Chapter 16 #2
If we had mind-speech—if we had one of those glorious convenient bonds some species seem to manage, the kind where thought could cross the space between two people as easily as breath—I would be screaming at him right now.
Tell me what to do. Tell me if home is worth you.
Tell me if staying is courage or cowardice.
Tell me if leaving will carve me hollow forever.
But we don’t have that.
What we have is a thread of sensation and emotion and need stretched thin over distance, and right now all it does is make me ache.
The rift contracts again.
Sonny sees it too. “Jack,” he presses, because his instinct for timing, for all his chaos, is better than most people give him credit for. “You need to do this now.”
Jack’s face goes white around the edges.
Jamie hears it and panics fresh. “No, no, no—”
He clings tighter, this time not to Caly but to Jack, and the sight of it is almost unbearable. Jack bends around him, forehead pressed briefly to Jamie’s temple, eyes screwed shut against whatever is trying to wreck him from the inside.
“I know,” Jack whispers. “I know, little mate. I know.”
Then, because he’s the adult and because sometimes the shape of love is monstrous in the face of what it makes you do, he eases Jamie back again.
Jamie fights him.
Not violently. Not with any real force. With grief. With refusal. With the pure helplessness of a child who’s found safety and belonging in the strangest possible place and is being told he has to leave it before he’s ready.
Caly steps close once more.
He doesn’t touch Jamie this time until Jamie reaches for him, and then he catches his hand in both of his, bowing his head so their foreheads almost meet.
I can’t hear all of what he says, only pieces carried by wind and static and the ugly hammering of my own heart.
“…not the end…”
“…find me…”
“…remember…”
Jamie sobs once.
Not loudly.
That almost makes it worse.
Caly lets go first.
The precision of the movement wrecks me. He’s clearly thought this through in the space of only seconds. If he hesitates, Jamie won’t go. If he breaks, Jamie will stay. So he gives him calm instead, and kindness, and whatever promise has just passed between them in a language deeper than words.
The sky shivers. A jagged piece of the rift’s edge folds inward and vanishes.
“Now,” Solan says.
No theatrics. No growl. Just command, because there’s no room left for anything else.
Jack moves like a man walking himself into a fire. He takes Jamie by the shoulders, turns him towards the tear, then stops because Jamie’s gone rigid.
“I can’t,” Jamie says.
My head snaps towards him.
He’s staring at the rift with the full-body terror of someone looking at height or deep water or any other natural threshold of human refusal. Going through was never something he chose. Being sent through on purpose, stepping willingly into the impossible, is something else again.
“You can,” Jack says.
Jamie shakes his head hard enough to make the medallion flash. “I don’t want Earth if you’re not there.”
Jack makes a strangled sound and then pulls himself together with visible effort. “You won’t be alone,” he says. “You hear me? You won’t be alone. You’re going to your parents. You’re going to people who love you and know you and have been waiting for you.”
“But you—”
“I’m staying.”
The truth of it drops hard.
Jamie’s face crumples.
“And I need you to be brave enough to go anyway,” Jack says, and now he’s crying openly, not trying to hide it, not pretending strength means the absence of tears. “Please, Jamie. Please. For me. For them.”
The rift shrinks again. A loud, tearing sound runs across the sky, like reality is protesting the strain of holding itself open this long.
Every nerve in my body lights up.
This is it. This is the moment.
My whole life tilts.
I could go.
The thought isn’t soft anymore. It’s not wistful.
It’s not theory. It’s a real, brutal possibility with edges and urgency and consequence.
If I move now—if I make the decision and run and jump and trust the impossible one more time—I could be on the other side before anyone stops me.
I could smell Earth air again. I could stand under a normal sky. I could stop being completely other.
And Varek—
The bond hits me so hard, I nearly lose my footing.
Need. Fear. Focus. A terrible, magnificent steadiness at the centre of violence.
He’s still fighting. Still alive. Still mine in whatever way that word belongs to us now.
He can’t know what I’m looking at in detail, but he knows enough.
He must know enough. Every scrap of me is lit up like a beacon.
My hand goes to my chest by instinct.
Useless.
As if pressing my palm there will help me hear him better.
What I need is him standing in front of me, eyes on mine, making me hold the truth of my own heart. What I have instead is distance and urgency and a door in the sky that isn’t going to wait for anyone’s grand romantic resolution.
I think of Earth.
I think of Varek.
I think of ten years of surviving just to one day maybe have the chance to leave.
I think of the way home has been an ache I carried so long, it felt like a second skeleton under my skin.
I think of his hands on me.
His voice in the dark.
How he learned my boundaries and held them sacred even when it hurt him. How he listened. How he chose me every time I made myself difficult to choose. And the way he kissed me like the whole bloody universe narrowed down to one point and I was it.
The rift tears inward again.
“Pax.”
Sonny’s voice.
Close. Alarmed. Knowing.
I turn my head and meet his eyes.
He sees it.
Of course he sees it.
The war in me must be written all over my face.
He doesn’t say don’t go. He doesn’t say stay. He just looks at me with this terrible, human understanding that almost undoes me more than anything else could.
Jamie makes another broken sound, and Jack, God help him, does what loving adults have done to children ever since the start of time when there is no good answer left.
He lies.
Not badly. Not cruelly.
With love.
“You’ll come back to me,” he says.
Jamie stares at him, desperate for the certainty.
Jack gives it to him. “You’ll come back,” he repeats.
Maybe he believes it. Maybe he needs to. Maybe that is how this all works in the end—not by certainty, but by faith spoken aloud in the moments where terror would otherwise win.
Jamie nods once. A tiny, wrecked movement.
Caly steps back. So does Solan.
Jack cups the back of Jamie’s neck, kisses his forehead, and then with his face in absolute ruins, he turns the boy towards the rift.
The sky shrieks.
Not with sound, exactly. With pressure. With wrongness. With the feeling of a thing collapsing under the effort of existing.
The blue beyond it wavers.
Narrows.
Waits.
And I stand here with my whole life balanced on the edge of a single step, knowing with awful, perfect clarity that whatever I do next will be the shape of the rest of my days.
Then Jamie looks back.
Not at Jack.
At me.
I don’t know why. Maybe because I’m the only other human standing here. Maybe because he sees the same thing on my face that’s in his own chest. Maybe because some part of him recognises that I’m standing at the mouth of the same decision, only with different consequences waiting on either side.
His eyes are huge and red-rimmed and full of a question he doesn’t ask.
Are you coming too?
The rift contracts.
The bond screams.
And before I know what the hell I’m doing, I move.