This is going to be 5 parts total, not 4, because the end stretched longer than I'd planned. You're...welcome?

Thank you so much for all your incredible comments on this thing. I really kind of expected this fic to fall flat because it's so far outside of my usual wheelhouse, so it's beyond exciting and flattering that you guys are digging this random universe so much.

When Myka is 20, she is happy, truly happy, for what may be the first time in her life.

She's working as a Junior Archivist for Languages, because her father is still the Archivist for Literature and she refuses to work with him. But that's fine: she loves languages; has a good ear for them, it turns out. She has mastered Illyrian and is becoming proficient in Duremese. Chthonic continues to elude her. And then there's Earth… the old world, where more than ten languages are still spoken. She's barely cracked those.

She remembers Christina when they were seven, and how she spoke such perfect Terran, and imagines that she must have spoken all the other languages, too, from the time she spent on all the different worlds. It's astonishing, Myka thinks.

She wonders what languages the Starlings speak when they are just amongst one another, on their ship. There is no Starling language that Myka has learned of yet. She will ask H.G., she thinks, because this is the year for H.G.'s ship to come back around.

The Junior Archivist for Engineering is a teenager named Claudia who, by all accounts, is a prodigy, finishing all her schooling by age 13, five years early, and taking a position as Junior Archivist the following year.

"The Starling for Engineering on this next ship is so great," Myka gushes to Claudia one day over lunch. "You're going to like her."

Pete leans across and nabs the piece of choco from the corner of Myka's lunch tray—they both know she won't eat it—and says, "Don't pay too much attention to this one, Claud, she's had a crush on that Starling since owwwww!"

Myka has punched him in the shoulder, but she's laughing. One of the perks of the Junior Archivist gig is that she gets to spend more time with Pete than she did when they were in school. He's the Junior Archivist for Military Issues, though she knows he's trying to weasel a transfer over to Sports and Recreation.

"She's a she?" Claudia asks. "She might be the only Starling for Engineering in all the ships who's a woman."

"Oh, is she ever a woman," Pete says, tilting his eyes skyward. "Right, Mykes?"

Myka huffs a sigh and rolls her eyes but she can't contain the little smile that curves her lips as she says, "Yes."

"And, hey hey hey, don't tell me you haven't been waiting for this visit, now that you're finally not total jailbait for her, right? Right?"

Myka can feel the hot blush crawling up her chest into her neck. She takes another bite of her salad and doesn't dignify him with an answer.

Pete grins and pokes her in the shoulder. "Knew it."

When the Starlings land, this time, Myka doesn't stand with her family but in a different file with the other Juniors. She has been looking forward to this visit but she has also been dreading it, because it brings H.G. but it also brings Will. And it's not that she doesn't want to see Will, exactly. It's more that she really doesn't know what she'll say to him when she does.

So she stands tall in her Archivist's uniform and thinks of how H.G. will see her and smile; she will put her hands on Myka's shoulders, perhaps, and squeeze them, and tilt her head to the side, and tell Myka she looks wonderful, and that she is proud, and happy that they will see one another in the Archives.

The lead Starling, who comes down and greets the President, is named Caturanga. Myka knows this because he is also the Starling for Languages, so she will be working with him. But her eyes don't linger on him; they look back up the ramp toward the hatch and watch the others file out: the red-haired woman, the man with the moustache, the man with the glasses, all the same as before. She watches them file out, dozens and dozens of Starlings with no sign of either H.G. or Will or Christina until the very end, when H.G. and Will walk out together, his hand resting on her back.

H.G. looks terrible.

Her hair is dull and limp, her face pallid and gaunt. Her eyes scan the crowd and lock onto Myka's and Myka smiles but then H.G.'s eyes are gone, shifted over and down and Will has stepped closer to her. She doesn't go to greet the front row, this time, like she usually does; Will stands close to her like a bodyguard and they work their way through the crowds and toward the Starling housing.

Disappointment covers Myka like a winter cowl, tugging her down toward the ground. She thinks about the terms under which they parted last time, because Myka has had seven years to grow from that and can no longer relate to the sad and resentful kid she was then, even though she's pretty sure the resentment wasn't for H.G., because how could it have been? How could it have been, when H.G. was in tears and Christina was sobbing and—

And where on earth is Christina?

