‘The hardest part isn’t forgiving yourself.’ He’d exuded a quiet confidence so far, but now he sat forward, broad shoulders hunching, and clasped his hands together. ‘I used to hate going to sleep. It felt too much like a surrender of my sense of self, like I’d wake up back in the Collective. I’d dream about being back all too often because it’s kind of like my subconscious belonged there.’

His words sank into the silence of the small group, sat in a circle in the counselling office. Eventually, Lieutenant Forrester shifted her weight. ‘Did it stop?’

Jack Logan’s lips twisted. ‘Yeah,’ he said at last. ‘It stopped. So here’s where it gets really screwed up: it stopped, and I missed it.’

‘The fear?’

He shook his head. ‘The Collective.’ His eyes swept over the gathered. ‘That’s the part nobody will want to tell you. You’ll cherish your freedom, hate yourselves for what you did, and never trust yourself again. You’ll want to burn the Collective to the ground. And still, a part of you will crave it like oxygen. The belonging. The purpose. The peace.’ In the next silence, he shrugged and grimaced. ‘Maybe. I were in the Collective for just over five years. You were there for hours.’

Counsellor Carraway leaned forward at that. ‘Thank you, Jack,’ he said softly, sincerely. ‘Even if this isn’t a universal feeling, one thing is universal: there’s no playbook for recovery. No checkpoints to meet. It can be as messy and complicated as you like, and this is the place where you can share these things without judgement.’ He looked around the gathered, the highest-priority counselling group after Frontier Day. The officers who’d killed or done awful things. ‘Does anyone want to go next?’

Logan gave a gentle scoff in the silence. ‘I really lightened the mood, huh?’

‘No,’ grumbled Forrester. ‘I mean, it helps, sir.’

‘Jack. In here, it’s Jack.’ He dug deep and found a smile. ‘I don’t want to say you’re lucky. One thing I never had to deal with was turning on my friends and loved ones. The people I hurt… they were strangers.’ Countless worlds. Slaughters. Genocides. ‘But you got one thing I didn’t: you’re not alone. ‘Cos coming out of the Collective… loneliness is the real killer.’

‘Is that the true “hardest part?”’ Forrester drawled.

He gave a short laugh. ‘You got me. What’s hardest changes on a daily basis. What you’re going through is a generational trauma, and that’s got its whole mess of baggage. Everything you went through is unique. And it’s also what everyone else went through.’

Forrester’s gaze dropped. ‘Not everyone else killed their mentor. Who forgives that?’

‘You won’t believe me when I say “the Borg did it,” but they did, and someday, you will believe that.’

‘And everyone in this room, Tes,’ pressed Carraway gently, ‘has done something they find unspeakable.’

Forrester looked like she might snap at him, but she caught the eyes of her shipmates; of Zherul, and all she’d done in the Mess Hall, of Tyderian, and all he’d done to the deck gang. Of all the other officers of Endeavour brought together to be guided back to living each day without choking on guilt.

‘And,’ Carraway pressed on, ‘that’s an example of a self-sabotaging thought. Which is what I want the group to reflect on for next time: these kinds of thoughts that block you off whenever you’re trying to move forward. However irrational or impenetrable they feel. We’ll next time work on more positive reframing.’

‘What,’ growled Forrester, ‘I killed my mentor; I’m a great shot?’ But she subsided at Carraway’s gentle look, and the session ended without further commentary.

‘I think that went okay?’ said Logan, fidgeting with his sleeve as the last patient left.

Carraway raised his eyebrows at him as he headed back to his desk. ‘You kidding me? You’re a great help, Jack; I really appreciate this.’

‘Might as well put my crappy story to good use,’ Logan grumbled, standing.

‘For so many of these kids, they’re at the bottom of a well and they think the last light above them’s gonna be snuffed out,’ Carraway said, waving a hand at the door. ‘They can’t imagine going back to anything that could be considered normal. But they sit here with you, who’s been through what they have, only worse and for longer, and they hear you talking about it with reason and acceptance. That’s so important.’

Logan’s lips twisted. ‘So, do I tell them?’

‘Tell them what?’

‘That I got out of the Collective, but I never had anything normal again?’

‘Jack…’

‘No vacations with the family, no meaningful relationships, stuck out on my own for fifteen years, Starfleet not wanting me…’

‘You have a place now.’ Carraway looked him in the eye. ‘Captain Valance wouldn’t bring you on Endeavour if she didn’t believe in you. If she didn’t accept you. Besides, I know you’re thinking something you don’t want to admit.’

