Cosmosis

Lessons

“So you’re feeling guilty?” Nai asked.

It was a bit of a low blow, considering her timing.

She erected a wall of grey crystal behind me to cut me off. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have known. But I was practicing keeping my cascade probing every direction around me.

So instead of backpedaling right into the barrier, I jumped when she tried to kick me.

It was a bit flashier than necessary, but I was coming to appreciate the value of some flourish when moving like I could.

If nothing else, it kept opponents guessing. So I vaulted upward, landing in a crouch atop the wall. Instead of arresting her kick though, she put more weight into it, jumping forward straight through the wall.

She could pass through her own crystal if she so chose. Or perhaps, since objects on her person also passed through, it was the stationary crystal that turned untouchable.

I was ready for that too.

She emerged on the other side of the wall, already swinging a fist up at me. But I tried to catch her wrist and drag her off balance as I fell.

Either my reflexes were getting better, or Nai was getting better at matching my skill level in a fight. Probably both.

Still, she showed off her own augmentations when, instead of my weight dragging her down, she hauled me in a wide circle around her like a human flail.

My grip was good enough to hold on, but letting Nai swing me into something upright wasn’t very appealing.

I let go and landed on my feet without a stumble. My balance was definitely improving.

“I’m not feeling guilty,” I protested. It was a bald-faced lie. I was feeling guilty. I just didn’t want to, because I had a good reason why not.

“I…I just didn’t know the Rak died. It’s surprising now, and I don’t…It was self-defense, I know that. But…that doesn’t make me feel any better, and—”

I suddenly lunged at her, trying to connect a jab.

She swatted it aside, but she took a step back at the same time. That was unusual. She didn’t give ground.

I tried to press my momentum, materializing a quarterstaff for reach. She seemed almost distracted, as if she would lose focus any second.

But she didn’t. Even if she was thinking about my hang-ups, this wasn’t enough to catch an experienced combatant off guard.

“I don’t relate,” she said, fending off my thrusts with her bare hands. “You didn’t start that fight, and they didn’t have to come after us. They tried to kill you and that means they needed to be ready to die. If they weren’t? That’s on them not you.”

She caught my staff, trying to wrench it out of my hand, and I let her take it. Fending off attacks like this was braindead easy for her. It didn’t take any real thought on her part.

But it wasn’t hard to execute on my part either. I’d spent the time planning.

Nai had told me having a wider and wider array of Adept tricks to call on would keep enemies off balance. It was harder to attack someone who had unknown abilities lying in wait. In a way, it made Nai an easy Adept to survive. Everyone knew her vorpal fire trick, and everyone knew to run away from it.

It was still losing, but sometimes fighting was about cutting your losses and limiting further damage.

But I couldn’t be that kind of Adept, so I needed to always have another trick up my sleeve.

Drawing inspiration from Itun, I materialized an opaque orange cloud of smoke, instantly blinding both of us.

I knew what came next and I was ready for it. Nai had kept her cascade running underfoot this whole fight and I was ready to fool it.

Just like I had against Itun, I materialized a dozen thin shoe soles on the ground all around Nai.

I heard her start to say, “what the—” before I leapt at an angle.

The false footprints misdirected her attention enough that had an opening to blindly throw a punch at where I sensed she was.

Even as my fist flew, I didn’t really think I’d connect. She would dodge at the last second, her cascade working quickly enough to give away the difference between how my feet contacted the floor and my fake-footprints.

But my punch landed somewhere on her shoulder, and she bowled over.

I dispelled the cloud I’d made so I could see what just happened, but Nai was already leaping back up. In one motion, she leapt off the ground and kicked me in the head.

My arm block went up in time to get in the way, but it was too slow to absorb any of the blow.

She pulled the kick too, following through far gentler than she could have been. The impact only pushed me over instead of cracking my skull.

“Don’t lose focus,” she chided. “You actually landed a hit, but you didn’t follow up.”

“I didn’t want to do any real damage,” I protested. “Isn’t landing a hit on you at all an accomplishment?”

“In an abstract sense? Sure,” she said. “But do you remember what Itun said to you? You’re only fighting to not lose, and that’s not always going to be enough. You have to win, and you aren’t always going to be able to get away with just immobilizing them.”

“How do you know what Itun said?” I asked.

“Umtane told me.”

“You’re saying I should have tried to kill you just now?”