Myka's eyes had followed Will and H.G. into the crowd but they turn back to the milling crowd of Starlings, and there are several children among them and Myka can't see Christina's dark head but it's hard to see through all the clothing and the—

Pete leans over and nudges her with his elbow. "Hey, wasn't that your friend? And and, uh, your… your father?"

Myka swallows, and swallows again, and shrugs. "I guess I'll see them in the Archives," she says.

That night, Myka lies awake in her cube in the Junior Archivists' quarters, listening to Pete snore in the cube next door.

The Archivist for Languages is an older, kind of goofy guy named Hugo and Myka stands beside him as Caturanga approaches with a cart loaded with crates that Myka knows will be full, mostly, of datasticks, but also with artifacts—paper texts and different items with words transcribed on them in different ways. One of the perks of being in Languages, Hugo had joked, was that you didn't need a huge Carrier to lug your items from one place to another. You should see what the Sports and Rec Starlings bring with them—loads and loads of toys and games and game-pieces and only a small amount of data, all things considered.

Myka takes the first crate and sets about loading it into the database while Hugo and Caturanga bend over the documentation systems to see if the new material aligns with the systems already in place.

Mid-morning, when she gets a break, Myka jogs down the hall and up a flight of stairs to get to the Engineering Archive. Inside she finds Claudia, loading data into the systems as Myka had been doing, and she finds Abigail Cho, the newly-appointed Archivist for Engineering, and Artie Nielsen, the Head Archivist.

"Where's H.G.?" Myka pants, winded from her run.

Artie spins on his heel and fixes Myka with a narrow-eyed glare. "H.G.? As in, the H.G. who sent some Agriculture guy to drop off all these crates with her name on them but never showed up herself—that H.G.? Because I have no idea, Myka, but she's supposed to be here, and I am supposed to be somewhere else doing my job and not hers."

A few tables behind him, Claudia makes eye-contact with Myka and shrugs, apologetically.

"She—she looked really bad at the landing yesterday," Myka says. "I thought maybe she was sick, which is why I—I just thought I'd see if she was here. Because if she's here, she's not sick, but if she's not, she probably is, so—" She's rambling, but Artie's fixing her with his beady-eyed stare and she loves Artie, she really does, but sometimes she kind of wants to smack him and sometimes he intimidates her.

She's a little intimidated now, to be honest, but that's probably because her guards are down.

Before she leaves at the end of the day she pulls up the info on Starling housing assignments and writes down the unit numbers for H.G. and for Will. Then she sends Pete a message not to wait for her for dinner and walks the half-block to the Starling apartments: tiny free-standing houses in tidy rows extending back half a league.

She goes to H.G.'s first. She rings the bell once and hears it echo through the rooms inside. She forces herself to count to thirty, slowly, before she rings again and listens, again, to the echo.

It's a five minute walk to Will's unit and before she rings the bell she can smell the food cooking inside. She rings once and hears Will call "Coming!" almost right away, and then footsteps.

He smiles when he sees her, somehow both nervous and genuine, and she knows that he has a secret. "Myka," he says. "I'd intended to send you a message this evening to see if I could convince you to join me for lunch at the diner tomorrow."

He stands near her on the stoop, pulling the door half-closed behind him.

Through her teenage years, Myka grew accustomed to the idea of her Starling blood-father. But now, looking at him, his body fewer than ten years older than hers, she is struck by the strangeness of it.

"Yeah," Myka says. "Sure. We could have lunch. But—but I'm just wondering if you've seen H.G. since you got here? Because she wasn't at the Archives today but I thought I saw her with you at the landing. And I haven't seen Christina at all."

Will glances back over his shoulder at the half closed door, and then turns back to Myka. "Yes, I've seen her."

"So is she okay? She looked kind of sick, or something, yesterday."

Will looks down at the ground, this time. He reaches back blindly for the door handle and Myka sees him clutch it tight, until his knuckles are white. Then he sighs, and looks up to meet Myka's eyes with intent.

"Have you eaten?" he asks. Myka shakes her head.

Will pushes the door open. "Come in," he says, "I've made enough for both of us."

