“Don’t move,” I order Keller’s corpse, like I’m going crazy.
I retrieve the shovel from Moon Dancer’s storage compartment and race back at a full sprint. The collector looks exactly the same as I left it.
I start digging. The lava must have cooled quickly after the eruption because it has essentially turned to glass, shattering easily under my blade. It doesn’t take long for me to break through the hardened rock, but even so, by the time I’ve got the door uncovered, my hands are raw, my palms bleeding. I toss the shovel aside, wipe my hands on my trousers. I’m still shaking. I look around for water, something to wash off the blood. I want to do this right. But there’s nothing.
He’s dead,my mind says.What does it matter?
It matters.
Now that the door is uncovered, I find myself hesitating. Keller must have knocked the collector into the magma pool during the eruption. The heat of the magma destroyed the voroxide inside. Then—wildly, desperately, as the lava continued to rise—he shoved himself into the metal container and closed the door. Mount Kilmon erupted, encapsulating the collector. The metal is designed to withstand the volcano’s heat, but it’s not meant to act as a life preserver. Keller would have suffocated in there. He’d have known he would.
Understanding that I couldn’t have stopped Keller from dying and believing it are not the same. I am the galaxy’s most medaled pilot. I learned how to repair a destroyed spacecraft from scratch, I speak six languages, I completed secondary degrees in nursing, aerospace trade, space operations, aviation physics. I am a renaissance Legionnaire, and for what?What’s the point of all this knowledge if I couldn’t use it to save the person I would have given absolutely fuckingeverythingto save?
Keller’s corpse is inside this heat collector, and I’m going to have to open the door.
I grit my teeth, get my fingers around the handle, and pull. The door pops open, and I almost can’t believe it’s really him. But it is. Slumped over in a divot of empty space, wedged between pipes and wires.
My heart is going absolutely mad. I think I might be hyperventilating.
“Keller?”
I don’t want to reach out, I think as I reach out. My hand closes over his wrist. His skin isn’t warm but it’s not cold, either. There are burn marks on his palms, and his eyes are closed. He looks like he could be asleep.
A corpse,my mind offers again.
No, please.
I pull him out, and his body just comes, which feels wrong and weird and I want it to stop but it doesn’t. I lower him gently to the cavern floor. He’s not breathing, but he’s not rigid, either. That’s no surprise—rigor mortis generally dissipates thirty-six hours after death, and Keller has been dead for five days. And yet…
“Keller?” My voice is thick with emotion, and damn it, I swore I’d never cry over this boy. Not even in death.
The world is swimming. I try to focus on breathing, blowing it out in little puffs. I see the features of his face, the thick fan of his lashes, his mouth. I’ve studied these features a thousand times. Memorized them. I lift my hand, then hesitate again before touching my thumb to his cheek. It’s not-warm and not-cold, either.
I pull the lifestone out from around my neck.It means something, that he gave that to you,Master Ira’s voice tells me again, before it’s replaced by the memory of Keller’s voice saying,When you love someone, you give them a lifestone, and it’s like giving them a part of your soul. It can protect them. Save them.
I never believed in the story of lifestones. I don’t really believe in this.But Keller believed in it, believed it like he did most things: with the whole of himself.
The stone is warm from where it’s been resting against my skin. I can’t tell if it’s my imagination, or wishful thinking, but… it’s glowing again. Just slightly. I squeeze it in my fist, imagine its shape imprinting on my palm.
I say the things I was too cowardly to say when Keller was alive. I tell him that I’m pissed at him, fuming and furious at how he ran off and got himself killed in his boneheaded act of gallantry. I say he’s an idiot, that this isn’t some hero story. I tell him I’d need an entire lifetime to forgive him, but I’d be willing to give him that, if he’ll only come back to me.
I ask if he meant it, what he almost said over my headset.
My cheeks are wet. My throat is wrecked. “Please,” I say into the silence. Hands trembling, I thread the lifestone around his neck. It comes to sit over his heart. The glowing intensifies, and I’m definitely not imagining it now.
“I’m sorry, Keller. I love you, okay? I love you more than all the stars in all the universes multiplied a millionfold. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner, and I’m sorry I was ever a jerk to you, that I closed you out so many times when all you wanted was to be let in, and I can’t help but think if I’d only—if I’d opened up to you sooner, ormore, maybe you wouldn’t have—”
I’m sobbing in earnest now. The light from the lifestone is building on itself, green and pure, crowding out all the shadows between us.
“Maybe you wouldn’t have done this. But I’m here now, and I’m begging you, Keller, I’mbeggingyou, if there’s any chance, if you would give me even just the smallest chance to love you in this life, I will, I swear it, Iwill. No matter what. Even if everything ends and all the stars go dark. Okay? Because right now, I have so much love for you and nowhere to put it, and it hurts like you can’t even imagine, and I don’t know what else to do. So you have to come back.” I grip his hand. Bow my head, bring our joined fists to my mouth. “You have to comeback. I love you.Please.”
He opens his eyes, and breathes in.
EPILOGUE
KELLER
“Tell me again,” Isay.