Logan scoffed. ‘You just met me, Greg -’

‘Maybe half of Starfleet being temporarily assimilated might make you a bit more accepted,’ Carraway pressed before he could be brushed off.

Logan stopped. ‘We don’t know what’s gonna happen.’

‘We don’t.’ Carraway’s gaze had been fixed, serious. Then he smiled. ‘But I know to the kids on Endeavour, you’re a rock. I talk to the lot of them, Jack. They feel better having you on the senior staff because what they fear is not being trusted by you guys. They think that with you around, they have someone in your corner. And the senior staff think they’ve got someone who can help them understand.’

‘Who said that?’ Logan narrowed his eyes.

‘What?’

‘What senior staffer?’

‘Hey, you know I can’t reveal this stuff.’

‘You revealed a lot.’

Carraway blew out his cheeks. ‘It’s from drinks and chatting with people I worked with for years, Jack. Not therapy sessions. Would I lie to you?’

‘We just met.’ Logan hesitated. ‘You strike me as a terrible liar.’

‘Oh, I am. Sweaty palms, stammering. It’s not a good look. You gonna be around for the next session?’

‘Unless Endeavour actually goes someplace.’ Logan rolled his eyes. ‘Chief of Security on a ship heading nowhere.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Carraway muttered. ‘There’ll probably be a crisis soon enough.’

Logan left him there, heading into the main counselling offices of Gateway just in time to see an officer finish a conversation at a desk and head into the corridor. ‘Hey! Wait up!’

But he wasn’t waited for, and had to break into a jog, out of the office and into the foot traffic of the station’s daily hustle and bustle to catch up. Running would have made ignoring him more conspicuous, so it wasn’t hard to reach Nate Beckett before he got to a turbolift. ‘You didn’t talk much in the session, kid.’

Beckett looked a little sour at the sight of him. ‘I don’t think I talked at all.’

‘That’s what I meant. You gonna clam up in your one-on-ones with Greg?’

‘I’m not sure that’s your business, sir.’

‘Sure,’ said Logan. ‘I got no vested interest in anyone coming out the other side of assimilation. Do you like that card? Should I play “Chief of Security” instead? Or how about “you were decent to me when I came aboard, so I’m looking out for you?”’

That made Beckett hesitate. But the hustle and bustle of Gateway’s day-to-day crowds, the station not touched by Frontier Day directly and its people thus further from its shadows, did not make him look like he wanted to open up. ‘I don’t know why I’m in those sessions,’ he said at length. ‘I didn’t kill anyone. Carraway insisted.’

‘You didn’t kill anyone,’ Logan confirmed. ‘You just wrapped your hands around your friend’s throat and left her for dead.’

Now, the young man looked like he might throw up. ‘Is this looking out for me?’

‘The Borg made you do something abominable. Violence against a loved one, and it were real intimate. But because you didn’t kill her, you’ve got, what, impostor syndrome about being in the highest-level therapy group? You get that that’s crazy?’

‘I’m not sure you should call people in therapy crazy.’

‘I ain’t your therapist, I can say that,’ Logan retorted. ‘Because what you’re feeling? Like you don’t deserve help? That one isn’t original. Take it from an expert.’ Beckett looked away at that, falling silent, and Logan’s shoulders sank as he watched the spark in the young man fade. ‘You spoken to her?’

‘I have no idea what to say or if she can even look at me.’ Beckett shifted his feet. ‘We were arguing. When it happened.’

‘Does that argument matter now?’

‘I don’t know. I think it was a mistake for her and me to keep on working together.’

Logan scratched his beard. ‘Look. I don’t know half of anything. And maybe she can’t look at you right now – and if that’s the case, that’s a reality you gotta deal with, and me and Carraway can help with that, too. But right now, you’re shadow-boxing with your own thoughts, not dealing with what’s actually in front of you. You got mutual friends? Reach out. Find the score. Then decide from there.’

‘I… alright.’ For one horrible moment, Logan thought Beckett was going to choke up. Perhaps if they hadn’t been in public, he would have. But the young man swallowed hard and straightened. ‘Find the score. Decide from there.’

‘One step at a time. One day at a time. Like Greg says. You got this, kid.’

As Beckett left, Logan had to stand in the crowd that had rushed by them, unseeing and uncaring, and try to hide his doubts. It was not that he’d lied. To Beckett, to Carraway, to any of the therapy group. He believed that they had it. That they would endure, persevere, and move forward.

He was sincere. He just knew there was a very real chance, when it came to the Borg, that he was wrong.