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breast.
    These and innumerable other moments, captured in refracted amber, steal the breath from her lungs and now, she does disgorge the contents of her stomach, what little there is in it rushing up as bile and sluicing out over her lips to blob and float away. Followed by tears that do likewise and choking sobs that echo in the small confines of the Lacrima ’s cabin.
    As Eliana cries, the tendrils of the thing inside the egg cease moving and it pulses once, deeply. For a few moments, it is silent, utterly still, as Eliana is wracked with the outpouring agony of her long-repressed grief. And then, all the tentacles of the immense, spacefaring entity thunder against the egg’s outer membrane at once, releasing a torrent of gravimetric waves that traverse the empty space between the alien craft and the Lacrima , slamming up against the pitted, already-cracked surface of the decaying vessel.
    Eliana rocks in her straps as her ship shakes violently in the gravimetric storm. And then, one of the straps, long overdue for replacement, tears and she is hurtling through the cabin to smash up against the open viewport at the front of the cabin. Her head cracks sharply against the well-reinforced, poly-paned glass. And then there is only silence.
    ***
    In the darkness in which she floats, there is a voice. It is her son’s. She knows this without thinking. It is as automatic a recognition as the ceaseless, effortless work of breathing. Eyes opening on a vast plane of darkness where no stars lie, she sees herself floating, then comes to stand upright on an unseen sense of solidity beneath her.
    Her son is before her, rushing toward her, his small legs pumping quickly across illusory, solid terrain that cannot be seen, but is nonetheless felt. But Eliana has been here, before. She knows the illusion for what it is, even in this state, somewhere between dream and memory. Always, always in her mind is the knowledge of his death. Ingrained so deeply that neither sleep nor dream can steal the knowledge from her. She holds herself erect, dream eyes closed as her dead son throws his arms around her and holds her tight. She clenches her jaw and looks away from the small, thick arms cradled around her upper thighs and the warm, soft head nestled up against her navel.
    Again, she damns her subconscious mind for thinking this will bring her peace or a measure of comfort. Doesn’t her symbol-ridden sense of self understand that nothing will ever be right again?
    She keeps her eyes shut against the sight of her long-dead child, but opens them when the arms pull back and the warmth of him moves away. That’s new. Confused, Eliana opens her eyes. Before her stands her son, his head cocked at an angle, his body naked and pristine, so unlike the actual state of him in death, when the lesions had blossomed on his rosy flesh and his skin had rotted away in great weeping chunks. But there is something wrong with him, here. Something...different.
    Eliana stares, unable to take her eyes from her dead son as he twitches, shudders and then convulses uncontrollably. She stands, rooted to the spot, unable to move her body, though every muscle screams to run to him and cradle his spasm-ridden body. Before her eyes, he throws up one tentacle, then two, then three, until his mouth is full with the thickness of a fungal bloom of cephalopod tendrils. He chokes on them, as she screams, and then tendrils are bursting through all of his skin, ripping it aside in order to be free of the cage of still-mortifying flesh.
    She cannot stop screaming.
    ***
    She is still screaming as she awakens, the sound loud in the silence of the Lacrima ’s cabin. Debussy no longer plays over the collapsed speaker system, the ship’s silent collision alarm awake and blaring in swift, repeating, red pulses of light that mimic those generated by the entity now raucously beating at the shell of its cage, drifting between her ship and the debris field far beyond. Blood wells and orbs