Andra’s mind was a wreck. Her control, which had been Cygnus’s anchor for months, was shattered.

Every noise made her jump, and when she did, the ship trembled. Everything that wasn’t bolted down floated through the air, the mark of a telekinetic pushed far past the bounds of their own ability.

Humans could do incredible things when it came to survival.

(Breathe with me,) Cygnus said, his own mind woven into Andra’s the only thing that was holding the ship together through her nightmares. It was a struggle. As his syzygy, she was just as powerful as he was, and panic tore control apart faster than anything else. (Andra. You’re safe.)

“Cygnus?” His name echoed across their thought-bond even as she said it out loud. He rose from his chair and came to sit beside her on her hospital bed. She reached for him, her hand shaking but warm when he tangled their fingers together. “Where (am) I?”

It was never good when a telepath couldn’t separate thought-speech and verbal, but at least she was communicating. It was the first time she was awake enough to truly form a coherent sentence since her miraculous reappearance. He feared her lost to the terror that threatened to swamp her every moment.

“The medical bay of one of our cruisers,” he told her, opting for verbal speech in the hopes of grounding her out. “You’re safe.”

Relief echoed across their bond, turbulent blue that was soothing and overwhelming at once. Towering waves of orange fear rolled between them until he leaned forward, careful to telegraph his every move, and gathered her into his arms. She was always small, but after weeks of captivity, she was so thin she felt fragile.

Her touch on his mind was soothing and so tentative it broke his heart.

She didn’t know if he still wanted her in his thoughts.

(You are always welcome in my mind,) he whispered to her, and filled their shared mind-space with starlight glimmers of the hope he thought was lost with her disappearance. Slowly the waves of vivid orange terror faded into cool twilight calm. (Andra, what happened? I felt you die.)

(They hate us,) she said, eyes closed against the memories that threatened to swamp her. He carefully bolstered up her trembling control. (The aliens. They’re from far away. Their world, it’s a rogue planet, drifting through space. They heard us, heard our telepathy first, and came to investigate. They thought we were like them. A lost colony that found the perfect home to thrive.)

With her words came flashes of memory, so vivid he could barely hold himself to reality.

Her capture. Crystalline beings, their bodies as changeable as their minds, who moved too fast for their own limbs brutally murdering the people around her, only to drag her away, impossibly strong.

The feeling of their bond snapping as a mind far more powerful than hers alone crashed into her shields and bundled her into impassible silence.

The ship, every inch of it plated in a metal she didn’t know, that blocked her every attempt to reach for him.

And the Queen.

(Tell me,) Cygnus prompted her softly as he laid back on her bed with her tucked so close he could feel her heartbeat against his side. (You’re the first to ever see them.)

(They’re like ants,) Andra told him, her eyes closed, and her head on his chest. (Every ship has a queen, but the queens, they’re the only ones with psionic abilities. The rest are just workers, soldiers, scientists. Grown for their purpose. They’re individual, sort of, but connected with their whole hive. They hate us because so many of us have abilities, but they don’t realize we’re not a hive-mind.)

(Why did they take you?)

(They thought- they thought I was a Queen, because we, you and I, we tore their ships apart, but it was me who killed that first queen.)

(You spoke to her,) Cygnus whispered in realization. He remembered Andra, raw from the loss of Asteroid Base Forty-Two and too angry for reason. He remembered the feel of that powerful mind blinking out in one sharp, angry twist. (She told the rest?)

(The last thing she did was tell them everything. They thought I was a queen,) Andra repeated, quickly coming to the end of her strength. (When they found out I wasn’t, that we don’t have queens like theirs, they tried to get information out of me. They- they’re so strong, but they didn’t know what to look for in a mind that’s not part of the hive. You remember how we met?)

He did. The meeting that seemed so long ago. Her mind that shone interesting where everyone else was tediously dull. Her thought project, the buggy, broken little ship that was lost in one of the first attacks. Her humor and easy acceptance of his presence in her mind. Her strength, the unexpected anchor against the precognition that always left him torn apart.

(They don’t know how to get around those stupid little exercises. They don’t have anything like it,) Andra explained tiredly. (So I flooded them with sand-thought. Meaningless nothing, until they left me alone. But they gave me something too, because they didn’t know I could get into their minds while they were in mine. As soon as they left, I got out of my cell and hid.)

More images came. Flashes of glowing crystal bodies in dark hallways. Of stealing the odd mushrooms that grew from the walls. Of building a crude little scanner from scavenged parts to determine what was toxic and what was safe.

Of her tiny little camp, tucked back under a monstrous crystal growth. A little hollow, so hidden that no one ever looked there. Her refuge, as the queen searched and searched for her in the deep parts of the ship.

Of shattering her own control so that her own mind flickered in and out, untraceable in a ship she couldn’t escape.

And finally, finally feeling the weapons unloading, feeling the tremble of a psionic attack, and seeing her chance.

Finding a ship. Blasting out, guided only by intuition and desperation.

(Tell the generals,) she whispered to him as her mind faded out into sleep. (I know how to beat them.)