Blake unwrapped a nutrient bar. It tasted like fruity packing foam, but in the field food was food. He chewed without enthusiasm, feeling his stomach grudgingly accept the offering. The growling subsided.

He tossed the nutrient bar wrapper onto a console. It skittered across the smooth surface and came to rest against a small, carved wooden figure—some kind of six-legged lizard creature, polished smooth by handling. The control center remained eerily silent, a pocket of preservation amidst the Leviathan's desecrated corpse. Emergency lights hummed, bathing the compact space—maybe three meters wide, five deep—in a low, steady glow.

Blake ran a hand along the back of one of the chairs positioned before a bank of dark screens. Not the molded plastic crap he'd expect in an office space, or even anything particularly industrial as befitting a space-vessel. This was covered in thick, woven fabric, patterned in subtle earth tones. It felt soft, worn smooth in places. Comfortable. Someone had spent a lot of time sitting here.

Now that he had time to look, other touches broke the sterile expectation of a ship's control room. A faded photograph pinned to a bulkhead showed a group of smiling, unfamiliar humanoids gathered around a table filled with food. Dried flowers hung in a small bundle from a conduit pipe. A clay pot holding a dessicated plant stem sat on another console, painted with clumsy, childlike swirls of color. This wasn't just a workspace. It was lived in.

And it was all untouched. While the rest of the ship writhed with corrupted flesh and warped geometry, this room felt… clean. Sealed off.

"Why here?" Blake thought aloud, the question echoing in the quiet. "What made this spot special?"

"It feels different, doesn't it?" Kitt's voice was still thin, recovering, but present in his mind. "Unexpectedly cozy."

"Yeah. " He nodded slowly, tracing the rim of a mug stain on a console. "What was this place?"

"Navigation? Tactical? Hard to say just by looking. The systems are dormant, shielded." A pause. "But maybe not entirely dark to us. We haven't had a chance to use your evolved Insight on anything with any real hardening—let's do it."

Normally, he liked to keep the skill burning away at minimum power, but he had deactivated it entirely sometime during the struggle against the outsider—probably on reflex.

He drew a breath, centering himself. The headache from their mental collision had subsided to a dull throb behind his eyes. He closed them for a moment, then opened them, activating [Warden's Chimeric Insight] as he did.

As always, the world dissolved into a cascade of overlapping energies, a disorienting flood of raw data. Lines of power pulsed beneath the deck plating, residual heat signatures bloomed and faded, faint psychic impressions clung to surfaces like static fuzz. It was usually overwhelming, a sensory firehose that he or Kitt would tamp down and try to organize. For the time being, Blake just let Kitt take it all in.

"Too much, that's for sure" Kitt murmured, her presence a gentle pressure alongside his own consciousness. "I had hoped we'd be able to set some more reasonable 'default filtering' or something, but it seems like one of the downsides of this skill is that you'll always have to manage it actively."

"Are other information and identification abilities normally more fire-and-forget?" Blake asked, trying not to focus on any one thing in his vision too closely, but to instead just accept the entire canvas as it was.

"Oh yeah," Kitt responded. "The Identify ability is one of the most common abilities in the 'verse, and the various specializations of it tend to be similarly simple. You just look, activate, and learn."

"Seems like I'm getting a raw deal, then." Blake began to take more deliberate and meditative breaths, still trying to fight his instincts to dive into any given strand of information in view.

"Not even a little," Kitt fired back immediately. "Most people just get a system message with a minimum of actionable information."

Her voice took on a robotic tone and cadence as she continued: "Creature: Dog; Tier: Unknown; A common mutt who might like pets, just make sure it's not rabid."

Blake laughed at that, and Kitt joined him.

"Understood, I'm getting too much information by comparison."

"Yeah, so don't whine that you have to put some effort in. Especially when I'm hear to do the heavy lifting. Now stop marinating yourself in the data streams and pick a console to focus on. We'll see what we can pull from it."

He mentally latched onto the console directly before him, the one with the wooden lizard. He pushed the chaotic background noise away, narrowing his perception.

"Good. Now, feel the energy pathways leading into it, out of it. Ignore the ambient stuff. Look for the directed flow, the structured data." Kitt guided him, not by controlling his sight, but by highlighting patterns, suggesting filters. Like a spotter calling out targets on a range. "See the resonance? The specific frequencies? That's internal communication protocol. Ship systems."

Blake pushed deeper. The console lit up under his Insight, not with physical light, but with intricate lattices of energy. Data streams, dormant but intact, traced paths through crystalline processors. He saw connections spiderwebbing out, linking this console to others in the room, and then deeper, into the ship's core systems—or what was left of them.

He focused on the interface points, the input/output nodes. He could almost feel the ghost of fingertips on the controls, the echo of voices speaking into integrated microphones.

"Communications," Kitt confirmed, her thought overlapping his own dawning realization. "Primary communications hub. Long-range arrays, internal ship comms, subspace links… it all ran through here."

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"Comms," Blake muttered aloud, running his fingers over the cool, dark screen. "Makes sense they'd want to protect this. Keep contact lines open."

"Or," Kitt added, a new thread of unease weaving into her tone, "to keep them closed."

He followed the energy pathways further with his Insight, tracing the main trunk lines leading away from the comms hub. They plunged into the corrupted mass beyond the bulkhead, but unlike other systems, these lines weren't severed or consumed. They were… insulated. Shielded by layers of dense, solidified energy that flickered defensively under his enhanced perception. Someone, or something, had deliberately protected this room and its function.