“You should have at least tried to pretend to kill me,” she said. “I’m not saying to try and kill someone when you’re sparring, but you can’t just land a hit and stand there dumbfounded. Follow up. Follow through.”

I didn’t like it.

This was so frustrating. I understood the problem! But it didn’t quite matter.

“…Do you know why I didn’t pick up a gun?” I asked.

“When?”

“Anytime,” I said. “Running from Korbanok or the Green Complex, I had some opportunities to grab one. But I didn’t think I should.”

“It has occurred to me that you’re capable of creating one,” she acknowledged.

I nodded. The thought had crossed my mind, but I still hadn’t.

“It’s because there’s no such thing as a warning shot,” I explained.

Surprise flickered on her face, but her silence prompted me for more.

“Back on Earth, there’s an idea that you can fire a gun to threaten someone, warn them they’ll get shot if they continue doing whatever. If nothing else, it shows you’re willing to fire. But it’s…it’s false,” I said. “It’s irresponsible and dangerous. Because if you’re going to kill someone in self-defense, the only acceptable reason to fire is because you have to. If you have the inclination to try a warning shot, it means the danger wasn’t imminent enough to shoot to kill…”

“Which means you shouldn’t be shooting at all?” Nai surmised.

I nodded.

“I…I’m not ready to shoot to kill,” I said simply. “I killed my friend in a moment where my life was in danger. And if I could do that moment again, I’d die if it came to it. I would rather he have lived.”

“…My instinct is…no…sorry. That wouldn’t be helpful to say.” She trailed off, truly deep in thought now. “…You are someone who would rather die than kill someone, even justifiably.”

It wasn’t a question.

I nodded slowly. It seemed to fit.

“How odd,” she said. “That is perhaps the most un- Farnata thought I’ve ever heard. A just reason to kill…is not an obligation, is it though?”

The times that Casti and Farnata caught me off guard and truly seemed alien were growing fewer and further between the longer I spent in their company. But I saw the opposite now.

She was looking at a creature that didn’t quite fit into any expectations. I knew they saw me as an alien, but it wasn’t often I could see that on their faces.

“I cannot say that you should kill to survive,” she said. “But…listen to why Farnata do not commit suicide first.”

That sounded familiar.

“We do not talk of ourselves often,” she said carefully. “If you respect me and my people in any capacity, do not repeat what you hear now.”

I nodded in agreement.

“Farnata do not kill themselves,” she stated. “It’s not that we don’t experience the motivations to do so. We have terminally ill, we have people who do not want to carry on. But we never kill ourselves. If a Farnata decides to die, it is an unwritten rule, but they’re expected to ask someone, anyone, even a stranger to aid them. Either to find the resolve to live, or to kill them gently.”

“Because of your homeworld?” I asked, not daring to bring my voice above a whisper.

“Before the Razing, the Kiraeni had no such…‘custom’,” she confirmed. “But in the aftermath, amidst the bones of billions, the survivors refused to let any of our kind die forgotten.”

“…On Earth, mass tragedy rarely made people lose hope,” I said. “Resolve swells instead of weakening.”

“It’s such for Farnata too. Proportionally, suicides plummeted after the Razing,” Nai agreed. “But they still do happen, however rarely. But my people have lost too many of our own for the survivors not to value our own lives.”

“I do value my life,” I said. “For exactly the reasons I’ve said. Daniel died so—”

I faltered. Not quite believing the words my feelings produced.

“You do,” Nai agreed. “You are willing to kill to survive. You’ve done it twice. But simultaneously, you don’t want to survive if killing someone is the price.”

“It…it depends,” I said. “If it were someone like Vather? I could kill him…if I had to.”

“Ah,” Nai said, comprehending something new. “You dislike killing in general because you killed someone you found undeserving of death.”

“…Yes.”

“You would rather not be forced to gamble whether your opponent was deserving or not,” Nai said. “And there is your mistake.”

She leaned close, looking me in the eye.

“No one deserves to die fighting,” she said softly.

“Some people do deserve to die,” I disagreed.

“Indeed,” she said. “But who precisely? In a single word, what makes one deserving of an early death?”

“…Evil. Harm.” I said. “But even then, not all evil. Not all harm.”

“Only the greatest of those,” she agreed. “But do those deserve to die fighting back?”

“…No. It should be…cold—a punishment, not a contest.”

