Line Captain Tissadelle Shepherd (Human)

The boundary took the ship at 0551 and it did not feel like an ending. It felt like arriving somewhere with too many doors.

The overfold, she thought, which was her grandmother's word for it and not a word for a place at all, and she knew that, and reached for the correct one, and could not find it, and let the wrong one stand. It was the first time in her adult life she had knowingly used an imprecise term and not gone back to fix it. She noticed that too. She was still noticing things.

She had been braced for pain and there was none, or none she could locate, which was worse in a way she did not have time to examine. What there was instead was load. Every contradiction she had ever declined to resolve arrived at once and asked to be held, and she held them, because holding them was the only thing she had ever been good at that was any use here — the hill and the Hollow, the rule kept without a reason, an order that was correct and had cost everything, a woman she had never said the thing to. She held them the way she had held them for thirty-one years, all at the same time, without choosing.

Then there were more of them than there were of her.

She understood, distantly and quite clearly, that she was coming apart, and that it was not violent and would not be quick, and that the flat voice she had used all her life to say true things she could stand behind was one of the things going. She reached for the finding — state the marker, state whether it resolves — and found she could no longer reliably tell how many times she had reached for it.

Tobble, she said, or began to.

Yes, said Tobble. Hold still.