[b]Springtime![/b]

Like a cloud with a smile, in blows a sheep. After the storm and the blood and the tears and the duels and the pain are all done, in comes a sheep. Just like the springtime, just like the heartbeats, it feels like an echo of a world far, far away.

Scenes fade in and out. Mynx with her fangs sunk into an opaque plastic cup. The steady drip of countervenom as it starts to fill. Trying to wave off concerns that she's not healthy enough to do this yet but the effort sends her back into convalescent sleep. Beautiful doing a complex redistribution of the food so that she only has a single, plain flavour available to her - "Have to cut down on new sensory inputs, don't want to spiral too quickly". Beljani reading a story out loud by your bedside. She's so deep into the story she's doing all the voices, channeling all the emotions, and stopped dead by every plot twist. Some kind of story about... statues on a beach, or all the colours of love and madness. Dolce cooking. Alexa smiling. The metal tang of adamantium alloys mixed in porridge and creamy quadranix-infused teas. Out the window, space rolls away. Moons pass by, and stars. Hot showers and sleep, and sleep, and frustration at not being able to stand up on your own until a moment's distraction leads to more sleep. Faces so bloodless and clean they look like angels, sunken into radiant pillows.

Somehow it has become hard to think of these girls as assassins.

*

[b]Alexa![/b]

You are one of the few left to guide the ship towards the [i]Tunguska[/i]. 

The station-ship is unbelievably ancient, spectacularly crude, massive in a way that might have impressed a species that had not built worlds and machines to build worlds. It relies on the most primitive expressions of physics; a rotating drum, the spinning force of which keeps people on the exterior. On the inside, seen through the glass, is a city built in black marble and ivy. This was a bank, once. A temple to Hades where a civilization warehoused sacred numbers. The external advertising screens are long broken and mad, hurricaning like snowstorms or blue summer days, faces formed of mathematical symbols, ghostly glimpses of black drinks and smiling girls and wheeled tanks through the haze. There is the buzz of neon and the flicker of lighthouses to guide ships in to dock. The warbling, crackling echoes of long-dead voices asking for the permission of Mr. Actual and Miss Uncontrol trace in your head. The mighty engines strain to shove the ship forward on the thinnest, weakest trail of plasma you have ever seen.

And just beyond it, the Rift. It dominates the sky. An entire direction of radiant, broken pink. Of flooding, drowned grey. It has been over a year since this journey began and it feels like even longer.

And it is your birthday today. In the new sense, perhaps, but in the old tradition too. Your friends from the Coherent have ambushed you as you step out of your room to drone the immortal, turgid chant that has survived since probably the dawn of humanity and numerous language shifts, an act of collective embarrassment with so much weight behind it that for all it's grim inevitability it is so much worse when it doesn't get sung. [i]Happy birthday to you...[/i]

[b]Dolce![/b]

"It's your birthday in a month," said Hestia as you put the finishing touches on Alexa's cake, the chant echoing down through the corridor. "Did you remember? How many is that now?"

She looks up at the Rift. "If you go through that you'll never get to have it."