Volume 2 - Chapter 106 - The Talk III

"Old Man?"

"Hmm?"

"When you talk about your squad, you always get this… look . Like you ate something real good—like a double portion chicken paste. But then you also look kinda sad... Why?"

"Hah… that obvious , is it ? I guess it’s because they were my friends, Missy. All of 'em. And… most of 'em are gone now. That's the general gist of it. Good memories and grief tend to arrive in the same package. You'll understand it all someday."

"That's the part I don't  get. If having friends hurts that much later, why have them at all? Sounds like a damn bug to me, not a feature."

"…A bug , she says. By the Void…"

"I'm serious! I do fine on my own! I win on my own, I fix machines on my own, I got the top score at the arcade on my own —"

"Aye, aye, on your own, I heard ya the first dozen times, damn… What happens on the day 'on your own' isn't enough though, hm? What then?"

"Then I just train  harder."

"Missy."

" What ? It's worked so far!"

"You're ten. ' So far ' is not even remotely as strong of an argument as you think it is. … Look. Stop jumping around for a moment and sit down, would ya? Let me try this a different way."

" Fiiine ."

"When my squad got chewed up on Derellin—you've heard that story, the crash, the long walk out, right?—do you know what got me through those six weeks? It wasn't my rifle, or my training. It sure as fuck wasn't the rations, ‘cause we ran clean out of those in week two."

"… What was it, then?"

"Berro's terrible singing. Lildy's even worse jokes. Marska reading  her sister's messages out loud to us every night 'til we knew that woman's laundry schedule by heart… That's  what it was. Six weeks of trekking through enemy territory, with no support and no salvation in sight, and every morning I got up because  those idiots were getting up, and I'd be damned if I let 'em walk out of there without me."

"But that's… I mean, that's just what morale is, right? The UHF has people for that. You  told me! Like officers, the mind-doctors—"

"Aye, they exist, and they do fine work. But hear me out here, Missy, because it's important: A psych-officer is  issued  to you like a helmet. A friend hands you theirs  in a shootout. It is not even remotely the same thing, and no amount of training, credits or cleverness will ever make it the same thing."

"… I—don’t get it. What's actually different there? You still have a helmet?"

"…Hmm. Hahhh … you'd think an old man would have the words ready by now… Alright. Let’s try this: The mind-doctor listens primarily because it's their duty . And duty's a fine thing, I'd never knock it, of course. But a friend listens because it's you . Because you matter to them, specifically. Not Recruit Such-and-Such, serial number whatever on their clipboard, scheduled for that day. You . And there's a kind of weight a person can only set down in front of somebody who  chose  them like that. Everything else just… holds the weight in place for a while."

[Brief silence.]

"That sounds made up."

"Everything’s made up, Missy. Doesn’t make it any less true."

"… And you really think I'm gonna find people like that? Me ?"

"I don't think so, Missy. I know so. Some crew of poor unsuspecting souls out there is going to get all this —"

" Hey !"

"—and they're going to love  you for it, the damned Emperor help  them all. And when that day comes, I need you to do the one thing  that won't come natural to you whatsoever. It’ll probably be harder than any drill I've ever put you through."

[Audible swallow.]  

"Which is…?"

" Let them help you . With the extremely heavy stuff, the kind where you'd rather chew glass than say out loud. That’s all. Let them help you, Missy. You will need it."

"That's… ugh. Fine, I guess? I don’t really get it, though... Is—Is this a Rule?"

[Brief silence once again.]

"Aye... It’s a Rule, Missy—Golden Rule #6: When the load gets too heavy, you don't grit your teeth and try to power through—you hand a piece of it to your people, and you always carry theirs in turn."

—

[Memory Excerpt : “Golden Rule #6: Friends ,” James McKay, 935 PFC]

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Thea leaned forward with interest, peeling herself away from the headboard, drawing her knees up and wrapping her arms around her legs as she settled in for whatever Kara was about to unload on her.  

