuitive that the smaller the area I limited myself to, the more I could actually perceive. The proverbial ‘resolution’ of what I could feel through my sense of touch.

“I’ve got the box,” I said.

“Alright, Nai, you get in position on the door, I’ll talk Caleb through how to trip the circuit,” Tasser said.

She nodded and climbed up over the top of the shelter back toward the door.

“Why isn’t Nai talking me through this?” I asked, “No offense, but wouldn’t she be able to perceive this?”

“Actually, no,” Tasser said. “As far as Adepts go, she’s not a very subtle one. Her cascade doesn’t give her any more detailed information if she limits its area. But conversely, she can cover absolutely huge areas with it.”

“Oh,” I said. “That actually makes me feel a little better. Because right now my cascade can’t even fill a volume the size of my head.”

“You get more detail than Nai does though, faster too, I bet.”

I nodded. “What am I looking for in this circuit box?”

“Upper right—wait, no left—upper left corner, there should be a stack of thin circuit boards. You want to focus on the two of them closest to the middle of the box.”

I frowned. The cascade wasn’t giving me enough detail to discern what he was talking about. The stack was just a fuzzy blur.

Then I needed to concentrate the cascade further.

The deeper I dove into the sensation, the odder I felt. At any second it felt like the cascade would snap back to its normal volume and concentration. Like holding a chin up, but instead of my arms and a metal bar, it was an abstract thought covered in grease. I truly couldn’t tell if I was fighting my own body or mind here.

But it was not impossible. I had a few months of practice interacting with my own mind, and I had become familiar with mental ‘spaces’ like this. I was…familiar with the unfamiliar.

Southpaw advantage, I thought again.

I shrank the cascade down by half, concentrating on just the top half of the electrical box. The stack of five circuit boards sprang into my mind as a tactile image.

“I see them,” I said. “Close to the center…on my right as I look at the box?”

“Yes,” Tasser confirmed. “On the two closest to the center, there should be four wires going into each of them, for a total of eight.”

“I see them. Do I need to know where they go?”

“No,” Tasser said. “On my signal, you need to create something to cut or melt the top two wires going into the board closest to the middle, and only the top single wire on the board second closest to the middle.”

“Three wires. The top two on this board,” I said, pointing with my free hand to the illusory image I was ‘feeling,’ “and just one on the next one over?”

“Confirmed,” Tasser said. “It’s critical you do not melt any other wires, otherwise the hydraulics won’t activate.”

“And so this isn’t going to tell the door to retract open, it’s going to tell it to slide further to the side like it’s trying to close, even though our whole problem is that it’s closed already?”

“…Yes.”

“I refuse to be blamed if this goes wrong…” I muttered. “But nothing is going to go wrong, right?”

“Of course not,” he said. “Worst case scenario, Nai just melts our way inside. All this is just to make sure we’re not skipping any safer solutions.”

I gave him a conciliatory nod. “Well, I can melt these wires when you say, but this cascade is hard to maintain so tell Nai to hurry.”

“Ready when you are!” a Farnata voice shouted. Her words had been clear enough, I was pretty sure she’d taken off her mask just to guarantee she was heard.

I was thinking about how useful a cell phone, or even just a basic walkie talkie would have been in a situation like this. We’d used radios to coordinate unthawing the Demon’s Pit doors, where had they gone?

But Tasser was climbing atop the shelter so he was between me and Nai.

“My signal, Nai. When I say ‘zero,’ Caleb is going to burn the wires. That’s our timing.”

I didn’t hear what she said back, but I did hear the familiar electric roar of the Torabin summoning up a particularly strong gout of alien flame.

The last time I’d tried to cut something with Adept powers, I’d soundly embarrassed myself and Tasser had wound up shooting the lock.

But since then I’d learned how to create some rudimentary chemistry with Adept powers, and I had a better chance of severing these circuits by melting or corroding the wire.

I couldn’t tell what metal was on the inside, but it was not a thick wire. If it hadn’t been buried inside the steel wall of a bunker, I could have just torn the wire in half by hand.

“Four…three…two…” Tasser said.

I had my creation ready for his signal. During the countdown, I focused on the tiniest span of each wire and visualized a creation in two stages. For the first, I made water. Less than a gram, divided between all three wires.

