Delve

Tasser swore.

I know it’s bad,” I said. “I never thought about it!”

“It’s been in her mind for months!” he protested.

“I know, I know! There was never any reason for me to think it affected her, or that she was even aware of it.”

“Oh, she’s definitely not aware of it,” Tasser assured me.

“What do I do?” I said, panic creeping into my voice. “We’ve just now gotten to a point we can tolerate each other, but it turns out, it was pointless! Because I set a time bomb that she’s going to kill me over!”

A pit grew in my stomach. She’d shoved me through a wall over a misunderstanding last time, over accidentally insulting her family, heritage, and species. But this was her mind, her consciousness, the self.

Worse still, it hadn’t been by accident.

“I should have said something,” I realized darkly.

Looking back, having Daniel in my mind had skewed my perspective in the moment. My mind hadn’t felt so inviolable then. So it hadn’t seemed problematic to dig into anyone else’s mind.

I’d fooled myself into dividing the responsibility between Daniel and I. Justified keeping my mouth shut by fearing what Nai might do to me if she learned I’d stuck something in her mind.

But then there hadn’t seemed to be any fallout.

“Seriously, Tasser,” I said shakily, “what do I do? She might actually kill me for this.”

“Don’t tell her,” he immediately said.

The answer startled me, and I stared at him.

“I mean you don’t tell her,” he clarified. “Let her hear about it from me, we’ll hide you somewhere on base and give her some time to be angry, a few hours, I don’t know. After that…”

“Make it right,” I said. “Fix things.”

·····

Four hours later I was sitting across from Nai in her section of the officer bunks.

Her eyes had not left me since she’d entered the room. There was fire in her gaze. Even with the psionic mirror in question masking her presence on my radar, I could feel the energy ready to spring forth from her fingertips.

Once again, the dread-inducing knowledge that I was a thought away from incineration crept over me. It felt more imminent than all the other times. She’d restrained herself in lieu of a true reason to attack so far.

This time, I’d given her a reason.

It felt uniquely frustrating to be retreading the same ground so soon after making a breakthrough.

I already knew much of what was about to be said.

I was going to say something like…’I didn’t mean to’.

Her obvious answer: ‘how is that supposed to help me?’

She was angry and right to be. I was screwed because, once again, I couldn’t have known.

“I’m going to fix this.” I opened.

“Even try to touch my brain and you’ll stop breathing,” she hissed.

I held up a hand to placate her.

“I said… I’m going to fix this,” I spoke the words slowly, intentionally forcing the conversation to stay in calm territory, “whatever that entails.”

Tasser sat between us, only barely off to the side. He would get between the Farnata and me if violence broke out, but it was a token gesture. If Nai decided to kill me, she wouldn’t even move.

It wasn’t lost on me that Tasser was upset with me.

He might have been ready to stop her from hurting me, but for the first time since getting to know him, I saw that he was actually angry with me.

“Start talking,” she said.

“I didn’t know it was affecting you,” I said. “The version I have doesn’t do anything to me, so I assumed it wasn’t doing anything to you.”

“You know better!” Nai roared, “I taught you better! If you don’t understand what you create, then—”

“I know!” I defended, “but I didn’t know then! And if I hadn’t done something , we’d be dead.”

“It isn’t just that you put it in her mind, Caleb,” Tasser said. “It’s that you kept it secret. She didn’t have any way to control her own mind. Keeping this mirror secret stole that control from her.”

Tasser was upset… on Nai’s behalf, I realized. It was vicarious. Supportive?

What was the right word? He was upset at me, because unlike before, when I’d insulted a people, this time, I’d hurt a person. His friend. It struck me that Nai almost certainly seen the same behavior in him when she’d hurt me.

“It wasn’t supposed to be a secret,” I said. “It wasn’t even a decision. It was just…something so we’d survive, and then after, there was always something else. Even on the occasion I ran into you, I didn’t even…think about it…”

I winced as I said it. This wasn’t helping. She was only growing more furious.

“Explain to me,” Nai growled, “exactly what ‘it’ is.”

