27
Months came and went, the seasons changed, and the crops began to put out clear glass nuggets again. The first one harvested had resulted in a full-on celebration in the Montihan household. Even if the party ended with Netto tearing into a piece of raw steak and making Lily cry. Not because of the steak, but because she couldn’t eat hers the same way and itwasn’t fair.
Janet stretched her arms over her head and cracked her lower back. The Kepler sun shined brightly down on her.
Janet looked to the skies every day, and even camped out on one of the waterships at night, just so she could watch the stars. Maybe she would become a wandering, watchful widow, hoping for her love to return. At least that’s what Rylie called her now in jest—away from their parents’ ears, of course.
She was happy, albeit wistful. Time would do that to a person. The pain of grief hadn’t ebbed so much as been buried deep, where she could protect it within her.I don’t want it to go away.It kept her love alive and vibrant for Zeph.
Hector.
She pulled back her damp, messy hair and tied it into a bun. Really? Did a name mean so much? Whether he was Zeph or Hector, he’d always belong to her.
The adventure she had was nothing but a memory now, and her family had recovered from the distress. Even Lily, in all her childlike innocence, had returned to her normal precocious mischief and had begun her lessons in shooting.
Quinten Montihan hadn’t survived a war without knowing how to protect himself, and each day he put all three of his daughters through an even stricter training regimen than before. She was almost as good as Rylie was now with her aim, and her aim was fantastic to begin with. Their da retired shortly after Janet and Lily had returned and now her older sister ran the agri-lot.
The chime on her ship’s comm crackled and Janet moved to the front, answering it. “What’s up?”
Rylie’s voice came through the feed. “You need to come back in, Steven’s been hurt.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. He’s been beaten pretty badly but our security feeds show nothing of the attack. Netto’s looking into it, but it's like he was attacked by a ghost.”
Janet’s hand tightened on the comm receiver. “That’s not—”
Possible...She dropped the comm. Rylie’s voice faded out at her feet.
There’d been a moment of fear, of that same strange foreboding she’d felt the first time she awoke on theOppression, and just like last time, it quickly went away. She stumbled to the watership’s controls and navigated for home.
There were plenty of people who didn’t like Steven, but there was only one man in the whole God-damned universe who’d beat him up just for existing.
Only one.
Janet inhaled and tried to calm her nerves—her growing excitement—but she couldn’t help herself. The spark of hope she had silently nurtured flared to life, raging through her core like a wildfire. She’d clung to those embers so tightly, afraid that the moment she looked away they would vanish into the ether as if they had never been. That tiny glimmer of hope was all that kept her together in her first weeks back home. That, and Rylie, who promptly moved her out of the Montihan house and into the cabin she and Netto were staying in while they built their own place a mile down the coast.
She peered over the railing ahead and scanned the horizon for the shore, knowing it was still distant but hoping against hope to see a familiar face. Her ship was sailing too slowly for her liking. Her nerves couldn’t take it. She’d been surveying the farthest agri-lots away from the settlements because Rylie was needed at the factories. Normally, she loved it because the rolling sea was the only other entity on Kepler that didn’t treat her differently after her abduction. Now, however, Janet cursed being so far away. She cursed the ocean and its endlessness.
Calm down, this is a good thing.
Janet gripped the wheel with both hands, tapping her foot quickly when something appeared in the distance. She found her binocular glasses and put them on, nearly dropping them twice in her haste.Another watership?
Not any watership.
Steven’s watership.
She scrambled to stop her own and tried not to hyperventilate.
If Steven was hurt, who was driving his ship?Janet’s hands clammed up.
It’s not him. It’s not Hector. It’s not Zeph. There’s no way he really survived and came back for me.
‘Happily ever afters aren’t meant for everyone.’
She’d taken his final words to heart. Her pulse raced, and her throat constricted, making her breathless with excitement. Steven’s watership made its way toward her.
A figure emerged as it drew closer, and she hurriedly picked at her loose, salty T-shirt, and ran her fingers over her head, straightening out the bumps of hair caused by her bun. As the ship got even closer, the figure coalesced into a man.
