A chill wind curled around Taes like the spindly limbs of a cold-blooded glikar’ma. Her skin prickled where the air currents grasped for her skin. First, her left shoulder tingled and then her left thigh, even through her muslin nightdress. When she had left the window open in her cottage bedroom, the sea had offered little more than a hollow whoosh in the distance. Now, the wind carried salt spray across her lips.

Taes reached for the heavy blanket, expecting to find it tangled around her feet. Her hand clasped nothing but air. The blanket was gone. Her bare feet crunched through gravel. Gravel? That shouldn’t have been there. There was gravel in her bed or her bed was long behind her.

Opening her eyes, ink-black sky loomed over her. Not a single star shone brightly enough for setting astronomical coordinates. She crossed her arms over her abdomen, burying her hands in the bishop sleeves of her nightdress. Her stomach churned, and her mind spun. Such places were improbable, but not impossible. Unfortunate, if not unfathomable. Had all the light been devoured within a spatial rift or a dark matter nebula?

Taes had been swallowed by darkness, not absence. The crashing surf cut through the void, and her breathing too. Sharp and too loud. And then something else broke through.

An amber-green mist swirled to Taes’ left. A source of light became visible through the fog. It pulsed from an old Romulan tricorder of brushed bronze and smoked glass. An older woman held the tricorder.  Of course, with Romulans, it was more challenging to pinpoint age. When she raised the tricorder above her shoulder, its light flickered across her features.

The Romulan wasn’t one of Flavia’s scientists from Constellation’s crew. Taes would have recognised any of them. Her chestnut hair was long and blown out, remarkably well maintained for the middle of the night. The expression on her sharp-boned face was assured, like someone untouched by apology. The ethereal serenity in her movement unsettled Taes, even if only because Taes felt so untethered from everything and anything.

“Do you know where you are, Captain Taes?” she asked. She smiled at Taes with a warmth that didn’t reach her eyes. Those eyes staring back at her were unreadable. Too practised.

Taes tapped into her mediation training to keep her expression neutral. To keep her own questions out of her eyes. She straightened her posture and tugged at the collar of her nightdress that was slipping down one shoulder. Discovering a Romulan walking out of the night –when Taes should have still been in bed– sounded like too many personal logs from the Starfleet archives of tragic encounters with the Tal Shiar.

“Caldos Colony,” Taes said a little defensively.  She crooked a grin and then played coy to gather information. She added, “Uhh, you have me at a disad–”

“I’m Pallauma,” she cut in. She bowed her head slightly in greeting and then closed the distance between them. She put a hand on Taes’ shoulder; the pressure in the grasp was reassuring. It demanded nothing.

“Any world looks like any other in the dark,” Pallauma said. “You were nearing the cliff’s edge. Did you forget your lantern?”

Taes tapped at the back of Pallauma’s hand with a couple of fingers. “I’m fine,” Taes said with enough conviction to convince herself, let alone Pallauma. “I couldn’t sleep. And needed a walk.”

Pallauma’s smile only spread as she withdrew her hand.

“How fortunate you found me,” Pallauma said. “I can light the path back to your cottage, if you’ll allow me.”

Taes hesitated. Her shoulders tensed involuntarily, and she shuffled her feet to approximate an athletic posture. As much as Taes’ instincts told her to run –to escape back to her cottage– a stroll with Pallauma would offer Taes more time to interview and observe her. If Pallauma wasn’t a Romulan Free State representative, how and why did she stalk Taes from out of the black?

Tilting her head to the side, Taes gave a reluctant nod. Pallauma smiled back at her, placid and patient. Taes waited too. She gave space for a prolonged pause to see if Pallauma also knew where Taes was staying, but Pallauma either didn’t know or didn’t take the bait. She waited.

Gaining her bearings by the soft light of Pallauma’s tricorder and putting the cliff’s edge behind her, Taes strode off in the direction of a trail she thought she recognised. Her steps disturbed the fog around her ankles, tearing the smooth blanket apart into coils. Pallauma kept apace.

