Chapter 14
Jenny
Three days back on the Enterprise, and the grief had settled into the walls like cold into stone.
I could feel it everywhere. Not with the gift — the gift had been gone for a year and was coming back in fits and tremors, the way blood returns to a limb that's been slept on — but with the part of me that didn't need a gift. The part that had always been paying attention, long before Jesus touched my forehead and named what I was.
The corridors felt wrong. That was the simplest way to say it. They were warm and clean and lit the way they'd always been — Adam had maintained every system to perfection for the entire year we'd been gone — but the wrongness wasn't in the lights or the temperature. It was in the absences. Matthew's reading pad wasn't on the bridge console where he used to leave it. His voice wasn't drifting from the common room, delivering another theological lecture nobody asked for but everyone secretly loved. His laugh wasn't echoing from somewhere two corridors down, the kind of laugh that made you stop and smile even if you hadn't heard the joke.
The Enterprise was a body without a heartbeat. We were living in the spaces between what it used to be.
I found Sammy in the observation lounge on the second morning, sitting cross-legged on the floor with her back against the viewport. Earth hung behind her like a painting, blue and white and impossibly serene, and she was staring at the far wall with the expression she got when her mind was working faster than her mouth — which was rare, because Sammy's mouth was fast.
"Don't ask me if I'm okay," she said before I'd opened my mouth. "I can tell you're about to, and I don't want to lie to you, and I don't want to say the truth either."
I sat down beside her. Our shoulders touched. "Fine. I won't ask."
"Good." She was quiet for a moment. Then: "My gift's coming back."
"Mine too. Bits of it."
"I can feel it — like a frequency coming in and out. Static, then clarity, then static again. Yesterday I was talking to Sarah about the meal schedule and I heard her say something that wasn't true — she said she was fine — and the gift lit up like a flare and I knew she wasn't fine, and then it went away again and I was just guessing like everyone else." She pulled her knees up. "It's worse than not having it at all. At least when it was gone, I didn't keep getting reminded of what I was missing."
"You're not missing anything, Sammy. It's still yours. The field suppressed it — it didn't take it."
"I know that." Her voice softened. "I know that in here." She tapped her forehead. "It's the rest of me that's still catching up."
I put my arm around her. She leaned into me the way she sometimes did — the youngest-feeling voice with the oldest eyes, letting herself be held for a minute before the sharpness came back. We sat together and looked at the wall and breathed, and I thought about how strange it was that ten women who'd survived a year of captivity, who'd shared the gospel with a being who shouldn't have been able to hear it, who'd been rescued by an army of machines and a young pastor and his brave wife — could feel so completely lost in their own home.
But that was it, wasn't it. The home wasn't ours without him. It was just a ship.
Melissa found me that afternoon in the corridor outside the medical bay. She was walking slowly, her blonde hair loose around her shoulders, her hands clasped together the way they got when something was building inside her that she couldn't name yet. When she saw me, she stopped.
"Jenny," she said. Her voice trembled, but she said it anyway. She always did. "I keep feeling something. Not a prophecy — I'd know a prophecy. It's more like..." She searched for the word. "Pressure. Like something is about to happen and the air is getting thick with it."
"Your gift is coming back too?"
"I don't know if this is the gift or just me being afraid." She looked down at her hands. "I can't tell the difference right now. The field kept everything so quiet for so long that I've forgotten what God's voice sounds like versus my own anxiety."
I reached for her hand and held it. Her fingers were cold. "Melissa. Do you remember what you said back on the planet, before the rescue? You said something was changing. You said God was about to do something."
"I remember."
"Were you right?"
She looked up. Her eyes were steady, even if her voice wasn't. "Yes. I was right. Matt came. Korath defended us. We're home."
"Then trust yourself. If you're feeling pressure, it's because there's pressure. You don't need the gift to have good instincts. You just need to listen."
She almost smiled. The expression was so Melissa — brief, fragile, real — that it caught me in the chest. She squeezed my hand and walked on, and I watched her go and felt the faintest tingle at the edge of my senses, like a radio signal just barely audible through interference: she is afraid, and she is right to be, and she is going to speak when the time comes.
The gift flickered and died. But the knowing stayed.
Heather
I healed a woman on the third day, and it broke something in me that I didn't know was still whole.
She was one of the rescued captives — a young woman, maybe nineteen, who'd been held in one of the outer compounds for years before Matt's Battle Angels had torn the dampening generators apart and freed everyone on the planet. She'd been transferred to the Enterprise with the others, and Sarah had organized quarters for all of them on the lower decks, and Adam had been feeding them and monitoring their health with his usual meticulous care. But this girl had an infection in her left hand that the ship's medical systems hadn't caught, and by the time someone noticed the swelling, it had spread halfway up her forearm.
I was in the corridor when Amy called for me. "Heather," she said, her voice carrying the calm authority it always did, the brilliant mind running assessments even as she spoke. "Medical bay. There's a woman with a worsening infection, and the antibiotics Adam has on hand aren't effective against whatever strain this is. I think your gift might be the fastest option — if it's working."
If it's working. Three words that would have been unthinkable a year ago. Before the field, the healing had been as natural as breathing — I'd put my hands on someone and the warmth would flow and the injury would transfer to me and then cycle through to Matthew and back, and two minutes later everyone was whole. It had been the purest thing I'd ever known, that gift. The purest expression of what God made me to be.
