Jackie is joining the military.

"They're going to work with me," she said, when I asked her what she was going to do about her nursing son. "They lost so many people during that battle with the Cylons..." She trailed off, shuddering. It occurred to me to ask her why she didn't think such a thing might happen again but I didn't because I knew it hadn't occurred to her. She'd heard they needed people on Galactica and she had the skills they were looking for and to hell with the fact that she had a very young baby who also needed her. I was eight years older than Jackie but sometimes I felt more like I was fifty years older.

"Who's going to look after Joe?" I asked her.

"Well, that's what I wanted to talk to you about..." she began.

I looked at her. "Why do you want to talk to me about it?" I could see her coming from a mile away but I just wanted to be sure.

"I want you..."

"No," I said.

"Why not? Joe loves you..."

"Joe is three months old, he doesn't know enough to love anybody."

"All right then, he likes you..."

"Jackie, the answer is no."

"Why not?" Jackie got this mulish expression on her face. Did she think she was going to make me her babysitter? I decided to talk to her as if she really were an adult.

"Listen, Jackie, you don't want me to watch over Joe..."

"Of course I do!" she said. "I wouldn't want anyone else, I wouldn't trust anyone else."

"Jackie, you do NOT want me watching over your kid," I told her. "I'm lousy at it."

"Oh, bullshit, Serina! You had kids, you know perfectly well how to..."

"Where are they now?" I screamed at Jackie and it seemed like the vibration from my voice stilled the hum of the ship itself. "My kids are dead! What kind of mother am I if I let my kids die?"

My heart was pounding and my throat hurt, I'd screamed so hard. At the place where my soul lived was a huge, burned out hole, and somewhere in the back of my mind I wondered what was keeping me upright. That very moment it quit on me and I went down.

Jackie dropped to the floor with me. She tried to embrace me, but I pulled away.

"Serina... you didn't let them..."

"They're gone, Jackie," I whispered and I realized that, until that very moment, that fact had been abstract. I don't deal in abstract. I work from life.

"It's not your fault," Jackie said.

What in gods name did she know? "I'm not going to look after Joe," I told her. I folded myself and rested my chin on my knees. "You'll have to find someone else." I closed my eyes, as if that would make her go away.

"Yeah, sure," she muttered. I could hear other people around me, attracted by my screaming, murmuring their concern. They probably thought I was a Cylon agent. I would have laughed if that had been funny. Jackie got up and left me there, sitting in a fetal position in the middle of the floor.

I wanted to die.

My sweet little girls whose faces I couldn't remember. Had the Lords of Kobol taken my daughters' souls to themselves like it says in the scriptures? Geb had believed in them with all his heart but I took it with a grain of salt, even before the end of the world.

And speaking of the end of the world, where had the Lords been then?