Duncan listened in silence to the voices that arrived in his mind.
There was Vanna and Morris’s steady, dependable reporting; there was Lucrecia’s resigned complaint; sometimes Shelly’s loud chatter and Nina’s tireless reminders would pop up — these voices, crossing vast distances of space and time, felt like warm anchor-chains.
Even after his two “avatars” left behind in the city-state began to fail, those voices kept him nailed, firmly, to the side of reason and humanity.
After a while he cut off the communications with Vanna and the others and walked slowly across the deck, down the stairways and ramps at the stern, until he reached the towering aft wheelhouse.
The puppet still stood quietly at the helm, hands gripping the dark wheel.
Her unfocused eyes stared straight ahead, and countless invisible threads extended from her body, connecting down to the Lost Homeland and up to the illusory projection of the New Hope hovering above.
A thin mist suddenly seeped up from the decks on all sides and began to flow and gather.