The world couldn't have been more different when Haven woke up. The cold was gone, repced with a warmth like a heavy bnket fresh from the dryer, clean and all-embracing. She could see again, the pale ceiling gently textured with runner vines climbing up the curved walls. She could feel the bed she was lying on, softer than any bed she'd ever slept on, the sheets indescribably smooth against her skin.

  But she still couldn't move. She couldn't even blink, but somehow her eyes weren't bothered by that.

  "Hey." Her perspective shifted, like she'd gnced to one side, but she hadn't felt her eyes move. There was a man sitting on the bed next to her, and either he was very small or the bed was absurdly rge. He looked like he was in his early to mid 40s, a bit of grey at the temples and in the neatly trimmed beard he wore, and he had the kindest eyes that Haven had ever seen. "Good, good neurological response. Can you hear me? Understand me?"

  Yes? Haven's vision tracked down his body, down the flower-print scrubs he was wearing. Some kind of nurse?

  "Mmm. That looks like a solid yes," he said, gncing off to one side for a moment before looking back to Haven. "I'm Nikoi Telmatei, Third Floret, he/him." He reached out, and Haven felt his hand close around hers. "You gave us quite a scare, you know that? Listen, don't try to move, okay? We've got you locked down for right now, but Master's going to come in and enable the st few systems, and then we'll see how you handle it. Alright?" He smiled, and it was a warm and kind as his eyes. "I told you were you gonna be okay, didn't I? Though, you might not remember that. You were pretty touch and go for a while." He gave her hand a gentle pat. "Just sit tight. I'll be right back." He jumped down off the bed, leaving Haven alone.

  Of course, the first thing she did was try to move. She could feel her limbs, but they stubbornly refused to respond. She began panning around the room — and panning was the only way to describe it, disconnected as the sense of vision felt. It was some kind of hospital room, with some strange, alien-looking equipment along the wall beside her bed. It was all so much bigger than it needed to be, but that was pretty normal for Haven. Every doctor she'd ever seen was the sort who catered to people who owned entire moons.

  When Nikoi returned, something else came with him. It was twice his size, a wet and shaggy mass of vines that only vaguely looked like a human being. It shambled along, two glistening polychromatic eyes peering out of a hollow in the center of the mass that was meant to be a head. It loomed over the bed, staring down at her, and when it spoke its voice was deep and gravelly. "Hello there, little one. Niko tells me you're awake and that your preliminary neurological response is good, so before anything else I'm going to go ahead and enable your motor neuron bus." He reached over with one of the thick bundles of vines that stood in pce of arms and began tapping at one of the readouts on the walls. "You may have some difficulty moving at first, but the neuromycelial bridge will read your nerve impulses and adapt retively quickly. And there we are! Now, I'm Arvense Telmatei, 5th Bloom, he/him. And, just for our records, so we're sure who the little cutie we have in this bed is, you're Harn Hudds-Friday — correct?"

  Haven's gut turned over. Not only was she lying paralyzed — or near-paralyzed, her fingers were starting to twitch now — on a bed in a room with an actual void-wretched affini who was no doubt going to do all manner of horrible things to her (and, very likely, already had), but they already knew who she was. Everyone in the upper crust knew the Affini were communists, and she was the scion of one of the richest families in the Accord. She was the offspring of their mortal enemies. She was doomed. For a moment, she considered lying, but she quickly realized there was no point.

  Just let it happen. Maybe they'll make it quick.

  So she said, "Yes." It was her own voice that came out, or near enough, but nothing moved when it did. Her jaw stayed put, and there was no feeling of tongue-on-soft-pate, no sibint hiss of teeth coming together — the sound simply came out of her. Her fingers twitched a bit more. "What's going on? Where am I?"

  "Well, you're aboard the good ship Tilndsia, somewhere about, oh, 450 light years from Earth. You're very lucky we noticed you, you know, running dark like that, and at such an extreme retive velocity. As for what's going on, well..." He trailed off for a moment, then loomed closer. "I'm sorry to say that you were very badly injured by a stint of primitive cryogenic vitrification, and much of your body was totally unrecoverable. You're presently in what we call a cambium ttice — it's a retively new development in veterinary science. Essentially, we've wrapped you up in sheets of programmed undifferentiated cells that are slowly reconstructing your body from what's left. There's also a few other phytotech organs in there, repcing those organs we weren't able to save. And then, we wrapped you up up in a psychonastic sarcotesta — think of it like artificial muscuture to support your body and even let you move around a bit, connected to the remnants of your nervous system by the aforementioned neuromycelial bridge!"