“It’s a mirror,” I explained. “Or it’s supposed to act like a mirror? I don’t know exactly how to describe it.”

“Why…would you put a ‘mirror’ in my mind?” Nai asked incredulously.

“Because at first we improvised the mirror to help me perceive my own mind and how it interacted with psionics. My mental radar operates at least somewhat parallel to the real thing—by emitting and receiving light. So I figured if mirrors could reflect real signals, a psionic mirror could reflect psionic…signals. Before I put the mirror in place, you gave off the most intense reading of anyone. It was terrifying to be around, so I figured if I could get the mirror to reflect back at you somehow, whatever the mirror was reflecting might be intense enough you might wake up and save all our lives.”

I was babbling, rambling as I talked, struggling to keep my cool.

“At least in that, it worked,” Tasser pointed out, and to my surprise, Nai gave a tiny nod of concession to the point.

“It’s been a long time since then,” I said. “I’ve learned a lot, even on my own. You could probably sleep tonight if I can figure out how to get it out of your head.”

“Your culture must not have the same considerations for privacy that mine does,” Nai said. “You violated my mind and now you’re sitting in front of me telling me to just accept more violation!”

“I had my dead friend in my mind,” I reminded her. “I know what it’s like to feel like your consciousness has been violated, and unlike you, I didn’t have anyone to blame.”

“But I do. You twisted my mind, and said nothing!” she hissed. “Why shouldn’t I burn you alive?”

The threat felt… wrong. Like it was in response to words I hadn’t said. It was possible my grasp of Starspeak was lacking. But was it enough for her to hear different words than the ones I’d said?

This isn’t her best, I realized. Sleep was something so ubiquitous that every flavor of alien I knew partook of it. It was so intuitively common that I hadn’t even bothered to file it under my ‘dissonant similarities’ list.

She was worn down, tired, and feeling unsure of her own mentality.

I remembered finding Daniel the first time our ship had been drowned in the pale light.

He hadn’t woken up for days. And what terrifying dark and lonely days those had been?

We really hadn’t been seeing each other as people. And for the first time, I imagined someone about nineteen or twenty years old, disheveled, looking like Daniel or I had after thirty days on a rocket through space.

I couldn’t help but pity her.

I’d decided I wouldn’t be afraid of her anymore.

“Try it,” I dared her. Her eyes widened a fraction like I’d slapped her, but in that moment her surprise won out over her anger. I met her furious stare unflinchingly.

“I know you’re [pissed off], and you have a right to be. But this happened months ago, and it was not a mistake. Regardless of what’s happened since, if I hadn’t tried something, then all four of us would be dead. I didn’t know anything about Adeptry, or even psionics. This was before I even named what was happening in my head. If you want to blame me, that’s fine. But I do intend to set this right.”

Nai was speechlessly angry, but she did not attack me.

“So,” I said, forcing my voice to stay steady, “will you let me help?”

She consulted Tasser with a glance, and he nodded.

“I want to know everything,” she hissed. “Every single thing you try, every single action you take. You are not touching my mind any more than absolutely necessary.”

I nodded in agreement. I could abide by that.

“The first step is to identify the actual problem. Is sleep the only thing the mirror affects?”

“How would I know?” she said scornfully, “you keep talking about how little you know about these psionics, but I know even less.”

“Then guess,” I said. “What else besides the insomnia have you noticed? The mirror isn’t a real mirror. It’s abstract, so anything you even think might be related to it could be relevant.”

“…I’ve been self-aware,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about ‘me’ more than normal.”

“The mirror was a self-perception tool originally,” I said. “Daniel made it to help me perceive the larger construct…”

“Construct?” Nai asked while Tasser simultaneously said, “Daniel?”

“One of the abductees who died,” I answered Tasser. “I got his consciousness, or a psionic echo of it, stuck in my head.”

Turning to Nai… “Assuming that psionics are some form of Adept ability, all the different psionics I have are part of, or at least derived from, the first one I created.”

“The first thing I created…” I added.