Just like the ice and salt, if I wasn’t trying to displace any of the existing solid it was actually quite easy to place the molecules inside an existing object. Dispersed evenly across a tiny area, my stray water saturated the section of wire I was targeting. The second stage was potassium, even less mass than the water.

There were multiple inches of steel between me and the alkali metal I was ready to make, but I was still sweating at the prospect of it exploding so close to me.

My flashbangs produced a more violent explosion though, hotter too. It gave me the confidence to know I wasn’t going overboard here. The sum total mass of the reactants was going to clock in just shy of a whole gram.

Distributed across three wires, these were tiny explosions for a tiny job.

“...one… zero! ”

I let my potassium fall into place inside the wires. The stray atoms of water I’d made found enough stray ‘K’ and I felt three flashes of heat inside my cascade. Even though I’d made it happen, the suddenness of the reaction startled me enough to lose the cascade.

At the same time there was a horrible screeching roar where Nai’s flames met the metal where the door would ordinarily stop.

A deep whirr rumbled underground and I could hear metal scrape against ice a moment later.

I started toward the shelter door, but no sooner than the first step did I hear Nai swear, “ -raksi! ”.

I stood still for a few seconds, just for safety.

Well, something had gone wrong.

I put my hand on the bunker wall again to check my work. I could only concentrate the cascade enough to glimpse the wires for a few seconds, but I was more than satisfied. Each wire had a neat little gap melted in it, and better still, I could still feel the electric potential humming in the circuits I was supposed to leave intact.

“Uhh, I don’t think that was me,” I said. “But I’m not—”

A loud string of curses rose up from Nai’s half of this little project. At least, I thought they were curses. She’d slipped into her native tongue, and I only caught a few of the words.

I looked up at Tasser on top of the shelter. He quietly beckoned me to come with and see what set Nai off. We came over the edge and found her lying on her back in the snow.

For a split second, Tasser was alarmed. His entire body stiffened for a heartbeat before looking closely at the context. At first glance, it seemed like she might have been blown backward by something. But since there wasn’t any other evidence of an explosion, Nai must have fallen backward like that out of frustration.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Rasha weig,” she said. “I didn’t think this through enough. We thought ice caught in the mechanism might affect the thermodynamics of this. Weld the door shut when we were trying to carve some extra room for it? Ice cools down the metal. But it also…”

“Vaporizes,” Tasser realized.

Nai nodded. “Steam explosion. It deformed the structure.”

“People inside?” Tasser said.

“Safe, as far as I can tell,” she said, seeming to calm down a modicum. “But I think we’re on the clock. This supports on this side of the bunker warped. They’re still sound, but I think the ventilation got crushed, so air is our time limit now. Aksi, how did we forget about the steam like that?”

“There shouldn’t have been ice where you were melting, let alone enough to hike the pressure that high,” Tasser reassured.

“Still, I should have—”

“Nai,” I said, “let it go. We knew something might go wrong. Ignore the stuff that isn’t important right now. Let’s just melt our way in like you said.”

She looked like she might grow even more furious, but Tasser shut her down. “Nai, how many people are in there and how much air do they have?”

“I don’t know the math!” she protested, “It’s hard enough to count them like this. I don’t know how much air they use or how much they have.”

“Forty-one,” I said.

Both of them stared at me.

“What? There’s forty-one of them. I counted with my radar.”

Tasser gave a small ‘oh,’ but Nai frowned.

“I thought your ‘radar’ was only sensitive to Adepts,” she said.

“It’s way more sensitive to Adepts, a few dozen times more. But I can still make out non-Adepts. They’re really fuzzy though, I’m still figuring out the finer details. I have a lot of different things to practice right now,” I defended.

Tasser gave Nai a nod in confirmation. I hadn’t had much opportunity to tell her, but Tasser knew.

“Forty-one bodies…” Nai began, muttering more numbers for her math.

“The headcount doesn’t matter,” Tasser said. “Oxygen consumption isn’t the problem.”

“It’s displacement,” Nai and I both recalled simultaneously.

Their own exhaled breath would kill them faster than a lack of oxygen.

“Doesn’t the headcount still matter, to know how fast—”

“No,” Nai said. “He’s right, the actual time isn’t the point. We need to get it open now.”

As soon as possible.

“Well aren’t you up then? Super-flame us inside,” I said.

“Then help me do it right,” she said to both of us. “How can we minimize our risks when we’re talking about melting through steel that might have ice between the layers?”

