Chapter 10
Alita
Dr. Ido was planting tomatoes when I found him.
He'd moved into one of the repaired buildings on the eastern edge of Iron City — nothing extravagant, just a clean three-room apartment with a balcony wide enough for pots and a view of the sky that didn't include Zalem's shadow. Amy had offered him a suite aboard the Enterprise three times, and three times he'd smiled and said he was an Iron City man and would stay an Iron City man, and each time he said it Amy's face did the particular thing Amy's face did when she was quietly, fiercely proud of someone and didn't want to show it.
He looked up from the soil when I stepped onto the balcony. His hands were black to the wrists, and there was a smear of earth across his forehead where he'd wiped the sweat, and his eyes brightened when he saw me the way they always did — the doctor who'd found my brain core in a scrapyard and given me a body and a name, seeing his daughter come home.
"Alita." He stood slowly, his knees protesting the way they always did now despite the healing beds' best work. Some things, he said, a man earned honestly and had no business giving back. "I was hoping you'd come today."
"I brought you these." I held up a bag of soil supplements Amy had formulated — nitrogen-dense, slow-release, calibrated for Earth's depleted topsoil. "Amy says to mix them into the root layer and water twice a day for a week."
"Amy says." He took the bag and set it beside the pots, and his mouth twitched with the old fondness. "I grew tomatoes before Amy was a thought in anybody's mind. But tell her thank you."
I sat on the railing. The city spread out below us — still scarred, still broken in places, but changing. Matthew and Amy had been cleaning and repairing the streets section by section. Buildings that had been hollowed shells three weeks ago now had windows. The water filtration plant was running clean for the first time in a century. Children were playing in a courtyard two blocks down, and the sound of their laughter floated up like something the wind had found and decided to carry.
"You look happy," Dr. Ido said. He sat across from me in the folding chair he kept on the balcony, the one with the torn seat that he refused to replace. "Not just today. Recently. Something's different."
I looked at him. At this man who'd rebuilt me from wreckage, who'd taught me what it meant to be loved when I had no memory of it, who'd held my hand through the terrors and the rages and the slow, grinding loneliness of being the only person in Iron City who didn't know who she was. Dr. Ido had never lied to me. I wouldn't start lying to him.
"I'm in love," I said. "And it's different this time."
He waited. He was good at that — the waiting. He'd spent years watching me learn to be a person, and he knew the shape of the silences I needed.
"With Hugo, I loved so hard I couldn't see past it. Everything I felt was this enormous, consuming fire, and it burned beautiful and it burned hot, and when he died it burned me down to nothing." I pressed my palm flat against the railing. The metal was warm from the sun. "I'm not ashamed of that. I loved Hugo with everything I had. But everything I had was just — me. Just Alita, standing in the fire, holding on."
"And now?"
"Matthew is different. What I feel for him is —" I stopped. Tried again. "It's not less. If anything, it's more. But it's not mine alone. It belongs to something bigger. To this family we're building, to the other wives, to God. When I love Matthew, I'm not standing in the fire by myself. I'm standing in it with nine other women who love him too, and with a God who lit the fire in the first place, and the fire doesn't burn me down. It builds me up."
Dr. Ido studied me for a long time. His eyes were wet, and he didn't bother to hide it, because Dr. Ido had never hidden his tears and never would.
"Hugo would be glad," he said quietly. "If he could see what you've become. He'd be so glad."
The grief was still there — a low, permanent hum beneath everything else, the kind of grief that doesn't go away but learns to live alongside joy. I felt it now, felt the ache of a man I'd loved and lost, felt the memory of his face and his voice and his hands, and I let it be there. It didn't compete with what I felt for Matthew. It lived in a different room of my heart, and both doors were open, and the light moved freely between them.
"I know he would," I said.
I stayed another hour. We talked about the tomatoes and the city and Queen Esther's plans for the eastern districts. I told him about training, about the way my blades were getting sharper and more responsive every day, about Lydia's constructs and Rachel's terrifying power and the way Sarah could hold a barrier now for nearly ten minutes without tiring. He told me about the clinic he was rebuilding, about the patients Amy's healing beds couldn't convince to come aboard the Enterprise, about the old woman three doors down who'd started a garden of her own after seeing his.
When I left, he hugged me. Tight, the way he always did — like he was making sure I was solid, making sure I was real, making sure the girl he'd built from scraps and heartbreak was still here.
"Be careful," he said into my hair.
"I'm always careful."
"You're never careful. But you're brave, and brave is close enough."
I kissed his cheek and left. The shuttle was waiting on the rooftop pad, and the Enterprise was waiting above Zalem, and Matthew was waiting in our quarters with the particular quality of attention he carried when he knew I was coming home — a warmth I could feel before I saw his face.
Matthew was standing at the viewport when I came through the door. The light from Earth caught the brownish-blonde of his hair and the line of his jaw, and he turned when he heard me, and the smile he gave me was the private one — the one he kept for the moment when one of us came back to him, the smile that said you're here and meant everything is here now.
"How's Ido?" he asked.
"Growing tomatoes. Refusing supplements. Being stubborn." I crossed the room and put my hands on his chest, feeling the binding hum between us — that deep, warm current that never stopped, that made closeness feel like coming home to a house that had always been waiting. "I told him about us."
"What did he say?"
"That Hugo would be glad."
Matthew's hand came up to my face. His thumb traced my cheekbone, and I leaned into his palm, and the tenderness in his eyes was the kind that still undid me — not because I was fragile, but because he saw me so completely. The warrior. The widow. The woman who loved with her whole body and her whole soul and was learning every day that love didn't have a ceiling.
"He's right," Matthew said softly.
I pulled him close. His arms wrapped around me, and I pressed my face into his neck and breathed him in — the clean soap smell and the warmth of his skin and the faint pulse of his heartbeat against my jaw. My hands found the hem of his shirt. His breath caught.
"Alita —"
"I'm here," I said. "I'm right here. Let me be here."
