“They did. The minute the stepped onto those ships, knowing what the ships were going to do, the second they closed their eyes to the truth of what sort of mission they were on, they were guilty. They had already done that very same thing in other systems, and so they too owe that debt. Do not ever let yourself feel as if you are guilty of harming innocents.”
“People on the planet’s surface died from that blow I dealt. That I do regret.”
She did. She had had no way of controlling the power. Maybe one day she would learn how to, but since she had never had to use herself in that way before, she had not known how to stop it once she had loosed it upon the world. But he had known. Somehow he had known to reach past the weapon and find her, to make her come back to herself in order to stop the rest of what she might have done if she had been left to loose that power unchecked and unbound.
He said, “I know. I regret much too. I regret that I did not know then, when we met, that power was what I wanted. That I was so weak and riddled with anger over a childhood I had left behind a long time before. That I did not have the heart to do what I should have done earlier that day, when we may have been able to save more of the people on that planet. I went soft, and I regret that, but not the reason why.”
“You were afraid for me.”
“I was afraid I would lose you forever.” He slanted her a smile. “I still worry that that might happen. I mean, you are still the weapon and one day you may be called upon once more.”
No. She would be. There was no maybe to it. She had seen that too during that hellish calling back of the weapon to a fortress where it and the Orb could be protected.
War would come again.
That ancient race that had warred with itself had been so advanced, and they remained so even though they too were trapped in a dimension far away from the universe that Drake had called home for so long. The universe right next to his, and a universe that would open soon because when her Tralam, the one she had hidden and sheltered and been imprisoned within, had fallen, that door had slid open, something she had to tell him—but not yet Not while there was nothing that either of them could do to protect the ones he had loved and left behind.
She would find a way to make sure he could help them. She would send him back, and with the Orb, as soon as she figured out a way to use the Orb to let him travel without her.
That too would come to pass. She had seen it too. What she had not seen was the life they would have together because that still had yet to be written.
And they would write it together.
They might be forgotten one day, but that would not matter to her. They would never forget each other, not even after death came for them and took their bodies from the world.
They had a love that was so strong it could cross space and time.
What was death in the face of a love like that one?