She nodded. “In a fight, with lives on the line, there isn’t anyone who deserves death in conflict . Maybe there are some evil people involved, and maybe that conflict is the only effective way to deliver what they deserve. But fighting for your life cannot be about who is deserving. It is about surviving to accomplish the goals you’re willing to risk your life for. Anything more is decoration.”

“That feels reductive,” I said. “Killing in combat isn’t murder because…?”

I bit off the question. I could see the obvious answer. It just…it just didn’t feel like it should include me.

“Do I have a right to defend myself?” Nai asked. “To defend my people? To defend my family or my allies? To defend you?”

“…Yes,” I said. It was the first crack in what I felt like was a principle.

“…You weren’t willing to kill to defend yourself,” she corrected. “Not the second time. It was Tasser. Even if you didn’t think it would kill the Vorak, you risked your life and fought because you didn’t want him to die.”

I nodded. She wasn’t wrong.

“Show me your device,” she said, seemingly veering off course.

Confused, I walked over to where I’d emptied my pockets for our spar and unlocked my phone.

Nai took the phone and showed the background to me. My parents.

“If you are willing to kill to save Tasser, be willing to kill to save these people’s child.”

It sounded familiar. I’d promised Daniel I would live. And even though he’d eventually taken that back, I had resolved to make it home all on my own.

“We all have goals—objectives,” I said, following her own words.

“But we cannot reach them if we’re dead.”

It was difficult to remember everything that had happened to me. But I remembered a moment of anger and resolve.

What was the point of making it home if only a corpse made the journey?

“It doesn’t feel right,” I said. “I don’t like the idea of killing. I don’t even like the idea of being willing to.”

“Wise,” she said. “But willingness is not the same thing as seeking it out. Never like it. Never enjoy it. You’re correct that killing is a terrible thing. But so is your own death.”

“And so survive?”

“And so survive,” she said, raising her fists to continue.

We’d only just begun to spar today.

It felt like I was…ruining part of myself. But…wasn’t that what growth sometimes was? Accepting that just because you felt strongly about something, that you weren’t necessarily correct?

Right or wrong, it still hurt. Far more than the blows Nai dished out.

·····

We sparred for most of the afternoon, the sun shining harshly enough to poke through tiny holes in the worn tent we were under.

I was getting a sense of Nai’s fighting style. Despite sparring up close, she was actually more of a distance fighter. It figured. Vorpal fire was not an Adept trick anyone wanted to be close to, even its creator.

But I was surprised at how much progress I felt like I made.

When I managed to close the distance, it was feeling more and more feasible to find a selection of Adept tricks to combine to snatch the initiative from her.

Blatant copycatting was proving to be an effective way of increasing my stockpile of tricks too. Ultimately, my first flashbang had been a mimicry of the Vorak’s trick on Korbanok. I had no qualms about stealing options from my enemies.

The throwable smoke bomb was my personal favorite so far. Making an obscuring cloud like Itun did wasn’t hard. But I found I could combine the principle with the meta-magnetic materials Nai had shown me to stick to walls.

I could make the smoke, binding it to itself with the selective magnetic materials, and make it into throwable form. The orb could be thrown beyond my creative range, so I could obscure areas previously out of reach.

As we continued to spar later, Nai alternated between focusing on Adept attacks and fighting by hand. Both were improving, enough that we eventually drew a small audience. Work on the ship—or ships, as I’d learned—was winding down.

In my mind, I could picture something of an end goal. Smokescreens and staves, flashbangs and fists; I needed to execute each new action as fast as the previous one faded. They should flow into one another, one creation dissolving so I could recoup the spent mass and immediately put it to use again in a new attack.

Overwhelming novelty, always a new attack, nothing repeated for an enemy to adapt to.

I was a long way off. But I could see some of it now.

“I need to practice creating things in succession, don’t I?” I asked.

“There’s a reason I had you do that before,” she nodded. “You’re moving a lot better now. That was a stupid trick you pulled, but who can argue if it works? Learning about your augmentations is making a huge difference.”

“I feel faster,” I agreed. “But…also not? I can’t quite describe it.”

“You probably aren’t strictly faster ,” she said. “But even if the motions themselves aren’t any quicker, the delay before you start moving is shrinking. You’re getting more accustomed to your augmentations now that you know they’re there. It’s happening quickly too.”

“How long does it take for most Adepts?”