What followed was ours. Matthew and me, in the quiet of our room, with the stars turning outside the viewport and the binding singing between us like a held note. He was gentle and I was not, and then he was not gentle and I was, and the rhythm we found was the one we always found — fierce and tender in the same breath, demanding and giving at the same time, two people who had lost everything and found each other and were determined to make the finding count.
I cried at the end. Not from sadness — from the sheer, overwhelming fullness of being loved by a man who prayed over me while he held me, who whispered my name like it was the name of something sacred, who looked at me afterward with those blue eyes and said nothing and didn't need to say anything, because the silence between us was the most honest conversation I'd ever had.
He fell asleep with his arm across my waist. I lay there and watched him breathe and counted the rise and fall of his chest the way Amy used to count his heartbeats, and I thought: this is what it means to be loved by a man who belongs to God first and to us second, and the order of it is what makes it beautiful.
I kissed his shoulder. Closed my eyes. Let the binding carry me down into sleep.
Three hours later, Adam's voice woke us both.
"Matthew. Alita. I'm detecting a significant escalation in Nova's activity. Weapons systems are powering across Zalem's defense grid. I'm reading armed personnel mobilizing in all sectors."
Matthew was on his feet before Adam finished the sentence. I was already reaching for my jewelry, the rings and bracelets that would become my armor, and my hands were steady and my heart was racing and the warrior in me was awake and hungry and ready.
"Get everyone to the bridge," Matthew said. "Now."
The briefing took four minutes. Adam laid out the tactical picture: Nova had activated every weapons platform on Zalem, deployed armed forces across the floating city's lower levels, and was broadcasting a signal that Adam couldn't decrypt but could trace to at least six relay stations in orbit. The orbital platforms were powering weapons arrays of their own.
"He's done waiting," Sammy said. She stood with her arms crossed, her jaw set, her eyes sharp with the flat certainty of a woman who could read truth the way other people read print. "Whatever he's been planning, it's happening today."
"He's committing everything," Tiffany added from the tactical display, her fingers moving across the projection with the calm precision that made her indispensable. "This isn't a probe or a test. The power draw from Zalem's grid is at full capacity. He's not leaving anything in reserve."
Matthew looked at each of us. Ten wives. One man. A family that had been married for weeks and training for war since the day the gifts were given.
"Amy stays aboard the Enterprise to coordinate sensors, communications, and fleet response," he said. "The nine of you come with me. We go down, we confront Nova, and we end this."
Amy nodded from the sensor station. Her face was calm, focused — the brilliant mind that had kept Matthew alive for centuries now turned to keeping all of us alive in the next few hours. "I'll have full sensor coverage of Zalem and Iron City. Adam and I will monitor every frequency. If anything changes, you'll know."
Melissa was trembling. Not from cowardice — Melissa was braver than she knew — but from the weight of something she sensed pressing against the edges of her prophetic gift. She caught my eye, and I saw the fear there, and I crossed the room and took her hand.
"We fight together," I said.
She squeezed my fingers. "I know. I just — I can feel something. Something I can't name yet. Something heavy."
Jenny was watching Melissa with the particular stillness that meant she was reading everything beneath the surface. She didn't say what she felt. But her eyes moved to Matthew, and something crossed her face — brief, tight, gone — and I filed it away because I trusted Jenny's instincts more than most people's certainties.
"Let's go," Matthew said. "Father, be with us."
We took the shuttle down. Nine warriors and one shepherd, dropping through the atmosphere toward a city that had been a fist around Earth's throat for centuries. Below us, Zalem hung in the upper air, silver and cold, and below that Iron City sprawled in the permanent shadow of the floating city's underside. I watched the ground rush up and thought of Dr. Ido in his apartment with his tomatoes, and I thought: we're doing this for you, too.
Rachel
I hit the first wave of Nova's soldiers thirty seconds after we touched down on Zalem's outer platform, and every hour of training I'd done since the wedding came flooding through my arms like a dam breaking.
They were armored. Heavy tactical gear, energy weapons, the kind of hardware that Nova had been hoarding in Zalem's upper levels while Iron City starved below. They came out of the access corridors in disciplined squads, firing in coordinated bursts, and they were good — well-trained, well-equipped, committed.
They weren't good enough.
Sarah's barrier went up first — a shimmering wall of golden energy that caught the first volley and held it. The shots hit her shield and flattened against it like rain against glass, and Sarah stood behind it with her feet planted and her jaw set, and I could see the strain in her shoulders but also the fierce, quiet satisfaction of a woman whose gift was protecting the people she loved.
"Go," she said.
I went.
The concussive blast I threw was the strongest I'd ever generated outside training. It left my palms with a sound like a thunderclap, crossed the corridor in an instant, and hit the front rank of soldiers with enough force to send them tumbling backward into the squad behind them. Armor cracked. Weapons clattered. Nobody died — the force was calibrated to incapacitate, not kill, because Matthew's rule was absolute and we honored it even when the people we fought would not have honored it for us.
Alita was beside me, her energy blades extended, blue-white and humming. She moved through the second wave with a fluidity that made my chest tight with admiration — spinning, ducking, striking with a precision that turned violence into something that almost looked like art. Each blade cut through weapon barrels and armor plating without touching flesh, disarming soldiers so fast that they were standing with empty hands before they understood what had happened.
"Left corridor!" Tiffany called from behind us. She'd positioned herself at the junction point, her eyes tracking three approach vectors simultaneously, her voice carrying the calm authority of a woman who processed spatial information the way the rest of us processed air. "Eight more coming from the maintenance level."
Lydia stepped forward. Her construct took shape in the air between the corridor walls — a lattice of interlocking energy forms that sealed the passage like a door made of light. The soldiers hit it and bounced. One of them fired point-blank into the construct, and the energy absorbed the shot and redistributed it across the lattice, and Lydia didn't flinch. Her face was concentrated, her hands extended, her artistic precision turned to architecture that could stop a bullet.