  Slowly but surely, Haven was regaining control of her limbs. They were weak, shaky, and felt like they weighed about a hundred pounds each, but she could move them. "Neuro... you put something in my brain?"

  "No, no, no, this is nothing like a haustoric impnt," Arvense said. "It's merely filling in the gaps in your peripheral nervous system. Your spinal column and brain, thankfully, came through the experience fairly intact. You represent one of the more serious cases we've had the opportunity to use this technology on, but now that you're stable and talking to us, your prognosis is extremely good!" Something in the affini's face bent in a way that, for some reason, made Haven think of a smile. "Would you like to try to sit up? I think, with a little help, you just might manage it. Here, Niko, up you go!" As if he weighed nothing, Arvense picked the nurse up and hoisted him effortlessly up onto the bed. "Now, no rush. Just brace yourself, and push."

  With Nikoi lifting her from behind, and Arvense's vines tugging gently but firmly at her body, Haven slowly managed to elevate herself to a sitting position over the course of a minute. She felt as if she ought to be winded, but she didn't. Her heart rate never once rose during the ordeal, and her lungs— "Oh shit," she said out loud, "I'm not breathing!"

  "The sarcotesta is doing that for you," Arvense said. "Your bloodstream is being directly oxygenated in several pces through the cambium ttice. Helps keep the strain on the heart low. Also, frankly, your lungs didn't take to victrification especially well, and they're particurly tender tissues when it comes to regrowth, so we're taking our time on those."

  Haven felt as if she ought to shiver, but she had no such reflex — or rather, the sarcotesta she was stuck in didn't. Once levered to a sitting position, it kept her there without any exertion on her part. It seemed to naturally want to hold whatever position it was left in. "What are you going to do to me?" Why did you even bother trying to save me?

  "Oh, this is nostalgic," Arvense said, chuckling. "I expect you think you're being 'sent to the mines,' or something like that, yes? But flower, we don't do that. We never did. You went to so much trouble to get away from us, when all we wanted to do was to make sure you were okay." He id one of his vines around Haven's shoulders (still too broad), and through the sarcotesta she could feel the damp cmminess of it. "We're headed back to the Rinan-Terran Protectorate now, as a matter of fact, to get you the specialized care you need, so you'll be able to see that for yourself. We're only a few days out from Solstice."

  Regardless of the state of her body, Haven felt the cold chill that came over her when she heard that word. There it was — the truth beneath all the kindness. She was being sent to a prison colony. "Look I didn't...there wasn't anything I could do, I didn't have a choice who my father was!"

  Arvense tilted his head almost ninety degrees to the side. "I'm afraid I don't quite follow."

  "Master," Nikoi said, putting his hands on Haven's shoulders, warm and gentle. "He probably doesn't know it's not a prison colony anymore."

  "It's not?!" She tried to whirl around, but only succeeded in tilting herself slightly — the sarcotesta didn't seem to respond to reflexes the same way, or maybe she just wasn't used to it yet.

  "Nope, just a pce people live," he said, giving her a soft pat on the shoulder with one hand. "I hear it's pretty nice, too. Prisons aren't a thing anymore."

  Not a thing?! "But...where do you put criminals, then?"

  "No criminals, either. No crime." He shrugged. "No reason for it. Why steal when you can just have whatever you want?"

  "But what about... bad people?"

  "There are no 'bad people,' little one," Arvense said, "only sophonts struggling to express themselves or who aren't given the opportunity to thrive on their own terms."

  "And the Compact is really good at giving opportunities," Nikoi added. "I mean, look at me. I was an awful person when I was younger, but Master gave me the opportunity to make my life about helping others and now... now I probably know more about terran medicine than most surgeons did back in the Accord, and a ton of xenomedicine besides, and I get to help instead of hurt. Even if I could, I wouldn't go back to who I was before I met Master for anything."

  "Awww, good boy Niko," Arvense said, reaching over to ruffle his hair. Nikoi leaned into the touch, his warm smile going blissful at the edges.

  "Besides, he's really funny, too," he added, snickering to himself.

