Chapter 37 Sem
Apparently, Maximus really had been pretending to be weaker than he was. The Aquilian Royal Guard had trained him well, and with a swift kick to the groin and a surgical jab to the throat, he’d taken Lars down before Gol’s lifeless body had hit the floor.
I, on the other hand, sat motionless, stunned, gutted while holding Elanie in my arms. She was gone.
Not entirely. She was still alive. Limp and heavy, but alive.
But every part of her that knew me, the real me, every part of her that loved me, was gone.
Worse than gone. Erased, like it had never been there at all.
“You have to leave her,” Maximus said, squatting in front of me.
“No.”
“Is that your favorite word? Because you say it all the time.” When I razed him with a tear-soaked glare, he relented.
“I understand this may be difficult for you. But we have less than twenty-four hours before every bionic in Thura wakes up. Before that one”—he hooked a thumb toward Gol—“finds his way to his backup memory, and all of this will have been for nothing. We have to get to the satellite array and call your ship before then.”
Snatching Lars’s cattle prod from the ground, Maximus spun it around once in a flourish and jabbed it into the Gorbie’s thigh.
When Lars cried out, Maximus sneered, “Hurts, doesn’t it?” before jabbing him again. “We’ll come back for her,” he promised me while he forced Lars to his feet and marched him toward the door. “And for Mal. But we have to go. Now.”
“I’m sorry,” I said into her hair. Then I kissed her head, then her lips. “I’ll be back soon. And then we can go home.”
Home, where she’d become herself again after her memory was restored from her last backup.
A memory that wouldn’t include anything about this place.
She wouldn’t remember how Thura’s soft breeze would blow through our windows and cool our skin at night.
Or the way Grover’s ear-piercing crow would wake us up every morning.
Or how a dinner of foot-eels by firelight could feel extravagant.
Or how quickly foreign constellations could become familiar and comforting.
She wouldn’t remember me. What it felt like to be with me. To know me. To love me.
I couldn’t bear it. And yet I had to, because she’d given me no other choice.
“I love you,” I said as I laid her down next to Mal. “More than you’ll ever know.” And then I stood, wiped my eyes, and made myself leave her behind.
“Can this thing go any faster?” Maximus shouted in my ear as I pointed one of Thura’s snowgliders toward the mountains where the satellite array was hidden.
“Do you wanna drive?” I snapped back, my teeth chattering even though I was covered in so many furs I could barely move my arms. “No? Then zip it.”
To his credit, he did. He also hacked into the satellite system with the ease of a doctor taking a patient’s blood pressure. Even in my desolate, near comatose state, I marveled at his skill.
“How long did it take you and Elanie to jump here?” he asked after sending our distress signal to the coordinates where I guessed the Ignisar would be on her route between Tranquis and The Aquilines.
“Nine hours, thirty-four minutes, and sixteen seconds,” I said, remembering what Elanie had told me in the pod with a stark accuracy.
Hoping I’d remember everything else she’d said or done since with the same level of detail.
Because that’s what she’d asked. You will have to remember it for me. “Give or take.”
“Not bad.” Maximus actually gave me an approving nod. “Let’s pad that a little and shoot for twelve.”
I shouldn’t have been so enamored with his praise. I should have disagreed with him. I knew the crew of the Ignisar. I knew how much they loved Elanie, how they’d realign the stars to get her back home. Because I would have done the same.
And in one minute shy of ten hours, a shuttle burst like a ball of fire through the atmosphere, landing so hard it shook the ground, snow flying around it like an atomic blast. But the actual explosion didn’t come until Rax and Morgath charged through the hatch, dressed in tactical winter gear and carrying the biggest firearms I had ever seen.
“Where is she?” Rax growled once he spotted me standing with Maximus inside the terradome.
Stepping up beside his brother, Morgath said, “Breathe, Rax. She’s here. Sem had nothing to do with her leaving, remember? He’s only her doctor.”
The words hit me so hard, they might as well have been made from the ammunition their gigantic weapons discharged. I wasn’t only her doctor. Or at least, I hadn’t been. I didn’t know what I was to her now.
