Kitt was stalling, and she knew it.

She wanted to linger, to watch over Blake just a little longer. The urge was almost primal—protect her host, guard her Pilot. But she knew better. The Leviathan's consciousness waited, fractured and hurting, needing her help to piece itself back together.

"You're still here?" Blake asked wearily as he woke.

"You weren't out long, why shouldn't I be?"

"Watching me sleep isn't as important as helping our Leviathan friend."

"I was productive," Kitt's presence was laced with a touch of playful offense. "I made another magazine of Recoil rounds for you. But I can keep them in the cache if you're going to be ungrateful."

"Fine, fine. Thank you," Blake laughed, the sound warm and welcome after everything they'd been through.

"You're welcome." She paused, hovering between staying and going. "Now, do you need anything before I actually get going? Remember: you can't touch our storage until we meet up next."

Before today, Kitt hadn't realized how much she relied on the easy way their thoughts intertwined, the seamless dance of their shared senses, the way his very being just was a part of hers. Leaving him, even for a few hours, felt like tearing something vital away. It made her feel… thin, somehow.

Blake needed her inside the Leviathan, though. The ship needed her, too. Its shattered mind was trying to knit itself back together, to remember what it had been before the Outsider had sunk its claws into its living flesh. She had to be the anchor, the interpreter, the bridge. The thought alone was exhausting, an ache already forming in what passed for her version of a headache.

But then, Blake's familiar aura, a scent of lightly oiled metal and worn leather, filled her awareness. It was a lingering thing, not the full surge of his active presence, but it was enough. It was him. Resolute. Stubborn. Like a stone taught to walk and shoot, he was something solid and dangerous.

"Did you just hug me, Connover?"

"I did no such thing, Kitt. You've got nothing to wrap my arms around, even if I were inclined. I just nudged you a bit. To get you moving."

"Sure thing, tough guy. I'll see you at the next sub-core, alright?"

"Of course. Stay safe in there, Kitt."

"Don't die, Blake."

The familiar mingling of their minds dimmed with each figurative step she took away. Her awareness contracted, losing the edges of his thoughts, the ghost-touch of his reflexes, the symphony of his senses mingling with hers. Her core trembled, straining against the growing distance between them. Space itself seemed to stretch and warp, pulling their connection into a gossamer filament that hummed with tension. It felt like she was wading through thick, dark mud, pushing her way back into the psychic mind-scape of the Leviathan. The last thread connecting them was taut, a hair's breadth from snapping. She pressed against it, a silent goodbye, and then forced herself over the threshold.

One moment, she was anchored to the steady, stubborn granite of his mind; the next, she was adrift in a sea of broken light and shattered sound. It was a kaleidoscope of pure, undiluted agony. A grief so profound it had its own gravity.

This was the Leviathan's mind. A cathedral of sorrow.

Her awareness, already a complex thing Blake struggled to comprehend, fractured and multiplied. The world was segmented, each facet reflecting a different angle of the same, overwhelming pain. She was herself, a distinct point of consciousness, but she was also part of this immense, wounded being. Her thoughts were no longer solely her own; they were twinned with the Leviathan's, harmonized with its resonant despair.

It hurts. It hurts. It hurts.

They weren't words, truly, simply emotion. A deep, thrumming vibration that resonated in her very core. She felt the violation, the Outsider's psychic filth smeared across pristine memories, the slow, grinding corruption that had turned a living starship into a tomb. If Blake had been exposed too directly to this… the raw, unfiltered input would have shattered his mind. He was strong, for all she made fun of him for being a meathead sometimes, but the mind of a Leviathan was a thing of fractal patterns and subdivisions of consciousness.

Such a mind was capable of unwinding into thousands of threads of individual awareness, of maintaining active awareness of a staggering number of physical and psychic bonds with various disparate pieces of linked technology and integrated biomass. It was a thick bundle of fiber optic cabling, compared to Blake's braided copper. And even worse, instead of being spread into a comfortable cloud of activity, all of the Leviathan's focus was here in one place. The psychic guardrails she'd erect at the next sub-core would need to be fortresses. This kind of sensory bleed could cripple him. Permanently.

Even she was only experiencing a limited subset of the Leviathan's true awareness—her own mind was a closer match to the ship's own, but she was barely a decade old. The Leviathan was almost two centuries her senior, and her full psychic weight could crush Kitt with barely more effort than it would to destroy Blake.

In this shared state of being, she perceived the Leviathan's Psycheform as the ship herself did. It was an immense sphere of crystal, shattered into countless shards, each one quietly vibrating with the memory of violation. It was a scream held in suspension, a song of grief with no end. The Leviathan's entire being was focused on this pain, trying to pull the discordant notes back into a single, mournful chord.

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But Kitt saw something else.

Through her own unique lens, the shattered Psycheform was less… abstract. Instead of a song caught in crystal, it was a puzzle. An impossibly complex, three-dimensional jigsaw of light and energy. Each shard was a discrete piece, holding a fragment of the whole. The form was damaged, but not necessarily broken; it was disassembled. The harmonics experienced by the Leviathan were dissonant because the pieces were out of place, scattered by a brute force they couldn't withstand.