Kara, for her part, took a moment to gather herself—shifting into a more comfortable position at the foot of the bed, folding her legs beneath her, the fingers of her left hand finding that slow, absent rhythm against her knee once more.

"So. My suspicions began… honestly, not that early," she started, tilting her head slightly as she seemed to sort through her own timeline of events. "I want that stated up front, because I don't want you thinking I've been sitting on some grand theory  since day one or anything. The Sovereign did a genuinely good job of pretending  to simply be an AI in service of the officers aboard the ship. Polite, helpful, ever-present in exactly the way you'd expect… I had no real reason to suspect anything else."

She paused briefly.

"That only changed during the Assessment—rather drastically."

Thea blinked at that and tilted her head slightly.

'The Assessment…? What could she possibly have picked up on the Sovereign in there…?'  she wondered, chewing on the thought. 'That was literally the  only  month aboard this ship where we had absolutely zero contact  with the ship's AI in the first place. It was just us, the DDS, and a whole lot of combat...'

"It was you , actually," Kara continued, before Thea could voice any of her questions. "You're the one who made me realise that the whole 'benevolent ship AI' shtick made no sense whatsoever."

Thea raised an eyebrow at her.

"… Me ?" She dug through her memories, trying to recall a single conversation where she'd ever said anything even remotely about the Sovereign during the Assessment—and came up completely empty. "I don't remember ever mentioning anything of the sort. Like,  at all ."

"You didn't have to mention anything," Kara said, shaking her head lightly. "You demonstrated  it on that first day: The Focus Overdraw."

Thea physically cringed, her whole body pulling in on itself a little tighter around her knees.

The memory of that first day needed no help resurfacing: The world tilting sideways, then awakening with Kara dead, her body hastily stitched together and pumped full of painkillers to keep moving—and everything that had come afterward.

"Because, after I respawned at the FOB," Kara went on, mercifully not lingering on the details, "I had a lot of time to think about what had happened, and why.  And the conclusion I arrived at was fairly simple: The UHF failed to inform a Wielder about the one thing  a Wielder, above all else, should know."

She raised a finger before Thea could interject. "Which, frankly, I would have accepted as an unfortunate oversight. Raised it as an issue to command afterward, potentially demanded compensation on your behalf—but that would have been it. Bureaucracies drop things. It happens, even in the UHF. Nothing’s ever perfect."

Her finger folded back down, and her tone evened out further into that familiar, methodical register.

"Especially because of the Faction Mission they specifically paid to have smuggled into the Assessment for you. Which, considering everything we know about how strict the Allbright System is with its rules, cannot possibly  have been cheap. That the UHF was willing to go that far to get you your Psyker materials mid-Assessment earned them quite a bit of goodwill in my eyes, honestly. It painted the picture of an organisation that cared about correcting its mistake s."

She met Thea's eyes. "But that still left one variable unaccounted for: The ship AI."

Thea frowned, trying to follow the leap—and failing.

"…I don't really see how the Sovereign factors into that, though?" she asked, genuine confusion bleeding into her voice. "The ship AI isn't exactly in charge of making sure Marines know things... That's an officer problem. Briefings, training doctrine, all of that—the Sovereign shouldn't have anything to do with it, no?"

Kara shook her head.

"The Sovereign does , though. Consider what the Sovereign actually is , at least officially: An AI meant to support the officers aboard this ship with their tasks. All  of their tasks—that includes training doctrine. While it can’t do the teaching itself, it should still support.  A ship AI that never  forgets a single thing, has more computing power than any of us could possibly even imagine, and that doesn't ever sleep."

She let that sit for a beat, watching Thea attentively.

"Supporting the officers is its entire stated purpose. So walk it forward from there, Thea."

Thea's eyes slowly widened as the shape of it started to form, now that Kara had laid it out explicitly like that.

"…The Sovereign should  have known I was a Wielder by then," she said slowly, each word dragging the next one out behind it, "and then reminded the officers to inform me about the Focus Overdraw…"

" Exactly ." Kara nodded. "That's its job . Flagging exactly that sort of oversight is the entire reason a support intelligence exists in the first place. The Sovereign exists to catch what the humans miss. And an oversight concerning the single most valuable Recruit asset aboard the ship?"

