grabs my shoulders and stares up into my eyes. “Listen to me. OK?”
“What?”
“There’s no such thing as soulmates.”
“Then there’s no such thing as name mates.”
“I’m totally on board with that.”
“But it’s wrong. I’ve seen my brothers with their mates. They make their girls light up like suns. And when they fuck, they get superpowers.”
Alera guffaws.
“What?”
“You left that part out.”
“Which part?”
“You have to fuck to get the superpower?” She giggles out these words.
And then I laugh too. And sigh. “It does sound pretty dumb. But that’s the whole reason I came here.”
“To find your fucking superpower?”
“You can laugh all you want. But back on my time loop, Harem Station is a pretty cool place. I’m the governor. I run the whole thing. And we’ve got millions of people who are counting on me to pull this shit together. And my last chance at doing that was this trip to find Corla so we could figure out what our superpower was. So now, I have to go back there and tell all my brothers that we have to use their soulmates to blow shit up so we can live.”
“Wow.”
“Right? It’s heavy.”
“No. Not that. I mean, yes. It’s heavy. But for sun’s sake, Crux. You are… you… you’re just kinda rigid, dude. You need to take a breath.”
“What? I’m not rigid. I’m fuckin’… I’m… well… I don’t know what I am. But I do know that I’m not rigid.”
She pats my chest. Smiles at me. “Corla was rigid, wasn’t she?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know her.”
“I wish I was recording this so I could play your words back to you.”
“Listen, I get that it’s a weird story. But I’ve been through all kinds of time loops and Corla was in every single one. I met up with her. We’re literally connected by… time. I think.”
“OK. So. What was the problem? Because you’re here, still looking for her, and there must be a reason for that.”
“Well, she was… not my Corla.”
“Explain.”
“She was some other Corla. None of those girls were my Corla. My Corla is in a cryopod on a security beacon outside of Harem Station—”
“Shut up.” She slaps my chest.
“What? Why?”
“Is your Corla, by any chance, a queen?”
“Yeah. She is.”
“Oh, my fucking god.” Then she laughs.
“What?”
“Your Corla is our queen.”
“No.”
“Oh, yeah. Her name isn’t Corla, it’s Tisha. But remember I was telling you that Aleric and his friends disappeared?” This is a rhetorical question because she doesn’t wait for an answer. “Well, Queen Tisha was locked in the security beacon and she disappeared too. That’s the whole reason this place is falling apart. I was supposed to be the next queen, but Aleric is gone and now I can’t. So we’re queenless.”
I shake my head. “I don’t get it.”
“Your brother brought home a random queen in a cryopod?”
“It’s Corla. I know it’s Corla. She’s a bomb, and her sister—”
“Veila.”
“Yeah. Veila. She and Corla were escaping when Serpint caught up with them. And… so… I know it’s Corla.”
“Because Veila identified her.”
“No.”
“Then how do you know it’s Corla?”
“I saw her.”
“You identified her?” She squints her eyes at me. “You just told me you knew this girl for like one day before she up and left you. Then twenty-one years went by before you saw her again. You didn’t even open up her cryopod to identify her, so you what? Peeked through the glass?”
I nod.
“That’s not her. That’s Queen Tisha. I was trying to explain this when you interrupted me. Tisha—and me, by the way—we’re related to the original queen who came through the spin node thousands of years ago. The Angels captured her, then used her to make a peace agreement with the Cygnians. She lived to be one hundred and eighty-seven. She had forty-seven children. She is my great, great, great—well, you get the idea. Many, many, many generations removed, grandmother. I‘m pretty sure your Corla was our original queen.”
“Is this possible?”
“Seems to me that anything is possible, Crux.”
She’s got a point there.
I try a wrap my head around the idea that Corla isn’t Corla. That my Corla got clean away. Went back in time and—“Was your original queen pregnant when she arrived?”
“Yeah. That’s how we got the new genetics. The ones that make us light up.”
“Fucking suns. So Delphi and Tycho—”
“Who?”
“Our children. The twins.”
“No, she didn’t have twins. She had a boy. Canis.”
“Why does that name sound familiar?”
“Maybe he’s jumping time loops too?”
“Maybe none of this is real.”
“That would be really messed up. But I’d be up for that. Because my future