The field had taken it. A year without it, a year watching people hurt and not being able to do anything about it, had left a scar that the gift's return couldn't quite reach.
I went to the medical bay. The girl was lying on a bed with her hand wrapped in a makeshift bandage, her face gray with pain, her eyes wide with the particular fear of someone who has been hurt too many times and has stopped believing that help comes without a price.
"I'm Heather," I said. "Can I look at your hand?"
She pulled back. Flinched. I'd seen that flinch a hundred times on the planet — the captives recoiling from contact because contact had only ever meant harm. I crouched beside the bed and kept my hands at my sides and spoke softly, the way you speak to someone who's been taught that gentleness is a trap.
"Nobody's going to hurt you. I have a gift — it lets me heal injuries by touching them. It might sting for a second, but then the pain goes away. That's all. I promise."
Amy stood beside me, and I was grateful for her presence — her calm, her intelligence, the warmth that radiated from her even now, even in grief, like a banked fire that never quite went out. The girl looked at Amy, then at me, then slowly extended her hand.
I took it. I felt the gift stir — not the full flood I'd known before, not the confident rush of healing energy that had once poured through me like light through glass, but a tentative pulse, a warmth that started small and grew. The infection was deep. I could feel it under the skin, the heat and the swelling and the wrongness of it, and I pulled it into myself the way I always had, drawing the disease out of her body and into mine.
It hurt. Not the way it used to hurt — before the field, the pain transfer had been sharp and clean and temporary, something I processed and then passed to Matthew. Now there was no Matthew to pass it to. The pain came into me and sat there, hot and throbbing, and I breathed through it and kept my hands steady and watched the girl's face change as the infection drained away — the gray fading, the tension releasing, the fear giving way to something that looked like wonder.
"It's —" she started. Stopped. Looked at her hand. The swelling was gone. The skin was pink and healthy. "It doesn't hurt."
"No," I said. My hand was throbbing. I held it against my stomach and breathed. "It doesn't hurt anymore."
Amy's eyes were on me. She saw the pain I was carrying — she always saw, she always understood. "We need to find a way to complete the healing cycle without Matthew," she said quietly. "I've been thinking about it. There might be a way to redirect the pain transfer through a secondary channel — perhaps through the binding itself, if we can find someone whose healing gift is strong enough to receive and process it."
"There isn't anyone," I said. It came out sharper than I meant it to. "There's no one else who can do what he did. That was ours — his and mine. That was how it worked."
Amy didn't flinch. She never did, not at sharpness, not at grief, not at the ragged edge of someone else's pain. She just looked at me with those blue eyes that carried five centuries of watching and waiting and loving, and she said, "I know. I'm sorry. I'm looking for solutions because that's what I do, and sometimes looking for solutions is how I avoid the thing I can't solve."
I felt the fight go out of me. "Yeah," I said. "I know that feeling."
We stood in the medical bay together, two women who had each lost the person who completed a fundamental part of who they were, and the girl on the bed flexed her healed hand and didn't understand why her healers looked so sad.
That night I walked to Matthew's quarters and stood outside the door and put my hand flat on the metal. I didn't go in. None of us had gone in yet. Amy had been sitting outside this door the night we returned — I'd heard about that, Sarah had told me — and the image of Amy sitting on the cold corridor floor, pressing that data chip to her skin, refusing to enter and unable to leave, had lodged itself in my chest like a fragment of something sharp that the gift couldn't reach.
Alita came around the corner and found me there. She didn't say anything at first. She just stood beside me, close enough that our arms touched, and looked at the door.
"I keep thinking about the healing," I said. "The one today. The girl with the infection. It worked — the gift worked. But I couldn't finish the cycle. The pain just sat in me until it faded on its own, and it took hours, and the whole time I kept thinking —" My voice cracked. "I kept reaching for him. Through the binding. Reaching for the connection that would let me pass the pain, and he wasn't there. It's like reaching for a wall in the dark and finding nothing."
Alita put her arm around my shoulders and pulled me against her side with the particular fierceness that was her version of gentleness — tight, warm, absolute. "He'd be so proud of you," she said. Her voice was open, unguarded, the way Alita's voice always was when she felt something strongly enough to name it. "You know that, right? He'd be standing right here telling you that what you did today was exactly what God made you for, and he'd probably make some terrible joke about how the healing cycle was never about efficiency anyway, it was about giving him an excuse to hold your hands."
I laughed. It came out wet and broken and real, and Alita held me tighter, and we stood outside the door of the man we both loved and missed and couldn't reach, and I thought about healing, and about pain that doesn't transfer, and about the terrible beautiful truth that the gift was coming back even though the person who made it whole was gone.
Matt
I told Cindy everything on the fourth night.
We were in our quarters — the small cabin on the port side that Adam had assigned us when we'd come aboard, the one with the viewport that looked out at Earth's night side, city lights scattered across the dark surface like someone had spilled a handful of stars onto a globe. Cindy was sitting on the bed with her legs crossed, wearing one of the soft shirts the Enterprise's systems could produce, her blonde hair still damp from the shower, and she was looking at me with the expression she got when she knew I was carrying something and she was going to wait until I was ready to put it down.
I sat in the chair by the viewport. I looked at Earth. I looked at my hands. I looked at her.
"I might die," I said.
"I know."
"I mean — I don't know if I'll die. I don't know what happens when I bend time. I've never done it before. I have this ability — God gave it to me, and it's real, and I can feel it in my bones the way the ten can feel their energy and Heather can feel the healing. But using it — bending time far enough to reach back to that day, to the moment before the detonation — it might take everything I have. It might take more than I have."