"Jenny?" Matthew called. He was in the center of our formation, exactly where he belonged — not because he couldn't fight, but because his gift was strongest when he could see all of us, when his energy could support and amplify what we were doing.
"Sixteen ahead," Jenny said. Her eyes were half-closed, her sensing gift reaching down the corridors ahead of us. "Armed. Nervous. One of them is — very scared. He doesn't want to be here."
"None of them want to be here," Sammy said from Jenny's shoulder. "I can feel the lies they've been told. Nova promised them glory. What he's delivering is a firing squad in the wrong direction."
We pushed deeper into Zalem. The nine of us moved as a unit for the first time — not the paired training exercises Amy had designed, not the individual drills, but a real, coordinated assault with all of our gifts working together. Sarah's barriers, my blasts, Alita's blades, Lydia's constructs, Tiffany's tactical coordination, Jenny and Sammy's sensing, Melissa trembling beside Heather but moving forward, always forward, and Heather — Heather beside Matthew, her healing gift ready, her red hair tied back, her green eyes fierce and watchful.
It was terrifying and exhilarating and beautiful all at once, and I felt something I'd never felt before — the sense of being part of something greater than my own strength, of my power being multiplied by the women beside me, of every blast I threw landing harder because Sarah's barrier freed me to throw without holding back, because Tiffany's spatial awareness told me where to aim, because Lydia's constructs channeled the force where it needed to go.
We were halfway through Zalem's administrative district when it happened.
Sarah stumbled. Just slightly — a catch in her step, a flicker in her barrier. Her hand went to her wrist, to the bracelet that was part of her protective jewelry, and I saw the fear cross her face.
"Sarah?" Heather was at her side in two steps.
"My bracelet — the energy reading is dropping. Something's pulling the charge." Sarah's voice was steady, but her barrier had thinned visibly, the golden light dimming at the edges. "I don't understand. It was at full power when we deployed."
Matthew moved toward her, and I shifted to cover the gap in our formation, and that's when I saw it — a small object, no larger than a coin, lying on the ground near Sarah's left foot. It hadn't been there a second ago. It pulsed once, twice, and emitted a brief, sharp wave of energy that I felt against my skin like static electricity. Sarah's bracelet flickered — and then steadied. The charge reading climbed back to full. The barrier snapped to full strength.
"What —" Sarah looked down.
The device crumbled. Not broke, not shattered — crumbled, like ash collapsing into itself. In three seconds it was dust, and the dust was dissipating into the air, and in five seconds there was nothing left.
"Amy." Matthew's voice was sharp. "Did you catch that?"
Amy's voice came through the comm from the Enterprise, tight with concentration. "I detected an unknown energy signature for approximately four seconds. Advanced technology — far more sophisticated than anything in Nova's arsenal. I tried to lock onto the source. It was gone before I could trace it."
"What kind of signature?"
"I don't know. The profile doesn't match any technology in my database. But it stabilized Sarah's bracelet. Whatever it was — whoever placed it — they were helping."
I looked at Sarah. She looked at me. We both looked at Matthew, who was staring at the spot where the device had been with an expression I couldn't read — not confusion, exactly, but the face of a man adding a piece to a puzzle he couldn't see the edges of yet.
"We keep moving," he said. "Stay tight."
We kept moving. Through the corridors of the city that had oppressed Earth for centuries, nine women and one man, fighting together, the mysterious device already fading into the background of the larger question: where was Nova, and what was he planning?
We found out ten minutes later.
Matthew
Nova was waiting for us in the central chamber of Zalem's administrative complex — a vast, circular room with a domed ceiling and walls lined with screens that showed every corner of his crumbling domain. He stood on a raised platform at the room's center, surrounded by the remnants of his personal guard — elite soldiers in heavy armor, weapons drawn, faces blank behind their visors.
He looked older than I'd expected. The footage Amy had compiled showed a man of commanding presence, sharp-featured, imperious. The man in front of me was still sharp-featured, still imperious, but the weight of the past weeks — of watching his world shift under him, of watching the people he'd controlled for generations begin to slip from his grip — had carved new lines around his mouth and new shadows under his eyes.
"Matthew." He said my name like he'd been practicing it. "The shepherd who fell from the sky and decided to remake my world."
"Your world." I stopped ten paces from the platform. My wives spread around me in the positions they'd trained — Sarah's barrier shimmering, Alita's blades ready, Rachel's hands glowing, the others alert and steady. "This was never your world, Nova. It belongs to the people you've been crushing under your boot for three hundred years."
"Such moral certainty." His voice was controlled, almost pleasant. "And yet you come into my city with soldiers at your back, using powers no human being should possess, and you call me the oppressor."
"Your soldiers can stand down. Nobody needs to be hurt today."
"Stand down." He smiled, and the smile had no warmth in it — none, not even the cold kind that pretends to be warmth. It was the expression of a man who had already made his decision and was enjoying the last few minutes before the other side understood what it was. "You know, I've been watching you for weeks. Your ship. Your women. Your miracles." The word came out sharp, mocking. "You heal the sick. You clean the streets. You give speeches about love and God and the future of humanity, and the people eat it up because they're starving and you have food."
"They're starving because you starved them."
"They're starving because they're weak. I gave them order. Structure. Purpose. A system that functioned. And you — you walk in and tear it down because your God told you to, and you expect me to be grateful." He leaned forward. "I am not grateful, Matthew. I am not impressed. And I am not unprepared."
The screens on the walls flickered. Every one of them, simultaneously, switching from surveillance feeds to a single display: a timer. Red numerals. Counting down.
Ninety seconds.
Jenny made a sound beside me — a sharp intake of breath that I felt more than heard. She could feel what Nova was feeling, and whatever she was reading from him was bad enough to strip the color from her face.
"He means it," she whispered. "Matthew, he's not bluffing. Whatever this is — he's committed."