She let out a short breath through her nose.

"It made no sense  for the ship AI to somehow ' forget ' that part. None. But—" she raised a hand slightly, "—at the time, I still hadn't fully  arrived at that conclusion yet. It was more of a loose thread that bothered me whenever I had a quiet moment. It was only after our drive back to the front together—after your Awakening—that I fully managed to put it all together."

Thea heavily slumped back against the headboard, as the implications hit her all at once and the pieces she'd been holding started slotting themselves into place almost against her will.

"Every single thing about the whole Psyker issue… I was not informed of any  of it," she said, her voice picking up speed as she went. "But the Sovereign should  have reminded the corresponding officers to do it. She knew  what Councillor Lumis had asked me to do… Even if they didn't expect me to level as fast as I did, the fact that they were actively  trying to get me to become a Psyker before hitting Tier 1 meant I had a fairly high chance of having an Awakening regardless of their expectations…!"

Kara nodded once more, a proud smile forming on her face—visibly muted by the subject matter it was attached to.

"Precisely, Thea. The Sovereign knew . She knew you were missing this information, knew you were an important UHF asset thanks to your agreement with Councillor Lumis, and yet… She still  did not inform the officers of their oversights , to get you the information you needed."

Silence stretched between them for a while.

Thea sat with it all, wrestling with the sheer scale of what Kara was implying, trying to contextualise every single interaction she'd ever had with the ship's AI so far—every polite greeting, every helpful answer, every smooth, pleasant deflection—and struggling to really get a grasp on any of it.

'How am I even supposed to process this…? Every conversation I’ve had with her. Every "How may I assist you, Thea?" Every single one of them, while she just… let me almost die during the Assessment…? What for? Why ?'

It was simply too large a conspiracy for her to fully wrap her head around at this moment, with her skull already pounding and the Soul Burn stoking its slow heat through her body.

But she also couldn't deny Kara's logic, no matter how much she tried to poke holes into it.

If everything they knew about ship AIs was, in fact, true, then the Sovereign shouldn't  have been able  to do what it had done. The support directives, the perfect recall, the entire stated purpose of its existence—all of it should have made this exact scenario impossible.

Yet… it had happened anyway.

After a while, Kara picked the loose thread back up, her voice slipping back into its methodical cadence as she continued her recounting.

"Now—as for how it became imminently apparent that we're not dealing with a simple AI like we'd been told?" She tilted her head slightly. "That would be the part where, after the Assessment ended, the Sovereign effectively imprisoned me for a talk."

Thea's eyes went wide.

"She fucking what —" she blurted, already halfway into leaning forward, a dozen questions piling up behind her teeth—but Kara simply held up her hand, signalling that she wasn't done.

Thea closed her mouth.

'Imprisoned?! What the fuck do you mean, imprisoned , Kara?!'

"Instead of returning me to a psychologist chamber , like standard procedure dictates—I checked," Kara continued, lowering her hand again, "I was placed in a gray, nondescript room without features and no exit. Somewhere between the Assessment and the Sovereign's DDS-proper, as far as I have been able to tell. And the location itself is important here, really—because it was perfectly designed to circumvent any potential rules. Think about it: There almost  certainly exist hard directives forcing the ship AI’s to place us into the psychologist chambers the moment the Assessment ends. But because I was placed into that in-between  area instead…"

She spread her fingers slightly. "The Assessment hadn't  technically , officially ended for me yet. So the Sovereign could keep me there. Likely for as long as she wanted—or until somebody realised I'd gone missing."

A chill ran straight down Thea's spine, terror creeping in cold behind it.

'This… This is the entity  we have to trust our Souls with? Every single Delve, every DDS session, every respawn—all of it goes through her. Somebody—no... Some thing —that can just do that , on basically a whim? As long as it's technically not against the rules…?'

Her arms tightened around her legs.