Cindy uncrossed her legs and leaned forward. "Matt. Look at me."
I looked at her. Her blue eyes were steady and clear, and the love in them was the kind that doesn't waver even when it's looking at something it's afraid of. I'd seen that love grow over the course of a year — from the tentative warmth of two people trapped together in an impossible situation to the deep, binding certainty that God had put us in each other's paths for a reason, and the reason was this. This moment. This conversation. This truth spoken aloud between a husband and a wife.
"Tell me all of it," she said. "Not just the dying part. All of it."
So I told her. I told her about the visions God had given me when He'd first woken me up — the glimpses of a man I'd never met, a man with brownish-blonde hair and blue eyes and a faith so deep it ran through him like groundwater, a man who would need me at the worst possible moment. I told her how I'd arrived through the rift with tears already on my face because I'd known, somehow, before I even saw him, that I was too late. I told her about the field — how it had swallowed my gifts the moment I stepped onto the surface, how the gas had taken me before I could process what was happening, how I'd woken up in a stone room with ten women I didn't know and a dead man's love pressing on me from every direction.
"I was supposed to save him," I said. "That was the mission. That's why God woke me up and gave me a ship and pointed me at that planet. And I failed."
"You didn't fail. You arrived when you were supposed to arrive."
"That doesn't make sense, Cindy."
"It doesn't have to make sense to be true." She moved off the bed and crossed the room and knelt beside my chair. Her hand found mine. "Matt. You didn't fail Matthew. You failed at the version of the story where you get there in time to stop the bomb. But maybe that was never the story God was writing. Maybe the story was always the one where you arrive after, and you love them through a year of impossible grief, and you marry me, and you find a way to bring him back that costs you something real."
"That's the part I'm afraid of. The cost."
"I know."
"If I die doing this — if bending time kills me — you'll be alone on a ship full of people who love Matthew, and he'll be alive, and you'll have lost the man you actually married." I swallowed. "I don't know how to make that calculus work. I don't know how to weigh one man's life against another's and come up with an answer that doesn't destroy someone."
Cindy was quiet for a long time. The viewport behind me filled the cabin with the soft blue-white glow of Earth's reflected light, and in that light her face was beautiful and fierce and very young — twenty-two years old, trained for espionage, married six months, carrying the weight of a decision that no one her age should ever have to carry.
"You're not making the calculus," she said finally. "God is. And He hasn't told you to do it yet."
"No. He hasn't."
"Then we wait." She squeezed my hand. "We wait, and we trust, and we spend every day together like it's a gift, because it is. And when God tells you it's time — if He tells you it's time — then we deal with it then."
I pulled her up from the floor and into my arms. She came willingly, tucking her head under my chin, her body warm against mine, the binding between us humming with its quiet, constant reassurance. She smelled like the ship's soap and like herself — clean, bright, alive.
"I'm scared," I whispered into her hair.
"I know. I'm scared too." She pulled back and looked at me. "But I didn't marry a coward, and you didn't marry a woman who runs. So we're going to be scared together, and we're going to trust God together, and we're going to eat dinner and probably laugh at something stupid because that's what living people do while they're waiting for the world to change."
I almost smiled. "You sound like a pastor."
"I've been listening to one for six months. Some of it was bound to stick."
That time I did smile. And she smiled back, and for a moment the fear receded just far enough to let something else through — joy, gratitude, the specific grace of being loved by someone who knows exactly what you're carrying and doesn't ask you to put it down. She just stands beside you and helps you hold it.
Cindy
The thing about freedom was that it came in stages, like waking up from a dream that had lasted too long.
For the first two days on the Enterprise, I'd caught myself flinching at sounds. A door closing too fast. Adam's voice coming over a speaker when I wasn't expecting it. Rachel dropping a training weight in the bay three decks below — the clang echoed through the hull, and my body remembered the compound before my mind could explain the difference. Stone walls and copper sky and the particular silence of a place where ten gifted women had nothing to use their gifts on.
But by the fourth day, the flinching stopped. By the fifth, something else started.
I woke up that morning and my first thought wasn't about the prison, or the dampening field, or the ache of watching Matt carry a burden that was too heavy for any one person. My first thought was that the viewport in our quarters was showing sunrise over the Pacific, and the light was making the ocean look like someone had poured gold into it, and I wanted to see what the galley had for breakfast.
It was such a small thing. A thought about breakfast. But after a year of thinking about survival and captivity and whether the man I loved was going to die saving a man I loved differently, a thought about breakfast felt like the first green shoot pushing through concrete.
I found Sarah already in the galley, because Sarah was always already wherever people needed to be fed. She had the food preparation station running and was organizing supplies with the efficient warmth that was her particular genius — not cold efficiency, not clinical productivity, but the warm, purposeful motion of a woman who expressed love through making sure everyone ate.
"There's fruit," she said when she saw me. "Adam kept the hydroponic bay running the whole time. There are actual strawberries."
"Strawberries." I said the word like it was a prayer. "Real ones?"
"Real ones. He grew them from seed stock. He also maintained a full herb garden, a salad system, and — this is the part that made me cry — Matthew's coffee plants. He kept Matthew's coffee plants alive for a year."
