“Anytime you’re ready, then,” her mom said.
Molly lifted the cover that shields the hyperdrive switch. She rested her finger under the toggle and glanced at the destination coordinates. Any mass would do, but they weren’t taking any chances and had chosen the center of Lok. It felt strange to ignore the various warning lights and alarms, but the sickness Molly felt inside about leaving the groups below made it tolerable. Deep down, she felt completely resigned to the worst that could possibly happen.
Before lowering her goggles, she took one last look up through the canopy. The scourge responsible for all her recent miseries hung overhead, the density of the constellation growing with each passing hour. Molly longed to strike at them, to morph her love for Cole into a rage, to transform her longing to see her father into an ability to lash out. She thought about what she would do with a cargo bay full of bombs and the special powers of her hyperdrive. She imagined how great it would be if all the survivors around those campfires below could harness their own enmity and somehow direct it toward their mutual foe—inflicting damage.
Molly ground her teeth together and lowered her goggles. She wished so many things were possible all at once.
“Is everything okay?” her mother asked.
Molly sat in the blackness provided by the goggles and held the ship level by her internal compass, by instinct. She felt the cool metal of the switch against the soreness in her scabbed fingertip. She thought about the hyperdrive it was linked to and how many people had risked their lives in trying to keep it secure. She thought about how many more would gladly do the same if they knew about its existence. She thought about Lucin and how desperate he had seemed to seize control of Parsona. Desperate enough to threaten her life. He had thought her father’s ship, or something within it, could end a pan-galactic war.
Thinking of the war diverted her thoughts to the people below and to what she could really do with a full tank of the fusion fuel. Fusion fuel so many countless Humans and Callites had bled for. And what was she about to spend it on? Rushing off, sad and desperate, to be with the only men in her life that ever made her feel safe?
“Sweetheart, what are you waiting for?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Activate the hyperdrive,” Parsona said. “Sweetheart, hit the switch.”
Molly put some pressure against the metal toggle and braced to jump to the middle of the planet, to purposefully whisk herself off to hyperspace. She felt the switch begin to give way—then she let it go. She rubbed the pads of her fingers together, the sensation deadened by her wounds.
“Molly, what in the galaxy are you doing?”
“I don’t know, Mom. I’m sorry, I just don’t know…”
“Don’t know what?”
“I don’t know if I can.”
She pulled her hand away from the switch and lifted her goggles, dispelling the blackness. All around her was the flashing of indicators and alarms, the twinkling of stars overhead, the lambent flames from those huddled in the forest below. She felt in the middle of it all—surrounded by points of light each with their own messages: warning, pleading, threatening, begging, flanking her with indecision.
But there was no decision.
Despite her agonizing longing to be with Cole, the impossible thrill of reuniting with her father, she was bound by something stronger than military duty. Something Saunders could never absolve her from by expelling her, something the universe could not cull from her spirit.
It was her nature.
Molly grabbed the control stick and banked to starboard, back around to the clearing in the woods. Walter threw off his own goggles and hissed some question, but Molly didn’t hear. She was too busy formulating a plan. Too busy dreaming of saving the universe…
Epilogue – The Blood of Billions
“Do we make our decisions? Or do they make us?”
0
“Okay, I think I’ve got it.”
“Really?”
Cole wiggled out from underneath the cabinet and turned to the Seer. “Yeah, the flow of water’s stopped, but it took all you had left of this caulk—”
“That’s fine,” she said, “I won’t need any more.”
“You can know things like that? That there won’t be any more leaks?”
The Seer smiled. “Or that the next time, they’ll be too much water to bother.”
Cole crossed the swaying shack and placed the empty tube of caulk in the small trashcan. “Should I empty the pot of water under the leak? It’s almost full.”
“Sure.” The Seer turned, her gaze following and approximating Cole’s location. “Just dump it in the sink if you don’t mind.”
Cole pulled the pot out and sloshed it carefully into the small sink. Ahead of him, the wall of tin rattled with the sound of a billion drops of water thundering to their doom. Other than the direction from which the storm came, the entire scene reminded Cole of home. His original home, not the orphanage or the Academy, just that little shanty crowded by thousands of others in one of the poorest barrios of Portugal.
Standing in front of the sink with the empty pot in his hand, he sank into that recollection. There was nothing he had ever wanted more than to get out of that place. To see the world. To see the galaxy and all its finer things.
And now he had. He’d been to places few ever would. Seen things most people could only dream of. And somehow, standing in a shack that reminded him of his childhood, he felt more at ease, more comfortable, more himself than he had in years. The suddenness of the sensation hit him hard, making him gasp with awareness. No sooner had he felt that sense of peace, some bastard portion of his brain stabbed him with a reminder of where he was, how very far from home, how far from the one he cared so deeply for, and how impossible it may be to ever return.
He put the pot away, hanging it between a skillet and a wide pan. The three jangled together softly, almost as if greeting their returned friend.
“I guess that’s that,” Cole said, trying to force the shakiness out of his voice.
“Thank you,” the Seer said. She folded her thin legs beneath herself and gestured to the edge of the bed once more. Cole checked his hands, wiped a small bit of caulk on the front of his pants, then looked around at the rattling cabin.
“There anything else I can do for you?”
The Seer smiled. “Could I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
Cole took the few steps required to cross the room and plopped back onto the bed.
“Could you have not fixed the leak?” the Seer asked.
Cole glanced over his shoulder, back at the closed cabinet door. “Uh, I guess, but it didn’t seem to be leaking. Should I put the pot back, just in case?”
The Seer smiled and shook her head. “No, what I mean is: do you think you could have refused to fix it? Could you have declined?”
“I—” Cole looked at his fingernails. He scratched at a fine line of dark caulk running along the edge of one. “Could I have refused,” he said to himself.
The Seer sat quietly while he thought about it.