  "Oh, I like to think I've developed a decent sense of terran humor," Arvense said. "But there's so much culture background you have to learn, you know? For years, I didn't understand why terrans tell actors to 'break a leg,' but then I realized, well, of course they say that: every py has a cast." Nikoi immediately cracked up ughing, startling Haven even if her body didn't jump quite the way she felt like she should have.

  Arvense made his odd not-quite-a-smile face and leaned in. "Ah, that's the only downside of the sarcotesta, you know? I can't see you cracking a smile when I tell a particurly good joke." Haven paused, very intentionally looking down and lifting a hand. Slowly, it came into view — a hand, an arm, covered in something soft and ivory-white, like some kind of a skinsuit.

  Haven flexed her fingers one by one, watching them curl in turn. "Does it all look like this?"

  "More or less. Of course, you can decorate it, if you like. I'm told terrans have a very old tradition of writing their names on primitive pster casts belonging to injured friends, for instance!"

  Why bother? "...maybe ter," she said out loud. "I guess there's a bunch of people in these things, huh?"

  Nikoi's ughter trailed off, and Arvense was quiet for a long moment. "Petal, as I said, you were put into a very primitive form of cryogenic vitrification," he said, his voice growing softer and gentler than it had yet been. "None of your fellows escaped it entirely unscathed, but some of you were lucky, and the freezing process didn't irreversibly damage the most critical parts of your cellur structure. You represent...well, the least lucky of the lucky ones. You suffered a great deal of damage, but your brain, spinal column, and a few key organs survived — enough for the cambium ttice to preserve and slowly reconstruct the rest. Others who survived suffered lost limbs, severe frostbite requiring skin regrowth, or a variety of other, more complex madies. Some were very lucky, and only suffered minor cosmetic damage. So, no, you're the only one in a full-body cambium ttice right now. The others' injuries don't require such a radical intervention."

  Haven sat with that for a moment, and Arvense and Nikoi both let her. This is lucky? she thought to herself. Lucky would have been never waking up. But she was long-practiced at not voicing those kinds of thoughts. "Lucky, huh?"

  Another uncomfortable silence. "Harn," Arvense said, crouching down and resting yet more damp vines across her shoulders, "please ready yourself for bad news. There were one hundred and one terrans aboard that ship, correct?" Haven turned her head to look at him, and nodded slowly. He took a deep breath and let out a long, gravelly sigh. "You are the twenty-eighth, and final, survivor. And even that was very close. All the rest were too damaged by the vitrification process to be successfully revived. We tried, Harn. I promise you we tried our very hardest. But we could only save twenty-eight of you."

  Beacon wasn't the sleepy little Quaker town it used to be, but it wasn't a New Landfall by any measure. The residents had, upon their return to the surface, organized a thoroughly anarchist community council and id down a charter designed to preserve the character of the original site of human habitation on Solstice, back when it had been called Fisher, before Osborne-Crke had starved the Quakers out and conducted a leveraged buyout of the colony. Even today, almost sixty years after humans had returned to the surface after the long winter had finally abated, it still looked much the same as it did. It had grown, to be sure, and was nearly three times the size it had been, but the new construction perfectly matched the old in style if not in weathering — one could see clearly which buildings had endured the winter and been repaired and which had gone up after.

  It was a quiet, seaside town. That was how the residents liked it. They liked that, even if they could no longer know each and every one of their neighbors, that they were all only a few degrees of separation from one another. Someone was always someone else's friend, or a friend of a friend. It wasn't just that Beacon was an ideal easternmost point for her circuit that kept her coming back — she was a friend of Maggie's, and everyone knew Maggie.

  The farmstead was one of the new buildings, on the outskirts of town, which made it easy for Trish to drive right up to it — in the heart of town, the streets were all meant for walking, not driving massive mobile habs down the middle of. She arrived just around noon, the sun high in the sky. Intellectually, she knew the star Solstice orbited was a little whiter than Sol, but after sixty years the sun was just The Sun to her. Maggie, as she often did at the lunch hour in the warm season, was sitting on the porch, watching chickens scratch in the dirt, watching the sea breeze set the false oaks shivering. She had a smile on her heavily lined face before Trish even stepped out of the mobile hab, before she crossed the yard and climbed the steps up to the porch, before the two of them embraced one another.