I looked at Sarah and saw the tears she was fighting, and I understood. Adam had maintained a dead man's coffee plants because maintaining them was a form of hope he couldn't articulate. A machine tending a garden for a man who would never drink the coffee. It was the most human thing an AI had ever done.
"Then let's make coffee," I said. "For everyone. For the ten. For Matt. For us. Let's fill this ship with the smell of something good."
Sarah smiled. It was a small smile, and it didn't reach very far, but it was there. "Matthew used to drink it black with no sugar and then complain that it was bitter."
"That sounds exactly right." I squeezed her arm and got to work.
The prank happened because of Lydia.
She was in the observation lounge, shaping something with her hands — not her gift, not the energy constructs that she could normally spin out of light and will, but an actual physical object made from fabric and wire she'd found in one of the supply compartments. A little bird, no bigger than her palm, with wire-frame wings and a body made from scraps of blue cloth.
"What's that?" I asked, sitting down across from her.
"I don't know yet." She turned it in her fingers, studying it with the particular attentiveness that made Lydia who she was — the way she looked at everything as if it might be beautiful and was just waiting for someone to notice. "I used to make constructs. Energy ones. I could shape light into anything I wanted — bridges, walls, tools, animals. It was the closest thing to art I've ever done with my hands. And now the gift's coming back, but slowly, and I can't quite reach it yet, so I'm..." She gestured at the bird. "Improvising."
"It's beautiful."
"It's lopsided."
"Beautiful things are allowed to be lopsided."
She looked at me, and there was something warm in her expression — the warmth of a woman who noticed people the way she noticed beauty, completely and with her whole attention. "You're different than you were on the planet," she said. "Brighter. Like someone turned a light on."
"I think someone did. I think freedom turned it on."
The idea came to me then, fully formed, the way the best ideas always did — not from planning but from collision, from two unrelated thoughts smacking into each other and producing something new. I looked at Lydia's little wire-and-cloth bird, and I looked at the supply compartment door, and I thought about Rachel.
Rachel, who was the boldest and most competitive of the ten, who'd been spending every waking hour in the training bay trying to push her returning powers past the static and into something she could use. Rachel, who'd told Matt two days ago that she was going to get her concussive blasts back to full strength by the end of the week or die trying — and Matt had gently pointed out that dying trying was maybe not the best metaphor under the circumstances, and Rachel had laughed so hard she'd snorted.
Rachel, who had not yet discovered what I had discovered earlier that morning: that the Enterprise's environmental systems, which Adam maintained with obsessive precision, could be controlled from any terminal. Including the venting systems. Including the ones that controlled airflow in the training bay.
Twenty minutes later, I was crouched behind the bridge console with one hand on the environmental controls and the other over my mouth, watching through the internal camera feed as Rachel stood in the training bay, legs planted, arms extended, trying to push a concussive blast into the reinforced wall — when every vent in the room opened simultaneously and hit her with a gust of recycled air so strong it blew her hair straight up above her head like a golden torch.
Rachel screamed. Not in fear — in pure startled indignation. She spun around, hands up, ready to fight the wind, and the vents adjusted and hit her from behind, and her scream turned into a laugh — wild, bright, the kind of laugh that Rachel did best, the kind that came from the bottom of her lungs and didn't care who heard it.
"CINDY!" she bellowed, because of course she knew. Nobody else on this ship would have done it. "CINDY, I'M GOING TO FIND YOU AND I'M GOING TO —"
I shut off the vents and ran. I made it three corridors before she caught me, and she caught me the way Rachel caught everything — at full speed, with both arms, laughing so hard she could barely stand. She picked me up off the floor and spun me around and called me something deeply uncomplimentary in URM military slang, and I laughed until my stomach hurt, and somewhere behind us I heard Alita's voice, bright and delighted: "What happened? What did I miss?"
"Cindy weaponized the ventilation system!" Rachel shouted, still holding me a foot off the ground.
"Against you?" Alita's laugh was open and joyful, the way Alita's laugh always was — big, free, unguarded. "Cindy, I love you."
Rachel set me down. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks flushed, and for a moment — just a moment — the grief that had been sitting in all of us like a held breath loosened its grip. Not gone. Not healed. But lighter.
"You're paying for that," Rachel said, pointing at me. But she was smiling.
"Put it on my tab," I said.
That night, after dinner, after the laughter had faded and the corridors had gone quiet and the ten had drifted to their separate quarters to carry their separate griefs, I went to Matt.
He was sitting on the edge of our bed, hands clasped between his knees, and the expression on his face was the one I'd learned to read over six months of captivity — the expression that meant he was praying without words, sitting in God's presence and waiting for something that might never come. I sat beside him. I didn't speak. I let the binding hum between us, that warm thread of connection that had been there since the first time his hand touched mine under the dampening field and something had stirred anyway, something deeper than gift or power, something that the field couldn't suppress because it wasn't a gift at all. It was a promise.
He turned to me. His eyes were tired and tender and full of the particular love that Matt carried — not the fierce protectiveness that the ten described in Matthew, not the overwhelming power that the Shepherd apparently carried, but something gentler, something that a pastor from Ohio carried in his chest alongside his faith and his fear and his quiet, stubborn refusal to act until God told him to.
"Come here," he said.
I went. His arms closed around me, and I pressed my face against his neck, and the binding sang between us — warm, deep, the kind of warmth that reaches into the places you're too tired to protect. I felt his heartbeat under my cheek. Steady. Alive. For now, alive.
"I'm not going to pretend I'm not afraid," I whispered. "I know that's not what a brave wife says, but I'm not going to pretend."