Then, as he was examining the defensive energies, he sensed something else. A faint, rhythmic pulse, almost hidden beneath the hum of the emergency lights and the residual energy signatures. It wasn't part of the ship's dormant systems. It felt… organic. And localized. Coming from beneath the main console bank. He rapidly withdrew his focus, zooming back out into a normal frame of reference.

"Kitt?"

"I feel it too—it just started up. Faint. Biological."

He crouched, extending his Insight toward the source. Metal plating, standard deck structure, then a shielded compartment. The pulse emanated from within. Not hostile, not like the Outsider's presence, but… alive. Waiting.

Something was hidden here. Something the Leviathan, or its crew, had sealed away and protected, even as the Outsider consumed the rest of the ship.

"Ready to go spelunking?" Blake pressed his palm against the console's cool surface. The metal hummed faintly under his touch, a ghost of the power that once flowed through it.

"Always." Kitt's voice carried a mix of excitement and apprehension. Thin tendrils of her biomass extended from his palm, spreading across the console like liquid graphite. They seeped into the console's seams, and once she found a solid connection, Kitt immediately began probing the system's defenses.

Kitt had tried to explain to Blake how her ability to interface with electronics worked before, but he still found it odd that her ability worked best when she could contact circuitry directly. He imagined it was similar in concept to his [Telekinesis], which worked exponentially better the closer his target was to him.

The room's air grew heavier as Kitt worked. Blake's breath came slow and measured, his focus sharp. He used Insight to follow along, watching Kitt's tendrils pulse with faint light, their movements deliberate and precise.

"Electronic defenses next," Kitt murmured. "Standard encryption protocols, but layered. The Leviathan didn't want anyone getting in here."

"Alright," Blake nodded, his eyes scanning the console. "You say the Leviathan set this security up? How certain are you?"

"Pretty damned certain, since the first layer of defense was a psychic one—an antimemetic that she probably hoped would make people stop looking so hard at the compartment," she replied. "That sort of defense is hard to make stick outside your own head, but if the Leviathan set them up itself…."

"Right, okay. This is good, though. I'll let you work."

Minutes passed in tense silence. The tendrils shifted, their patterns becoming more delicate as Kitt navigated the defenses. Blake's hand remained steady on the console, his connection to Kitt a steady hum in the back of his mind.

"Got it." Kitt's voice broke the silence. "The compartment's open, but... you need to know something."

"What is it?" Blake asked, his brow furrowing.

"The Leviathan isn't entirely dead. And she's not entirely corrupted."

"Explain." Blake's eyes narrowed. "How is this thing still alive?"

"After a crash like the one she had? I don't know and am a little afraid to find out. But she is alive and still fighting, even now."

"That's great news. Is tha—is she what we sensed?"

"Yeah. There's a sub-core in the compartment. Kind of like what I built into Verdict, but an order of magnitude more developed. A part of the Leviathan's consciousness is inside—I can feel it. It's half-asleep, fractured and disjointed, but alive. I think she set part of herself aside to keep the Outsider from using the communications array."

Blake grinned at the thought. Feisty. Good for her.

"She's been fighting this whole time, even as the corruption spread. It's... remarkable."

Blake glanced around the room, his gaze lingering on the personal touches—the photograph, the dried flowers, the clay pot. "It's protecting more than just the array."

Kitt's tendrils pulsed with agreement. "Interstellar comms is tough business. The fact that Leviathans can assist in the process is just one of the many reasons everyone wants to be our friends so badly. I don't think its a stretch to think she probably had a soft spot for the people on the crew who made it possible for the ship to keep in contact while in the black."

"Can we talk to it?" Blake didn't know whether it was a good idea, but he had to ask.

"I can try. But be ready for anything. This isn't going to be a normal conversation."

Blake nodded, his grip on the console tightening. "Do it."

The tendrils shifted again, their light intensifying. Blake felt a surge of energy as Kitt reached out to the sub-core. The room seemed to hold its breath, the air thick with anticipation.

Unfortunately, Blake would have to hold his breath longer than anticipated. When Kitt made contact, there was no sudden feeling of connection and no holographic avatar telling Blake he was her only hope. He could only tell because Kitt's emotions were clear as a bell across the bond they shared, and whatever she discovered when she connected with the ship… She didn't like it.

Blake felt the connection with Kitt sharpen, pulling him from his thoughts about the dormant systems. The hum in his mind shifted, jagged edges replacing the smooth flow. Sorrow washed over him, thick and cloying, followed by a spike of fury that felt like shattered glass against his thoughts.

"She's… broken," Kitt's mental voice trembled, the sound resonating with a grief that wasn't entirely her own. "Barely there. Just… fragments. Flashes of memory. Pieces of star-song."

"Star-song?"

"How Leviathans communicate. It's not words. It's… resonance. Emotion. Pure data woven into harmony. Usually, the Pilot translates."

"You seem to manage fine talking through speakers."

"I had new language structures stitched in," Kitt said, a flicker of something cold and sharp crossing their link. "To be more… useful."

Blake let the comment hang. The Outsider had already scraped that wound raw. No need for him to poke at it now, especially not after… everything. He mentally backed away from the topic.

Kitt seemed to seize the shift, her anger hardening, overriding the sorrow. "Terrible things happened here, Blake. We've got to put an end to this."

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