He slows, stops, pants heavily, and looks back at me as he hunkers forward like he’s in immense pain. “I’m sorry, Aera.”
“What’s happening to you?” I ask, clutching my shirt against my skin in the breeze.
“I don’t know.” He gets brighter the more time passes. “I never know until it does whatever it’s going to do.”
He looks scared and like he feels alone and broken.
I don’t know what I can do to help him, only that he did one thing for me when I was lost, which helped fight through the chaos.
“I’m here,” I tell him.
Sadness flits through his eyes. Evo’s face contorts. He curls forward, drops to his knees in the field, cries out in pain, and shatters into millions of tiny fragments that disperse into the dusky sky.
It is so beautiful and heartbreaking to see that I stagger back. “Evo?”
I watch the particles, fearing I’m supposed to catch them or do something so the wind doesn’t blow what’s left of him away. A fragment of him hovers close to me, the facets reflecting light like a diamond. I reach out and gently take it from the air.
It settles heavily into my hand as tears fall from my eyes. I am alone on a distant, uninhabited planet with the only one who’s ever really understood how alone I’ve felt now in a cloud of pieces.
“I’m here, Evo,” I call to his essence. “If you can hear me, I’m still here. I’m not going anywhere. Take your time, but come back to me. Please come back.”
The wind ripples through my shirt with chilly fingers, but it can’t compete with the frost in my heart at what Evo has had to endure. If anyone deserves someone who will stick by them, it’s Evo.
I shuffle back to the ramp, sit on the edge, clutch the piece of him to my chest, and wait.
Please come back.
Please don’t leave me here without you.
Chapter 17: Evo
The pulse is all I know. Its two-beat pattern resonates through my scattered mass. I am not alive, not dead. I am not here nor gone. I am in liminal space, a dimension between, filled with stars and darkness, nebulae and black holes, the same place Eon and I go when we fight together. Only I am not stardust and vengeance this time. I am fragments, fragile glass, energy, emptiness, disaggregated by self-disgust.
Aera cannot—should not—love me. But I want her to. I want her for myself, but that is not a Titan’s job, nor a soldier’s. And I burned her when my lust climbed too high and got too hot. Fear of hurting her made me want to shatter.
So I did.
Her voice sends my name echoing back and forth in my fragmented cloud above the land. The beat of her heart thumps through every fragment of me. She has captured a piece and holds me close. It is the only reason I can feel her like this.
She stays with me through the darkness, only leaving to get herself a blanket and sit out under the stars with me. Aera talks to my cloud, my essence, like I am still a person who can speak back.
Aera reminisces about ice cream with gummy bears, coats she made for her dog as a child, and learning to shoot a gun when she was just three years old.
She laughs about how hard it was to hold up what she calls a “pea shooter.” And then she starts crying again.
I want to comfort her, but my pieces do not want to come back together.
“So many of my friends are gone,” she says, her voice resonating through the fragment of me she holds close. “Solcrue killed them in battle, took them as anajas, or they died from starvation onCenturion. And now you?”
Aera cries harder. Then her sobs turn into a growl. “I hate this galaxy! It’s fucked up! It takes everything from me that I care about! Fuuuck!”
It’s a feeling I know well, Eon, too, after his years adrift in space alone.
She grows quiet for a long time, and all I hear are periodic sniffles. Still, Aera doesn’t lie back or fall asleep. She forces herself awake, gets up, paces, works on the ship, anything to stay with me. Then, finally, as dawn paints a thin blue line on the horizon, she sits on the ramp again, wiping her hands on a grease rag.
Aera draws my fragment from her shirt pocket and settles it into a hand. She sighs and swipes loose hairs from her face. “Guess we’ve all made mistakes. Even me with my special ancient resistance nanos or whatever. I could’ve pushed harder for a relief mission before things got as bad as they did. But we had Solcrue patrols in places around us that just made it look like we were going to die no matter which way we went. We were always trying to find Toriszi’s group or any of the others.
“Judgment got impaired because we were taxed, starved, battle weary, and scared.” Aera sighs. “Even the best of us fuck up. But there are a few things I feel like I’ve done right.”
