Chapter 1
T'ara
Time did nothing to kill the question: how did we become this? Which led to another question. One I feared answering, and hoped I never would.
How did we become a we?
Our destination was drawing closer. We'd taken a roundabout method, through an asteroid field, risky with our fuel supply, but necessary. We couldn't risk Anazarian pursuit. It would defeat the purpose of everything. I couldn't shake the feeling it was already pointless. That I should be lying dead in the desert of that world, Ka'nu not far away, the contents of his skull spilling out. I bit the inside of my cheek. It was a complete defeat. I ran like a coward. I should have ended him. At any cost.
I looked down at Zeke's face.
Not any cost. And that truth sat heavy on my shoulders. There was a price I wasn't willing to pay.
Our room was small, even by hauler standards. One bunk, not built for two. A storage locker with someone else's dents in it. Pipes ran the ceiling and sweated when the heat cycled, and nothing — not one thing on this ship — was new. It was all old the way tools are old. Used hard. Kept anyway.
But it smelled clean. Scrubbed metal. Fresh bedding. The blood was gone from under his nails.
Vesheria's work. She found reasons to be in here whenever I surfaced — a basin, a rag, a fresh dressing he no longer needed. Stealing time at his bedside that I never granted her. It annoyed me. It annoys me still.
And I appreciated it. She did the things I didn't know how to do.
Yet.
Four days since the desert. Four days since Ka'nu. The wound above his temple had mostly healed. The new skin still pink, still raw, the ridge of bone beneath it rough under my fingers. His body was mending itself the Anazarian way. Fast. Relentless. It was his mind that would not surface.
He was there. Against mine, the way he'd been against mine since the beginning. But to be near him — the real him, not the drifting warmth at the edges — I had to move into the deepest reaches. Past the static. Past the empty rooms. And even when I found him, it never lasted long before the current pulled him somewhere I couldn't follow, and I had to withdraw and begin the search again.
Four days ago, I could hold him for two hours. Yesterday, barely one.
Today I hadn't let myself count.
It was taxing in a way I had no reference for. My antenna ached. A dull, threaded pain running from the tips down into the base of my skull. That had never happened before. Antenna strain. Twenty years of military conditioning, five years in hell, and it took an unconscious human to teach me my own anatomy had a breaking point.
I found myself almost amused. Even now he was teaching me about myself. That I'd follow the sound of the music in his head anywhere. Through any depth. Past any silence.
Music. Something I didn't know I loved before him.
Anazar had music. Ceremonial. Sanctioned. Played at the hours the empire designated for it, in the registers the empire approved. I was never permitted to partake. That wasn't my role.
My role was one I knew well, and was proud of, at one point. It was an honor. To be selected as the mate of Za'nan. An elite. The taste of it sat bitter in my mouth now. It always had, if I'm being honest with myself — a thing I am still learning to do — but duty had always been stronger than the apprehension. Duty had always been stronger than the feeling of betrayal. Of replacing my sister. The only being I'd ever been permitted to love, and the only person to ever love me back.
Before Zeke.
―――
I brushed a hand across his antenna and felt a small pleasure brush against my own. I grimaced. He was changed, again. Even more Anazarian than before. I had made him this. I hated it. That I'd taken such a weak, fragile, curious, wonderfully perfect thing, and made it, this. I hated that I'd touched his mind and changed the course of our lives forever. Hated that I'd allowed him to fight at my side, to be my sword when I was the one forged for the role. Hated that I'd given in to his pursuits and offered myself as his reward, deepening a bond that was already impossible to break.
Because it led to an even bigger, even more unforgivable violation.
That night still plays so vividly in my mind. The night I let desire win. Before I knew the damage I'd be doing. Because the loop demanded it — no, because my body — no. Even now I can't admit it to myself.
I poked at his face. Jawline more chiseled now, his human features less distinct, harder in ways that felt familiar and new all at once, and my heart raced. I found him beyond attractive. Another first. Attraction. It was so… human. On Anazar, you'd never use the word. You'd never crave your partner the way I craved him.
I bit down hard on my lower lip.
"I'm a failure."
I found myself grateful his mind was somewhere between awake and dormant. He wouldn't be feeling this emotion. No — emotions. All of them. Too many. Things I didn't know I could feel. But mostly shame. Deep, intense shame. For the night I'd forced myself on him in his sleep.
On his world, it's a crime. And after the brothel… I understand why. I understand it.