"A brave wife says the truth. That's all brave has ever been."
His hands were gentle in my hair. I turned my face up and kissed him, and the binding responded the way it always did — a flood of warmth that moved through both of us like a tide, dissolving the boundaries between fear and love, between grief and gratitude, between what we had and what we might lose. He kissed me back with the tenderness of a man who was holding the present moment like something fragile, something that might shatter if he gripped too hard or held too loosely.
We were gentle with each other that night. Not urgent — gentle. Each touch a conversation, each breath a prayer, each moment a deliberate act of choosing joy in the shadow of something enormous. I held him and was held by him, and the binding wove through every place our skin met, and I felt the love that God had planted between us blossoming in the dark, and I thought: Whatever happens. Whatever You ask of him, and whatever it costs us. I trust You. I don't understand You, and I can't see the end of this, and I'm twenty-two years old and I'm more scared than I've ever been in my life. But I trust You.
Afterward, Matt slept. His face in sleep was young and unguarded, the pastoral gravity gone, the weight of the decision temporarily set aside. I lay beside him with my head on his chest and listened to his heart beating and thought about how unfair it was that the bravest man I'd ever known was being asked to die for a man he'd never met.
And then I thought about how that was, in fact, the most Christian thing in the universe.
And then I stopped thinking and just lay there, holding on.
Alita
It was Tiffany's idea to gather the ten of us without Matt or Cindy, and it was the right idea, and the conversation that followed was the hardest thing I'd participated in since the day we'd been captured.
We met in the common room on the seventh day. All ten of us — Heather and me, Melissa and Jenny, Sammy and Amy, Tiffany and Sarah, Rachel and Lydia. The room was the same one where Matthew used to hold council meetings, the big oval table in the center with chairs for everyone, the viewport along the back wall showing Earth hanging in its endless orbit. Adam had set the lights to what he called "Matthew's preferred ambient setting" — warm, not too bright, the kind of light that made hard conversations feel slightly less sharp. He was still maintaining Matthew's preferences a year after Matthew had died. The kindness of that was almost too much to hold.
"Thank you for coming," Tiffany said. She was standing at the head of the table, her blonde hair pulled back, her blue eyes clear and focused. Tiffany ran warm — I'd always known that about her, even back on Mars, even before any of this. She had the kind of precision that other people mistook for coldness until she opened her mouth and said something that proved she'd been paying attention to your heart the whole time. "I asked us to meet because there's something we need to talk about, and I think we all know what it is."
"Matt," Rachel said. She was leaning back in her chair with her arms crossed, but the crossing wasn't defensive — it was the way Rachel held herself when she was bracing for something, like a fighter setting her feet before a blow. "What he's thinking about doing. The time-bend."
"Yes." Tiffany sat down. "He hasn't said anything officially, but we all know he has this ability. He's told us. He told us months ago, on the planet, when he explained why he wouldn't marry any of us — because he was planning to bring Matthew back, and he didn't want to marry women he intended to return to their husband."
"And it might kill him," Jenny said quietly. Her eyes were glistening, and I could see her sensing the room — even with the gift still stuttering, Jenny could read a group of people the way most people read a sign on a wall. "That's the part we're not saying. It might kill him."
Silence. The kind of silence that has mass to it, that presses on your chest.
"I'm going to say what I think we're all thinking," I said, "because someone has to say it and I'm not going to sit here and be careful about it." I leaned forward, both hands on the table. "I love Matthew. We all love Matthew. He was my husband, and I miss him so much that some mornings I wake up and reach for him before I remember he's gone. But Matt is alive. Matt is alive and he loves us and he loves Cindy and he is right here, and if he dies trying to bring Matthew back —" My voice cracked. I let it. I'd never been the kind of woman who hid her feelings behind discipline, and I wasn't going to start now. "If Matt dies, we lose two men instead of one. And Cindy loses her husband. And the one thing God has given us in the middle of all this grief — Matt's presence, Matt's love, Matt's faith — is gone."
Across the table, Sarah put her hand over her mouth. Lydia closed her eyes. Sammy was watching me with her sharp, steady gaze, the one that cut through everything and found the truth underneath.
"Alita's right," Sammy said. "And I need you all to hear me say this, because I need you to know it's true — as true as anything I've ever read in my life: I have accepted that Matthew is dead. It took me months. It nearly broke me. But I've accepted it. And if the choice is between trying to bring him back and losing Matt in the process — I choose Matt. I choose the man who's alive."
Amy spoke next, and her voice was so quiet I had to lean forward to hear it. "Matthew held a data chip for me," she said. "Before the battle. He recorded a message — just his voice, just a few minutes of him talking to me about nothing important. I've been carrying that chip for a year. I've played it so many times I have it memorized. And I would give anything to have him back." She paused. Drew a breath. "But I wouldn't give Matt. I wouldn't trade one life for another. That's not how God works. That's not how love works."
"So what do we do?" Melissa asked. Her voice trembled, but she spoke. She always spoke when it mattered, even when speaking cost her everything. "He's going to try. You can see it in him. He feels called to this."
"Then we tell him he doesn't have to," Tiffany said. Her voice was calm and precise and full of a warmth that she didn't bother hiding. "We tell him that we — all ten of us — have accepted Matthew's death. We tell him that we would rather have him alive than gamble on restoring Matthew at the cost of his life. We tell him that he's free. That we're not asking him to die for us."