Maximus’s hand on my arm, his gentle squeeze, made me grunt in pain. But since I’d rather swim through that damn pipe again than cry a single tear in front of the twins, I pulled the broken pieces of myself together, lowered the shield, and let them in.
“Follow me,” I said, turning toward our hut, where I’d laid her in our bed with an unconscious Grover in her arms, pulled our sheet up over her shoulders, and kissed her forehead one last time, lingering through two full breaths. “She’s still asleep.”
With Elanie and Mal strapped in, Maximus and I climbed into the shuttle.
I held Grover in my lap, and Rax narrowed his eyes at me when I took Elanie’s hand, but I didn’t care.
We’d launch soon, jump soon, be home soon.
These were my last hours with her before she woke up and forgot me, and I’d spend them with her hand in mine.
Once we were in the sky, Imperion vessels streaked past through the viewport.
So many I stopped counting. Armed forces would infiltrate the terradome.
Bionics would be captured, sent back to where they’d escaped from to resume their servitude.
The underworld organics would be returned to their homes.
Gol would face a tribunal. And Thura, and everything it had tried to stand for, would disappear.
“Hard to know how to feel about it, isn’t it?” The deep grooves etched into Maximus’s brow were painted red and orange by the superheated glow of more ships entering Thura’s atmosphere. “It could have been something.”
Interlacing my fingers with Elanie’s while my eyes burned and my throat closed up, I said, “It was something. It was everything.”
I won’t tell you about the journey back to the ship.
How Maximus either slept or coughed through most of it.
How the twins asked me hundreds of questions I was barely able to answer.
How Grover woke up first, squawking in shock and general outrage after his reset, and then Mal, and finally Elanie.
How I lost it when her brown eyes found mine.
The way I sobbed silently while she stared at me, her expression empty and blank as her recovery protocol executed a full system reboot.
I won’t tell you how I died a little when we returned to the ship and Maximus restored her memory from her last saved backup.
When she became Elanie again like a spark igniting.
When she accepted hugs from Sunny, then Tig, Chan, even the twins.
And then she looked at me, confused, and asked, “Am I sick?” like she wasn’t quite sure what I was doing there.
I won’t tell you how badly my voice trembled when I told her what had happened to us, withholding all but the most salient details.
How my heart broke again when she didn’t believe me.
When I realized she might never believe me.
I won’t even talk about how sharply my chest caved in, nearly a month later, when I saw her walking through the halls, nodding politely at me while the ship’s holos advertised the overpriced services available at the spa.
No, I won’t tell you those things. I wouldn’t do that to you.
But now, all I had left to prove that Thura actually existed were the occasional news pieces about Gol’s trial, a grumpy master mechanic terrorizing the Ignisar’s maintenance staff, a new gen-1 crewmember, a half-monkey, half-chicken podmate, and a heart so broken everyone on the ship knew it. Even if they didn’t know why.
A knock at my door pulled my thoughts from where they tended to stray when I was alone now: fire flickering off cave walls, soft hands cradling my face, the scent of vanilla and cinnamon I still caught faint traces of everywhere I went on this Saintsforsaken ship.
I opened my door, finding Freddie on the other side.
“Hi, Freddie. Did you forget something?”
He’d left after Sunny’s checkup ten minutes ago, after we’d all teared up while watching the 3D spectral holo of her little boy swimming around in her belly.
“I think I did,” he said. “Do you mind if I come in to look for it?”
“Be my guest.” I stepped aside to let him pass. “What did you forget?”
Spinning around, Freddie slid his hands into his pockets. “My manners, I’m afraid.”
“Your manners?” I highly doubted that. Nobody on the ship had Freddie beat when it came to politeness.
“Yes,” he stated firmly. “I forgot to ask how you were doing. So, how are you, Sem? How are you holding up since coming back?”
I wanted to tell him what I’d been telling everyone who’d asked me that question since the twins’ shuttle docked: that I was fine, settling back in, happy to be home. But I just couldn’t keep up the act anymore, and by the sympathy pulsing out from Freddie’s chest, he wasn’t going to let me anyway.
Leaning back against my counter, I admitted, “I’ve been better.”
He nodded. “Have you spoken to Elanie recently?”
“No.” The word stung like acid. “No more than usual.”