“Fiona?” I reach for her hand. She lifts her face, and the tears pour down her cheeks.
“I’m going to have a word with Gazargo,” she says, her voice firm and hard in contrast to the devastation on her face. “It’s not fair to make one of you go home. I’m not going to let him do it.”
To my surprise, Khesan nods in agreement. “It is cruel. Surely there must be a way around the rules.”
I sigh at both of them. “He made himself clear, and Earth law is definitive. We don’t both get to stay, Khesan. But that is all right.”
Fiona’s head snaps over to me. “It’s not all right!”
“It is.” I hold her hand tighter. “Because I am returning to Arshur.”
Her mouth falls open in horror. “Shathar! You aren’t going anywhere. I won’t let them send you home. You belong here, with us!”
I smile at her, pleased by her protectiveness. But I know what I must do tomorrow. I will say goodbye, and I’ll do it with a smile just like this one—loving them both beyond anything I could have imagined.
I can break down once I am on the ship headed home.
“You know,” Fiona says, wiping her face, “since we’re talking about the rest of our lives, do you know when your birthdays are? I want to read your chart.”
“Chart?” I ask.
“Birthday?” Khesan asks.
Fiona stares at us, then shakes her head and laughs. “No birthdays? Like, the day of the year that you were born. Do you know?”
“I was born in the year 5890,” says Khesan. “But what day? Just at the start of the warm season.”
Fiona blinks, then furrows her brow. “Okay, so spring. I guess… May?” She heads to one of her bookshelves in the living room and pulls down a book, which she brings back to the table. “Yeah, you seem like a Taurus. What about May tenth? Here we go.”
She flattens the book to show us the page. It has symbols on it I don’t understand alongside a big block of text.
“It’s all about the arrangement of the stars when you were born. If you knew what time of day, that would help, too. Let me look up your chart.”
She brings out her laptop computer, types some things in, then clicks, then types again.
“Here we go. It says… you are a fighter, Khesan.”
Fiona and I glance at each other. True enough.
“When you love, you love fiercely,” she goes on. “This sounds right. You’re dedicated and loyal.”
“These are all accurate statements about Khesan,” I say. “And this is all in his ‘chart’?”
“Indeed.” Fiona grins up at me. “When were you born, Shathar?”
“In the colder season. Which is still quite warm compared to here.”
“Okay, so winter. You do kind of go with the flow, so perhaps you’re a Pisces.”
I enjoy watching Fiona pick out a birthday for me, and then she tells me all about it and what it means for my future.
“Selfless,” she says in a grumpy tone of voice. “Sounds right, too.”
Fiona puts away her laptop and looks at us with determination in her eyes. Then she holds out a hand to each of us, and we both accept.
“We’re going to manifest a solution to this,” she says with determination. She squeezes my hand tighter. “Close your eyes and imagine. Picture a future with all three of us, and we can make it come true.”
I admire this, how hard she’s trying to hold our family together. I love her all the more for it.