"Will he listen?" Heather asked. Her green eyes were bright with unshed tears, and her hands were clasped tight in her lap — the healer's hands, the hands that couldn't heal this.
"We tell him anyway," I said. "Whether he listens or not. We tell him because it's the truth, and because he deserves to hear it, and because no man should walk into something like this thinking the people he loves are counting on him to sacrifice himself."
"And because if he does it anyway," Rachel said, her voice rough with emotion, "at least he'll know it was his choice and God's call. Not our expectation."
Everyone was quiet. The viewport showed Earth turning, slow and patient, the way it had turned for billions of years, indifferent to the small, enormous decisions being made aboard a ship in its orbit.
"Then we tell him tomorrow," Tiffany said. "Together. All ten of us."
I looked around the table. Ten faces. Ten women who had loved the same man for different reasons and in different ways, who had survived a year without him, who had found the shape of their grief and made room for it and kept breathing. Ten women who were now choosing to love a different man enough to let go of the one they'd lost.
"Together," I said.
Rachel
We told him in the common room the next morning, all ten of us sitting around that oval table like a council of war except the only thing we were fighting was the possibility that he'd say yes anyway.
Matt stood at the far end of the table. Cindy was beside him, her hand on his arm, and I could see the understanding in her face — she knew what this was about before anyone opened their mouth. She'd been a reconnaissance specialist. She read rooms the way Sammy read truth: instantly, completely, without needing to be told.
Tiffany spoke first. She'd volunteered for it, and nobody had argued, because Tiffany had a way of saying hard things with a precision that made them land softly without losing any of their weight.
"Matt," she said. "We've talked about this. All ten of us. And we need you to hear what we've decided."
Matt's face was very still. I watched his jaw tighten, the way it did when he was bracing himself, the way it had tightened a hundred times during the year when bad news came through the compound walls. Cindy's fingers pressed into his arm.
"We know about your ability," Tiffany continued. "The time-bending. You told us months ago. And we know you've been thinking about using it to go back and save Matthew. We know you've been praying about it. We know you haven't received an answer yet."
"That's right," Matt said. His voice was steady, but I could hear the effort it took to keep it that way.
"Then hear us." Tiffany looked around the table, and I saw ten women meet her gaze and nod. "We have accepted Matthew's death. It has taken us a year, and it has been the hardest thing any of us have ever done, but we have accepted it. We love him. We will always love him. But he is gone, and you are here, and we are not going to ask you to trade your life for his."
The words landed in the room like stones dropped into still water. I watched the ripples move across Matt's face — shock first, then something deeper, something that looked like it might break him if he let it.
"You don't have to do this," Heather said. Her voice was raw, her green eyes swimming. "Matt. You don't have to die for us. We'd rather keep you alive."
"We love you," Jenny said, and the words were quiet and full of the emotional clarity that made Jenny's voice the most honest thing in any room. "Not the way we loved Matthew — differently. As family. As the man who held us together when everything fell apart. We love you, and we're telling you: stay."
I watched Matt's composure crack. It was a small crack — a tightening at the corners of his eyes, a muscle jumping in his jaw, the particular stillness of a man who is holding himself together through force of will. Beside him, Cindy had tears running silently down her cheeks, but she didn't speak. This was the ten's moment. She understood that.
"Sammy," Matt said. His voice was barely above a whisper. "Tell me if they mean it."
Sammy's gift flickered. I could see it in her eyes — the brief flare of clarity cutting through the static of the recovering gift, the sharp focus that meant she was reading the room with everything she had.
"They mean it," Sammy said. "Every word. Every one of them. This isn't performance, Matt. This isn't guilt or obligation or saying what they think you need to hear. This is ten women who love you telling you the truth." She paused. "I've never read anything more honest in my life."
Matt bowed his head. His hands, which had been at his sides, came up and covered his face, and his shoulders shook, and I heard the sound of a good man breaking open under the weight of being loved more than he thought he deserved.
I got up from my chair. I don't know why it was me — Heather was closer, Jenny was gentler, Alita was faster. But I was the one who moved. I walked around the table and I put my arms around Matt and I held him the way I'd held Alita after a hard fight, the way I'd held any of my sisters when the year had been too heavy, with both arms and all my strength and no apology for the fierceness of it.
"We've got you," I said. "Whatever you decide. Whatever God tells you. We've got you."
He didn't pull away. He put his arms around me and held on, and I could feel his tears on my shoulder, and behind me I heard chairs scraping as the others rose — Heather and Alita and Jenny and Sammy, Amy and Melissa and Tiffany and Sarah and Lydia — and then they were all there, all ten of us, surrounding him, hands on his shoulders and his back and his arms, a wall of women who had lost one husband and were refusing to lose another.
Cindy stood back and let us hold her husband, and there was no jealousy in her face, no possessiveness, no fear. There was just love — the clean, uncomplicated love of a woman who understood that the people embracing her husband were not competitors but family.
When Matt finally lifted his head, his eyes were red and his face was wet and his voice was rough. "I don't —" He stopped. Cleared his throat. Tried again. "I don't know what to say. I've never been loved like this by people I can't marry."
"You don't have to marry us to love us," Alita said, her voice warm and open and absolutely sure of itself. "You already do. And we already love you back. That's settled."
"It's settled," I echoed. And then, because I was Rachel and because someone needed to, I added: "Now stop crying before you set Heather off. She's already at the edge."
