And they're not hungry anymore, Michael thinks, but recognizes that thought as too morbid to share given her current mood. They've had eight hundred years of close friendship and he can sense the guilt in her words better than some of his own feelings. It's not her fault they're dead, but he understands why she might carry it anyway. He looks at the silent hives, full up with dead bees, and for a moment it's Heaven. Younger siblings fracturing into factions and starting civil wars and fighting battles well beyond them because he wasn't around to lead them. When he'd come back, the usual chatter of angel radio had been nothing but dead air.

If he'd been there, he could have prevented it; if she'd been here, she'd still have her bees. The if only is hard to let go of.

"You had no way of knowing how long you'd be gone. Even if you had, you wouldn't have been able to do anything about it." The locals hadn't been willing to take 'no, I'd rather not visit the Singularity' as an answer. "Even in nature in nature this sometimes happens. You took care of them well, for as long as you could."

They were probably as happy as bees can be, under her care. He'd never thought to ask.