Cat Rambo is a writer living in the Midwest with too many cats. This is their third appearance in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, following Nebula-nominated “Red in Tooth & Cog” (March 2016) and “Crazy Beautiful” (March 2021). Their most recent book is the final volume of the Tabat Quartet, fantasy novel Wings of Tabat (Wordfire Press). They say, “How we cope with deep grief has always fascinated me, and so I wrote this story to explore it.” Somewhere in passage from the Cygnus Gate to the Magellanic Clouds, grief deranged the ship. The first sign of its