"Nuclear devices," Adam's voice said through the comm, and for the first time since he'd come online, the AI sounded something close to afraid. "I'm reading nuclear signatures beneath the platform. Multiple warheads. They've been shielded — that's why my sensors didn't detect them on approach. Matthew, the yield is —"
"Enough to destroy this city and everything above it," Nova finished. He spread his hands, and the gesture was almost elegant, the showmanship of a man who had decided that if his empire fell, it would fall in fire. "Your ship. Your people. Half of Iron City. All of it. I may not be able to beat your God, Matthew, but I can make sure that what you love burns."
Eighty seconds.
My wives were looking at me. All nine of them. Alita's blades hummed. Rachel's hands glowed brighter. Sarah's barrier rippled. Melissa was shaking. Heather's hand was on my arm, and I could feel the binding singing between us — all of them, all ten threads of it humming with the shared terror and the shared love and the shared, absolute refusal to let this man destroy what God had given us.
I could feel Amy through the binding, too — far above us, aboard the Enterprise, her brilliant mind already calculating, already searching for solutions, her new human heart hammering against her ribs.
Seventy seconds.
"Adam," I said. "Can you beam the warheads out?"
"Negative. I don't have transport capability. The warheads are shielded and I cannot target them remotely."
"Tiffany. Can you open a rift around them?"
Tiffany's face was white. She was staring at the floor, at the platform, her precise mind mapping the space beneath it. "They're embedded in the structure. I'd have to open a rift inside the city's foundation, and the yield — if one detonates during transit —"
"It would be worse," Amy confirmed from above. "The rift would channel the blast. You'd vaporize Iron City."
Sixty seconds.
Nova watched us. He was calm. He'd made peace with this, I realized — or whatever passed for peace in a man whose soul had been a clenched fist for three hundred years. He was going to die, and he was going to take us with him, and the only thing he felt about it was satisfaction.
Fifty seconds.
I looked at my wives.
Heather, whose hands could heal anything. Alita, whose blades could cut through the world. Melissa, who trembled when God spoke through her and spoke anyway. Jenny, who felt what I felt before I knew I was feeling it. Sammy, who saw truth in every lie. Tiffany, who carried people through impossible distances. Sarah, who shielded the ones she loved. Rachel, whose raw power could crack a mountain. Lydia, who made light into architecture.
Nine women. My wives. My family. The people I loved more than my own life.
Forty seconds.
Father. Show me what to do.
The answer came not in words but in certainty. The same certainty I'd felt when I woke from hibernation and Amy told me the world had ended. The same certainty I'd felt when I'd looked at nine women in brain cores and known — known without understanding, known with my whole self — that they were mine to love and mine to protect.
I knew what to do. And the knowing was so clear, so absolute, that the fear fell away from it like clothing from a body stepping into water.
"Get them out," I said to Tiffany. "Open a rift. Get everyone to the surface. Get them to Iron City, as far from Zalem as you can."
"Matthew —"
"Now."
Thirty seconds.
I turned to my wives. There wasn't time for what I wanted to say — that I loved each of them individually and specifically, that Heather's fierce gentleness and Alita's laughing courage and Melissa's trembling faith and Jenny's feeling heart and Sammy's sharp honesty and Amy's ancient, patient love and Tiffany's steady hands and Sarah's sheltering warmth and Rachel's bold joy and Lydia's beautiful vision had made me the richest man who'd ever lived. There wasn't time. So I said the only thing that mattered.
"I love you. All of you. God is with you. Go."
Alita's face broke. I saw it — the warrior's composure cracking, the woman underneath reaching for me. "Matthew, don't —"
"Go!" I pushed her toward the rift Tiffany was tearing open beside them, a bright wound in the air. Rachel grabbed Alita's arm. Sarah grabbed Melissa. Heather hesitated — one heartbeat, two — and I saw in her green eyes the moment she understood what I was going to do, and the moment the understanding broke something inside her, and the moment she went anyway because I'd asked her to.
Twenty seconds.
They went through the rift. All nine of them, pulled and pushed and carried by each other, and the last thing I saw was Heather's red hair disappearing into the light, and then Tiffany closed the rift behind them, and then I was alone in the room with Nova and his soldiers and the countdown on every screen.
Ten seconds.
I knelt. Not because my legs failed — because it was right. I knelt on the floor of Zalem's administrative center, the floor of a city that had crushed generations under its weight, and I put my hands flat against the ground, and I opened everything I had — every gift, every particle of energy, every ounce of the power God had given me — and I pushed it downward. Into the floor. Into the structure. Into the warheads beneath me.
Father. Let me be enough.
Five seconds.
I felt the detonation before I heard it — a wall of force and heat so enormous that my mind couldn't process it as a single event, only as a series of impacts: the floor dropping away, the air igniting, the pressure crushing inward from every direction, the radiation flooding through me in a wave that I could feel dismantling my cells at a level below conscious thought. My shield held for a fraction of a second, deflecting the blast upward and outward, away from Iron City, away from my wives — and then the full force of it hit me, and I took it, I took all of it, I pulled it into myself the way Heather pulled pain into herself when she healed, and the world went white.
The white was not empty. There was light in it — not the light of the explosion, something else, something warm and golden and so deeply familiar that I almost wept. I was lying on something — the ground? the rubble? — and my body was broken in ways I could feel but not name, and the radiation was in me, in my blood, in my bones, and I could feel my cells failing one by one like lights going out in a city losing power.
Father.
The binding was still there. Faint, now — ten threads of gold humming against the growing dark. I could feel them: Heather's fierce warmth, Alita's sharp tenderness, Melissa's quiet depth, Jenny's wide-open heart, Sammy's steady clarity, Amy's ancient love, Tiffany's calm precision, Sarah's sheltering care, Rachel's blazing courage, Lydia's gentle light.
Ten women. My wives. Alive.
Thank you.