Kara, however, continued unabated, her tone still that of somebody walking through a case file rather than their own imprisonment.

"By the time I'd properly taken stock of the room, the Sovereign's attention was fully on me. And so, we had a chat ." A humourless little breath left her. "She recognised immediately that I'd sussed out her duplicity, by the way. Didn't even need to be told. Which… Makes sense, honestly—from her perspective, the logic likely had never held together, and she knew that I knew it didn't. There was no point in either of us pretending otherwise."

Thea sat with that, and felt distinctly stupid.

'Kara figured all of this out mid-Assessment, and I didn't put together a  single piece of it… Not one. It was all right there in front of me the entire time, and I just—No.’

She interrupted her own thoughts, catching herself mid-spiral.

'That's not reasonable, Thea, and you know it. Nobody  but Kara put any of this together. Potentially not even the officers themselves… And you were more  than overwhelmed with literally everything else going on—the whole Awakening, Æht, the Councillor, the Runepriest, all of it . You didn't have the spare brain power to chew on a conspiracy this minutely detailed. Kara did. That's why she's Kara.'

"She didn't really admit to anything, mind you," Kara went on, meanwhile. "Despite my probing—and believe me, I probed. But she implied quite a number of things. First and foremost: That she had no intention of hurting you. That was the first thing she said when she spoke to me then. Before introductions, explanations—anything else, really. That she had, and I quote, ' simulated everything beforehand and determined this path led to the best outcomes.' "

Kara's shoulder rolled in a slight, noncommittal shrug.

"I don't have an exact idea of what she meant by that. What 'everything' entails, how far forward these simulations of hers reach, what 'best' is even being measured against… No idea. But… I  have  to begrudgingly admit, in hindsight—you did  come out of that entire Assessment with a truly absurd  amount of benefits. Both in terms of the Allbright System itself, and from the UHF's restitution package you told me about."

'…And I didn't even tell you all of it,'  Thea thought, a faint pang of guilt flickering through her. 'The Ace gear is still entirely unaccounted for. Nobody knows about that one, ‘cause of the deal with Councillor Lumis…'

"But ultimately," Kara said, "I wanted to tell you anyway. All of it. The moment we were both out… But the Sovereign forbade it."

Then something shifted.

Kara turned cagey—sheepish, even—her posture drawing inward, her fingers stilling against her knee. It was so utterly alien  to see on her  best friend that Thea couldn't help but stare, entranced, as the ever-composed Squad Medic seemed to shrink in front of her.

"She… mentioned that she knew about—about my past," Kara said, quieter now, each word coming slower than the one before. "And that… if I told you any of this, she would reveal said past. To people that I… really  don’t want knowing  about it."

She didn't manage to meet Thea's eyes—for the very first time since they'd met.

Thea's stomach turned over.

'It blackmailed her… The Sovereign   blackmailed   Kara. To keep me in the dark…'

The abhorrence and anger hit first—hot and immediate—but hard on its heels came the curiosity, burning just as fiercely, entirely against her will.

What had that whole conversation even entailed? Kara's past ? What could that possibly  mean? What could be so bad that the mere threat of exposure had kept Kara , of all people, silent for this long?

But it was painfully obvious that Kara was beyond uncomfortable with even this much of an admission.

"I'll… I'll tell you about it. Someday," Kara said, still addressing a point somewhere on the blanket between them. "But… I'm not ready for it. I haven't figured out how to…"

She trailed off, then sighed heavily, the sound dragging up from somewhere deep within. "It's part of—part of what happened with Evelyne. She… Her existence sparked… Memories  that I would have rather forgotten about entirely, and I… I don't know how to handle them yet… I'll—"

"It's okay," Thea interrupted gently. "I'll wait. I don’t need an explanation now."

Kara sputtered, her head snapping up at last—and Thea simply smiled at her, mustering the very best not-horrified-at-the-Sovereign's-actions smile she could possibly manage for her friend's sake.

Because this was it .

This was what she'd been waiting for, for days!

