Ondo and the whole of the universe faded away.
He told her later what had happened, earnest words whispered to her as she lay like a helpless child, barely moving, barely conscious. “There was substantial tissue rejection of your new organs, your lung and gut. Necrosis set in and that triggered sepsis. You must have been in great pain for some time.”
She didn't reply, ignoring the accusation in his voice. Ondo and the hard realities of the external world seemed so distant, so unimportant.
“Your body reacted to the infection by upping its core temperature, desperately trying to eliminate the infection overwhelming you,” he continued. “Even as I brought that under control, your heart stopped. The machines have been keeping you alive for three days now.”
Her voice was a whisper once again. “Will I live?”
The light from the machines gleamed on the tears in his eyes. “I think so. If you wish it.”
By way of a reply to his implied question, she closed her eyes and said nothing. After a moment, no more words spoken, he rose to leave her to her thoughts.
Two days later, she awoke to find herself alone in the hushed calm of her room. Freeing herself from the battery of sensors and tubes and catheters that he had her tangled up in, she forced herself to a sitting position, and then to her feet. Time to take matters into her own hands. Once again, the room lurched around her. She ignored it with a snarl, and, fighting the dizziness, set about struggling her way to the observation deck that Ondo had led her to that first day. At some point during her death and her recovery, she'd come to a clear decision, prompted by the repeating nightmare of hands clutching at her from beneath the dust of Maes Far. She knew what she had to do. Now she simply needed to tell Ondo.
Three times on the journey she had to stop and lean on the hard wall to let the shapes swimming in front of her eyes fade. She was as weak as a new-born, the flesh of her body feverish and useless. Her senses were glitching, overloaded; the whiteness gleamed so brightly around her that she couldn't tell where floor ended and walls began.
A utility droid, seeing her toiling up the corridor, shimmied out of the way and regarded her mournfully through its optical sensors.
“Stop staring at me,” she shouted at it. “I'm doing my fucking best.”
The droid, for its part, didn't reply.
Once, she found herself on the cold floor, with no idea how she'd got there. She crawled until her head cleared. Her biomechanical augmentations, at least, still functioned, and it was they, rather than her own weakened biology, that allowed her to drag herself asymmetrically along corridors and up spiral ramps to reach her destination.
Finally, she made it. Through the transparent bulkhead, the galaxy hung unmoved by her recent death. She slumped against the opposite wall to consider it. Her cracked lips stung to the touch of her tongue. The swirling stars filling her eyes were a vast brain; once it had been active, functioning, creative. The trajectories of starships flashing across it were the pathways of the neurons: ideas and emotions streaming around the mind, spreading, growing. Now that mind was crippled, a few neurons firing occasionally, but only enough to convey a twisted, broken echo of all there had once been. An invading parasite sat spiderlike across the galactic mind, stunting all normal activity.
“Ondo.”
She spoke out loud, although thanks to the comms implants he'd given her, she really had only to think his name in the right way, imagine herself calling for him, and he would hear. They could communicate brain-to-brain over a limited range, their bodies' electrical fields powering flecks to transmit encrypted radio waves. Within the Refuge or on the Radiant Dragon, the effect was amplified, hardware systems routing their communications, allowing them to converse remotely with no effort. She wasn't sure she welcomed the technology, but it was powerful, something they hadn't had on Maes Far. Whether it simply hadn't been developed, or had been actively suppressed by Concordance, she didn't know, although the danger of tech that allowed people to spread ideas without an eavesdropper overhearing was obvious.
“Selene.” It was clear from the surprise in Ondo's voice that he hadn't known she was conscious. “Why are you in the observation room?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“I'll be right there.” She could hear the foreboding in his words. She knew why. He didn't know what she'd decided to do, but he suspected: she was going to demand the final release she craved. He couldn't deny her any longer; he'd given her his word. She sat and waited for him, lacking the energy to do anything else.
The haunted look on his face as he entered confirmed what she'd thought. Ondo said nothing, but crossed the room to sit beside her on the hard floor.
He spoke out loud. “Are you in pain?”
“It's fine.” Her voice was a rasp. Strange how the act of physically talking, of persuading jaw and throat muscles to act together, was such an effort. Nevertheless, she preferred to speak out loud. It helped her to pick through what she wanted to say. The thoughts in her mind floated free, weightless, flighty, but speaking them out loud pinned them down, gave them the weight of gravity.
He wasn't looking at her. He was looking at anything but her. His gaze was on the whole of the galaxy, laid out before them. He said, “I sometimes think of it, of my journey over the years, as something like a pilgrimage among the stars, that I'm following the twisting paths of a labyrinth. Do you know the concept?”
“A maze.”
He shook-nodded his head in his yes and no way. “Something similar. A labyrinth has only one way through it, with no forking paths. In that sense it's impossible to get lost, but the way