The threads dimmed. The light faded. I felt hands on me — Heather's hands, I thought, because they were warm and they were shaking and they carried the particular signature of healing energy that was hers alone. She was trying. She was pouring everything she had into me, and I wanted to tell her it was all right, I wanted to tell her to stop, I wanted to tell her that what mattered was that they were safe —
The healing light went out. All of it, like a switch being thrown. The warmth of Heather's gift vanished. The faint hum of the binding guttered and died, not severed but smothered, like a candle held under a glass.
Something cold settled over everything. Not temperature — absence. The absence of gifts, of power, of the spiritual connection I'd carried since the day Jesus had touched my hands and given me the ability to heal. All of it, gone. Pressed down. Silenced.
I tried to breathe. The air tasted like blood and ash and something chemical I couldn't name.
The dark was very close now. Very gentle. It didn't hurt the way I'd expected dying to hurt — it felt like being lowered into warm water, like the world softening around me, like the pain withdrawing to make room for something else.
Father. I trust you. Take care of them.
I closed my eyes. The gold threads were gone. The light was gone. The warmth was gone.
There was only the prayer, and the silence that answered it, and then nothing at all.
Heather
The rift dumped us onto a rooftop in Iron City, six blocks from the administrative district, and I was turning back before my feet hit the surface.
"Tiffany, open it again! Open it now!"
"I'm trying —" Tiffany's hands were shaking, her precise composure shattered, tears cutting lines through the dust on her face. "The rift point collapsed. The energy interference from the detonation is — I can't stabilize a lock."
The explosion hit. Not the sound — the shockwave. A wall of pressure that knocked us flat, even at this distance, even with Sarah's barrier flaring to full strength around us. The sky above Zalem turned white, then orange, then a sick, churning gray, and the floating city lurched — a visible, sickening drop of several meters before its systems compensated — and chunks of its outer rim broke away and fell toward Iron City like burning rain.
"Sarah!" Rachel was on her feet first, always first, and she was pointing at the debris falling toward the streets below. "The civilians!"
Sarah widened her barrier. Her face was a mask of concentration and pain, the golden energy stretching to cover three city blocks, catching the falling debris before it reached the ground. The strain showed in her shoulders, in the trembling of her legs, in the cords standing out in her neck. Lydia was beside her instantly, adding her constructs to the barrier's structure, buttressing the shield with the precise architectural forms that were her gift's expression.
Alita grabbed my arm. Her dark eyes were wild with fear and fury and something I recognized because I felt it too — the absolute, bone-deep refusal to accept what was happening.
"He's still up there," she said. "Heather, he's still —"
"I know."
Tiffany opened the rift. It took her two more tries, her hands trembling, her voice breaking on the coordinates, but she opened it — a ragged tear in the air that flickered and spat sparks and was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
I went through first. I didn't think about it, didn't calculate, didn't weigh the danger. The rift opened onto the wreckage of Zalem's administrative center — the dome collapsed, the walls half-gone, the platform where Nova had stood reduced to twisted metal and ash — and I found him.
Matthew was on the ground. What was left of the ground. He lay in a shallow crater of fused metal and scorched concrete, and his body was —
I dropped to my knees beside him. My hands found his chest, his face, his neck. His skin was hot — not fever-hot, radiation-hot, the cellular heat of a body that had absorbed a nuclear blast and was failing at the molecular level. Burns covered every visible surface. His clothing was gone, burned away, and the jewelry he'd worn — the protective technology Amy had designed — was fused to his skin in places, the metal melted into the tissue.
"Matthew." I pressed my hands to his chest and opened the healing gift with everything I had. The golden-green energy surged from my palms into his body, and I felt the damage, and the feeling was a kind of scream.
It was everywhere. Not a wound, not a break, not a tear — a dismantling. The radiation had reached into his cells and pulled them apart at the level of DNA, destroying the blueprints his body needed to rebuild. His organs were failing not because they were damaged but because the instructions for their repair had been erased. His bone marrow was dead. His blood was dying. The healing energy I poured into him found nothing to anchor to — no intact template to guide the regeneration, no foundation to build on.
"Come on," I whispered. "Come on, come on, hold on —"
Alita was behind me. I could hear her breathing — ragged, harsh, the breathing of a woman fighting not to break. Jenny and Sammy had come through the rift. Melissa. Rachel. All of them, clustering around me, and I could feel their terror pounding against the walls of the binding like fists against a locked door.
"Heather, talk to me," Rachel said. Her voice was rough. Her hands were glowing, her concussive gift useless here, and the helplessness in her face was something I'd never seen on Rachel before.
"The damage is beyond anything I've — the radiation destroyed the cellular repair pathways. I'm pouring energy in and it's — it's not finding anywhere to go. It's like trying to heal a fire." My voice was steady. My voice was completely steady, because if my voice broke, my gift would break with it, and if my gift broke, Matthew would die. "I need more. I need —"
The air split.
Not a rift like Tiffany's — wider, brighter, edged with light that was warm and golden and carried a weight of purpose I'd never felt before. A man stepped through it. Young — mid-twenties, maybe. Brownish-blonde hair. His face was streaked with tears — not the tears of someone who had just started crying but the tears of someone who had been crying for a long time, who had known what he would find before he found it.
He didn't speak. He crossed the rubble in three strides, dropped to his knees beside me, and put his hands on Matthew's chest, and the healing energy that came from his palms was staggering — a wave of power so deep and so precise that it made my own gift feel like a candle next to a furnace. The energy reached into Matthew's body and began rebuilding what the radiation had destroyed — not just repairing but reconstructing, cell by cell, molecule by molecule, with a knowledge and authority that went beyond anything I'd ever felt in my own healing.
"Who —" Jenny started.
Matthew's heartbeat strengthened under my palms. The cellular readings Amy was streaming to my jewelry began to climb. The stranger's tears fell onto Matthew's chest and mingled with the dust and the blood, and his face was a landscape of grief so raw that I couldn't look at it directly — the grief of a man who had come a very long way and was very afraid he had come too late.
