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“I can multitask.”
I shake my head slowly. “I know.”
She smiles, then grows serious again. “What else do you see?”
I hesitate.
This answer feels more vulnerable than the others.
“A home,” I say.
Her eyes widen slightly.
“Not immediately,” I add. “Not while officials are circling the shard like scavengers and Rolaev is somewhere in the galaxy deciding what broken certainty wants next. But someday. A door that is ours. Windows. Sunlight, if possible.”
“Real sunlight,” she whispers.
“Yes. A table covered in your notes despite repeated safety concerns.”
“Organized notes.”
“Unstable notes.”
“Emotionally organized notes.”
“And a place for my blades that is not an armory.”
Her gaze moves to the shrine stone. “A shrine?”
“Perhaps. Not like this exactly.”
“What would it be for?”
I look at the ceremonial blade resting on the stone. “Remembering. Choosing. Forgiving nothing too easily. Honoring what we build because we build it.”
Anita’s face softens until it almost hurts to see. “That sounds beautiful.”
“It sounds difficult.”
“Most beautiful things are. Annoyingly.”
The ship hums around us, carrying us away from Nareth-Kul’s grave and toward officials, investigations, lies, partial truths, and the fragile architecture of responsible revelation. The old faith would have told me that this path was prepared. The new truth tells me no path waits intact.
So we will make one.
Anita reaches for the ceremonial blade and looks to me for permission. I nod. She lifts it carefully, surprised by its weight, then places it back beside mine on the stone.
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’m new here.”
The answer makes me love her more than a perfect prayer would have.
“It can mean you witnessed,” I say.
“Okay.” Her fingers brush mine. “Then I witnessed.”
I look at the two blades resting together, one placed by a man learning how to live without inherited certainty, one placed by a woman learning that truth without tenderness becomes a weapon. No cosmic law declares the moment sacred.