Myka follows him into the living room but instead of going to the kitchenette, he puts a finger to his lips and gestures to the slightly open bedroom door. With his palm, he pushes it open just enough for Myka to see inside, to see Helena sleeping in the bed, her face half-turned into the pillow, that heavy black hair draped over the edge of the bed.

"Oh," Myka says quietly. "Are you and she, um. Well, are you?"

Will shakes his head solemnly as he pulls the door closed. "Never have, never will," he says. "That's not how we are together."

"Okay," Myka says. "Well, if you need someone to help with Christina while you're here, I mean, she knows I adore that kid, so."

Will is standing over his saucepan now, idly stirring vegetables over the heat.

"You haven't asked where she is," Will says.

Myka blinks. "I assumed with a friend? She was always at my house when we were kids together."

Will shakes his head. "Not all the worlds are as fond of Agents as you Terrans are," he says. He glances over at her through the corner of his eye and she remembers sitting at a counter much like this, seven years ago, watching Helena cook.

"Chicha?" he asks.

Myka nods.

He pulls two green bottles out of the fridge and pops their lids off against the edge of the countertop. He slides one across the counter to her, and keeps the other for himself.

"Not all worlds are as fond of Agents as we are," Myka prompts. She has been getting a sense of this fact already, actually, from listening to and reading conversations and stories from the other planets.

Will nods. "It's always such a pleasure to come to Terra," he says. "We are appreciated here. Respected. Almost revered—it can be a little uncomfortable, even, on occasion, as though you think we're more than the people we are."

He pulls two plates from the cabinet and begins to scoop food onto them. Myka notices he leaves a good portion in the pan, for Helena, she presumes.

"Chthon is nice, too," he says. "It's a very… corporate state. They treat us as partners in their endeavors to design new things. Some places are annoying, if not outright offensive to us." He lets out a breathy laugh. "Earth," he says. "They act as though all the other planets exist to serve them."

Will has come around the counter, now, and taken a seat on the stool beside Myka. He lifts his chicha bottle to her. Myka looks at it, and then blinks at him, puzzled.

"Tap yours against mine," he says. Myka furrows her brow but obliges, clinking the butt of her bottle against the neck of his, and then copies him as he sips his drink.

"Earthen tradition that I'm fond of," Will clarifies. "It expresses goodwill at the start of a meal. Anyway," he sets the bottle down, "Illyria. In Illyria we are widely despised. The sentiment is spreading on Domus, too, but that's neither here nor there. Not everyone hates us in Illyria, of course, but it's the dominant sentiment. Illyria for Illyrians, who needs all this foreign rubbish invading our independent spirit and culture, things like that. If it weren't for the Seven Worlds Treaty, they would have banned us by now, I'm sure of it."

"That's terrible," Myka says.

"We're practically prisoners when we're there," he sighs. "Armed guards between the Archives and the Agents housing, for our own protection, and we don't really go anywhere else. We're all miserable on Illyria, but the children most of all. We don't send them to school there, because it's not safe enough. They spend time with each other, but Christina always suffered there. There's only one other child on our ship who's near her age, but they've never really mashed up, you know?"

The food is delicious but Myka finds that her bites are slower and smaller, because there's foreboding in Will's story, she just knows it.

"We do get on with the Archivists there," Will says. "And there is a man—the Archivist for Education there—who had a daughter about Christina's age. He offered to bring Christina to his house to have them play."

"Well, that sounds good, right?" Myka offers.

Will raises his eyebrows, and takes another slug of his drink. "One would think. He brought her some of his daughter's clothes to wear so she wouldn't be a target. And she wasn't. It wasn't her that the shooter was after—it was the Archivist. The extremist who did it claimed that since Agents were too hard to reach he would make his point through, and I quote, 'exterminating their snakes who hide among us.'"

Myka chews slower, and slower, as the words sink in. She swallows and sets her fork down on the edge of her plate. "No," she says.

"Yes."

Myka and Will both wheel around. Neither of them had heard H.G. rise from the bed and make her way into the living room where she stands, now, her head looking very small emerging from the thick blanket she's wrapped over her shoulders.

"And they won," she says. "They wanted to destroy me, and they succeeded."