Hope surged through the binding. I could feel it in all of them — Alita's fierce prayer, Rachel's desperate grip on her own composure, Jenny's hands clasped to her mouth, Sammy's eyes locked on the stranger with an intensity that said she was reading every truth he carried. Tiffany, standing at the edge of the crater, scanning for threats with one hand and holding Melissa upright with the other.
The healing was working. I could feel it. The stranger's power was rebuilding the DNA templates, restoring the repair pathways, giving my own gift something to anchor to. I poured everything I had into Matthew alongside this man I didn't know, and for three seconds — three bright, impossible seconds — I believed it would be enough.
Then the cold hit.
It came from everywhere at once — not temperature, not wind. A wave of suppression so total that it felt like the world going silent. My healing gift died in my hands. The golden-green light guttered and vanished. The stranger's power cut out like a severed cable. The binding — the warm, constant, singing connection between me and Matthew and all of my sisters — didn't sever. It smothered. Went flat. Became a dead signal where a living voice had been.
"No," I said. "No, no, no —"
I pressed my hands harder against Matthew's chest. Nothing. No healing energy, no gift response, nothing. My hands were just hands — warm, human, useless. The stranger was staring at his own palms with an expression of horror, his healing power gone the same way mine was gone, and his tears were falling faster now, and his mouth was shaping a word that might have been a name or might have been a prayer.
Matthew's heartbeat faltered. I felt it under my palms — the rhythm breaking, the spaces between beats widening, the muscle failing without the spiritual energy that had been sustaining it.
"Matthew, stay with me. Stay with me, please, you have to stay —"
His eyes opened. Just barely. The blue was dim, clouded, and I wasn't sure he could see me, but something moved in his face when his gaze found mine — recognition, or love, or gratitude, or all of them at once compressed into a single fading look.
His lips moved. I leaned close.
"Safe?" The word was barely a breath.
"Yes," I said, and my voice broke. "We're safe. You kept us safe."
Something that might have been a smile. Something that might have been peace. His eyes closed.
His heart stopped.
I felt it — not through the binding, which was dead, but through my hands, through bone and muscle and the terrible, simple physics of a heart that was no longer beating. The rhythm ceased. The chest beneath my palms went still.
"Heather," Alita said behind me. Her voice was small. She never sounded small.
I kept my hands on his chest. I pushed, the way a normal human pushes in the desperate imitation of a heartbeat, because there was nothing else, because my gift was gone and the stranger's gift was gone and everything I had was gone except my hands and my will and the screaming refusal in the center of my chest that said this could not be happening.
"Heather." Jenny's hand on my shoulder. Jenny, whose empathic gift was dead, who was reading me with her human eyes, who could see from my face what I couldn't bring myself to say.
"He's gone," I said.
The words fell out of me like stones from a height. They hit the rubble and didn't bounce. The silence that followed was the loudest thing I'd ever heard — louder than the explosion, louder than the combat, louder than every scream of every patient I'd ever healed. It was the silence of a world that had just lost its center.
Alita made a sound. Not a word — a sound, something raw and broken, ripped from the deepest part of her, and she dropped to her knees beside me and put her hands on Matthew's face and said his name, and her voice was the voice of a woman who had buried one man she loved and was now kneeling over another.
Around me, in the ruined chamber, on the broken platform of the city that had been a weapon against the world, my sisters began to weep. And I knelt beside my husband's body and kept my hands on his silent chest and said nothing, because there was nothing to say, because the man who had loved us, who had healed us, who had shielded us with his own body from a nuclear blast — the man who had given everything for us — was gone.
Then the darkness came. Not gradually — all at once, a wave of unconsciousness so total that I didn't feel myself falling. The suppression field that had killed our gifts intensified, or expanded, or did something I couldn't name, and one by one I felt my sisters going down around me — felt it in the thud of bodies hitting rubble, in the sudden silence of voices that had been crying — and the last thing I saw was the stranger's face, tear-streaked and anguished, as his eyes rolled back and he collapsed beside Matthew's body.
Then I was gone, too.
Tiffany
I came back to consciousness cataloging details, because my mind processed the world in precise inventory even when it was breaking.
Stone floor. Cold. Not metal — stone, rough-cut, the kind of surface you'd find in a structure built for function rather than comfort. No light from windows; the illumination was artificial, a flat, pale glow from panels set into a ceiling that I registered as approximately four meters high. The air smelled recycled — filtered, recirculated, the particular sterility of an enclosed environment with mechanical atmosphere processing.
I was lying on my side. My jewelry was still on my body — the rings, the bracelets — but they were inert. No hum, no energy readout, no connection to Amy's systems. Dead technology on living skin.
I sat up. The movement sent vertigo through me, and I pressed my palms flat against the stone and waited for the room to stop tilting. When it steadied, I looked.
A compound. A large room, maybe fifteen meters by twenty, with stone walls and a heavy door that had the look of something built to hold people who were stronger than ordinary humans. Benches along the walls. A basin in one corner with water running from a spout — the only sound in the room, a thin, continuous trickle that seemed impossibly loud in the silence.
Bodies. People on the floor, on the benches, slumped against the walls. I counted. The counting was automatic — the same precision that let me calculate rift coordinates and spatial vectors turning itself to the immediate problem of knowing who was here and who was not.
Nine. Ten. Eleven.
My sisters. Heather, still unconscious, her red hair spread across the stone. Alita, her face turned away. Melissa curled on her side, one arm over her head. Jenny and Sammy beside each other. Rachel sprawled on her back, her hands loose. Sarah against the wall. Lydia in the corner, her sketchbook gone, her hands empty.
Amy. Amy was here. Not aboard the Enterprise, not at the sensor station where she'd been when we deployed — here, on the floor, unconscious, a bruise darkening along her jaw. They'd taken her. Whatever had happened after we passed out, they'd gone to the Enterprise and taken Amy.
