He looked back to Andi, his expression overcome with sadness. But sadness for what, she wondered? The years they’d lost? The mistakes they’d both made?
He looked so much older now. Four years had passed, and yet it seemed like ten.
Had he missed her? Had he wanted to find her after she’d run?
As she looked at him, the memory of their final moments together took shape.
*
He’d come to visit her in the holding cell, in the southern sector of the capital city. She’d been nearly starved for three days, and her energy was growing faint.
“It’s happening tomorrow, Androma,” her father said.
She’d barely been able to look at him without wanting to cry. But she had no tears left. “Will it hurt?” she asked.
He’d glanced over his shoulder to where the guards waited several paces away down the hall.
When he looked back at her, his expression was haunted. As if he were already looking at his daughter’s ghost. “The injection is painless.”
Andi had nodded then. His words felt so unreal, they hardly registered.
Tomorrow she was going to die.
“Where is Mom?” Andi asked. “Is she coming to say goodbye?”
Tears streamed down his cheeks. “No,” he whispered. “She’s not well, Androma.”
As she looked at him, she felt hollow. The guards approached then, telling them that time was up.
“Just a final goodbye,” her father told them. “I...won’t be able to do it, tomorrow.”
“Make it quick, Oren,” the soldier in charge said. He glanced at Andi, equal parts sadness and disappointment in his face. Andi’s father had been a soldier his entire life, was as close as family to these comrades who worked the barracks. The soldier ushered the others a few paces away to give Andi and her father space.
“We don’t have much time,” Andi’s father whispered. “You need to listen to me.”
Andi wanted to reach for him. To hold on to him and never let go. She didn’t care, in this moment, that he hadn’t defended her in the trial days before. He had always represented safety and strength and warmth.
After tomorrow, she’d never see him again.
Tears poured down her face. “Please,” she begged him. “Please, don’t let them take me. It was a mistake, Daddy.” She was a child, sobbing in a cell meant for a cold-blooded killer. “Please.”
He crossed the cell in a few strides. Knelt before her until their gazes were level.
“Look at me, Androma,” he urged. His hands gripped her cheeks, brought her gaze to his. She tried to blink away the tears, to memorize every line of his face. “You’re strong. You always have been.” His lips were wet with tears as he pressed them to her forehead in a kiss.
“Oren,” the soldier outside said, more insistent this time. “Come on. It’s time.”
“I’m coming, Broderick,” her father growled over his shoulder.
He leaned forward and wrapped his arms around Andi. She couldn’t hug him back, her burned wrists too painful and fresh. But she felt his warm hands touch the bandages around her wrists, where the burns were still fresh and aching.
As he pretended to kiss her cheek, his next words were so low, she barely heard them at all. “Bay Seven. Tomorrow at dawn.”
Without another word, he slipped something beneath her bandages.
Something cold and solid. A key.
When he pulled away from her, his eyes burned like coals.
“Any last words?” the soldier outside said.
“Goodbye, Androma.” Her father nodded once. Wiped a tear from his cheek and turned away from her, never looking back.
The soldiers locked her cell.
In the morning, when the general and his executioner came for her, the cell door was wide open, the cell itself empty as a tomb.
Androma Racella was gone.
*
“You were always so strong-willed,” her father said now. His voice nearly cracked, but he swallowed and it came back stronger, the lines of his face fading as the commander he’d become took the place of the father she’d loved. “I remember the day you were born. You came out kicking and screaming so loud I thought you’d make everyone go deaf. Your mother and I used to joke that you might never stop.” He smiled then, a look that made Andi’s chest ache. “When you got older, and you started dancing, we were so proud. You used to twirl for hours in the living room, not stopping until you’d gotten every move perfect. Then, when you became a Spectre... You could’ve gone so far, Androma.”
His eyes took on the shine of someone lost in the past. He was looking at her, but it was like he was really seeing the girl she used to be.
The girl she never could or would be again.
So many years had passed since he’d freed her from death. She no longer knew the man before her, and he had no idea who she was now. They were like two strangers—together in this room, but galaxies apart. It made Andi wonder if they could ever rekindle the relationship they had in the past.
“I wrote to you,” Andi said suddenly. “Did you...did you get the letters?”
She’d sent so many messages back to Arcardius once she’d had a safe way to do so. Dex had helped her with that—finding messengers to deliver her letters, and scaring the living hell out of them to ensure that they’d stay and wait for any word that her parents wanted to send back in return.
But nothing ever came.
It had helped to harden her heart. To remind her that even though her father had given her a chance at escape...he’d moved on. It proved to Andi that no one, not even family, could be expected to stay close when the sins of life came to tear them apart.
“I couldn’t respond,” he said. “You know I couldn’t.”
She’d seen the headlines on the feeds, the suspicions about who had freed Androma Racella before she could pay for her crime.
Her father stood and began to pace. “I had to protect myself. I was being watched, all the time. Anyone who’d ever known you was under scrutiny. Classmates, professors, drill instructors. Your mother and I were at the top of that list. Any tiny mistake, Androma, and we would have been found out. Marked as traitors, too. I couldn’t live with that.”
They had never had a chance to discuss what had happened. After Andi had awoken in the hospital, she’d tried to tell them. But all she could do was cry. Then she’d sunk so deeply into herself that no one could speak to her, no matter how loudly they yelled. How desperately they wished for an explanation. She was drowning, not entirely in shock as the doctors thought, but in despair.
She knew exactly what had happened.
She knew exactly how guilty she was.
“We had to live, all these years, without you. Pretending to the public that we loved our daughter, but not the girl who’d murdered Kalee Cortas. That we never would have helped a traitor run free.”
Silence filled the room.
Andi closed her eyes, realizing in the darkness that though he’d saved her life that day...he’d destroyed many parts of her soul.
She opened her eyes and looked at him, standing there in his Spectre uniform.
“Why didn’t you come with me?”
Her father was as still as stone.