"H.G.," Will says, and his voice is soft but even Myka can hear the strain of slight frustration beneath it. "It wasn't about you. You know that."

"They wanted to destroy us, Wolly, and to do that they destroyed me," H.G. says, and there's a stillness to her face and her voice that's troubling given the content.

Myka is hearing what's being said but she's barely processing it. Her brain is stuck, like one of her audio recordings skipping, on the word 'exterminating.'

She has many memories of Christina but the one that sits brightest in her mind, right now, is of Christina sitting on a tree branch, slightly higher and across the trunk from Myka herself, saying "Your weird planet just calls us Starlings."

Her fork drops loudly against the edge of the plate. Will jolts and turns back to her. "Myka?"

"Christina is—she's—"

"Myka—" Will says. He reaches out and puts a hand on her shoulder but she jerks away like his fingers are hot coals. She looks at him, then at her plate, and then turns back to H.G., who wraps the blanket tighter around herself.

She pushes her chair back and stands up. She looks at Will, and then down at her half-eaten plate of food, and says, "This was really—it was really good, but I think—I need to—"

Will nods.

Then Myka turns to H.G. Steps closer to her, and closer still, and puts her hand on what looks like a shoulder under the blanket, and says, "I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

H.G. is still, and stiff. She takes a deep breath in, and as she lets it out she nods, twice, her lips pressed into a tight line.

And then Myka escapes out the door.

She starts walking back to her housing, but the thought of spending the night in her cube, four feet by eight feet with a mattress for a floor and a locker down the hall where she stores her things, is abhorrent. So she changes her plans and makes a left turn and winds up at the apartment where her mother and sister still live.

"Mom?" Myka calls from the entryway. She still has a key.

"Honey?" her mother calls back from the kitchen. A clatter of cookware, and then she appears at the doorway between the kitchen and living room. "Myka!" she says, smiling, "I wasn't expecting you. Have you eaten?"

Twenty-year-old Myka is tall, now, and she crosses the living room in four strides and she has to half-crouch to get her arms tucked under her mother's arms, her head tucked under her mother's chin, and that's when she starts to cry.

She lies, that night, in the bed where she slept from the time she was 15 until she was 19 and moved into the Junior Archivist housing, in a room that she shares with Tracy. Before bed she explains to Tracy what happened to Christina, but fourteen-year-old Tracy has only thin memories of her as a child she befriended for a month many years ago, so the impact is less overwhelming than it had been for Myka.

So she lies in her teenage bed but she doesn't sleep. In the morning she changes out of the too-small flannel pyjamas and back into her work uniform; she kisses the still-sleeping Tracy's forehead and leaves a note of thanks for her Mom and steps out into the grey light. She walks, first, to the cluster of trees, big things now, and spreading, where she and Christina had played as children, almost fifteen years earlier for Myka but less than two years ago for Christina. She trails her fingertips over the thick bark, feeling it crumble just a little under her fingertips. She looks up at the growing light between the branches.

There is a bakery on the main street between the trees and the Archives and she passes just as it's opening its doors. The window is full of steamed dumplings, baked cakes and desserts with fillings peeking out between their layers and Myka thinks of H.G.'s head coming out from the broad puff of blanket last night, her eyes dark, her cheeks sunken.

Ten minutes later she is bound for the Starlings' housing holding a box full of baked treats that she can't really afford, but who can possibly turn down a baked manna-fruit twist? Nobody, surely.

There is no movement when she knocks on H.G.'s door so she goes to Will's and knocks quietly. There is a shuffle on the far side and Will answers, still in pyjamas and looking disheveled, and only then does Myka realize just how early it is.

"I'm—I'm sorry, I just—breakfast?" Myka stutters, holding out the box.

Will smiles. "That smells heavenly. Come in."

There are a blanket and pillow on the living room couch and Myka is strangely relieved to see that Will and Helena haven't been sharing a bed.

"I don't want her to be alone," Will says, as if reading Myka's mind. "Since she lost Christina, it's… none of us trusts her to take care of herself. She sleeps almost all the time."

"You're good friends," Myka says.

Will nods. "She has always been a mentor to me. Tea?"

"Sure."