The stranger. The man who'd come through the rift, who'd tried to heal Matthew, whose tears had fallen on Matthew's chest. He was lying near the door, his brownish-blonde hair matted with dust and blood, his face still marked with the tracks of dried tears.
And one more. A woman I didn't recognize — blonde, early twenties, athletic build, wearing clothing I didn't recognize but that had the utilitarian cut of someone who dressed for movement. She was slumped against the wall near the basin, her eyes closed, her breathing steady.
Twelve people. Ten wives. The stranger. The unknown woman.
No Matthew.
I pressed my hand to my chest, looking for the binding, reaching for the thread that connected me to my husband. It was there — I could feel its structure, the architecture of it — but it was silent. Dead. Like a power line with no current, the conduit intact but the energy gone. The suppression field, whatever it was, didn't sever the binding. It smothered it. Sat on top of it like a weight on a wire, pressing everything flat.
I tried to open a rift. Nothing. My hand moved through the air, and the air was just air, and the gift that had let me tear holes in space was as dead as my jewelry.
"Tiffany?"
Sarah's voice. I turned and found her awake, sitting up against the wall, her blue eyes focused with the particular intensity of a woman who was refusing to let the situation break her.
"I'm here," I said.
"Where is here?"
"I don't know. Not Zalem. Not Earth." I gestured at the walls, the ceiling, the flat artificial light. "Somewhere with an atmosphere processor and a suppression field strong enough to kill every gift we have."
Sarah looked around the room. Her eyes moved from body to body, and I watched her do the same count I'd done — the same careful, terrible inventory. When she got to the end, her face went very still.
"He's not here," she said.
"No."
"Is he —" She stopped. Swallowed. Started again. "Heather said he was gone. Before everything went dark. She said he was gone."
I nodded, because the word dead was a wall I couldn't climb yet, and nodding was all I had.
Sarah closed her eyes. She pressed her palms flat on her knees and breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, and I watched the effort it cost her — the physical labor of holding herself together when the man who had held them all together was not here.
"Then we take care of each other," she said. "We take care of each other until we figure out what comes next."
She stood. She went to the water basin and cupped her hands and brought water to Heather first, because Heather was the healer and Heather had been closest, and because Sarah had always taken care of the one who needed it most.
I sat on the cold stone floor and looked at my inert jewelry and my empty hands, and I ran through the spatial calculations I always ran, the routes and coordinates and vector analyses that were my contribution to the family's survival. But the calculations all ended in the same place: I couldn't open a rift. I couldn't reach the Enterprise. I couldn't reach Adam. I couldn't reach home.
We were somewhere I couldn't map, imprisoned in a room I couldn't escape, stripped of every gift and every technology that had made us more than eleven frightened people in a stone cell.
Twelve. Twelve frightened people. Two of whom I didn't recognize, and one of whom had tried to save a man who could not be saved.
I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them and made myself breathe, because breathing was a thing I could still do, and doing it was enough for now.
Jenny
The silence was the worst part.
I'd carried the empathic gift since the day Jesus gave it to me, and in the weeks since, it had become as constant as my own heartbeat — a flowing river of emotional data, the feelings of every person in range pouring through me in a stream that I'd learned to navigate the way a swimmer learns a current. I could feel my sisters' love and fear and joy and frustration. I could feel Matthew's steady warmth, his worry, his humor, his faith. I could feel Amy's ancient tenderness and Adam's new, tentative reaching. I could feel Rachel's blaze and Melissa's quiet depths and Sammy's sharp edges and Alita's fierce heart.
Now I felt nothing.
Not reduced. Not dimmed. Nothing. The river was gone. The current was gone. The sense I'd relied on to navigate every relationship, every room, every moment of every day — gone. Smothered by whatever was pressing down on this place, the field that sat on our gifts like a hand over a mouth.
I opened my eyes and saw stone. Cold light. Bodies on the floor. And the absence of everything that had made the world legible to me for the past six weeks.
I sat up. The vertigo was mild — I'd been unconscious, not injured — and I took stock with my eyes since my gift was useless. Tiffany was awake, curled against the far wall. Sarah was moving between bodies with water. The others were starting to stir — Sammy first, then Rachel, then Lydia, each waking with the disoriented gasping of people pulled from a forced sleep.
Alita woke screaming.
Not loud — not a battle cry, not the sharp bark of combat response. A low, shredding sound that came from the bottom of her throat and rose until it filled the room, and it was the sound of a woman who'd gone to sleep in a world where her husband was alive and woken up in a world where he wasn't. She sat up and her hands went to her chest, reaching for the binding, and I watched the exact moment she realized it was dead — the way her fingers curled inward, the way her face changed from searching to stricken.
"Alita." I crossed to her. I took her hands. Without my gift I was just a woman holding another woman's hands, just two people in a stone room, and the simplicity of it was both terrible and strangely grounding. "I'm here."
"He's gone." Her voice was flat. Cracked. She said it the way you say a thing that can't be true but is — the way you say it when the saying is the first step of a road you can't see the end of. "Jenny, he's gone."
"I know."
"I can't feel him. I can't feel anything. It's like being — it's like being back in the scrapyard, before I knew who I was, when everything was just — blank."
I held her hands. I couldn't feel her emotions, couldn't read the terrain of her grief, couldn't navigate her the way I'd navigated her a hundred times before. All I could do was be present. Hold on. Stay.
Around us, the others were waking. Melissa came to consciousness with tears already flowing, her hand pressed to her mouth, her prophetic gift as dead as my empathic one. Sammy woke sharp and alert, her truth-detection silent, her blue eyes sweeping the room with the assessment of a woman who was used to knowing exactly where she stood and had just lost every landmark. Rachel sat up with a jerk, her hands already glowing — except they weren't glowing, they were just hands, and the frustration that crossed her face was immediate and fierce.
Amy was the last of us to wake. She sat up slowly, pressing a hand to the bruise on her jaw, and her eyes moved around the room with the analytical precision that had once been computational and was now purely human. She took in the walls, the ceiling, the light, the air quality, the stone. She took in the faces of her sisters. She took in the absence.
