I’M BACK IN my rack, stretched out on the bed with my eyes closed and my hands folded behind my head, just thinking about drifting off, when Eight’s death finally hits me. It makes no sense for so many reasons—I mean, even setting aside the fact that he pretty much had to go if I was going to stay, and also the fact that he was kind of annoying most of the time, and that I only actually knew him for a few days, he’s not really gone, is he? After all, I’m him, and he was me. It’s like mourning your reflection when you’ve broken a mirror.
Doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s for him, or maybe it’s for me, or maybe it’s just a release of everything that’s been building up inside me ever since I fell down that fucking hole, but in the span of five seconds I go from totally fine to full-on ugly crying.
That goes on for a while.
I’m just winding down when someone knocks at my door.
“Come,” I say, then sit up, swing my feet to the floor, and wipe my face mostly clean with the front of my shirt. When I look up, Nasha’s closing the door behind her.
“Hey,” she says softly. “Welcome back.”
“Thanks.” I shift to make room, and she sits down on the bed beside me. “Sorry it’s just me this time.”
She laughs, then slides an arm around my shoulder and rests the side of her head against mine. “Was it bad, what happened to Eight?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. We were separated. He’d found a … nest, I guess? Thousands of creepers crawling over one another in a huge domed cavern. He was sending me stills of it when his signal cut.” I can feel her shudder against me. “It must have been quick, anyway. He was set on pulling the trigger. Whatever happened to him, it was sudden enough that he didn’t get the chance.”
I don’t really know that, of course. He was me, after all. Maybe he had a change of heart at the last minute. Maybe he could have pulled the trigger, but chose not to.
Nasha sniffles, then laughs.
“Sorry,” she says. “I have no idea what to feel right now.”
I slide my arm around her waist. She sighs, leans into me, and pushes me down onto the bed.
“You know,” she says as she settles her head against my chest, “Marshall actually tried to order me to do a bombing run on your friends out there.”
“Huh,” I say, my eyes already drifting shut. “What did you say?”
She laughs again, softly, and slides one leg across mine. “I said that if what you told us is true, they’re buried under a hundred or more meters of bedrock, and we don’t have anything in our arsenal at this point that’s powerful enough to so much as knock the dust off of their chandeliers. The most we could hope to do would be to annoy them, and that seems like a bad idea right now.”
“Good call. How’d he take it?”
She slides her hand up my chest, cups my cheek, and pulls my head up far enough to kiss me. “About how you’d expect.”
She settles in again, then reaches up to stroke my cheek. “Is it true?”
I kiss her hand, then move it back down to my chest. “Is what true?”
“What you told us,” she says. “About the creepers. Are they really gonna leave us be?”
I shrug. “I think so? The truth is, though, that I don’t know for sure how much either one of us understood what the other was saying. They said they’d leave us alone as long as we stayed clear of their tunnels and didn’t try to build anything in the foothills south of the dome. Do they actually know what ‘the dome’ means, though? Are they totally clear on the fact that leaving us alone implies not grabbing the occasional human and tearing him to shreds? Who the hell knows?”
“Wow,” she says. “You’re a hell of a negotiator, huh?”
“Sorry,” I say. “I did my best, you know?”
She rises up on one elbow, kisses my cheek, and then pulls my arm back around her and nuzzles her head into the hollow between my shoulder and neck. “I know you did, babe.” She sighs, and pulls me closer. “I know you did.”
It’s no more than a minute or two more before she’s sleeping. I’m drifting as well. It’s been a long few days. I close my eyes, and soon enough I slide into the dream of the caterpillar. We’re back on Midgard, sitting across the backward-burning campfire from one another, watching the smoke spiral down out of a clear black sky.
“Is this an ending,” he asks, “or a beginning?”
I look up from the fire. “You can speak now?”
“I could always speak. You couldn’t understand.”
I shrug. That’s fair.
“I think it’s both,” I say. “I hope it’s both.”
That seems to satisfy him. We sit together then in companionable silence until, bit by bit, he fades away.
026
NASHA’S GONE WHEN I wake. She’s left a message on my tablet, though.
Gotta fly today. See you when I’m back?
That makes me smile. I get out of bed, give myself a quick dry-scrub, and pull on my last set of semi-clean clothes.
I can’t quite pin it down, but something is different today.
I feel a weird sense of … lightness? I don’t know. I just …
And then it hits me. For the first time in I have no idea how long, I’m not afraid.
I’m savoring that feeling, wallowing in it, letting it soak straight into my bones, when my ocular pings.
<Command1>:You are required to report to the Commander’s office immediately.
<Command1>:Failure to do so by 09:00 will be construed as desertion.
Oh well. So much for that.
I take my time responding to Marshall’s summons. I’ve got a pretty good idea what he’s planning to say to me, and I don’t want to hear it.
It’s 08:59 when I open the door to Marshall’s office. He’s leaned back behind his desk, hands folded across his belly, with what could almost be a subtle half smile on his face.
Huh. That is not what I was expecting.
“Barnes,” he says. “Have a seat.”
I step into the office, close the door behind me, and pull a chair up to the desk.
“Good morning, sir. You asked to see me?”
“Yes,” he says. “I did. Mostly, I wanted to apologize to you.”
That’s really not what I was expecting.
“It seems,” he continues, “that I misjudged the situation yesterday. When I learned that you’d left our device with those creatures, when I learned that you’d told them what it was, well…”
“As I explained,” I say, “I didn’t leave the device with them. They seized it from Eight when they killed him. I had to explain what it was and how it operated, or they might have triggered it accidentally.”
He nods. “You did mention that. I naturally assumed that they would immediately turn our weapon back on us. However, the fact that we’re sitting here having this conversation tells me that I was wrong. I was wrong, and you were right. So, again—I apologize. I should not have reacted the way I did yesterday.”
“You mean when you tried to get Cat and Lucas to kill me?”
His right eye twitches, but beyond that he maintains his composure. “Yes, Barnes. That was wrong. I’m sorry.”
“Huh. Well. Apology accepted, I guess?”