The cakes are still warm when Myka opens the box. Myka points: "Manna-fruit, purple, honeyfruit, choco, gold nugget, plain."

"What's your favorite?"

"Manna." She pulls out the one with the reddish filling and hands it to him, but he holds up his hand. "Take it to H.G.," he says. "With this." He hands her a cup of tea.

Myka eyes the mug and bites her lip. "She's asleep."

"I think she won't mind if you wake her," Will says. "She's quite fond of you, you know."

Myka's skin turns the color of that manna-fruit, she's sure of it. She shrugs and takes the breakfast and quietly slips into the bedroom where H.G.'s head is, again, emerging from the thick wad of heavy blankets, her hair in disarray, spread over the pillows. Myka has a flash of that first time she'd seen Helena's hair, how it gleamed near-white in the sun, and now, against the white pillows, how dull it is.

She crouches by H.G.'s face and sets the mug on the bedside table, and then puts a careful hand on H.G.'s shoulder. "H.G.," she says.

H.G. clears her throat and says, with surprising clarity, "I heard you come in."

"I didn't mean to wake you," Myka says.

"I know." Slowly, H.G.'s eyes blink open. A hand emerges from beneath the blankets to rub away the sleep-sand. "Give me a moment and I'll join you in the kitchen."

Myka sits at the kitchen counter and picks at her gold nugget dumpling opposite Will, who devours the honeyfruit. She hears the shuffle of movement in the bedroom, the flush of the toilet, and then H.G. emerges in thick socks and a thick sweater and warm pants, her hair loose over her shoulders, tea in one hand and pastry in the other.

"This is delicious, Myka. Thank you."

It sounds thin, a little forced, but genuine. Myka smiles carefully. "I'm sorry I ran away last night."

"It's quite all right, darling," H. G. says with a dry laugh, "I've been running away ever since it happened."

They sit in pleasant quiet, the three of them, eating breakfast and drinking tea.

"Would you like me to tell the Head Archivist what's going on?" Myka asks. "I mean, I don't need to give the details or anything, but just enough to explain why you won't be in."

"That might be a good—" Will starts, but H.G. shakes her head.

"I'll be in today," she says. "It was… it was hard, yesterday, being here." H.G.'s eyes begin to glisten. "This was her favorite planet at the end. She was so excited to be in Illyria because that meant we were halfway around to coming back again…" as her voice trails off, H.G.'s head tips down and she pinches the bridge of her nose.

"You don't have to, H.G., people will understand," Myka says. But H.G. shakes her head. "This is my purpose," she says. "I can't let them take that from me, too."

Myka waits in the living room while Will and H.G. dress and then the three walk together to the Archives.

"The pink sky here," H.G. says, "I've always found it to be one of the most beautiful things in all the worlds."

Myka smiles. "It's the rubidium in our star," she says. "Burns pink."

"Lovely," H.G. says, with a smile that reaches her eyes. "Lovely."

Myka decides in that moment that she will do anything, absolutely anything, to make H.G. give that smile as often as possible for as long as she's on Terra.

So she brings pastries to Will's house for breakfast a couple of times each week, until one day Will says, "If I've been paying attention, you're going to bring us breakfast again tomorrow, so I've pre-empted you and made an order at the bakery that you can pick up on your way, because you've been spending far too much of your stipend on H.G. and me."

Myka doesn't complain, because she has been spending too much of her stipend on treats, but she can't bring herself to want to stop.

In the evenings, she sometimes waits for H.G. at the Archives' gate and says, "I want to take you somewhere."

H.G. usually smiles, tight-lipped and a little down-cast like one does to a child who says, with great pride, "Look at my drawing!"

That's not how Myka wants H.G. to look at her. That's not the way at all. But it's still a smile from H.G., so she takes what she can get.

Myka has only seen images of the other worlds so it's hard to compare them to Terra, but she learns, quickly, what kinds of things H.G. likes to see. She takes H.G. on walks to the tops of hills where they can look down on the city, or where they can look out on the fields and the lands.

"The colors," H.G. murmurs. "The purples and the reds… the colors of this planet take my breath away. I always insist on the seat by the window when we land here, so I can look down on this sea of colors."