"The Enterprise," she said quietly. "They boarded the Enterprise. After whatever knocked us out, they came for the ship. I remember — alarms. Adam's voice, trying to seal the bridge. Then they breached the hull, and there were —" She stopped. Her face tightened. "They weren't human."
"What do you mean?" Sammy asked.
"The beings who boarded the ship. They were tall. Enormous. And their energy signatures —" Amy's eyes were distant, reaching for data she could no longer access, relying on the imperfect but remarkable human memory she was still learning to use. "Their signatures matched the fleet that attacked us weeks ago. The unknown fleet. Whatever they are — whoever sent them — they were waiting for this."
The room went quiet. We looked at each other — ten women, bound by marriage and love and gifts and months of training, stripped of every advantage except each other.
And two strangers.
The man who'd come through the rift was stirring. He pushed himself upright with effort, his brownish-blonde hair falling across his face, and he wiped the dried tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand. His eyes found us — ten women staring at him — and the grief on his face was so deep and so present that I didn't need my gift to read it. It was written in every line of him, in the slope of his shoulders, in the way his hands hung at his sides, in the redness of his eyes and the rawness of his voice when he spoke.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I tried. I came as fast as I could, and I tried, and I wasn't —" His voice broke. He pressed his fists against his thighs. "I wasn't fast enough."
Sammy was watching him. Without her gift, she was watching him the way any sharp-eyed woman watches a stranger — his body language, his micro-expressions, the alignment between his words and his face. After a long moment, she said, "You're telling the truth."
"You can tell?" He looked up. "I thought — the field —"
"I can't tell the way I usually can. But I've been reading people my whole life, and you're not lying." Sammy's voice was firm. "You tried to save him."
"Yes."
"Who are you?"
He took a breath. Let it out. "My name is Matt. I'm a pastor. I was in hibernation — like Matthew. I woke up about two years ago in a ship I didn't build, with a prophetic vision that told me to come here. To this time, to this place." His jaw tightened. "To save him. And I failed."
The blonde woman near the basin spoke for the first time. "You didn't fail." Her voice was hoarse but steady, and she was looking at Matt with an expression that I filed away for later — an expression of someone who recognized a thing she hadn't expected to find. "You came through a rift in the middle of a nuclear aftermath and tried to heal a man you'd never met. That's not failure."
"Who are you?" Rachel asked. Direct, as always.
The woman straightened. "My name is Cindy. I'm URM. Queen Esther and Matthew sent me to Zalem three weeks ago on a reconnaissance mission — intelligence gathering on Nova's defenses." She gestured at her clothing, the utilitarian stealth gear. "I was operating covertly when the battle started. When everything went dark, I was in the lower levels trying to get to your position."
Alita lifted her head. "Esther sent you?"
"Esther and Matthew. He approved the mission himself." Cindy's eyes were steady. "I'm a stealth and reconnaissance specialist. I don't fight like you do. But I was supposed to be your eyes inside the city."
"Instead you're a prisoner," Tiffany said. Not unkindly — just precisely.
"Instead I'm a prisoner," Cindy agreed. "Same as all of us."
I looked around the room. Twelve people. Ten wives, a stranger who'd come through a rift to try to save a man who couldn't be saved, and a scout who'd been caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. All of us stripped of our gifts, our technology, our connection to the ship and the AI and the civilization we'd been building.
And one absence so enormous that it filled the room like a physical object, pressing against the walls, pressing against our chests, pressing against the place behind our ribs where the binding used to sing.
Matthew was gone.
I stood in the silence of my own mind — the terrible, empty silence where the river of feeling had been — and I let the grief come. Not as a wave, not as a flood. As a settling. A weight that lowered itself onto my shoulders and said: I will be here for a while. Learn to carry me.
Heather was the last to speak. She was sitting beside Amy, her healer's hands in her lap, her green eyes dry — the dryness of a woman who had cried everything she had onto the broken ground of Zalem and had nothing left. When she spoke, her voice was the voice I'd heard in training, in the medical bay, in the quiet moments after a healing when the patient was asleep and Heather was standing watch — steady, certain, made of the same material as her gift even when the gift was gone.
"We're alive," Heather said. "He made sure of that. He stood in front of a nuclear explosion and took it into himself and made sure every one of us survived." She looked at each of us in turn, and her gaze held. "We honor that by surviving. By staying together. By trusting that God isn't finished with us, even when it feels like the world just ended."
Melissa wiped her eyes. Alita pressed her forehead against her drawn-up knees. Rachel's jaw was set in the expression she wore when she was fighting something she couldn't hit. Amy sat very still, her hands folded, her brilliant mind working behind eyes that were wet and would not look away from the truth.
Sarah had already refilled the water basin. Lydia was sitting beside Melissa, holding her hand, her other hand resting on the stone floor as if she were trying to draw something with her fingers, trying to shape beauty out of bare rock because her constructs were gone but the impulse to create was in her bones and would not be silenced.
Sammy moved to Alita's side and sat close, shoulder to shoulder, and said nothing, because Sammy knew when words were currency and when they were counterfeit, and right now they were counterfeit.
Twelve people in a stone room on a planet they couldn't name, stripped of everything except each other. The grief was enormous. The silence was worse. The absence of the man who had held them together was a wound that none of them could heal, because the healer was kneeling with empty hands, and the gift was gone, and the binding was dead, and the God they trusted had just let the worst thing happen.
But they were alive. Matthew had made sure of it.
I sat down next to Alita and Sammy and closed my eyes, and I prayed — not with the fluency of Matthew's prayers or the trembling authority of Melissa's, just with the only words I had: Father, we're here. We're alive. We're together. And we don't know what to do next, but we trust you. Even now. Even in this.
The stone was cold. The light was flat. The silence pressed.
But we were alive. Twelve of us, in the dark, together.
It would have to be enough.