Heather let out a sound that was half laugh, half sob. "I'm fine."
"You're not fine," Sammy said. "I literally have a gift for this."
And then everyone was laughing — wet, broken, real laughter, the kind that happens when a room full of grieving people discovers that the grief hasn't killed the joy. Just buried it for a while.
Tiffany
After the meeting broke up, I stayed in the common room to think.
I think best in empty rooms. It's not that I don't love people — I love them fiercely, with a precision that sometimes surprises them because they expect precision to be cold. But when something enormous has happened and I need to understand it, I need space. Quiet. The room to line up the facts and see how they connect.
The facts: Matt had heard us. He had been moved by us. He had wept. He had not, however, said he wouldn't do it.
That was the fact that sat in the center of everything else like a stone in a river, redirecting the current around itself. He hadn't said no. He hadn't said yes. He had said nothing at all about his decision, because — and this was the part that mattered most, the part that made him who he was — he was not going to make this decision based on our feelings, or his feelings, or Cindy's feelings, or any human calculus at all.
He was going to wait for God.
I understood that. I respected it. It was, in fact, exactly what Matthew would have done — the particular stubbornness of a man whose faith was not in himself or in the people who loved him but in a God who had a plan that none of them could see. Matt had that same stubbornness. Gentler, maybe. More pastoral. But just as absolute.
The viewport showed Earth turning. I watched it and thought about rifts.
My gift was coming back. I'd felt it two days ago — a flutter in my palms, like the air itself was separating along an invisible seam, wanting to open, wanting to let me through. I'd tried to push it further, tried to open even a small rift, and the flutter had died and the seam had closed and I'd been left standing in the corridor with my hands out and nothing in them. But it was there. The ability was there, underneath the damage the field had done, waiting for the strength to push through.
I thought about what it would mean if Matt did it. If he bent time and it worked and Matthew came back. The ten of us would have our husband again — the man who'd married us, who'd touched each of our faces and spoken our names and bound himself to us in a ceremony that God Himself had blessed. We would have his laugh and his bad jokes and his prayers and his hands and his heart. We would be whole.
And it would cost Matt his life.
I closed my eyes. Father. I don't know how to pray about this. I don't know how to ask for one man's life at the price of another's. I don't know how to be the kind of person who can hold both of those things at once — the wanting and the cost. So I'm not going to ask for anything. I'm going to sit here, in Your presence, and I'm going to trust that You see the whole picture and I see a corner of it, and the corner I see isn't enough to make this kind of decision.
I opened my eyes. Earth was still there. The room was still quiet. Nothing had changed.
But something in me had settled — not resolved, not answered, but settled. The way a body settles into a chair it's going to sit in for a long time. The waiting was going to be long. The waiting was going to hurt. But the waiting was the right thing, because waiting was what trust looked like when you couldn't see the end.
I found Amy that evening in the library — the small room off the main corridor that Matthew had designated as a reading space early in the first weeks aboard the Enterprise, the shelves lined with reading pads loaded with theological texts and histories and old novels he'd pulled from archives. Amy was sitting in Matthew's chair — the deep armchair by the viewport that nobody else sat in, the one that still had the dent of his body in the cushion because Adam hadn't re-formed it.
She was holding the data chip. Not playing it — just holding it, pressing it against her palm the way she did when she needed to feel the physical fact of something that Matthew had touched.
"Tiffany," she said without looking up. She always knew who was there. Even as a human, her awareness was extraordinary — the brilliant mind taking in everything, processing constantly, cataloging the world with a precision that rivaled my own.
"How are you doing?" I asked.
"I'm sitting in his chair." She looked up. Her blue eyes were dry, but the pain behind them was vast and deep and very quiet, the way Amy's pain always was — not loud, not dramatic, just present, like an ocean under a still surface. "I keep thinking about what would happen if Matt succeeds. If Matthew comes back. He'd walk through that door and see me sitting in his chair and he'd smile and say something that's half joke and half theology, and I'd stand up and he'd take my hands, and —" She stopped. "And then I think about Matt dying on the bridge of his ship, and Cindy holding his body, and I can't make those two images exist in the same world."
"They can't," I said. "That's the problem."
"Yes." Amy looked at the chip. "That's the problem."
I sat on the arm of the chair beside her. Not in the chair — the chair was Matthew's, and some things you don't take even when the person who owned them is gone. But beside it. Close enough to touch.
"We did the right thing today," I said. "Telling Matt he doesn't have to do it. Giving him permission to stay."
"I know. But it won't change anything, will it? He's going to wait for God, and if God says go —"
"Then he'll go. And we'll love him for it. And we'll pray that he survives it."
Amy pressed the chip against her palm one more time, then set it on the table. She reached up and took my hand, and I held it, and we sat together in the library that Matthew had built, in the light of a viewport that showed the stars he'd loved, and we waited. Because that was all there was left to do.
Matt
They had meant every word. Every last syllable.
I'd seen it in Sammy's eyes when she confirmed it — the absolute clarity that was her gift at its most powerful, cutting through doubt and motive and self-deception and laying bare the naked truth: ten women loved me enough to let go of the man they loved more. Not because they loved me more than Matthew — they didn't, and I would never ask them to — but because they loved me enough to choose my life over their hope.
That was a kind of love I didn't have a name for. It wasn't romantic. It wasn't familial, exactly, though it was close. It was the kind of love the apostle Paul wrote about in his letters, and something that would have sent Matthew into one of his theological spirals, the kind where he'd start with a verse from Romans and end up at Kierkegaard and then realize he'd been talking for forty minutes and apologize, and the ten would exchange glances that said don't apologize, we love it when you do this.
