“Where you go, I go.”
He said, “The general consensus is that we will all die.”
She nodded. “The general consensus is that we will all die in this war. Might as well go on a quest. Either way, we will probably die. The quest might just help us save some that we might not have saved otherwise.”
His tone turned gentle. “You are a remarkable woman. Do you know that?”
She sighed and rested her cheek against his chest. The sound of his heartbeat, steady and comforting, filled her ear. “I don’t. And I don’t think I’m that remarkable either. I just want to live. Everything I do is just so I can live. But I don’t want to just live. I want to be alive and with you. I want us to have something beyond this war, but I’m horribly afraid this is all that we will ever have of time together. War.”
He spoke softly. “I seem to recall Talon saying something similar not so long ago during the conversation that I had with him. It seems that we all want more than this and the only thing standing in our way is the Federation. Even after the Federation falls, there will probably still be civil war among planets as people try to take power. We may never know a time of actual peace.”
Her chest rose and fell, meeting his as he breathed in tandem with her. “I know. And I wonder, will we have children? If we do, will they survive long enough to see peace? Will we survive long enough to see peace? It scares me, thinking that we might not.”
“It scares me too.”
The words startled her. She looked at him again, trying to read his face, but it had gone impassive and unreadable. “I would not believe you are frightened of anything.”
He said, “At one point, that was probably true. At one point, I did not care at all if I lived or if I died. But then you came along and healed my heart. My broken heart was the largest wound I had ever sustained it in my entire life. You made me want to live. You made me want to love. Made me feel alive again and I’m grateful for that, but along with that comes the knowledge that the life I had before you, after her death, was meaningless. I was only living to die and now that I want to live, it seems like there’s not enough time. So yes, that frightens me.”
The words made her heart ache, but they also reassured her. They had avoided death the day before when the bombs were raining down, but all death was inevitable. Every being and every single thing died eventually. There was nothing they could do about that.
But to live having known love?
That would make it all worthwhile.
She said, “You do not trust your brother, do you?”
“Half brother.” The terse words were followed by even harsher ones. “No, I don’t. I don’t trust his motivations and I don’t trust his agenda. Drake has always had his own agenda. He’s always worked well within other’s agendas but only so that he can direct them toward his own. So no, I don’t trust him.”
She considered those words. “You don’t like him either.”
His sigh was heartfelt. “It’s hard to like him. His mother was not mine. My mother was not dead, nor was she divorced from my father. They were together when he strayed. For some reason, he always preferred Drake. I know, because I’m an adult now and I can see things differently, that that was mostly due to the fact that my mother insisted that I was a sickly child and kept me in bed or in the hospital and he was a healthy boy, and one whose mother encouraged him to fight and take up training even as a toddler. I believe our father saw me as weak and him a strong, and strength is something that my father always admired.”
Those words made her hurt all over again for him. “I see. I knew a girl whose mother insisted that she was sick. She actually broke her child’s legs to keep her from being able to walk so that people would believe that the girl couldn’t walk. There’s a name for that kind of disease, but I don’t know what it is.”
His fingers traced over her cheeks, his fingertips rough against her soft skin. “I don’t either. My mother never went that far but probably only because she didn’t think of it.”
They lay there in silence. They would leave in the morning, and whatever else they had to say to each other they would say it simply by holding each other in this moment of peace and quiet. Their hearts beat against each other’s chest. Tara could feel the warmth of his skin, proof that blood still flowed freely in his veins and that he was alive, and she could smell his unique and masculine scent as she pressed her face into his chest and closed her eyes.
Whatever lay beyond the Speakers door, it was something that they would face together. Stand or fall, they would be together.
Fear was there, right at the edges of her mind and heart, but she ignored it, settling herself deeper against his body and listening to his breathing as he drifted into sleep. She studied his face, doing her best to memorize every inch of that beloved visage in case something happened to take him away from her.
Tralam.
The Speakers door and the universe that lay beyond it. The universe that the Federation coveted so much that they were willing to ruin the universe which they already ruled to have it.
All the pieces of the puzzle were together now, and all that there was left to do was to seek out the door and cross its threshold.
Stand or fall.
The halls were quiet. The sound of machinery whirring and chirping to itself sounded through the empty corridors of Tralam. The wind blew in through shattered windows and heaps of leaves and other debris rustled together, lending a ghostly sighing noise to the tune played out by the machinery and the wind.
The sound of footsteps, soft and muted, moving along the old and broken floors sent tiny vermin scattering away from their nests within the piles of debris and toward the shelter of deeper shadows and cracks within the walls and floors.
A sour smell rose heavily from outside and blew in through the window, which rattled brokenly within a frame that held ancient writing in a language long since forgotten. The wind picked up, and its mournful wail grew louder as it careened into blind intersections and found itself trapped there.
They came: the weapon, the assassin, the thief, the healer, the warrior, the captain, and the one whose mind could turn the machine on full tilt again for the first time in untold ages. The wind beat harder against the windows and walls and roof, as if it sought to break through and level warning upon those that lay waiting.
