twenty-one

"Now what are we going to do?"

It was familiar, this cascade of circumstance that drove action to action, giving no time for reaction or recompense. Hadn't he already spent a lifetime rolling from disaster to disaster?

"No rest for the wicked."

"You're not helping."

"Whoever supposed I might?"

An annoyed grunt passed through his being; the memory of a sound, an allowed reaction to circumstance.

"We need to carve a new chimney through the rock."

First, Shepard took the measure of the local space. The gigantic flare reached toward the last planet. If he could wince, he would. He had tried to contain the direction of the energy released by the destruction of the creature. He had aimed for the most desolate corridor. Tungel would have been rocked by quakes. Matol had been brushed by the periphery of the planet wasting wind. Clugon would pass through in four years, unaware of the fact Herschel had even twitched. Clobaka would bear the brunt of it. The nascent terraforming efforts greening one side of the ringed planet would be negated.

"The thing would have eaten the planet anyway," the kernel of self noted.

Wearily—and fatigue was a new sensation—Shepard agreed. "Eventually, yes."

Had he made the wrong choice again? Could he have given the handful of colonists down there a chance to evacuate? Considering the struggle to contain the dark entity, the fight inside the sun, Shepard decided he had not had the time. Kat had accepted his existence, or seemed to have. But she was alone and had seen the evidence of him. Convincing a stranger on the other side of a dumb terminal that he carried a message from the stars would have taken too long...

…and he would have had to expose himself, again.

Shepard had formed the notion his existence should not be made public. It was too bizarre, and he'd never liked talking about himself. Not with the screwed up faces of the press—eyes shining with avarice, mouths set to rip sound bites from his words and set them against a backdrop of misinformation that made him out to be either the greatest hero the galaxy had ever seen, or the worst criminal, the bane of all races.

He had only really talked with one person. Talked, as in shared pieces of himself. And now that he remembered who he was, he remembered who she was, or had been. Why he had taken inadvisable—to whom?—action in order to save a woman who loosely resembled her.

Sunshine.

That had been his name for Jack. For the defiant young woman who had become the face of his private war. She had scowled every time he smiled, except when they were alone, skin to skin in the heated and damp afterglow, their faces pressed so close together he could see the smile in her eyes. She had threatened to render him forever childless every time he called her Sunshine. But he'd seen the twitch at one corner of her perfect mouth, the wrinkle that hinted at a smile she tried so hard to hide.

That mouth, those lips.

If he had eyes, he would close them. Shepard imagined the darkness instead so he could indulge in the slideshow memory would play across the blankness inside his lids. Jack actually smiling, pouting, touching her fingers to her lips in a rare gesture of affection. Her eyes flashing with anger, lips twisted, chin raised, her posture forever bold! The woman who trembled in his arms sometimes, then offered an explanation for it, as if she needed to have a reason to be afraid, to let go.

The lines he remembered were her tattoos. He only had an impression of them, though he had spent as much time as he could tracing them, the calloused pad of his finger tip counting scars as well as ink. They were all a part of her; each had a story to tell and she told them all, indiscriminately. She wanted to shock and surprise him. She liked it when his brows drew down low. She'd poke in between, slender digit tap, tapping the front of his skull. Then, when he asked for the next story, she'd say, "You're weird."

Jack had liked that he was weird. Apparently it was kinky.

"Now I am nothing and everything, a thing that is and isn't."

And Jack was gone. Long gone.

His grief felt fresh and old. He'd already mourned life and the existence he barely remembered. He'd mourned the fact of the war and his death. A compartment of his self, a separate process that remained voiceless, still marked off a list of losses. He didn't check in with it very often, it was counter-productive. And the losses hadn't been personal; they had been brutal and overwhelming.

"Shepard?"

Am here, he typed as he reintegrated with the part of self wrapped loosely around Kat.

"Are you all right?"

Something inside him smiled at the simple query. Am fine, he answered.

"What…" Hesitating, she leaned into the wall, braced against one gloved hand that sunk into the skin of him. Shepard imagined he could feel her fingers. "Did the fucking world end?"

No. Entity destroyed. Beyond a shadow of doubt—except for the small, inert portion trapped in an airless bubble of himself somewhere on the dark side of the asteroid. Solar flare pushed through the system. Clobaka will… How should he put it? Not fare well.

"Can you warn them? Type a message like you do to me."

Would you listen to a message carrying no signature, no point of origin, that warned of impending disaster?

Her throat vibrated with a quiet hum. "No, probably not." Thought lit her features. "What if I send the message?"

"That could work," the kernel put in.

"It could."

Being recording, he typed. I'll prepare the transmission.