Epilogue
THREE MONTHS AFTER the war ended, Willow learned warriors complained exactly like graduate students.
They did it with better posture and more visible weapons, but the tone was identical.
“This exercise is impossible,” the young Azar said from the middle of the training ring.
Renjik stood across from him with his rebuilt prosthetic hanging loose at his side. “Yes.”
The trainee blinked. “Yes?”
“The enemy rarely offers possible conditions.”
Willow leaned against the observation rail and bit the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling.
Around her, a dozen Ka’atari trainees stood at attention on the red-gold sand of Rath Kovar, a planet the Alliance had converted into a specialized training center after the war.
Its climate was miserable, its terrain shifted from stone flats to razor grass within a day’s march, and every government involved insisted the location had been chosen for strategic utility.
Willow suspected the warriors had chosen it because it looked dramatic at sunrise and could kill you creatively.
Na’ashq’ii clung to her shoulders, plates half raised against the dry wind.
It hadn’t approved of Rath Kovar at first. Too much dust. Too many shouting warriors.
Too many people who thought a small armored land octopus was adorable and therefore ignored all sensible survival instincts.
After the third trainee had to visit the Molzaed for a warning bite, everyone learned to admire Na’ashq’ii from a respectful distance.
Growth, Willow believed, came in many forms.
Renjik moved through the next sequence slowly, demonstrating how to fight when one limb failed to respond. Not as a weakness. Not as humiliation. As information. He let the prosthetic hang useless, shifted his weight, drew the trainee forward, and dropped him gently but decisively into the sand.
“Again.”
The trainee groaned. “Sir, I’ve died seven times.”
“Then your afterlife has excellent educational opportunities.”
Willow lost the fight and laughed.
Renjik looked up. His stern expression didn’t change, but his eyes warmed. That look still did absurd things to her internal organs.
He hadn’t returned to active deployment.
Not fully. The decision had taken weeks and more arguments than Willow preferred to remember.
Renjik needed to serve. He needed his strength to have somewhere to go, his skills to matter, his survival to mean more than simply having failed to die.
But the thought of vanishing into border patrols while his new arm still misfired and his nightmares still came with teeth had hollowed him out.
So Dhenkea, the Okan female who became chief of the Ka’atari after Sucaen decided to remain on Earth, and Det’ae made him an offer that let everyone pretend it was a duty assignment rather than a deeply coordinated act of affection.
Renjik trained mixed teams now. Warriors, Alliance security, translators assigned to conflict zones, medics who needed to understand threats before a room became a weapon.
He taught them how to survive enemy tactics.
Willow taught them not to assume every unfamiliar ritual was meaningless decoration until it tried to kill them.
It was, frankly, the most relevant her anthropology degree had ever been.
Her lab sat half a kilometer from the training ring, built into the side of a cliff where the stone kept the interior cool.
It had three translation suites, a cultural archive, a containment room for artifacts everyone promised not to touch and then immediately wanted to touch, and a habitat Na’ashq’ii refused to use except when important visitors arrived.
Then it lounged in there like royalty receiving tribute.
Willow loved every inch of it.
She loved the way Renjik came to find her after drills, dusty and tired and alive.
She loved that he no longer flinched when she reached for the seam of his prosthetic.
She loved that some mornings he woke from dreams and let her hold him without apology.
She loved that some evenings he held her while she cried for everything they hadn’t been able to save.
Happiness, she had discovered, didn’t erase grief. It gave grief somewhere warm to sit down.
The exercise ended when the young Azar finally landed a decent strike on Renjik’s artificial wrist and disengaged before Renjik could turn the opening against him.
“Better.”
The trainee beamed like he had been handed a planet.
Willow pushed off the rail as the group dispersed. Renjik crossed the sand toward her, the sun burnishing the dark red of his skin and catching on the metal of his arm.
“You’re laughing at my students.”
“I’m respectfully observing pedagogical suffering.”
“Is that what you call it?”
“It sounds better in grant applications.”
He bent and kissed her. It was meant to be brief. It rarely was. Na’ashq’ii tolerated the first few seconds, then inserted one cool tentacle between their cheeks.
Willow pulled back. “Our chaperone objects.”
“Our chaperone has poor timing.”
Na’ashq’ii clicked.
“And strong opinions,” Willow added.
Renjik took her hand. The prosthetic was warm from the sun, the fingers sure around hers. “Come home. You’ve been in your lab since before first light.”
“I was working.”
“You were arguing with a dead philosopher recorded two hundred years ago.”
“He was wrong two hundred years ago. That doesn’t mean he gets away with it.”
Renjik’s laugh rolled over her, deep and easy. There were still shadows in him. There were shadows in her. Some losses became part of the architecture. But they had built around them with stubborn hands.
Their home overlooked the valley between the lab and the training grounds.
It was small by Ka’atari standards, which meant only two of the rooms were large enough to park a shuttle in.
Willow had filled it with soft blankets, translation tablets, sample cases, and a growing collection of ceremonial objects gifted by species who heard she was trying to preserve cultural records damaged by Scozid before and during the war.
Renjik had filled it with weapons, training manuals, and an increasingly suspicious number of pillows because he claimed human spines were built incorrectly.
Na’ashq’ii had filled it with stolen socks.
It wasn’t the future Willow would have chosen when she boarded the Shangris. It was stranger, louder, more dangerous, and farther from home than any nightmare she had once imagined.
Renjik squeezed her hand as they walked.
“What are you thinking?”
“That I should be more alarmed by how happy I’m on a planet designed to injure overconfident warriors.”
“It’s an excellent planet.”
“Naturally.”
He looked down at her, face solemn. “Are you happy, Willow? Here. With me.”
The vulnerability in the question broke her heart a little every time. She stopped walking and turned to him fully.
“Yes. Here. With you. With our judgmental scarf and my lab full of haunted grammar. Yes.”
His shoulders eased. “Who once saved an entire planet and has never stopped acting smug about it.”
Na’ashq’ii clicked once, soft and satisfied.
Willow rose on her toes and kissed him again. This time Na’ashq’ii allowed it.
Above them, trainees shouted in the distance, the lab comm chimed with a message she’d absolutely ignore for another ten minutes, and the wind carried dust across the red-gold sand.
It wasn’t peaceful in the way she once understood peace.
It was better.