“The concern is whatever metal you melt has to go somewhere, and you have limited control on where it goes?”

“The fire itself too,” Nai said. “If we had more time, I’d do something with acid to eat through the hinges, but I—”

“Negative pressure,” I said, formulating an idea.

“Explain,” Nai said.

“One second…”

I yanked at a blank page in my psionic journal and started making a rudimentary diagram of the shelter door or wall, with two meaningful additions.

“…Here,” I said, materializing the page once I’d finished drawing it in my mind. I had a stick figure drawing of Nai with blue fire melting the wall. But on the exterior of the wall, there was a round chamber sealed onto the spot Nai was melting.

“If we have a vacuum on our side of the wall, whatever you melt will be blown outward by the air pressure inside the shelter,” I said. “If that’s not enough, then you could make extra material as a buffer on the interior side and melt through the door until you start burning into your buffer. Then you just dissolve the buffer you made, and we’re through.”

Nai scrutinized the paper carefully before slowly nodding.

“Play to my strengths…” she said. “If I’m not precise enough with this little material, just add more material.”

“Anything we can do to help?” Tasser asked.

“No, just keep everyone back. Caleb, use that radar and tell me where it’s safest to go through.”

“Definitely not the door,” I said. “A few of them are standing pretty close to it. I think you should have room on the east side though.”

She nodded, wasting no time moving toward that side.

We were wading through the deepest snow on the hill to get the wall, but Nai wasn’t waiting.

“Where?”

“…there,” I said, pointing at a spot where I sensed no Casti within a few meters.

“Buffer first…” Nai said.

It was absolutely nothing to look at, at first. She was adding material to the inside of the shelter wall. But once that was done, she made an orb of teal fire the size of a basketball and let it hover a few inches away from the spot I’d indicated. Then finally, with both hands, she made a dome affixed to the wall and sealed her fireball inside, leaving a small gap for the heat to drive air out.

She sealed the dome, and I realized my plan might have a critical flaw.

“Nai, your fire doesn’t need oxygen does it? Because this whole vacuum, negative pressure, idea doesn’t really work if the fire goes out.”

“It does not,” she confirmed. “Because what I make isn’t actually fire.”

With that I felt the heat from the fireball intensify, even sealed inside the opaque dome Nai had made.

“Well they’re backing away from it,” I told Nai. “That has to be a good sign right?”

“Unless they’re getting spattered with molten metal and concrete,” she retorted.

“Nah,” I said. “You’re sour, but you’re not incompetent. The buffer will catch any splatter, then you can just dissolve any creations and we have a nice hole in the shelter to get people out of.”

“I really can’t take your optimism right now,” she growled. “Let me guess, it’s because this is out of your hands now?”

“Pretty much,” I admitted.

Even with the dome and buffer in place, Nai didn’t rush the job. She held her hands against the dome filled with fire, using her cascade to measure her progress burning a hole in the wall.

“…If it’s not fire,” I said, “what is it?”

She didn’t answer immediately, and I couldn’t tell if she was concentrating on maintaining her creations or if she was deciding if she was going to answer or not.

Maybe both.

“…It’s a sword,” she finally said, no small amount of strain in her voice.

“Is that your sorry excuse for a metaphor?” I asked.

“It’s a sword,” she insisted, “I’ve dulled the proverbial edge for this because I don’t want to flash vaporize steel. But you’ve seen first hand that, with it, I can cut through anything.”

“…Does it have a name?”

“W-what?”

“Well if you’re big bad and scary enough for the Vorak to give you a big bad scary name, did they give your signature trick a name too?”

“…No,” she said.

One of the last books I’d read before being abducted was Through the Looking Glass. The word ‘Vorak’ and how it sounded reminded me of a line.

“[The vorpal blade went snicker-snack…]” I said, but Nai didn’t respond to the English.

“If it’s a sword,” I said. “How do you feel about ‘Vorpal blade?’ ”

“What does it mean?”

“Absolutely nothing,” I mused. “But it’s supposed to be a sword that can cut through anything.”

“…Why do you want to name my fire so badly?”

I grinned, but I didn’t think she could see it behind my mask.

“Just for fun,” I said. “…But it’s also harder to be afraid of something if you give it a name.”

“[Vorpal]?” she asked.

