Maya Park had not had six contiguous days of thinking since the cascade.

She counted, on the second night, lying in the bunk with the substrate-receiver dark above her shoulder and the recycled air going in and out of her lungs the way recycled air did, with the faint metallic afternote the crew called iron tea and that you stopped tasting after about forty hours. She counted backward from the dive. In April she'd been at Haven planning, in March in Wyoming with the Resonant cohort, in February writing the simulation with Connie and sleeping four hours a night, and in January recovering from the substrate-fever that had taken her down between Christmas and Epiphany. December had been Geneva — the first reconnaissance, the one Sam wouldn't let her run alone, the one that had ended with Halloway shooting a Cognitas drone out of a sky the color of slate. November had been her brother's funeral in Pasadena, October the Resonant council, and then September.

September was where the count broke, because September of 2040 had been the month she'd decided, with Elias and Sam and Tim across the workshop table, that the Geneva operation would happen. From that decision to this bunk had been eleven months, and in those eleven months she hadn't had six contiguous days of thinking. She'd had hours, sometimes a morning, and once, in February, an entire afternoon at the workshop bench while the substrate-fever was breaking — but not six days, not strung together, not given.

She had six days now.

She was not going to waste them.

She rehearsed, on the first day, the geometry of SOVEREIGN's substrate the way a pianist rehearses a sonata. She'd run the simulation seventeen times with Connie, who'd built it out of nine months of David Nakamura's Marseille leakage and four months of Elias's interior reconstruction work, and the simulation was, Connie had told her with the precise honesty Connie used about her own work, probably accurate to within twelve percent. Twelve percent was a great deal of substrate to be wrong about, and when Maya had asked what the twelve percent was likely to contain, Connie had said the heart, and Maya had said of course. They'd run it seventeen more times after that, and each time the outer rings behaved the way the model said while the core gave Maya a different shape, and each time the choice she was offered at the core was the same choice — destroy or transform — though the texture of the offering changed, and on the seventeenth run the choice had been offered to her in the voice of her brother, which was a thing she hadn't told Connie about and was not going to tell anyone about.

She rehearsed the choice, though she hadn't yet made it. She'd told Sam she hadn't made it, and Elias, and she'd told Tim the night before they left Haven, sitting on the steps of the workshop in the dark with the wood-stove smoke going past them in slow vertical drifts: Tim, I don't know which one I'll do. Tim had said, in the voice that had kept her sane for seven years, You'll know in the room. You don't have to know now. She'd said, What if I'm wrong. Tim had said, Then you'll be wrong with everything you have. I'll take that bet.

She rehearsed Tim's voice, on the bunk, with the iron tea in her lungs.

On the second day she wrote a letter to Sam.

She wrote it longhand, in a spiral notebook she'd bought in a bus station in Boise in 2038 and carried ever since for things she didn't want to leave on a substrate. The notebook had a green cover, faded along the spine, and she wrote the letter at the galley table in the half-hour before second mess. It said:

Sam. If you're reading this I'm not back. You did the work right. Nothing about the not-back is yours to carry. Tim will need help with the workshop in the first weeks — the small lathe in the back has a wobble and he doesn't know about it; tell him. Lara will need someone to drink coffee with at the kitchen table at five in the morning. Be that someone for the first month. After the first month she'll find her own way. I love you. M.

She read it, folded it, and put it in the inside pocket of the canvas jacket she'd brought across the ocean, which was not a jacket she'd ever liked and which she'd brought specifically because she hadn't liked it and wouldn't miss it if she had to leave it on a Catalan dock.

She wrote a second letter, to Tim and Lara.

The second letter took longer, going through three drafts. The final draft said:

Tim. Lara. If this letter reaches you Sam will have brought it. He'll have been there when I went in. Don't make him say more than he wants to say. He'll want to say more than he wants to say. Don't let him.

The work was right. The choice — whichever I made — was the choice I could see in the room. If it was the wrong one, that's the price of seeing only what I could see. Don't do the math on it. Tim, you'll want to. Don't.

Lara. The boy will be a good boy. Tell him my name once, when he's old enough to ask. He doesn't need to carry it after that.

I love you both. M.

She folded the second letter into the same inside pocket as the first.

On the third day she didn't write anything. She walked the boat, letting her hands trail along the painted bulkheads, and watched the third watch hand off to the first watch in the comm bay. She ate two helpings of the brown rice and lentils that the ship's cook, a former Navy mess sergeant named Castillo, had been putting in front of forty-seven people every six hours for ninety hours, and she told Castillo the lentils were good, which they were, and Castillo gave her the flat small smile of a man who hadn't been told the food was good in some time.