Myka takes her to the growing centers, too, where researchers and agriculturalists grow the food that people eat. Some of it, the edible stuff that grew here before humans arrived, is grown outdoors, but the seeds that come from other planets are raised in covered spaces because nobody wants to risk upsetting the delicate natural ecosystem that makes the planet habitable.

"Such a young planet," H.G. marvels, "So few resources, and yet look what you're doing with them!" She trails her fingers along the skin of a fuzzy orange fruit hanging from a tree. "Peaches," she says. "An Earthen fruit. Durem is the only planet besides Earth and here that can grow them."

Pete jibes her every time he sees her, which is, most often, when she's climbing the ladder to her cube alongside his. "Awfully smiley these days, Mykes! You gotta be getting something in your life that you didn't used to be getting much of in your life, know what I mean? Am I right?"

Myka punches him in the shoulder, but not hard enough to knock him off his ladder. "No," she says, but she can tell from his face that he doesn't believe her—and she's kind of okay with letting him think what he wants.

One day her plans to find H.G. at the gate are foiled by Will, waiting for her there.

"Can I take you to the diner for an after-school snack?" he says, with a smile.

Myka smiles and shrugs. "Sure."

They sit in a booth and there's much less awkwardness over their noodles than there was the last time they met here, like this.

"I know it's perhaps not proper for me to say this," Will begins, "and I apologize in advance if it upsets you, but: I'm so terribly proud of the person that you have become. I know I have no real right to say it and I've certainly had no influence upon it but—"

"Will," Myka interrupts, smiling. "It's okay. Thank you."

Will's responding grin nearly splits his face. But then he sobers. "How—your father—"

Myka sighs a little. "We left him when I was fifteen. He's still at the Archives and I try to avoid him there, but even when we cross paths he doesn't talk to me so it's not really a big deal. He'll be retiring soon anyway."

Will nods, then lets out a dry laugh. "We'd thought to take you away, you know."

Myka isn't surprised. "'We' who?" she asks, though she's pretty sure she knows the answer.

"H.G., of course. The idea that I was letting my own daughter be raised by another man who was mistreating her… and H.G., she was so very, very fond of you. You were here favorite of all the planet-dwellers, I think. Still are, as far as I can tell."

Myka can't contain the smile that pulls across her cheeks. She bites the side of her lip and then camouflages the whole thing behind a mouthful of noodles.

"I'm glad you didn't take me," Myka says, eyes down on her bowl, but when she looks up again Will is smiling sadly at her.

"I know you are," he says. "And I know you've already done the math, that you know how old you'll be the next time we come around. Same age as me, round about," he takes a sip of his drink, "and catching up to H.G."

Myka feels her heart race, her stomach settle, though in embarrassment or excitement she does not know. Because yes, she is aware of this. She is very, very aware of this.

"Please be careful, Myka," Will says. "It's not an easy thing, for a planet-dweller to love an Agent. And H.G…." he pushes his fingers through his hair, the same color as Myka's. "She's struggling these days. And you've helped her, I think, truly you have, but it will take her years to move forward from this kind of grief. Years by our measure, not yours."

But Myka shakes her head. "Don't you go trying to be dad-like with me now," she says. "No offense, but we're never going to have that kind of relationship."

Will palms the back of his neck and nods.

"We can be friends, though," Myka says.

Will smiles. "Friends. I like that."

That night, as Myka lies awake staring at the low ceiling of her cube, she thinks of the word Will had used. Love.

The next day the Archivists receive notice that the Starlings will leave the following day. The Archivists and the Starlings work late into the evening, trading and documenting the information that needs to be traded and documented both for the Archives on Terra and the records on the Starling ship to take to other planets. Myka scrabbles, works so fast her eyes and her hands start to hurt, but she manages, still, to be done before the Archive of Engineering sends its people home.

She doesn't go to the gate this time. She waits for H.G. in the corridor, right outside the Engineering door.

"I've been saving the best for last," she says to H.G. instead of greeting.

H.G. smiles. "Lead on."

They go, of course, to the trees. Myka makes a show of inspecting each of them as she walks past, "Not this one… no, not this one either," until she announces, with the flair of an illusionist's reveal, "This is the one!"

The trunk is quite big around, now. Myka can touch her fingers around it, but just barely.