“Yup.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

A few seconds later, Nai killed the heat and dissolved the dome. There was no more ‘Vorpal’ fire under it, but there was a perfectly neat hole with scorched and melted edges in the shelter wall to match the dome’s width. On the other side, a solid sheet of transparent crystal was spattered with dark chunks of melted metal, now resolidified.

“Nice,” I said. “Since the buffer is transparent, the occupants can see why they should back away. That was your idea, not mine.”

“Just stop,” Nai said. “Compliments from you feel worse than optimism.”

Still, it had worked perfectly. She dissolved the crystal and squinted at the Casti visible in the darkness. There was an immediate clamor as the people in the shelter found the opening.

“Go get Tasser. Once you and I are out of here, the borough personnel can take care of the rest.”

It went without saying that I should make myself scarce. I was already keeping my distance from the Casti outside the shelter, and getting out only to find a new form of alien greeting them was probably not the best foot.

I picked my way back around the bunker looking for Tasser. The snow up to my hips only tripped me once, but I was pretty sure I’d been out of sight of Nai.

Tasser was standing twenty feet down the hill occupying the attention of some onlookers. But when I came back without Nai, the crowd’s buzz intensified.

I gave him a wave. Not the most elaborate of signals, but he could see me standing off to the side. He was sharp enough to conclude our success, and it was time to send in everyone else. Troops of Casti started marching up closer to the shelter, clearing a path in the snow around the side toward the hole Nai had made.

Tasser and I found a convenient spot to avoid most of the Casti onlookers while still giving us a view of the proceedings. He was probably looking for a moment for us to duck through and grab one of the vehicles to drive back to base, but I wasn’t feeling in much of a hurry.

“You said something to Nai,” I decided. “She put up with me too much.”

“…Just now, or for this whole storm?” he asked.

“The latter, definitely.”

“You knew I talked to her after your fight,” he said. “What’s the problem?”

“No problem,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m just surprised is all. You were right, it didn’t take much of an effort to improve things. But I’m also thinking you told her as much.”

“I’m significantly older than both of you,” he pointed out. “Someone had to demonstrate some maturity. At the rate you were going, one of you was going to explode.”

“Whose idea was it to have us shelter in the same spot? Yours or Serral’s?”

“Mine,” he admitted. “I know her, and it turns out, I know you too. You’re both curious. You weren’t going to fight with that many other people around, and you weren’t just going to sit there and do nothing for twenty hours.”

“Nai said that she and I hadn’t treated each other like people. It didn’t even matter that we knew neither of us had a great reason to be so afraid. We just never gave ourselves an opportunity to talk and fix the problem.”

“You and she did not meet under ideal circumstances,” Tasser said. “Her life has taught her to be suspicious and wary, and staying on this planet has not done her any favors.”

“Like what?”

“Her sleep has been inconsistent. She says she keeps waking up over and over. Odds are she just has a bad reaction to the planet…”

“…but what?”

He gave a shrug. “I don’t know how exactly humans suffer from lack of sleep, but it’s ugly for Farnata. Fatigue, impatience, mood, pick any kind of mental trait, and it will suffer if the Farnata doesn’t sleep enough.”

“Humans are the same way,” I said. “Do Casti not suffer symptoms from missing sleep?”

“We do,” he said, “but it takes a while to accumulate. For Nai, the difference is noticeable after just one or two nights of bad sleep, and it’s been a few months now. She’s not suffering physically too much because she’s Adept, but our time here has not been the rest she needed to recover from Korbanok.”

“Has Dyn been able to help? I know he mostly does Casti medicine, but surely he learned Farnata medicine too.”

“He couldn’t find a microbial reason. But there’s a million different things it could be. I’m proud of her for how she’s handling it, strange as that sounds after what she did to you. I had to convince her it wasn’t something you did, you scared her pretty badly the first time you told her about your psionics.”

I froze on the spot while he kept going.

“I know she acts hostile, but she really is friendly.”

“…She’s right,” I realized. “I did do something psionic.”

The third otter we’d fought, Nai had been out of commission from the strenuous hike the night before. She’d been utterly unconscious, and I had been stuck with her with a wild alien panther coming after me.

The mirror still in her head had the benefit of hiding her from my psionic radar, but that hadn’t been originally why I’d tried to randomly stick it in her head. I’d been trying to mentally stir her, to save our lives from Courser and his pack.

It had even worked.

“I woke her up.”