“In lieu of comprehension, intent will blindly shape the result. What were you intending when you made this ‘construct’?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I don’t even know exactly when I created it. It was at some point on the ship, sometime after we ‘skipped,’ you called it.”

“Focus on the mirror then,” Nai said.

“Intent shapes outcome,” I said. “I made your mirror to wake you up. I created another mirror to help myself hide from [Chief] after I realized the mirror in your head was rendering you undetectable to my, and therefore also her, radar.”

“Then there should be a difference between the mirrors,” Tasser guessed. “Your mirror doesn’t keep you awake, so if we can figure out what the difference is, maybe we can still help Nai.”

“The trouble is, I can’t even perceive her mind right now, much less the mirror. The very thing we want to remove is preventing me from even looking at the problem.”

Nai only glared at me.

“…Cascading your head might help,” I said. “I don’t know how psionics or even Adept powers interact with the brain, but that extra knowledge can’t—”

That…was probably not the best way to phrase my point.

“Were you about to say it can’t hurt?”

“Yes,” I admitted, “but I mean, right now, I can’t even sense your mind at all. Even Tasser registers more prominently than you.”

“You could detect me when I first showed you tactile cascading,” Nai accused. “How recent was that?”

“I had to improvise that,” I said. “I tweaked the radar to saturate the surroundings. The radar metaphor actually falls apart here: your mirror still prevented me from detecting you, but it didn’t prevent me from detecting background near you. So as long as you were close, like in the same room, I could track you by watching where the dead spot on the radar moved.”

“We’re getting off topic,” Tasser said. “Nai, Caleb didn’t have to say anything today. You could have gone through the rest of today with no idea what happened.”

She was physically struggling to keep calm.

“Nai, I trust him,” Tasser decided. He was still upset with me, so his affirmation felt all the more humbling. She didn’t visibly react until he quietly said only one more word, “…Hivivi.”

She shot him a venomous, desperate look, and something unspoken went between them.

Nai stared violently at her friend, before slowly, begrudgingly, nodding.

“Please don’t make me regret this, Caleb,” she said icily. “I don’t want to kill any of Tasser’s friends.”

“We should go to the medical ward,” I said. “Dyn could help, or at least monitor you physically then.”

Tasser and Nai both nodded, him barely more readily than her.

·····

The three of us walked into Dyn’s office in silence, not having said a word the whole way there. Part of me thought we should have involved Serralinitus at some point, but the rest of me knew that wouldn’t deliver a solution quickly enough to help anyone.

“My strangest patient,” Dyn remarked. “I thought you were clearing snow, what brings you?”

“I’m bringing you a patient actually,” I told him.

“Oh this should be good,” he said. But then he saw who was with me.

“She came to you about trouble sleeping?” I asked.

Dyn nodded warily, “Yes…she had no trouble falling asleep only to stir awake a few minutes later.”

“My fault,” I said plainly. “When we were running from the Vorak to get here, I woke her up psionically. It stuck with her, and I didn’t realize it had any long-term effects until today.”

The doctor looked between me and Nai, incredulously. “She didn’t attack you again?”

“I think that will be contingent on how well she sleeps tonight,” I said.

“So what are you actually doing?” Dyn asked.

“I’m going to cascade her brain and figure out what exactly I did…”

Nai lay down on one of Dyn’s gurneys and I tried to figure out how to best lay my hand on Nai’s head.

She kept an angry eye on me but didn’t protest when I opted to touch her forehead.

Despite having lived among aliens for six months, I hadn’t had very much physical contact with any of them. Dyn had to hold my arm in place to draw blood, or carry out other medicine, but he was really the only alien to have even minimal physical contact.

Even in the endless hours spent learning with Tasser, he and I had never really broken each other’s bubble of personal space. Save for handing papers and laser pens back and forth, I was reaching for a time I’d even come close to touching any alien that wasn’t trying to kill me.

Nai was being an unbelievably cooperative patient despite being livid.

That was in no small part due to also being visibly exhausted. She’d been materializing high-energy creations all morning, on top of being low on sleep.