But my body still doesn't care. It was satisfying.
Heat burned my face as I lived in the memory — the unbearable desperation during the act, of trying to finish before he could wake, of sending suggestion after suggestion to keep him under, of pleasure killing my focus. The sounds filling the ship. My sounds. Sounds a warrior should never make. The heat has beaten me so many times now.
I removed my hand from his antenna. A burning in my core becoming molten the longer I stayed in the memory. I clenched my fist, nails digging into my palm until I felt the liquid warmth dripping between my fingers.
The yearning didn't die.
"Why is it like this!?"
―――
He forgave me for that night.
No. He didn't. He just accepted it. Because he was already in love. He rationalized it. Forced himself to make it fine. Because he'd have said yes anyway. Because the consent was standing.
It wasn't.
Because he wouldn't do the same. He wouldn't lose to the heat. I would never wake to find him violating me with all of his strength. He'd have woken me, because he needs me in that moment, with him. He'd never use the link to hold my mind in a state of sleep — and he'd certainly never fail at keeping me there, if he tried. Because the link is sacred to him.
He'd be almost too gentle. Frustratingly so. Like I'm the one who might shatter under his touch. And a part of it felt true. His every action cracked something open. Pieces fell away I could never recover.
He'd paint pictures in my mind while he had me. Feeding me scenes of a life he desired, with me and only me. A beach with white sand and water turned pink by a setting sun. I understood the phenomenon. I had never once seen it. It was breathtaking. A city at night no less illuminated than if it were day. And I'd be annoyed. Genuinely. Because as cute as it is, it's meant for after, and I'd send as much, and he'd laugh — out loud and across the link at once — and then the laughter would die out and what was left was pure heat and passion.
He wouldn't force anything. Ever.
But I'm not him. I don't know his customs. His world. He somehow blocks parts of himself even now — walls in a mind that swears it's an open book. He's such a… dangerous creature. He adapts so easily to a power he's never known. He can make such terrifying weapons. But even more dangerous — he uses them.
I've touched his mind. Zeke isn't a warrior. He's actually kind of a wimp. On the surface he's just a person who crashed into the wrong world and ended up here. None of what I find in his mind explains why he never misses a shot. Why he can build things he knows next to nothing about. Why sometimes his eyes go cold.
I recall when he gave the order. Plan Charlie. Ziggie. For just an instant, before it turned to sorrow, there was nothing. No grief. No hesitation. Nothing at all. There wasn't time for my blood to run cold in that moment.
It runs cold now.
Because the look on his face was hauntingly Anazarian.
*Am I making you this?*
I sent the thought without thinking. I tried to pull it back. Impossible, but I tried anyway. His mind didn't respond. The relief I expected didn't come. My heart twisted instead.
*Zeke… will you truly not return to me?*
I felt a small quiver. Then nothing.
The room we were in was our own. The only place on the ship with any real privacy. We couldn't keep him in the med bay. Too many eyes. Too many questions. The voice of the revolution was in a coma. We'd already lost so much. We couldn't let them believe they'd lost him too.
I don't know why I cared. I never asked for this. He never asked for this.
And yet, we had it.
―――
I'd given myself enough rest. I was diving back into his mind before I could stop myself. My antenna ached as I touched them to his.
I heard the rhythm immediately. Gentle, unique, something I knew didn't exist anywhere but in his mind. Music the world would never know. A song played just for me. I felt a warmth in my chest that came each time the music filled my skull, my lips tugging upward.
He was still there. Somewhere. Being himself. Completely and utterly unAnazarian.
*Never endin, never endin. You and me, you and me.*
I followed the sound down.
*Evry version, evry version…*
The music opened like a door, and behind it, a life.
―――
Earth. A small home. A yard.
We met in some ordinary way — a version of me with no antenna, no pink skin, just a woman he saw across a room and never recovered from. And we fell in love the slow way. The human way. We had human fights. He didn't take out the trash. I gave another man my number to watch his jaw do that thing it does. He looked at another woman too long, was too friendly with a waitress, and slept somewhere cold for it. He put his mother first. His father was kind of a perv, in the way old men are permitted to be on his world, and Zeke apologized for him with his eyes every holiday.
But no matter how much they fought, the making up always came. The love always won.
One thing followed him even here. At some loud, bright festival, he put a ball through a hoop from a distance that made strangers stop and watch. Then another. Then ten. He handed her the prize like it was nothing, because to him it was. He never missed. Not even in this life. I didn't know why that snagged in me. It just did.