"Christina taught me to climb this tree," Myka says, smiling.

She turns around to look back at H.G., behind her, but H.G. isn't smiling. H.G.'s eyes are wet, her lip held tight between teeth.

"She talked about it all the time," H.G. says. "Everything was, 'When me and Myka climbed the trees this,' 'When me and Myka climbed the trees that.'" She laughs a little, sadly. "I used to correct her. 'Myka and I.'"

Myka takes a cautious step closer H.G., and then another one. She puts her hand on H.G.'s shoulder, and then, in a burst of courage, moves it to H.G.'s cheek the way H.G. would touch Myka's cheek when Myka was younger. Myka's heart nearly stops when H.G. tips her cheek into that hand.

"Are you okay?" Myka asks.

H.G. closes her eyes and breathes for a few moments before deciding, apparently, to settle on honesty: "No." She lifts her head, now, and steps back. "I don't know that I ever will be. But I'm trying."

Myka nods. They stand in silence for a moment.

"Do you want to climb it?" Myka asks, suddenly.

This makes H.G. smile. "Oh, darling, I don't think I'm young enough for that."

"Don't be silly. It'll be fun. Come on, you go first. I'll give you a boost to the first branch and then I'll go behind you."

That's all it takes for H.G. to relent. Ten minutes later, they are perched high in the branches. H.G. sits sideways but Myka faces, straddling her branch with her cheek against the trunk. Both of them are breathing hard, and smiling, and Myka is relieved to see that H.G.'s eyes aren't wet anymore.

"You're right," H.G. says. "That was fun." She tips her head sideways to rest it against the trunk, eyes angled toward Myka.

Myka's heart is pounding from more than just the exertion of the climb. Because H.G. is so close she can smell her breath, almost feel it puffing against her skin.

"What does H.G. stand for?" she says. She knew, sometime long ago, she knows, but now-anything to break the strain.

H.G. smiles. "Helena George."

"Helena," Myka echoes, because it's the most beautiful name she's ever heard.

Her heart is thumping harder still, pounding so she's sure H.G. – Helena—can see it in her neck, she's sure her hands would vibrate with it if they released this tree trunk. So she takes a deep breath and holds it and then leans forward and presses her lips against Helena's.

It's barely a kiss: lips pressed dryly against lips, without moving. When that touch of lips lasts long enough for Myka to process that Helena's not pulling away, her heart all but flutters into arrhythmia.

But then Helena does pull back, carefully and without haste. Myka just watches her, blinking, and resists the urge to press her finger to her lips. She rests her cheek against the rough bark of the tree trunk.

Helena looks down—way, far down to the ground, and then over to the side. She bites her lip.

"I think we'd better climb down," she says.

They climb wordlessly, and when they emerge from the trees and begin the walk back toward town, Helena keeps more distance between them than she did on the walk over, Myka notices.

They stop at the entrance to the Starling housing. "Myka," Helena says, and it comes out like a sigh. She pushes her fingers through her hair. "I appreciate everything you've done for me, these past weeks. I hope you know that."

And Myka knows the beginning of a let-down when she hears one. She pushes her hands into her pockets and nods.

Helena nods back. "Don't give your heart to an old and broken woman like me."

"You're not old," Myka protests.

"Centuries, by your standards, Myka," Helena admonishes. "And even measured in relative terms, how old are you?"

"Twenty."

"And I'm nearing thirty-five." Helena shakes her head. "You've so much to give, Myka. And there are better people on this planet than I to receive it."

Myka opens her mouth to respond but is silenced when Helena cups one cheek in her hand and rises up on her toes to press her lips to the other. "Goodnight, Myka."

Then she turns and walks through the gate.

Myka stands alone beneath the darkening, purpling sky.

She takes a long route back to the Junior Archivists' housing, choosing roads that are dark so that she can see the twinkling of the lights above. She presses her fingers to her lips and walks that way, as though it will keep the trace of Helena's touch from escaping.

In the morning, she rises early after a poor night's sleep, and she goes to the bakery. She buys a larger than usual box of pastries and leaves it on Will's stoop with a note:

We are all children of the stars, aren't we?

Travel safely.

Myka