Answers— actual  answers—for what had been going on with Kara this whole time. And sure, they were partial ones, locked behind a nondescript ' someday ' with no date attached, but just knowing  that Kara was working through something and would come out the other side of it at some point was more than enough for her.

And, more than that—she finally, finally  got to be the good friend for once! To repay her , by simply supporting her ! No prying, no pushing, no conditions! That's what best friends did!

Or… at least so she'd read on the cached GalNet articles she’d tried to consult over the past few days.

Thea also  found the flushed, sputtering, socially inept version of Kara sitting in front of her extremely… cute , for a lack of better words. The usually unflappable Squad Medic, reduced to fumbling half-sentences and darting eyes—it was downright endearing, honestly, watching her  flounder like this for once.

But almost immediately, the realisation hit her.

'Wait…! This is probably exactly  how she—and everyone else, really—sees me , every single time I mess up socially, isn’t it?! Which is… basically fucking always…!'

She felt her ears turn hot.

'The uncertainty, the sputtering, the not-being-able-to-meet-anyone's-eyes thing… Oh no. Oh no, no, no that's just—that's me ! That's me  on a completely regular basis…!’

"I-It's   completely fine, really," Thea quickly said, mostly to distract herself from that particular avenue of self-discovery. "You've helped me with so  much already—this is genuinely the least I can do. And I have full trust in you to figure it out."

She held Kara's gaze, willing  the sincerity behind her words across . "And if you can't? Then you can always come to me and ask for help. That's what friends are for."

Kara stared at her for a long while after that.

Long enough that Thea started to feel awkward under the weight of it, then started shifting in place, squirming slightly under her best friend's unreadable gaze as the seconds kept stretching on.

'… Did I say something weird? I don't think  I said anything weird…?'

But then, finally, Kara smiled faintly and nodded.

"I will," she said quietly. "And… thank you, Thea. For your understanding and your patience. It's indeed what friends do… I just kind of forgot about that, I guess…"

The words settled between them, and Thea could feel an awkward silence gathering at the edges of the moment, ready to make itself known. She was unwilling to go back to the earlier self-discovery, however, so she pushed through it instead.

"So—what, exactly, is  the Sovereign, then?" she asked. "If it’s not an AI… what is it?"

Kara sighed heavily and shook her head.

"I don't really know. That's the honest truth… But I know she's not what the UHF says  she is—which… Also means we can't ever  talk about this out loud. To basically anyone." Her eyes sharpened as they came back up to Thea's. "Because we don't know how high up this conspiracy goes. Or how dangerous it really is."

“It imprisoned  you, Kara!" Thea interrupted, anger flaring up hot and fast. "Without informing anyone! It just— grabbed  you and stuck you in a gray box, and nobody even—"

"We don't know  that," Kara interrupted right back, calm but firm. "That nobody was informed, I mean. It could be that Major Quinn knew. Or Captain Cross. Or any number of UHF officials up the chain. That’s exactly what I’m saying here, Thea. We have no way  of verifying either direction." She let out a slow breath. "And, ultimately—as much as I hate to admit it—the Sovereign has never  actually  been wrong about what she said. The Focus Overdraw, the blind Awakening… at first glance, both look  like a massive problem, yes. But the System rewards risk. That's one of its core tenets. And you absolutely  did  come out of the Assessment already at Level 10—which is basically unheard of across the entire UHF. It's happened a small handful of times across  recorded history.  I checked, by the way."

A dry note crept into her voice. "With the help of the Sovereign herself, who was more than happy to assist in proving her own point."

Thea grimaced at that.

" Nothing the Sovereign has done has actually  hurt you—or me. In the long run, at least. Yes—it was done without consent, and potentially without any sort of oversight, which in itself is… problematic beyond belief, don't get me wrong. But ultimately? The Sovereign is not an enemy to us. At least not a direct one, as far as I can tell. If anything, she's clearly  heavily invested in your wellbeing and your career, considering how often she simply helps  you—like she did with getting me into this very room right now." Kara gestured vaguely at the walls around them. "So making a whole thing out of this would be  extremely unwise , in my eyes. At least until we have some actual evidence, or at least somewhat of an idea  to work with, at the very least."

