But she asked, and she deserves honesty. She's given me hers.
"Not much to tell," I start, which is a lie and a stalling tactic, and A'Vanti sees right through it.
"Cody."
"Okay, okay." I take a breath, sliding into the pool and sinking until the water reaches my chin. "I'm from a town called Cedar Hollow. It's in the Appalachian Mountains – that's a mountain range in the eastern part of the United States. Smalltown. Really small. The kind of place where everyone knows everyone and there's one traffic light and the high school football game is the biggest event of the year."
"It sounds peaceful."
"It was. Is." I stare at the cave ceiling, watching the light play across the stone. "My dad was a mechanic. Had a shop on the edge of town, Johnson's Auto Repair. Fixed everything from tractors to school buses. My mom was a nurse at the county hospital. I have two younger sisters, Lisa and Claire."
A'Vanti has turned in the water, watching me. I can feel her focus like a physical thing.
"I was a restless kid. Couldn't sit still, couldn't focus in class, drove my teachers crazy. My mom used to say I had 'itchy feet'. That I was born wanting to go somewhere, I just didn't know where yet." I smile at the memory. "Then when I was ten, my dad took me to an air show at a base a few hours from home. And that was that."
"An 'air show'?"
"The jets." I close my eyes, and I'm ten years old again, craning my neck so hard it hurts, watching F-16s scream across the sky in tight formation. The sound shaking my chest. The contrails cutting white lines across the blue. "I just knew. The way you talk about architecture… That feeling of knowing exactly what you're supposed to do with your life? That's what it felt like. Standing there in the bleachers, covering my ears because the noise was so loud, and thinkingthat. I want to do that."
"And you did."
"Eventually. Wasn't a straight line, though." I open my eyes. "My dad got sick when I was a teenager. Cancer. Took him eighteen months."
The words come out simply, without the dramatic weight they probably deserve. It's been a long time now. The sharpedges of that grief have worn smooth, but it's still there. It will always be there; a heaviness I carry everywhere I go.
A'Vanti doesn't say she's sorry. She doesn't offer platitudes or try to equate her loss with mine. She wades closer and takes my hand under the water, threading her fingers through mine.
"After he died, I thought about staying. Taking over the shop. My mom needed help, and Lisa and Claire were still young, and it felt selfish to leave." I squeeze her hand. "But my mom… she's tough. Tougher than me, honestly. Tough like you, actually. She sat me down at the kitchen table one night and she said, 'Cody Allen Johnson, if you stay in this town out of guilt, I will never forgive you. Your father wanted you to fly. So go fly.'"
"She sounds formidable."
"She is. She's about five foot two and barely a hundred pounds, and she is the scariest person I have ever met." I pause and give A'Vanti a sly look. "Actually, tied for scariest."
A'Vanti's lips curve. "I will take that as a compliment."
"It's meant as one." I draw our joined hands from the water, lifting her knuckles to my mouth and pressing a kiss there. "So, I enlisted. Went through basic, then flight school, then fighter training. Turned out the restless kid from Cedar Hollow was pretty good at flying fast and making split-second decisions."
"You are more than pretty good."
"Well. I got lucky a lot." I shrug. "And then your people arrived, and they needed human pilots to integrate with the fleet, and I volunteered because… honestly? It was the most incredible thing I'd ever heard of. Aliens. Spaceships. An actual interstellar alliance. The ten-year-old at the air show would've lost his mind."
"And then you were sent to rescue captives from the facility."
"Yeah." My voice goes quiet. "And I met you."
She's close now. Close enough that I can see the individual scales along her cheekbones, each one a tiny masterpiece of goldand amber. Close enough to watch the steam from the pool bead on her skin like dew.
"I carried you out of that cell," I say, "and you hissed at me and tried to claw my face off."
"In my defense, you bared your teeth at me. That is a threat display in Cerastean culture."
"I was smiling."
"I know that now. I did not know it then. All I knew was that a strange creature with sky-colored eyes was holding me like I was precious, and I did not know what to do with that."
"And now?"
She lifts our joined hands and presses them to her chest, right over her heart. I feel it beating beneath my palm, strong and steady and slightly faster than resting rate.