Tired limbs might be the only thing that had kept her from throwing me through another wall.

I had not cascaded my own flesh much. It was more difficult to work my cascade through complex matter like living skin and tissues than it was other, more inert materials. I could cascade roughly a liter of space when it was filled with something like concrete, but I could barely manage a third of that trying to analyze my own body.

But what I lacked in volume, I made up for in detail.

My cascade washed over Nai’s skull, and she shivered.

Bone, blood, and muscle flared into focus. It was so much to keep track of! Like watching a colony of insects, it was impossible to focus on any one part for more than a second. The flow of blood was stunningly intricate, but I had cascaded it before.

A brain? Not so much. The nerves were what overwhelmed me. It was like watching lighting so bright it scorched my eyes, only for the bolt not to fade but be immediately replaced a thousand times every second.

Scanning her brain wasn’t the point though.

I needed some way to detect her consciousness, to bypass the mirror’s cloaking.

One of the odd things I’d come to realize was that my radar was not one psionic creation, but rather the combined function of at least three integral pieces of the greater construct. At the bare minimum, the radar could pick up these emanation’s direction and intensity. Based on that information, the psionic clockwork turned that information into usable sensory information that I could intuitively determine a location from.

The mirror was blocking the emanations Nai was sending out, so my radar couldn’t detect her.

So…if I wanted to get a fix on her mind, then I needed a way to detect it psionically. It wasn’t enough to just cascade her brain and blindly aim my own mental machines at the theoretical position of her brain.

I needed something new.

If I couldn’t detect the emanations Nai gave off, then perhaps I could give off my own…

The radar metaphor got messy if I compared it too much to the real thing, but in this case it could actually help. Real radar, and even sonar, didn’t rely on their targets giving off their own signals to detect. They emitted their own, and knowing where and when they were emitted, they detected those same signals bouncing back off whatever they wanted to detect.

So I needed to emit my own signal.

I even already had the tool for it.

When Daniel had been in my mind, he hadn’t been mixed in homogeneously. He’d been a distinct entity, able to erect some form of mental separation between us. To communicate without talking out loud, I’d had to learn to

Nai flinched ominously.

“What was that?” she hissed.

“Probing,” I answered. “Even with my cascade, I can’t detect your mind. But I think I have a way…”

“I thought you… buzzed or something.”

“You heard a sound?” I asked.

“Not really?”

I sent.

She reacted, but didn’t appear to register I’d sent any words. She had only felt the signal itself. She couldn’t interpret it. Huh.

Still, with each signal that she, and her mind, reacted to I got a clearer picture. Cascading her brain hadn’t been strictly necessary, it turned out. But certain flashes through her synapses coincided with the greater definition that I was able to glean of her mind.

Instead of perfectly blending into the background, it was now emerging like a murky shape just about to lunge upward and break the surface of the sea.

But the more I learned, the worse it got.

Repeatedly bouncing signals off her mind had its drawbacks though. For one, it wasn’t smooth. When I detected minds ‘passively,’ for lack of a better term, I could continuously intake whatever emanation they gave off. There was no interruption.

I was emitting my own emanations, on their way out, they could interfere with the very same emanations I wanted to detect. So I couldn’t detect passively and probe with signals simultaneously. The latter ruined the results of the former.

But even with the stuttering psionic image that was forming, the news wasn’t good.

Because no matter how much her mind came into view, no matter how much I homed in on the mirror, none of it reacted to the signal aside from bouncing it back.

I’d hoped if I could perceive the mirror that I could just reach in and pluck it out, no harm done.

“…I can’t,” I realized.

Nai seethed at the words.

“I can’t remove it.”

There was an intransigent gap between our minds.

No matter how I tried, I couldn’t reach across it. My ability to sense minds afforded me no detail whatsoever from a distance, each person simply giving off nebulous thoughts like a hot spring evaporating steam into cold air. I couldn’t read any thought or feeling, but I’d had the impression that if I sat down to examine a person in detail, I might be able to make sense of the emanations.

Peering into Nai’s mind disabused me of that notion.

