Epilogue #2
She waited with her forehead against mine until my lungs found their rhythm again. Then she asked, “Continue?”
“Yes. Please.”
That was the last question she needed. She trusted me to say stop if I needed it, and I trusted her to hear me.
We found a pace and a rhythm my body could handle.
I touched her everywhere I could reach, learning what made the gold brighten, what brought pink spilling over it and what made her lose the careful precision of the movement of her hips.
Nothing measured my pulse. No system classified the tremor in my muscles or converted pleasure into fuel for someone else.
When my release took me, it belonged to my damaged, recovering, stubborn body.
And it was real. Avena held me through it, her light flooding the room as her body tightened around mine and followed a few moments after.
For several breaths, neither of us moved. Rain pattered against the metal roof. My heart worked harder than it should have beneath her palm, but it worked. And it was working for me.
Avena lifted her head. “Are you all right?”
I touched two fingers to her mouth. “I’m sore and tired. But I’m very, very happy. You can record all three of those if you need to.”
Her laugh warmed my fingers. “No record needed. I will remember it.”
“Good.”
She eased down beside me and arranged herself carefully against my chest. I woke the next morning still tangled with her, aching in several new places and breathing without a machine.
Pink light glowed beneath the sheet. Avena asked once how I felt, listened to the answer, believed me without question, and fell back asleep.
That might have been the most intimate part of all.
We had spent the months since learning the differences between bodies imagined by a machine and bodies that grew tired, hurt, healed, and wanted.
The cabin and Khevari had given us privacy without consequence.
The cabin on Earth gave us consequences and mornings after, sore muscles, tangled sheets, and Avena’s light turning half the bedroom pink whenever I reminded her that humans did not require a spoken report on every successful experiment.
I preferred Earth.
She turned from Vaeron’s marker and studied me. “You are tired.”
“I walked up here without the cane.”
“Those statements do not contradict each other.”
I wrapped an arm around her waist. “Admit it. You’re proud of me.”
Pink brightened beneath her cheekbones. “Your recovery is progressing within the higher range of Keller’s projections.”
“Deeply proud.”
“You are becoming unpleasant.”
I caught the front of her shirt and drew her close. Six months earlier, I could not lift my own head from her shoulder. Now my legs held while she settled against me and put her arms around my neck.
When she pulled back, she kept her forehead against mine.
“You should use the cane on the return path,” she said.
“Ah, romance is alive and well.”
“So are you.”
The answer took the humor out of me.
I touched the bare skin of her wrist where the Steward bracelet had once been. The burn had faded but left a scar. She still looked down sometimes before opening a door, as if a dark band might have returned while she wasn’t paying attention.
“And so are you,” I said.
Gold joined the pink beneath her skin.
We walked back to the cabin slowly. I used the cane because she was right and because surviving fourteen years as an Anchor only to fall on a tree root would have embarrassed both of us.
The place no longer looked abandoned. Human communication equipment occupied the old shed.
A secure antenna rose between two pines, disguised badly enough that every bird in Michigan probably knew it was there.
The medical unit had become a rehabilitation room, and the front bedroom now held shelves of Dominion records the resistance had captured and never fully decoded.
The cabin remained our home and became the first joint field station of a resistance that had spent fourteen years fighting an enemy it did not understand from inside.
Avena worked through the captured House records every morning.
She identified Steward assignments, energy transfers, and the coded phrases used to hide human vital signs inside property reports.
By the end of the first month, she had located sixty-three probable Anchors.
By the third, the count had passed two hundred.
I worked with the surviving Janus engineers.
Not many remained from the original program.
Keller had kept the Janus return watch active for fourteen years after command declared me lost. Reyes had spent those years coordinating resistance cells after the Dominion declared Earth contained.
Neither woman trusted the Khevari government, but both had learned to trust Avena’s evidence.
Trust still came one choice at a time.
Our first goal was not invasion. Earth had lost too much to start another war without knowing who would pay for it.
We were building small corridors instead, narrow enough to carry messages and, if the tests held, living bodies.
The captured records supplied the locations.
Avena supplied the Khevari protocols. I supplied the pattern Janus had used to find its road home.
The resistance supplied people stubborn enough to try.
The first belonged to Earth. The third had arrived the previous night from Khevari space.
Not Central Authority. Not any known House channel. The signal had used one of Vaeron’s oldest Intelligence ciphers and included coordinates for a recovery facility outside the capital. Beneath them, someone had written six words in human English.
WE FOUND WHERE THEY KEEP THEM.
Avena stopped beside the table. “Reyes believes the source is Brevak.”
“Reyes believes everyone is Brevak until proven otherwise.”
“You also believe it is him.”
“Yeah.”
Brevak had stayed behind so we could leave. In six months, we had received no confirmation that he’d survived that choice. The cipher was not confirmation, but it was evidence.
Evidence was where trust had to begin.
Avena touched the third signal. “If the coordinates are accurate, the facility contains at least twelve human patterns.”
“And if it’s a trap?”
“Then we test it until we know.”
Vaeron could have said the same thing.
I looked through the window. Summer had turned the frozen lake dark blue. Wind moved across the surface, breaking sunlight into pieces. Vaeron’s marker stood beyond the trees where we could see it from the table.
The Dominion still existed. Hundreds of Anchors remained beneath its homes, and the truth had only begun to cross the distance between our worlds. Nothing about the future was safe.
It was ours anyway.
Avena slipped her hand into mine. Her fingers were warm, solid, and familiar. No machine measured the contact. No corridor required it.
Tomorrow, we would open the first transmission window.
This time, when the road appeared, we would be the ones waiting on the other side.
We were going to bring them home.