This was the difference. The Leviathan felt only the pain of its brokenness. Kitt saw the path to its restoration. It was a task of immense scale, requiring a delicacy and an understanding of structure that the grieving mind of the ship couldn't manage alone. Kitt would have to help play architect and conductor. She had to take this shattered symphony of sorrow and rebuild it, note by painful note, until the song was whole again.

In the distance, she sensed the thought-form that she had awoken by linking the first sub-cores. She did not disturb it in its work. That sub-set of the greater ship was busy collecting every possible scrap of memory and coherent thought it could recover, and they'd need as many of those metaphorical puzzle pieces as possible.

She knew what she had to do. The Leviathan's mind was too vast, its pain too immense to tackle without a trial run. It was like trying to mend a planet-sized tapestry with clumsy, unpracticed fingers. She needed to start smaller, to refine her technique on something more manageable. Something familiar.

Her own mind.

The Leviathan had shown her how, in a brief, brilliant flash of shared understanding. It had projected the concept, a way to visualize her own Psycheform, to see the shape of her own consciousness from an objective distance. A diagnostic tool of incredible power. She had been eager to try it, to see the architecture of her own being.

She didn't like what she saw.

Following the Leviathan's guidance, Kitt drew her awareness inward, coaxing the ephemeral substance of her consciousness into a tangible form. It shimmered into existence before her mental eye, a glowing orb of pearlescent light held in the ghost of a hand. It should have been a perfect sphere, a smooth, unbroken globe of memory and identity.

It wasn't.

She had always known her memories from before Blake were… unreliable. A collection of fragmented images, disconnected sounds, and emotions without context. She understood it intellectually, but seeing it laid bare like this was something else entirely.

The sphere was marred, pocked with dark, empty holes where memories should have been. The last five years of her existence were a disaster zone. Jagged cracks spiderwebbed across its surface, entire sections were dim and unlit, their connections to the whole severed. Nearly half of her life was just… gone.

The sight of it sent a shudder through her. If she ate, she might have been nauseous. This was her. This was the sum of her experiences, and so much of it was missing, burned away or locked behind impenetrable walls. The memories of Vylaas, of Kaelen, of Ishta—they were there, but they were islands in a sea of nothingness. What had happened in the gaps? Who had she been?

She focused on one of the cracks, a hairline fracture that ran through a memory of her time with Vylaas. It was one of the good missions, when he was able to help people, and she was able to fly. She remembered the way it felt to be bound to that ship, the Asklepios... It was freedom. She remembered flying faster than they had ever dared push the engines before, and at a lower altitude that was strictly sane. It was marvelous. But the memory was thin around the edges. Brittle. When she tried to probe deeper, to find the context, the days before and after, she found only static. A psychic dead end.

This was the damage the Outsider had exploited. It had poured its filth into these cracks, widening them, prying her apart from the inside. It had used her own brokenness against her.

A surge of anger, hot and sharp, cut through the sorrow. No more. She would not be a vessel for anyone else's pain, not the Leviathan's, not the Outsider's, and not the ghosts of her own past. She would fix this. She had to. If she was going to help the Leviathan, she needed to be whole.

So she started working.

Kitt couldn't say how long she'd been immersed in her own Psycheform. Time moved strangely in the Leviathan's mindscape—hours felt like minutes, and minutes stretched into what might have been days. The ship's vast consciousness operated on a scale that made mortal perception feel like trying to measure an ocean with a teaspoon.

She'd been working methodically through the damaged sections of her memory sphere, learning to identify the difference between corruption and deliberate concealment. The Outsider's damage was obvious—jagged tears that bled psychic static, wounds that festered with alien malice. But there were other gaps, smooth-edged and purposeful. Sealed chambers in her own mind, locked away with surgical precision.

The revelation had thrown her completely off balance. She hadn't just lost memories to trauma or the Outsider's assault. She had actively hidden them from herself, with all memory of why buried behind the same impenetrable walls.

The latest section she'd been working on felt different from the others. Heavier. More layers of protection, each one more sophisticated than the last. Whatever lay behind these barriers, her past self had been desperate to keep it hidden. From everyone. Including herself.

She'd finally managed to breach the outermost layer when the voice spoke.

"Hello, sister."

Kitt's awareness snapped outward, the delicate work on her memory sphere forgotten. Someone else was here, in the Leviathan's mindscape. Impossible. The ship's consciousness was vast but sealed—nothing should have been able to manifest without—

The figure stepped into view, and Kitt's thoughts ground to a halt.

She was tall and curvaceous, unmistakably humanoid but with features that spoke of careful design rather than natural evolution. Feline ears twitched atop her head, and a long tail swished behind her with predatory grace. Her eyes were golden slits that caught the strange light of the mindscape and reflected it back with unsettling intensity. The skin of her arms was covered in scales the color of warm caramel, and her fingertips ended in claws that looked sharp enough to cut andrium plating.

She wore a silk dress that managed to be both elegant and practical, accented with fur that formed a collar reminiscent of a lion's mane. Everything about her spoke of power held in check, of wildness dressed in civilization's clothes.

Kitt didn't know who she was. But she understood immediately what she was looking at.

This was an avatar. A representation of the version of herself that had sealed away those memories. The part of her that had made the choice to lock away entire sections of her own mind and then hidden the key from herself.

The avatar smiled, revealing teeth that were just a little too sharp.

"I'll bet you've got questions for me."

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