I had not even set a toe inside Nai’s mind itself. I couldn’t. It was everything I could manage just to look through the door and perceive even a small part of her consciousness. Even what I perceived was incomprehensible. There wasn’t a single thought I could have influenced, not a single idea I could have affected in the slightest.

She didn’t have to worry about mind control. Mind reading was similarly out of the question.

For the first time, I managed to imagine how Daniel had felt, trapped inside my head. Every single scrap of unyielding self, swirling around with him utterly not in control? No wonder he’d called my psionic construct ‘a phantom.’

I thought the greater construct was mind bogglingly complex, but a living mind itself had to be another order of magnitude above that.

Nai’s mind was similarly opaque, and I didn’t think it was because she was trying to shut me out.

We were just meat; flesh computers speaking two different programming languages.

“Even right now, I can’t even begin to figure out how to remove it. If it makes you feel any better, that means I also can’t figure out how to change anything in your mind at all.”

I took my hand off her head. There was no point to cascading her anymore.

“Give me a minute to think,” I said. “There has to be a solution.”

What was my actual goal?

‘Remove the mirror,’ obviously.

But I couldn’t, so what then?

That…depended on why we wanted to remove the mirror. That was where a possible solution still lived. I couldn’t remove the mirror. But doing so was just a means to an end: helping Nai.

So if I couldn’t remove the mirror, how could I help her?

It was keeping her awake. But my version didn’t do anything like that.

…But I did have a psionic construct that was tangentially related to sleep. My radar turned itself off when I went to sleep…not because I had to be conscious to maintain it, but because there was no way I could begin to relax while it was feeding me information like that.

But maybe it didn’t quite turn itself off. Maybe I turned it off by reflex, or there was some other psionic tool I had that split the difference.

Nai wouldn’t have either of those options. She couldn’t manipulate the mirror. She didn’t have the same tools I did…

“There’s some gap between our minds,” I said. “I can’t pull anything across it…but I think I could push something else.”

“Don’t. You. Dare.” Nai said.

“Hear me out,” I said. “I couldn’t figure out how to remove the mirror, but I did get a really good look at it, even if I couldn’t affect it. I don’t think the two versions of mirror are any different, because I made mine expressly to be the same as yours.”

“So why can you sleep?”

“Because I can…‘turn it off,’ for lack of a better term. I use the mirror for different things. Like even right now, it’s part of how I’m even perceiving the other mirror, helping me look at your mind from a slightly different mental angle. But sometimes I use it to help perceive my own mind, and I even used it to hide from Sendin Marfek.”

Nai was growing more impatient.

“My point is… it doesn’t do all those things automatically. I have to manipulate it into position, tweak how it reflects, and alter it in stupidly abstract ways. But I use other psionics to manipulate the mirror. So it seems like your mirror is stuck in the abstract configuration where it prevents you from staying asleep. If you had the tools to manipulate the mirror, you could change that configuration.”

Nai shooed me away so she could confer with Tasser and Dyn alone. I gave her the space.

She talked with Tasser more than Dyn. The exchange was hushed but intense. He was willing to talk to her directly. One of the things I appreciated about him was his casual refusal to sugarcoat anything. It wasn’t even a conscious effort on his part. Tasser simply didn’t think to exchange anything but the plain truth.

This was the first time I’d seen that happen with someone else. I hadn’t thought about Nai and Tasser’s friendship much. Why were they so close?

They beckoned me back after a few more minutes of debate.

Nai asked me, “…How much do you understand what you would be creating? How confident can you be that if you put more of this in my head, that something else won’t go wrong?”

“…Zero,” I said. “I can’t be sure. But the only other alien I’ve ever met who might know about this was an enemy Vorak, and she’s dead. So I am confident when I say no one has any better grasp of this than me.”

A heartbeat before she acceded, I saw she would. It was the honest number that convinced her. In a strange way, ignorance was common ground. We both had no certainty about psionics. Just like our respective homeworlds, we might have been in different boats, but we were stuck in the middle of the same ocean.

“…Do it.”

“Not without a test run,” I said.