She paused there, and something shifted in her expression—the discomfort from earlier fully gone now, replaced by that bright, analytical gleam.

"What the Runepriest and the Sovereign's interaction has  shown me, however, is that the Runepriest is likely in-the-know."

Thea blinked at the sudden shift. "In-the-know how ?"

"Consider the sequence of events of his arrival again," Kara said, leaning forward slightly. "My working theory is this: He was aware of what had happened to you—the Overdraw, the blind Awakening, all of it—and he confronted  the Sovereign over the risk involved in letting you walk into your Awakening completely uninformed. And then… somehow rewrote  parts of her ruleset. Which would be where those keyphrases you watched him use come from. Phrases specifically built to stop the Sovereign from wriggling out of the rules that keep her chained to her core tasks—closing the exact kind of technically-not-a-violation loopholes she used on me."

She tilted her head, then raised both hands in a small concession.

"That entire line of thinking is pure theory  at this stage, I will admit. I'd need to actually talk to the Runepriest about it, to confirm any of it—which I definitely  won’t do anytime soon—or find some other pieces of evidence to support it. But… It would, at the very least, make the most logical sense in the grand scheme of things, with everything that I can put together so far. The timing lines up. The behaviour—and changes therein—lines up. The Sovereign's total, frictionless compliance with his every whim lines up as well... All of it."

Thea simply sat there, mouth open, staring at her best friend.

'She went from social wreck to full-on lecture-level hypothesis of a grand conspiracy in a single breath. Thirty seconds ago she couldn't look me in the eyes…'

Kara was truly incredible beyond belief—she'd need to ask her for tips on that level of compartmentalisation one of these days, when they actually had some time for that kind of mundane stuff.

‘Surely, someday, things aren’t constantly falling apart around us… Right?’

Thea slowly nodded, chewing on Kara's words for a moment longer. "That does sound like it makes sense, yeah… But it's still a bit far-fetched..."

"Absolutely," Kara nodded, not even attempting to argue the point. "Hence why I will not talk to the Runepriest—or anybody—about this matter for quite a while. As far as the Sovereign is concerned, we never talked about this at all, alright?"

Thea grimaced, her jaw working as she tried to swallow that down.

Every part of her wanted to do  something about all of this—the imprisonment, the blackmail, the weeks of quiet, deliberate omissions. Letting it all just… slide, felt fundamentally wrong .

But ultimately, she relented, and nodded.

"That, however, also means you need to fix your speech again, Thea," Kara scolded, one teasing eyebrow climbing upward.

"My speech ?"

"You're calling the Sovereign ' it ' now. Have been since I told you about the after-Assessment part. You practically never  do that. You've always referred to the Sovereign as a ' her '. She'd absolutely catch that. Don't slip up, or she'll know immediately—and I'm fairly certain by now she's far  closer to human than mere technology at this point, so the referencing would line up as well."

Thea opened her mouth to protest—then took a second to actually reconsider, replaying her own words from the past few minutes and realized… Kara was—as always—absolutely right.

She sighed, letting her shoulders drop. "Fine. I'll try to make sure to keep behaving around the Sovereign as usual. Hopefully she won't be paying too close attention…"

"Don't try , Thea. You have to succeed." Kara's voice had lost every trace of its earlier teasing. "And she will absolutely  be paying close attention, given that you've just completely locked her out of this conversation. She'll be paranoid about what we could have talked about in here . Do not  mess up. I've trusted you with this secret, as my best friend. Don't make me regret it."

Her eyes were beyond serious at this point, boring into Thea's with an intensity she usually reserved for triage, and Thea swallowed hard under the weight of them.

'She's right… I need to be very  serious about this. Treat the Sovereign as you have been. Pretend you didn't hear any of that just now… You owe that to Kara,'  she thought, firming up her resolve.

She gave a single, strong nod. "I will. I won't mess up, Kara. Promise."