  "Welcome home, kiddo," she said, giving her a pat on the back that grew a little more feeble every time Trish felt it. Trish was pushing her centenary, but Maggie's was in her rearview mirror, and she'd seen a lot more and a lot rougher road before the Affini and their magic medicine had shown up. If Trish wore her years on her sleeve by comparison to those even a decade younger than her, Maggie's was a fshing billboard with neon lights. "Sit down, sit down. You eat yet?"

  "Not yet, no," Trish said, breaking the hug and pulling up the chair next to Maggie's rocker and settling in. Sure, she'd been sitting all day, spent a good percentage of every day sitting, but there was a qualitative difference between the driver's seat and a handmade wooden chair next to one's best friend on the pnet.

  "Well, you're just in time." She put two fingers to her lips and blew a sharp, piercing whistle that actually echoed off the outbuildings. In the loft of the barn, a human figure poked its head out of the window, visibly perked up, and vanished again. Moments ter, the youthful shape of Piper Raeburn reappeared, jogging across the open yard.

  Stars, Trish thought, is she seriously in her twenties already? It didn't feel right. She'd been there, on and off, throughout the kid's life — only now, she wasn't a kid anymore. Now, she looked like a proper Raeburn, wavy auburn mane tied back out of the way, freckles on her cheeks, and a smile on her face. "Hey, Auntie Trish!" she called out, waving. "When'd you get here?"

  "Just now," Trish said. "Working hard?"

  "Oh, you know it," Piper said, ughing. "Grandma's got me fixing up the old barn." Indeed, she still had her toolbelt on, with a thoroughly worn-in coverall stripped to the waist revealing both strong arms and a graphic tee with a flower-print on the front of it. "Hey, you want me to get you some lemonade or something?"

  "And a couple of sandwiches, if you don't mind whipping up a lunch for your old nana and auntie, hm?" Maggie said.

  "Sure thing!" She leaned over and gave Maggie a kiss on the cheek, then disappeared through the screen door into the house.

  "I swear she still gets taller every time I see her," Trish said, shaking her head.

  "That's what stable nutrition'll do for you," Maggie said, nodding. "She's a good kid, though. Even if she is of a certain generation."

  "Mmm." A certain generation. Piper had never experienced the world before the Affini arrived. In her mind, they weren't invaders, however well-intentioned, but a natural fixture of the world, no matter how Maggie might have tried to keep her grounded. It had been that way with Piper's parents, too. "Think she's of a mind to run off to New Landfall?"

  "Oh, I know she is," Maggie said, sighing. "I think it's just me keeping her around. And one of these days that might not be enough either. And I have tried, stars know I have, to coax an ember out of her. But she doesn't understand. I worry she can't. And that's why I've been meaning to ask a favor of you, next time you swung through town."

  "Oh?"

  She stopped rocking, and leaned over towards Trish to whisper. In a low voice, she said, "Take her with you. Let her see the world, sure, but let her see what the work means to those of us who went through it." She leaned back. "Maybe that'll get through to her where I couldn't."

  "I was never the great communicator," Trish said, "but sure. I could use another set of hands. And hell, someone's got to take this over from me, sometime. I'm not getting any younger.' Her conversation with Koer was hanging heavy in the back of her mind: Sometimes, the best way to root out feralism is simply to provide a path of least resistance to slow acclimation — and a strain of feralism like yours is ideal for that. Trish understood perfectly well the subtext: let those st embers burn out slowly, kindling no others. If no one was ready to take up what she was doing when she went, that's exactly what would happen. "Are you going to be okay without her, though?"

  Maggie snorted. "I may be old, but I'm not useless. Besides, you think they wouldn't have chucked me into an elder-care wardship by now if I couldn't take care of myself?"

  "True enough, true enough." She'd seen it happen to some of her contacts. The Affini didn't exempt infirmity from old age from the list of reasons why a sophont might need a wardship, whether that be a long-term arrangement for what few years of life were left for the hapless ward, or an on-ramp to domestication and a few more decades of life as a floret, with a haustoric impnt squeezing every erg of life out of old and tired flesh. On an individual level, there really was no escaping them — but Freedom's Ember was about community resistance as much as it was individual resistance. Trish wasn't fighting for herself, and she never had any illusions about that. She wasn't even fighting for Piper, or Piper's grandkids. It was a much, much longer fight than that, and the torch would have to be passed many, many times before the race was run.

  The only question was, would Piper take the torch from her?