two heartbeats and 13.8 billion years, it lifts its helmet free, and shows me the face beneath.
I know, an instant before I see it, what I’ll see.
And yet it hits me like a blow, robbing me of breath, of thought, of strength.
Beneath the fat leaves that bloom from his right eye, beneath the silvery moss that trails down his graying skin to disappear into the neck of his suit, I can still make out the lines of his face. His round cheeks, the lines across his forehead that my mom used to joke were there from the age of fifteen, because the world surprised him so much.
“Daddy …”
The words swell up inside my mind, like ugly, oozing slashes across my silver-speckled nebula. It’s as if I’m back in the moment of our last conversation.
Thanks for the birthday wishes, Dad.
Thanks for the congratulations about winning All-States again.
But best of all, thanks for this.
I hung up on him before his return transmission could come in. Before I could see the hurt on his face. The way my hits landed.
“I’ve missed you, Jie-Lin,” he says.
My heart implodes, caving in on itself.
“It’s been so hard,” he says, shaking his head. “To be apart from you when you should have been with us all along. There were so many things left for both of us to say.”
I hear myself sob. I feel my mental fortress start to crumble, stones falling away. I thought he was gone forever. I thought I was perfectly alone. And now he’s here, and the full weight of my grief finally tumbles down to bury me, an avalanche I can’t possibly resist. My vision’s blurred with tears, my breath coming so fast it fogs up the inside of my helmet.
The helmet separating me from him.
“We are all connected,” my father says, holding out his hand to me. “We are perfectly together. We will be complete, when you join us.”
“Auri,” Ty says quietly from beside me. “That’s not your dad.”
“But it is,” I manage. “You don’t understand, I can f-feel them all in my mind. If it w-wasn’t him, it would be easy.”
But it’s so, so hard. Because now, amid the green-silver-blue-gray of the mental plane of this place—I can feel it, I can see it, I can sense Cat’s gorgeous reds and golds turning to muddy browns as they merge with the gestalt surrounding us.
And I can see so much more.
My father’s reaching out to me. Showing me the connection that could be mine. The brilliance of it. The complexity and beauty. And though they’re all one, all the lives, all the minds this thing has swallowed over the eons merged into one complete whole, I can still sense him inside the many.
I can see the threads of the whole cloth that were once his. That are still his. I can find the parts that are him inside this hive mind.
He’s still there. I could still apologize to him. Feel him pull me close as he laughs. Have you been fussing over such a small thing all this time? he’ll say.
“Jie-Lin,” he calls. “I need you.”
Kal looks across at me from where he sits against the wall, his purple eyes catching mine. And though I’m sure he doesn’t know it, the golden tendrils of his mind stretch toward me, strengthening me, twining with my midnight blue.
“I know what it is to lose family, be’shmai.”
There’s endless compassion in him, but his face is bleak. I can sense the pain of that memory—I can sense a story there I want to know.
His loss is like my loss.
It’s a story about losing people who aren’t yet gone.
“When we leave this place”—and Kal leans on that word, when—“we will seek out word of your sister. Your mother. What became of them. Perhaps something of your blood remains. But you have no family here, be’shmai. Because that is not your father.”
And in a moment of stillness, I know that he’s right. My father was once in this place, and was once taken by the Ra’haam, once made a part of this whole.
But he’s not here now.
These are just echoes.
I nod slowly, tears rolling down my cheeks, and push the rest of my strength into my mental walls, fending off the touch of this planet and the thing inside it.
I was never meant for the Ra’haam, and I will not join with them.
I am of the Eshvaren, now.
“Jie-Lin,” that thing outside calls. “Come with us.”
“No!” I yell.
“It is pointless to resist. Join us.”
“Never!”
And finally, that smooth voice