“Depends on the augmentations, but you’re definitely on the quicker end. It just sticks out to me. You learned Starspeak quickly too. Makes me wonder.”

“Well, psionics helped me pick up the language,” I pointed out.

Nai nodded. “I’m wondering if there isn’t some psionic structure you haven’t unraveled yet that’s helping you adapt to physical experiences too. Helping you learn.”

“As far as I can tell, psionics don’t affect anything physical,” I said.

“They have to somewhere . Otherwise, how could they have kept me waking up?”

That…was hard to confirm. It begged the question just what ‘mental’ meant in the context of psionics? It didn’t seem like psionics were just neurons flashing a certain way in my head. So what was happening?

There was no manual. I just had to keep learning it on my own.

“You said your mom taught you some of this Adept stuff?”

“She went over some of the broad theory with me. Exotic materials, atomic bonds and how to mimic them, that kind of stuff.”

“Is she…?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “She’s not dead. She’s an administrator on one of the space stations orbiting Ordeliege.”

I stared at her blankly.

“That’s Farnata’s moon,” she supplied.

“There’s a lot of moon talk going around,” I mused. “Do you know the plan yet?”

Nai shook her head. “Ase Serral is still finalizing details with his staff. Actually, we should finish up here. We have to get you fitted for a suit.”

I was sweaty after fighting off Nai for the last hour or two. But Nai was in a similar situation, and she took a shower on the spot.

A huge bubble of water a meter across flickered into existence all at once. Only it wasn’t ordinary water because the dozens of gallons just floated in midair, even when she walked right into the bubble.

She must have created it to selectively ignore gravity. That was a trick I needed to learn.

She was still fully clothed and everything above her waist was inside the levitating bubble of water. It looked uncomfortable. But after scrubbing her face and hair for a few seconds, she just dissipated the liquid, instantly drying everything.

“Oh that’s so [cool],” I said. “I don’t suppose you’d make some water for me? I’m beat.”

“I would…” Nai said, “but you hit me really hard in the shoulder earlier and I just don’t know if I’m I have it in me to be forgiving right now.”

“I was supposed to hit you!” I protested.

“Call it the price of victory,” she chided. “Besides, you’re right. It is ‘cool’. You should learn how to do it yourself?”

“I can make the water,” I said. “I just can’t make that much at once. Or levitate it.”

“Well if you’re going to try, do it fast. I think you’re talking to Wurshken about this voidsuit.”

A bubble of water materialized above my own head, only a gallon or two to Nai’s almost fifty. It splashed down on me, and I gave a pained yell. I hadn’t thought to make the water warm, and even though there was no snow here, it was still gut wrenchingly cold when you were wet.

“Cold?” Nai asked.

“[Shut up.]”

I had just enough potential mass leftover to materialize a small rag to scrub at my face and arms. Although rags were not as easy as I thought they would be. What I made was less cloth and more wad of fiber. Whatever. It was good enough for now. The urge to make another instance of warm water was strong, but I was too tired to be making gallon after gallon. I had to fight the urge to make more water until I was ready to rinse.

Since my water didn’t hang conveniently midair, It was much harder to get properly clean, but what I did manage was a big improvement.

“That would have been a nice trick to figure out a few months ago,” I said. “I was sneaking into those rigged up showers off the weight room every morning. It was super embarrassing the few times someone almost walked in.”

“Casti are a bunch of nudists,” Nai agreed, only exaggerating a little. “Tasser says the leading theory is they didn’t need as extensive clothing on their homeworld, so Casti society developed with a lot looser sense of dress.”

“But there’s still a Coalition uniform,” I noticed.

“Vorak were the ones to really popularize uniforms,” Nai said. “They proved it affected morale and unit cohesion.”

“Some day I’m going to want to learn some more history of how all you aliens crossed paths,” I said.

“That’s a very long story, human,” Wurshken said as I followed Nai into the right tent.

Wurshken and two other Casti had set up some collapsible tables with a dozen different spacesuits strewn across it. They were divided into two piles based on color, but aside from that, I couldn’t tell what the difference between them was.

“Not that long,” Nai said. “We invented interstellar communication, then the Casti cracked interstellar travel after we shared information, and then we stumbled onto the Vorak trying to kill themselves.”

“…Is she kidding?” I asked Wurshken.

“Sadly no,” he said. “It’s reductive, but not inaccurate.”

“Leave the history lessons for Tasser to teach him,” Nai said. “You’re making him a voidsuit.”