I found one of the neater pages of my journal and materialized it, handing the sheet to Tasser.

“I’m going to test this with something I do know, inside and out. I’m as sure as I can be that this isn’t going to affect your mind. I’m going to try and put a copy of that page into your head, if you can read it, then we can try with something more complicated.”

Copying the page and pushing it across the void between our minds gave me shivers. The feeling of raw information leaving my head was disturbing. If I hadn’t copied the page, I wouldn’t have any way to recover the contents.

I kept every iota of my psionics aimed at the page as it settled onto the surface of Nai’s psyche. For a moment, I wasn’t sure Nai had even noticed, but then her mind gave a unified shift, and her mind snatched the page, dragging below the surface of her mind.

That was her noticing the new information…

“Well?”

“Every single Vorak on nine different planets sang five distinct songs with no way to prevent anyone from stopping them,” she quoted. “Wait…that’s not how it’s supposed to go. It’s eight planets, three songs, and you changed the adjectives...”

It was the Starspeak version of ‘the quick brown fox.’ The sentence contained every letter pairing possible under its alphabet.

“I edited the text to see if you could read the sheet itself or if your brain would just fill in the information with the words you already knew,” I told her. “How well can you perceive the sheet itself?”

“…It’s like a rectangle with words on it. It’s clear and diraksi, that is bizarre.”

“You’re sure you won’t forget the page,” I guessed. “You can’t.”

She nodded warily.

“I’ve got about a thousand of those,” I told her.

“How does that not overwhelm you?” she asked incredulously.

“I have a filing system, I had to make it because of exactly that issue.”

“So she can perceive the page,” Tasser said. “So what now?”

“Now, I try to copy the significantly more complicated tools I use to manipulate the mirror.”

“If we’re operating under the assumption that your psionics are created Adeptly, then try to recreate them with the express intent to be usable by Nai.”

“That’s going to be complicated…” I said, “…but not a bad idea.”

Unlike copying the page, copying pieces of the greater construct was much slower and more difficult.

The different pieces of it that I used to manipulate all my other psionics were intricate and dense. The technical details were steeped in abstraction and vaguery that I had to blindly improvise my way through.

Nai had told me that intending to create something non-reactive was relatively safe because you didn’t need to understand that much to comprehend a creation not reacting with something. It was easy to wrap your head around the concept of something not doing anything.

That was what I needed now. I needed a way to make a set of psionic tools so simple that nothing else could possibly go wrong. I entertained the idea of making some kind of psionic paint instead, something to cover up the mirror’s ‘reflective’ portion.

It wasn’t a real mirror though. It wasn’t rectangular. It didn’t have a definite shape at all.

In the end, it was too much of a risk, and it didn’t put things in Nai’s control, and that felt too important to compromise.

Nai needed to be ultimately in control of whatever I put in her mind. So I shouldn’t try to give her tools too similar to mine. My construct was suited for me, a human, with my own eccentricities and quirks.

The solution wasn’t perfect. It involved allowing the tools to change more than I would have first wanted. But if they were to actually be usable, they needed to adapt to Nai as much as she would need to adapt to use them.

It wouldn’t be enough to just give her a tool to manipulate the mirror. Just shoving something new into her mind without the support structures to manage it properly would only repeat the problem in the future, next time maybe with something even more critical than sleep.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ve got them ready, there’s three of them. Here, here, and here.”

One by one I pushed the new tools out of my mind and into hers. Making them was the hard part, sending them toward her consciousness was trivial by comparison. Just like the page before, they were undisturbed for a moment before Nai’s mind surged up around them, dragging them under.

“Not so deep!” I warned, “don’t just commit them to memory. I don’t think they work like that. You want them to stay...at the edge of your awareness. Like how you breathe without thinking about it, but you can still consciously control how you breathe if you want.”

Nai muttered something in her native language, “Vrastna! What are these?”

