fighter’s heart.
Beloved voices wove in and out of existence.
“…the air, when you pressed this one? How’d you…”
“…if you’d just…”
“…is she?”
And often, “Hold on, my love. Just stay with me.”
Somehow, that last was in all their voices, all at once, over and over. I’m sorry, I wanted to tell them. So sorry. I didn’t mean to make you love me. I didn’t mean to make you hurt. I will miss you so, so much.
And also, Thank you.
Something shifted underneath me, as if this plane of existence were falling away. My spaceship gave that high-pitched hum, like when it was coming out of hyperspace and new sublight systems were coming online. They were noisier, the sublight drives. Clean and silver and echoing inside my body, like medical saws.
Warm voices and strong hands surrounded me still and comforted me. How were my husbands on my spaceship? Impossible. So impossible.
But not as unbelievable as the next voice, slicing into my oxygen-deprived fugue and chilling me through and through. “Bianca? You okay? I thought you forgot about me.”
My brother’s voice. Right here on the edge of the universe, on the stark edge of life, somehow, he’d found me.
My heart skipped a beat, then two. I gasped. The air felt like razors down my throat.
I sat up and Brent pushed me back down. “Easy. You know better than that.”
Blinking against the too-bright light, I stared at him. He was there—in the room with me—on a spaceship where a white-wearing doctor scurried around touching the machines. The scene was so strikingly familiar that I almost wondered if I’d dreamed everything. Was my time on the planet some drug-induced dream?
No. It was real. It had all happened.
“How?” I managed to talk, even though my throat hurt like I hadn’t spoken in weeks.
Brent attempted to soothe me with one of his patented, concerned half-smiles, the kind he saved for public mourning after tragedies. “I’ve been looking for you since the signal was lost. Took a little time to find you. The ion clouds in this area are almost impossible to navigate for the equipment. Seems I got there right on time. They’d almost lost you, those savages of yours.” He had been sitting in a chair by my bed, and now he leaned back in it and stretched out his legs in front of him. “Amazing they kept you alive at all. The medical team has stabilized you for now, and when we get you to a more advanced planet, they’ll replace your heart with a metal one. Then you’ll finally be fine.”
I stared at Brent. It was like seeing his face had become a foreign sensation for me. As though I’d killed him off in my mind as something from another time, a dead time, and I’d been born again to something else. Now he was like an intrusion on my now.
But my feelings for my brother didn’t matter right now. There were too many questions, too many things to address. I was in space. That meant I wasn’t on the planet. My guys were… Well, I didn’t know what had happened to them. And I had to hide my feelings. If Brent saw a reaction he didn’t like, things could be made much harder for me. He was a person who wanted things to be the way he wanted them to be.
Still, he’d come for me. He’d searched. Had he been expecting a body? He’d brought doctors. He must have wanted to find me. Or he was covering all angles.
It didn’t matter. I had to repeat that over and over in my head. Brent looked tired; lines I’d never seen before traced outwards from the corners of his eyes.
“I missed you.” He spoke words I’d never have expected to hear from him, ever.
“You did?” Despite my best intentions, I couldn’t keep my disbelief from my voice. I decided not to care. Torrin would say what he thought regardless of the consequences. I had learned something from my time with him. “You don’t even like me.”
Brent shot forward in his chair. “What? Of course I do. You’re my twin sister. I like you very much. And I’ll like you even more when I don’t have to worry that you’re about to drop dead. I want you steady and healthy. Then we can figure out what’s next for you.”
No one had ever asked me what I wanted. The machines beeped loudly, and Brent stared at them. “Bianca, I need you to calm down.”
The doctor approached fast and fiddled with