“Lath?” Wurshken turned to one of the Casti disassembling one of the suits. “What do we have for the human?”

‘Laths’ were not officers, if I recalled. But then again, I didn’t totally understand the Coalition military structure. Still, the Casti didn’t say a word. Instead they wordlessly handed one of the gloves for the suit, disconnected at the elbow.

I stuffed my hand into the glove, finding that it seemed to fit quite well.

The different suits piled up on the table, it turned out, had been fabricated with minor variations in the dimensions and neutral posture. Each one afforded slightly different ranges of motion.

“We have to take that fabricator with us,” Wurshken said, practically swooning. “These took four hours to make. Anywhere else? It would have been weeks.”

I flexed my arms in the spacesuit. Aside from the helmet, we’d landed on a decent combination that felt natural to move in.

“It certainly let you make a huge number of options,” I agreed. “What will you do with the suits that didn’t fit properly?”

“Toss them back into the fabricator,” Wurshken shrugged. “It can reduce them back to their component materials. Use the stuff for some other build. You ready for the helmet?”

“Yeah,” I told him. “How did you guys design this stuff so quickly? Even the pieces that didn’t fit well weren’t that bad. In a pinch, they’d be fine.”

“Dyn helped,” Wurshken said. “The Organic Authority has your skeleton’s dimensions and Dyn was with us earlier this morning to make sure we had some references.”

“So you know exactly how big my head is, and this helmet is going to fit on the first try?”

“Yes,” he said confidently.

“And here I thought it might leak on our way up there,” I said. “Better check everything. How much trouble would you be in if the suit failed and I suffocated?”

“Well, it would take more than just the suit failing,” Wurshken said. “This is just one of several redundancies. It’s overkill, really.”

“Spacesuits are optional for spaceflight?” I asked.

“You’re going to be the only one,” Wurshken confirmed.

“The rockets are airtight aren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“So what if there’s a rupture in the hull?”

“You sleep under an air bubble,” he said. “You didn’t think we used that technology for space flight? Rockets are equipped with bigger and better ones to help pressurize the cabin.”

“Oh.” That made sense. “Those bubbles only stop air though, if someone fell outside the bubble…”

“Then other things would have gone even more wrongly,” Wurshken said. “The suit is a precaution. But it’s hardly the only one.”

“Even then, I suppose that’s what the suit is for, isn’t it?”

“Ase Serral might not make you wear it specifically, but you can rest assured it will be close at hand in case its needed.”

“Well I’m surprised it’s this trim,” I admitted. “It’s not even half as bulky as the ones Earth space programs use.”

“That’s the Vorak again,” Nai said. “If the Casti scientific specialty is bioscience, then the Vorak’s is material science and engineering. They have confidential manufacturing methods for a few thousand different special materials.”

I almost asked what the Farnata specialty would be then. But I thought better of it.

The helmet turned out to be less a helmet, and more a flexible balaclava with a rigid faceplate transparent only from the inside. That was a little concerning. One of the moments that I remembered more vividly than others from my time on the spaceship with Daniel was bashing my head on every surface possible while I failed to move in zero-G once the ship had stopped accelerating.

Nai assured me that more head protection could be arranged.

I found myself standing in a tent, dressed in a fully airtight spacesuit, just a dozen or so hours from being launched toward a moon.

“…This is all happening very quickly,” I said.

“It’s not slowing down until our feet are on one of Paris’ moons,” Nai agreed.

The spacesuit passed the pressure checks, and I was one step closer to being off this rock.

·····

“From lift off to touchdown will be roughly thirty hours,” Serral told us. “We’re using every scrap of fuel this place has left so we can’t be using active thrust the whole way there.”

Serral clicked a button on the blocky remote and the projector behind him switched to a new image.

A bird’s eye view of a city surrounded by barren rocky wasteland.

“We’ll be touching down at these points, outside Cirinsko proper.” Two yellow ‘x’s marked points on the map on the very edge of the city.

“Leadership above Paris has arranged for more than twenty ships, both civilian and military to pick up personnel at multiple points. Some of your rides will be just a few feet from the pads we land on. Some will have to move through the colony to reach your departure points.”

He clicked the projector again and a dozen different colored lines drew connections between our landing point and where everyone else would be departing from.