“The first one is a perception tool. Think of it like a lens,” I said. “It’s a bit like the mirror itself, but it’s easier to move around impulsively and it should take effort to activate, not the other way around. It will help you perceive the mirror and what needs to change. You can use the second tool to interact with and manipulate the other two and the mirror. It’s the simplest but also potentially the most important because without it, you can’t affect anything else. The last is…well, it’s an organizational tool. Think of it like a tool rack, or some kind of case. You can attach the other tools to the third one to keep them in a consistent spot, conceptually speaking.”

“I hate this,” Nai said. “This is all metaphor. How is it supposed to—” she stopped abruptly, and I saw something had changed. She’d grasped part of the second tool.

“There,” I encouraged, “now use that and the lens to look at the mirror and fold it back up—make it dormant.”

It took her a few tries, but even the tiny first adjustment she made was enough for me to start perceiving her mind remotely again. It was like how the sun started to peek out from behind the moon again after an eclipse.

She pulled the mirror away and folded it back up into an unobtrusive mote of thought.

I broke out into a cold sweat as the sensation of Nai’s presence inundated my radar once more. She was the most threatening Adept I’d felt with it, by far.

Nai sat with an unreadable look on her face. I had no idea what she was thinking about all this, but there was no doubt she was wrestling with the new objects floating around her mind.

“...Did it work?” Tasser asked.

A good question. Nai had definitely figured out how to peel back the mirror. But whether or not things were fixed was...pending.

“I think so,” I said, “but…”

Nai gave me a glare only slightly less venomous than before.

“...but it remains to be seen. I’m going to sleep now.”

She tried to get up from the gurney, but Dyn pushed her head back down.

“I’m keeping you for observation. You two, scram.”

Tasser and I left without protest, though I could tell Tasser wished he could have talked with her more.

“I wasn’t sure she’d let me do anything for a minute there,” I told him. “How come she trusts you like that?”

“Same reason you do, honestly,” Tasser said. “If you save each other’s lives and the have right element of personality in common then I’ve found friendship is inevitable.”

“I wouldn’t have figured you had that much in common with Nai,” I admitted.

“It’s not the best time to ask,” he said. “I’m still…” he clicked his tongue, mildly frustrated. “I don’t really know how to put the feeling into words.”

“Two of your friends nearly fought today. Again,” I hazarded.

He nodded slowly. “We have to do better, Caleb. Even small mistakes can have ruinous consequences.”

He was right. It still felt like there was no way to have realized the long-term impact, but he was right.

“Caleb, if harrowing experiences and something in common make friendships…” Tasser carefully spoke, “for you and I, the first is obvious. But the second is patience.”

I raised an eyebrow at him.

“You and I are both methodical people. I’ve seen your journals, and you know firsthand how dedicatedly I can pursue a solution. But that does not mean we are perfectly methodical. No matter how thorough we are, it does not make us immune to mistakes. No matter how patient we are, there will still come a moment where we act just a bit too hastily. So…”

“So, we need to do better.”

“…Yes.”

“I’m not sure I’m as patient as you give me credit for. I didn’t have any choice to learn Starspeak any other way. Outside of learning with you, I can’t really say that I’ve been that methodical.”

“No, you are patient,” he said. “But this is my whole point, patient people can still be impatient. Hasty people can still be thorough.”

It reminded me of something Daniel had said with me. “[We’re idiots…and it’s dangerous to pretend we aren’t…]” I recalled.

“What’s that?”

“Something the other…something Daniel said to me. It’s…complicated. But I think he meant it as encouragement, or maybe a warning. I’ve made some shortsighted decisions—been plain stupid in a lot of ways. But that’s not a reason to be content with making more mistakes. The point of not punishing yourself for mistakes isn’t to just keep making more mistakes. It’s so you don’t tear at the good parts of yourself while you’re trying to excise the bad. It’s not supposed to make you feel better when you screw up, it’s supposed to help you not screw up next time.”

“Do better,” Tasser confirmed.

I nodded gravely. “Do better.”

I spun up my psionics again and started planning out how I could learn more about them. Nai had been both right and wrong in some ways.

But I didn’t want to fool myself into thinking I hadn’t been wrong in some ways too. I needed to understand what I’d made.