“You’re a friend of Flavia, then?” Taes asked the question in a leading manner to see what response it might get.

“Who?” Pallauma blinked at her. Between the blinks, Taes thought she saw something. It could have been a trick of the pulsing tricorder glow, but she thought she saw a blossom of panic.

Intentionally, Taes didn’t answer Pallaum’s question. She was leading this interrogation. Her steps became more assured as the trail led through the field of black flowers. She recognised this; she could find her way home. She had never seen the blossoms at night, the way they curled up into themselves, protected.

“How do you know me, Pallauma?”

“Who wouldn’t recognise the Hero of the Nekrit Expanse?”

“No one says that,” Taes whispered.

Fleet Captain Taes had been one voice among many in orbit of the Vaadwaur homeworld. A single voice among two squadrons, among an entire coalition of Delta Quadrant enemies and allies. She was nobody.

Still, there were no artificial lights to be found on the horizon, except for the glow of Pallauma’s tricorder. Despite the rejection of modernity, Caldos also wasn’t natural. The field of flowers had been planted in aesthetic formations and were pruned to perfection. Caldos operated at a slower pace than most Federation worlds; it was a place for rest. On Caldos, especially, Taes was supposed to be invisible.

“You’re right,” Pallauma affirmed, nodding solemly. “I can be prone to theatrics. I understand you will be speaking at the Daybreak festival, though?”

Breathing out a “tt” between her teeth, Taes said, “I have been invited to do so.”

“It’s meaningful if the locals wish to celebrate you, Captain Taes,” Pallauma said. She spoke softly, as if she were offering a confession. In the chill of the night, Taes wasn’t fully embodied, but her Deltan empathy picked up on feelings of longing from Pallauma.

Pallauma also said, “The locals say the land rejects us outsiders, but I’ve found the land speaks to dreamers, if you’re open to listening.”

“Rejection and I are old friends. I don’t recall a single dream since I beamed down from Constellation. I’ll leave my dreams to my counselor.”

But Taes closed her eyes for three seconds, for five. She trusted her memory of the trail to take her ten more steps closer to her cottage. And yet her memory failed her, no matter how deeply she looked inward. She couldn’t remember what she had been dreaming about when Pallauma found her.

Returning her gaze to Pallauma, Taes asked, “What dreams brought you to Caldos?”

“The Republic hired me,” Pallauma answered directly, for once. “Without the vast resources of the Star Empire, bringing comfort to the people of the Republic will require reviving methods from the past. Caldos is a rare opportunity for a geological survey of the long-term effects of terraforming. I was drifting before they offered me this purpose. Practically sleepwalk–”

Pallauma raised her tricorder high above her head. “Oh, over here. Is this one yours?”

Taes stopped breathing. She turned her head to examine the darkened cottage, but mostly to hide her expression from Pallauma. Taes hadn’t mentioned sleepwalking. Awakening in such mental disarray wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to Taes. If anything, it was mortifying how familiar it felt. It had been a common occurrence for a time, but had stopped entirely after waking up in the nacelle control room of the USS Mnemosyne.

But it had been so long since she had been that ensign, reeling from the culture clash of Starfleet life. The stress, trauma and fatigue of facing the Vaadwaur in the Delta Quadrant were all perfectly reasonable explanations for the sleepwalking. She could explain all of that, but she couldn’t explain the coincidence of Pallauma bringing it up.

“Yes, that’s mine.”

Pallauma kept walking towards town as Taes passed through the gate. Taes crossed the path to the porch and started up the stairs when Pallauma shared one final thought with her.

“Sleep well, captain. If you dream again, try not to answer when they call your name.”

Taes tried to think of a pithy response, but she felt another chill from the sole of her left foot. She stepped on something slick—a single wet footprint on the patio. The size felt much like her own. If the footprint was hers, that would mean admitting to the sleepwalking and accepting she was unfit. If the footprint was someone else’s, Taes didn’t want to know about it. She smeared it away with the heel of her foot.