“A nominal agreement was reached with the colony governor and the Marshall-Adjutant for the Red Sails. Vorak military personnel are not cleared to engage us, so anyone who engages combat will be stripped of their rank and disavowed. You are not cleared to engage any enemy troops. Your orders are to move to your launch sites with no delay. There will be no detours. You will not stop to address civilians. You will not antagonize any living soul en route in any way. Not Red Sails, not colony security, nobody.”

Serral’s eyes swept over the tent. “Am I understood?”

“Take note here, these are the route divisions. The following squads are assigned…”

He divided the Coalition troops across the numerous routes, pointing them each along different paths toward new launch points on the outskirts of the colony. Slowly the tent began to empty as squads were dismissed until there were only a few dozen people left.

“All dismissed, except for—you know who you are,” Serral said, emptying the tent.

There it was.

Only I, Nai, Tasser, Nemuleki, and Yakne—one of Serral’s top men, were the only ones to remain.

“I have I think an obvious question,” I said.

“Why have our groups split?” Serral asked.

“Why are we traveling away from our landing spot in the first place? Can we not refuel the rockets we’re taking?”

“No,” Nai said. “Our design options were limited given our fuel and destination. Even if anyone on the moon was willing to sell us fuel, it would take too long even if we could refuel these rockets.”

I read into what she’d implied.

“…Our rockets are single use only,” I guessed. “They can’t be refueled without disassembling them.”

“It’s more like they can’t be refueled at all,” Serral said. “They would have to be melted down and refabricated entirely.”

“This really is the quick and dirty form of spaceflight isn’t it?” I asked.

“Five days from planning to launch is about as quick as it gets for standard craft,” Tasser agreed. “The only ships launching on a moment’s notice are rigged with Adept-sourced technology. No two are alike.”

“Eliminate the chatter,” Yakne ordered. He hadn’t liked me at Demon’s Pit. “There’s still much to cover.”

“The crucial part of this plan is going to be your route,” Serral said.

“I’m not one of the people launching again from the same platform?”

“No,” Serral said. “If for no other reason than because the colony governor insisted that you do so.”

“He wants me detouring through his sunken city?” I asked, surprised.

“The opposite,” Serral said. “She wants you to launch from the adjacent launch bowls. It was her only stipulation.”

“…You think the Vorak put her up to it,” I realized. “So they can know where I’m going to be.”

“They won’t know which point you’re landing at,” Serral confirmed. “But they insisted you would only be allowed to launch from one point.”

“I’ve seen this [episode] before…” I said. “They’re going to try to grab me at that platform.”

“It’s…likely,” Serral said. “The Red Sails remain difficult to predict, because we only negotiated this with Marshal-Adjutant Tox.”

“He sounds important,” I said.

“But he’s not in charge, not really,” Serral explained. “He’s a trusted aide and subordinate commander to the Marshal himself: Tispas. According to Adj. Tox, he hasn’t talked to the Marshal five times in as many months. Which begs the question what diraksi the Marshal has been doing if not leading his Void Fleet.”

Five months ago was only a little while after when I arrived at Korbanok…That stank. Reeked, even.

“So if we’re not walking into their trap…?” I asked.

“You and Nai are going to be unattached,” Serral explained. “Every ship Admiral Laranta arranged to be present to pick us up has extra room pre-allocated. Extra troops would only slow you down. The two of you are to disappear as best you can, and move directly to any of the awaiting ships you can reach. Abuse your Adept advantages and reach any of the craft before the Vorak can stop you.”

“And they are going to try, aren’t they?”

Serral nodded gravely at me. “There are pieces of this moving in the dark,” he said. “It’s possible they abide by the agreement, but the Prowlers at the Green Complex were operating under the Red Sails. Given that…someone is desperate to keep you from escaping Vorak controlled space.”

“I want to make sure I understand our urgency then,” I said. “Because it seems clear we’re walking toward a trap. What’s to stop us from just turning around and walking away?”

“This planet isn’t the Coalition’s,” Serral explained. “The Red Sails were only content to sit idle as long as you were just a rumor bottled up in Demon’s Pit. Even if we hadn’t ceded that territory, we couldn’t just walk you back there. They wouldn’t stop anymore. They can’t take the risk of waiting anymore.”

“So neither can we,” I summarized.

“On the moon or here, they’re coming for you one way or another.”

I nodded. It was about what I’d expected. But it felt important to hear some of it spelled out.

“…And so survive,” I said quietly.