📖 Stories

We got back to the Lodge from the Scow to find Noel at the comm station, face tight, running the same hail on repeat.

She’d been trying to reach Vladimir on the Eye for twenty minutes. No response. I stood there and watched her try again and again, and then the line crackled and Vlad’s voice came through — strained, but steady. They’d been attacked. A Starborn, alone. Sam was hurt. Hurt bad. He’d gotten what he came for and left on his own terms, and now he was heading to the Lodge next. Vlad’s recommendation was clear: stay, defend the Lodge, protect the artifacts.

I stood there for a moment with that. I don't know why I felt like I was contemplating something while everyone else felt miles away even as Noel frantically packed up the artifacts six feet to my left.

In the end I stayed.

I heard Walter before I saw what was happening — something heavy moving on the upper level, a struggle. I went up.

He was there.

Full matte black suit. No markings. The helmet completely opaque. He had Walter from behind with a gun to his head and an arm around his neck, and I stood at the top of those stairs and understood two things at the same time: that I had sat two seats away from this man at a bar in New Atlantis and another one in Akila, and that everything he’d said to me in both of those places had been perfectly true.

Everyone implements their vision by force. The honest ones just admit it.

He let Walter go when he saw me. Not out of mercy — out of something more like reorientation. Walter wasn’t the point. I put myself between him and the others and bought whatever time I could while Noel got everyone moving through the basement. When I made an opening I took it and we ran — through the basement, up through the Well, through the streets and the starport... The man in the Suit followed us the whole way. For the first time in the weeks since I'd arrived in this... Since I woke up on Vectera... I was afraid. Afraid of losing the new bonds I'd created, afraid of dying. This was a battle unlike anything I'd ever fought. And one that I don't think I could have won on my own. Andreja got the Naginata first, got it running, and I had the ship moving before the ramp had fully closed.

He followed.

His ship came up alongside us in orbit and he opened a channel, and the voice that came through was not the voice of someone who had been in a fight. He said he was done hunting us. Just like that. The tone of it — unhurried, full of curiosity and wonder — was worse than anything else that had happened. He hadn’t been threatened. He hadn’t been stopped. He had simply decided he was finished, the way you set something down when you’re done with it.

Then he was gone.

We set course for the Eye.

Sam Coe had been at the Eye.

Sam Coe was dead.

I don’t know how to write Sam Coe. I knew him for a handful of weeks. He was straight-laced and rough around the edges and he raised his daughter alone in a universe that makes that harder than it has any right to be. He had a father he was complicated about and frontier principles he wasn’t complicated about at all. He thought things through and then said them, without decoration, and I’d come to realize I trusted his read on situations in a way that surprised me when I noticed it.

He was a good man. I don’t say that easily. I mean it in the plain sense: he was someone who tried to do right by the people in front of him, consistently, without needing credit for it.

Andreja had gone in ahead of me at the docking bay.

I came through the entrance behind her and stopped.

She was on the floor near the entrance, Sam’s body in her arms, and she was crying in a way I had never seen Andreja cry and hope to never see again. Cora was kneeling beside them, her hands on her father’s arm. Her face, I...

She looked up at me.

“No. Go Away!” “I kept telling him to hold on. That you were coming. That you’d save him.”

She was right. She was completely, entirely right, and I had nothing to offer her.

"I HATE You"

I chose the Lodge. Sam died at the Eye.

I failed him. I failed her.

I failed.

The Lodge was quiet.

He arrived just before it began. The common room had been arranged — chairs, people standing at the edges, the particular stillness of a gathering that has not yet found its shape. He stood in the doorway for a moment and looked at the room, his mind and body in agreement that he should not be here, but his last shred of humanity urging him to enter.

Jacob Coe was in the corner.

He recognized him immediately. The last time he'd seen the two of them together, in Jacob's office in Akila, the air between father and son had the quality of something long compressed — not an argument, exactly, but the residue of years of arguments bottled and remembered.

There was a raging voice in his chest demanding that he confront Jacob, ask him what the hell he thought he was doing here, and where he got the nerve.

"Did... Did you ever patch things up in the end?"

Jacob was quiet for a moment. He said that all he had ever wanted was to protect his son. That his son had been out the door the moment he was old enough — away from him, from his mother, from everything they had built. That all he ever did was love his boy. That it should be him in the ground, not his son. He said it without anger. That was the part that was hard to listen to. The love and sorrow in it was plain and it had nowhere to go.

"I'm sorry for your loss..."

Cora was on the upper balcony, looking down. Beside her stood a woman he didn't recognize — composed, watchful, with Cora's same quality of taking stock of a room without appearing to.

She introduced herself when he reached them. Cora's mother. She said that Cora would be coming to stay with her for a while. It was probably for the best, after all, that she get away from all the reminders of her dead father.

He looked at Cora.

She looked back at him. The last time she had looked at him her face had been something he couldn't remember without a deep pain welling up in his chest. This was different. The rage was gone. What had replaced it was harder to name — a flatness, a kind of settled emptiness, as though she had arrived somewhere and found nothing waiting.

"Hey," she said.

"Hey" he replied.

She asked what the point of this was. Whether it was supposed to make anything better. He said something about keeping living. About how you had to. He heard himself saying it and knew it wasn't enough even as he said it.

She looked at him for a moment.

"Don't you get it?" she said. "Every single day is just going to be worse from now on."

He didn't answer that. There wasn't an answer for it.

Below them, Noel was beginning to speak.

He made his way back down. He stood at the edge of the gathering and listened to Noel speak — about what they had lost, what Constellation had lost... She spoke well, even as she struggled to choke back tears.

When she finished, she asked if anyone had anything they'd like to say.

Every head in the room turned toward him. All of them, at once. He could see it in their faces — the way they’d been watching him since he walked in, the way this universe had been watching him since Vectera, The artifact, the pirates... The Starborn. And...

He walked to the lectern. He felt the weight and the pressure of everyone around him, the new family he'd found since waking up in this world, the people who had trusted him, the people who he had become a sort of defacto leader for...

The weight of their broken expectations.

His eyes glazed over and his focus blurred as they looked back and forth, going through the motions of "making eye contact" without truly seeing anybody. Walter. Mateo. Sarah. Barret. Vasco. Andreja...

There was a lamp on the corner table near a book shelf. The light flickered a moment.

He opened his mouth.

“Sam—”

The air in the room felt stale. The silence, oppressive.

He stood at the lectern for a long time after that. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. Eventually, He apologized. It was unclear who this apology was for... Was it to Constellation, for failing them? Was it to Noel for failing to give a speech? Was it to Cora, for failing to save her father? Or was it to the one person not in the room with them?

He wasn’t sure how long he was up there. His body felt like something he was carrying. He breathed slowly. He stepped back from the lectern and moved through the room and did not look at any of them. He walked past a silent gathering of Constellation members. He walked past Vasco whirring quietly in the corner. He walked past the lamp, its light flickering like morse code trying to reach him. He walked down the steps and through the door and out into the cold air of New Atlantis. He walked toward the spaceport.

The ship was where he had left it. Inside there was only silence as Muira sat at a table contemplating some Chunks before her.

She didn't say anything. Neither of them did.

The Lodge was behind him now, Constellation was behind him now, but Cora's words were not behind him at all.

Every single day is just going to be worse from now on.

He sat in the pilot's seat for a long time before he started the engines. When he did, he already knew where he was going.