Kara held her gaze for a heartbeat longer—searching for something, apparently finding it—before she finally smiled back at her. "Glad to hear. I'm sure you won't."

Then her smile turned mischievous, the shift as sudden as flipping a switch. "So… About that Æht of yours… Any chance I could somehow talk to her?"

Thea's eyes widened at the sudden shift in topic—and the question itself.

'Talk… to her ? Like, directly?!'

She considered it for a moment, mentally running through every interaction she'd ever had with her passenger, then shook her head.

"No… I—I don't think so? I've never  seen her interact with anything in the real world. I guess the best bet would be to somehow have her talk to me, and I relay the information…? I would have to ask her if that's even possible, I guess…?"

Kara nodded pensively, her fingers resuming their slow rhythm against her knee. "Makes sense. She does  sound like she's fully stuck in there, then… I'd say we treat her similar to how we're treating the Sovereign for now. I just don't think we have even remotely enough information to really make a decision on your passenger, one way or another. I'm glad you shared it with me—I'll do quite  a bit of research on this… Make sure it isn't some kind of mental disorder—"

Thea's eyes snapped toward Kara, indignation flaring hot, a retort already half-formed on her tongue—before Kara's raised hands stopped her cold.

"—just to make sure , Thea! I'm not saying you're crazy or anything. I'm simply crossing off every possibility, alright? We don't want to go into this whole thing with half the information simply missing  entirely. We have no idea  what she is, so there's no harm in exploring every avenue. For the record, I don't think I'll find anything wrong with you—medically speaking. But it would be absolutely stupid to not even bother to look."

Thea deflated slowly, the indignation draining out of her as quickly as it had come.

She had to admit, that made sense—Kara always made sense.

It was honestly a bit infuriating, but that's why she'd come to her for advice in the first place, wasn't it? That's exactly  why Thea had needed Kara in this room, with the Runepriest's magic words active to tell her everything.

"So… What, then? We just pretend nothing changed after this whole conversation?" Thea sighed, gently massaging her temples, the dull throb of the headache still pulsing away beneath her fingertips.

Kara mirrored her sigh, nodding. "Pretty much… Except that now we both know what the other one knows. And we can start keeping an eye out— together . You tell me if you figure things out, I tell you if I figure things out, and we go from there. With the abysmal lack of information about just about everything right now, though… We don't really have another choice, Thea. At least none that aren't extremely  risky. Talking to the UHF, even Major Quinn, is simply a risk that's not worth taking before we're entirely certain it's a safe option. And what you've told me about how the Runepriest reacted…"

She tilted her head slightly, considering.

"I agree with your assessment—he would not  be receptive to Æht's presence yet. He doesn't know you long enough for that. Maybe in a few months, or years, once you've built enough rapport with him, you can break the news to him… Which, of course, leaves the danger of him finding out before then—but I think it's the less  risky of the options we have right now. We can, and should , reevaluate this constantly and find the right timing to mitigate potential fallout… But first, we need  more intel before making any final decisions. No matter what."

Once more, Thea let out a long, heavy sigh, tilting back until her head rested against the cool wall above the headboard, letting the chill of the metal seep into her scalp and dull the Soul Burn's simmer, if only slightly.

"You're right. As always… I'll continue as I have been so far, being clueless and lost. And we'll figure things out over time."

A moment of silence stretched between them as they digested that joint decision.

It wasn't a good plan, exactly. It was barely a plan at all—more of a mutual agreement to keep drowning quietly, except  together  now, until one of them found something solid to grab onto. But it was a decision they’d made as a team.

Finally, Thea asked, "Can you tell me about your Psychic 101? At least the parts that you were there for? I'd like to learn what you all learn about us Psykers.  And  have something else to think about."

"Sure," Karania smiled, then started shuffling up the bed toward her, settling down right next to her at the head of the bed and leaning her head back against the headboard, just like Thea.

" Ahhh —now I get why you do this. This feels great."

"Right?"

"Alright, so. Psychic 101…"