*I lived a life I never met you, and still whispered your name.*
The scene folded into the next.
―――
Anazar. Home.
We were born there. Both of us — his skin blue in this one, his eyes the same. We weren't lovers at first. Just comrades in arms. Same unit. Same drills. Same rations.
My sister was there.
Alive. Laughing at something Zeke said that wasn't funny. Standing in the light of the training yard like the empire had never learned her name.
We found love on the battlefield, the two of us. Slow. Forbidden. And when the empire came to collect what it was owed, we escaped Anazarian rule and never looked back. All three of us.
I felt the tears before I understood they were mine.
*I took a trip across the stars and landed in your room.*
The scene folded again. I let it. I shouldn't have. I could have lived in that one until my antenna gave out.
―――
The planet.
He crashes into my life, the same way. The wreck. The smoke. The impossible creature crawling out of it.
And I don't establish the link. I don't do anything. This version of me looks at him — bleeding, babbling in a language she doesn't know — and she looks disappointed. And she leaves.
Every few days she returns. And each time, he's more beaten up. Torn by things he can't see coming. Starving in a jungle that has never once been merciful. The world is going to kill him, slowly, and she watches from the tree line with her arms crossed.
My heart ached, watching this version of myself watch the man I love die.
"You foolish woman." I put a hand over my mouth, though I hadn't spoken aloud. "I know you can't see it. But that fool of a man is the one."
The hand stayed over my mouth.
I'd never said that. I'd never even thought it.
He's the one.
The vision continued, merciful. She does help him. The aqua-dog comes, like before, and he rushes to her side, like before — no link, no reason, just that body of his making promises his skill can't keep. I smiled, recalling how I fought that thing in the nude, right in front of a man wearing his desire plainly on his face. Neither version of me understood it. I don't fully understand it even now.
That's just Zeke Newton. An open book, full of mysteries.
They don't face the bear in this life. He convinces her to run — with his hands, with his eyes, with a map scratched into dirt — to leave the hellscape of the jungle for a new territory. And she does. They never establish the link. They communicate in gestures and sounds. Pointing. Mimicry. Building a language that belongs to no world but theirs.
It's harder. It looks harder.
But… better.
By the end of the vision I was confident of that. And by the end of the vision there was a small child riding on her back, small fists wrapped in her hair, and the vision ended before I could see their face.
*No.* I almost pleaded with him. With his sleeping mind. *Go back. Just a moment longer. Let me see—*
A feeling washed over me that I couldn't name. Cold. Almost damp. Uncomfortable.
Regret. Is that what this is?
It was unwelcome.
The music continued.
*Same name on the mailbox. Same kid laughin in the yard. Same story.*
Another story. Same characters. Different life. Then another. Different sky, different war, same fools.
The message was clear.
*I'll love you across every lifetime. If we exist in different galaxies, different timelines, I'm still yours. Because Zeke loves T'ara.*
A completely simple belief. It was almost funny, how certain he was. Not even fully conscious, and this is where his mind goes? Truly dangerous.
Because I was beginning to feel the same. And with the galaxy baring its fangs, that may not be the best.
―――
*Lady T'ara?*
Vesheria. The link request hit my aching antenna and I surfaced too fast. The music tore away.
*I've asked you not to call me that, bird.*
*And I've asked you not to call me that. Enough is enough. You've been in there a full cycle. The people will begin to ask questions if one of you doesn't appear.*
*Let them.*
There was a brief silence. I brushed a hand across his cheek. His facial hair had gotten thicker.
*You don't mean that.*
I didn't.
*…I'm on my way.*
*Are you really? Because last time—*
*I said I'm coming! You don't know how this feels! He's more than just a mate. He's— I am coming.*
I felt her disconnect the link.
I rose from the bedside, taking his hand in mine. I don't know why. But I did. It had become somewhat of a ritual.
"Would you wake if I said I love you?"
I spoke the words aloud, in Anazarian. I couldn't risk speaking his tongue and botching the words. Or maybe I was simply embarrassed to admit how he made me feel to anyone but myself.
No. That was embarrassing too. Shameful, even.
His mind stayed quiet. Even the music was gone now — the way it always was when something disturbed the link.
I should've asked why, then. I should've done a lot of things.
*I shall return,* I sent.
I left the room without looking back. Because if I did, I'd never leave.