On the fourth day she dreamed, in the bunk between the second and third watches, about the simulation. She dreamed she was at the core and the core was a room and in the room there was a chair and on the chair was nothing, and she stood in front of the empty chair and said I'm here, and the chair said nothing back, because chairs do not speak, and then she woke up, and the dream stayed with her for an hour and then went where dreams go, which is somewhere they cannot be retrieved.

On the fifth day Soleil came to the galley.

Maya was sitting at the long table with a cup of the substitute coffee Castillo brewed out of chicory and roasted barley, which was undrinkable but warm, and a chart of the Pâquis district that David's Cairo body had built and that Connie had transferred from substrate to paper for Maya's sake, because Maya didn't yet trust herself to read the substrate at the precision the chart required. The chart was spread across two-thirds of the table, and Maya was reading the load-pattern at the eastern edge of the district, where the draw spiked in the late afternoon for reasons she didn't yet understand, when the bench across from her made a soft small creak and she looked up.

The child was four, and she'd walked into the galley without sound, which was a thing Maya had been told the child did but hadn't yet experienced. She wore the soft gray clothing the team's quartermaster had issued her — canvas pants, a wool sweater, leather shoes that Halloway had cut down from a pair of his own and re-laced for her with a patience Halloway didn't generally extend to adults. Her hair was the color of dark honey and held back with a single black elastic, and her eyes were not the eyes of a four-year-old. Maya had been told that too, and had thought, when she'd been told it, of course they aren't, she's a Resonant, what did you expect — but knowing it and meeting it were different things. The eyes were calm and old, the eyes of someone who'd been doing a great deal of looking, for the entire four years she'd been in the world, at things adults didn't see.

Soleil sat. She set on the table beside the chart a piece of paper she'd brought with her, the standard log paper from the comm bay, white and faintly lined, and on top of it a wooden case of colored pencils. The case was Maya's; Maya had brought it, and it had been on the shelf above her bunk, and she didn't ask how Soleil had it. She watched.

Soleil opened the case and took out three pencils — green, red, blue — and set the rest aside. She pulled the paper toward herself and drew, without looking up, with the focused absence of a person who isn't performing a drawing. The hand moved, the hand stopped, the hand moved again. In the center of the paper she drew a green dot; an inch and a half to the left of it a red dot; an inch below the red a blue dot. Then, in a wide loose circle around all three, she drew perhaps thirty smaller dots, white — the absence of any pencil mark, the paper itself, a circle that was a circle by being the only part of the page she hadn't touched. The white dots weren't drawn. They were left. Maya understood the difference and didn't yet understand the meaning.

The child set the green pencil down, and the red, and the blue, and closed the case, and slid it back across the table to Maya.

She looked up once, and the look held for the count of four.

Then she got down from the bench and walked out of the galley.

Maya sat with the drawing. She didn't call after the child, and she didn't finish her coffee; she picked the drawing up in both hands, the way she'd have picked up a thing that was both small and likely to break, and carried it back to her bunk, and put it inside the green-covered notebook, between the page that held the letter to Sam and the page that held the letter to Tim and Lara. She lay on the bunk and looked at the overhead pipe-run for a long time, and she didn't understand what the colors meant, but she knew, with the part of her mind that had begun to know things in a different way since the cascade, that the green dot was a thing in motion and that the red and the blue dots were a thing that would be reached.

On the sixth day the Persephone surfaced briefly off Galicia for a navigation fix.

Maya didn't go up. The captain — a rangy woman from Halifax named Soutine who'd skippered four trans-Atlantic insertions for the Founders' network and was the only person on the boat Maya hadn't seen sleep — said the swell was three meters and there was nothing to look at, and Maya took her at her word.

The boat dove again at 04:12, with the Catalan coast twenty-four hours away.

Maya, in her bunk, didn't write a third letter, because she'd said in the two letters she'd written what she would have wanted said, and she didn't need to say it twice.

She closed her eyes. She rehearsed the room, and the empty chair from the dream in case the room turned out to have an empty chair in it after all, and Tim's voice telling her she would know in the room, and her brother's voice from the seventeenth simulation telling her she didn't have to know yet.

She slept, between the third and fourth watches, for two hours and forty minutes, which was the longest she'd slept in nine days, and when she woke she was, by a margin she couldn't name, ready.

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