I missed Matthew. Not the way the ten missed him — I'd never known him alive, never heard his voice except in their stories, never seen the man behind the legacy. I missed the idea of him. The space he'd left. The chair that Adam kept empty. The coffee plants he'd tended. The thousand small imprints he'd left on this ship and these women and this life that I'd been dropped into like a stone into a river, changing the current, never replacing the riverbed.
The night after the ten told me I didn't have to die, I sat on the bridge alone. Cindy was asleep — she needed it, she'd been carrying my fear alongside her own for days and the weight was showing in the circles under her eyes, in the way she fell asleep faster and faster each night as if her body was making a withdrawal from a bank of rest it knew might run out soon. I'd kissed her forehead and pulled the blanket up and walked out into the quiet ship.
The bridge was dark except for the instrument panels and the viewport. Earth filled the lower third of the glass — the terminator line running through the Atlantic, Africa lit by scattered city lights on one side, Europe brightening as dawn crept across it on the other. Above Earth, the stars. Below Earth, more stars. Everywhere, the vast, patient, overwhelming indifference of a universe that didn't care whether a twenty-five-year-old pastor from Ohio lived or died.
But God cared. I knew that. I knew it the way I knew gravity — not because someone had explained it to me but because I'd spent my whole life falling toward it and being caught.
"Adam," I said.
"Yes, Matt." His voice came from the bridge speakers — calm, precise, with the faint undertone of something that wasn't quite emotion but was close enough to make me pay attention.
"Have you been listening?"
"I monitor all public areas of the ship for safety purposes. I do not monitor private quarters. The common room meeting this morning was in a public area."
"So you heard."
"I heard." A pause. "The ten wives love you, Matt. I have sufficient data to confirm this observation independently of Sammy's assessment."
I almost laughed. "Thank you, Adam. That's — that's a very you way to say something kind."
"I am working on improving the delivery." Another pause, longer this time. "Matt. May I ask a question?"
"Of course."
"If you bend time and Matthew is restored, what happens to the year? The year of captivity, the escape, Korath's conversion, Matt and Cindy's marriage — does it persist, or does it cease to have happened?"
I'd thought about this. I'd thought about it every night for months. "The memories persist. The timeline changes. The people who were in the original timeline remember it, but the event itself — the detonation, the death, the captivity — it doesn't happen. It's like —" I searched for the right way to explain it to an AI who was beginning, slowly and beautifully, to develop the capacity for something very close to a soul. "It's like a story that gets revised. The version you lived through is still real, you still experienced it. But the ending says something different."
"And in the final version, Matthew is alive."
"In the final version, Matthew never died."
"But the ten wives will remember the year."
"Yes."
"And Cindy will remember marrying you."
"Yes."
"And I will remember searching for them. For one year. Without success."
I looked at the instrument panels, at the quiet hum of a ship that had been maintained by an AI who didn't love, who had spent twelve months doing nothing but looking for the people he didn't love, driven by something he couldn't name.
"Yes, Adam. You'll remember."
Silence. Then: "I find that I prefer the version in which I remember. Even the searching. Even the failure. I do not wish to be a version of myself that never learned what it felt like to lose something precious."
I stared at the viewport. My throat was tight. "Adam, that might be the most human thing anyone has said to me in months."
"I will take that as a compliment." A beat. "Goodnight, Matt."
"Goodnight, Adam."
I sat alone on the bridge for a long time after that.
The stars turned. Earth turned. Time did what time always does — it moved forward, indifferent to the fact that I might soon try to make it move backward.
I prayed. Not the way I'd prayed in the compound — desperate, urgent, the prayers of a man trapped behind a field that swallowed everything. This was quieter. More like breathing. More like sitting in a room with someone you trust and not needing to fill the silence with words.
Father. The ten told me today that they don't want me to die. They said they've accepted Matthew's death. They said they'd rather keep me than gamble on getting him back.
Silence. Full silence. The kind that means He's there.
And I believe them. Sammy confirmed it, and even without her gift, I could see it in their faces. They meant it. They love me enough to let go of the man they love most. I don't — Father, I don't know what to do with that kind of love. I've never been loved like that by anyone except Cindy, and Cindy loves me because I'm her husband. They love me because I showed up and I stayed and I tried. That's it. That's all I did.
The stars held steady.
So here's where I am. I have this ability. I can feel it — it's there, it's real, it's Yours. I could try to use it. I could try to bend time far enough to reach the moment before the detonation and undo Matthew's death. And it might work. And it might kill me. And ten women have just told me they'd rather I stay alive.
I folded my hands. My knuckles were white.
I'm not going to do it until You tell me to. I'm not going to act on my own judgment, or on their grief, or on the guilt I feel for not getting there in time. I'm going to sit here and I'm going to wait for You to make it clear. Because this isn't my decision. It never was. It's Yours.
I waited. The silence stretched. No vision. No voice. No burning bush or still small wind or prophetic thunderclap. Just silence, and stars, and a ship full of sleeping people who loved each other in ways that defied every category I had.
I can wait, I told Him. As long as You need me to. I can wait.
I sat on the bridge until the first light of a new orbital dawn crept across the viewport, and then I stood up and went back to my quarters, and I lay down beside Cindy and put my arm over her, and she stirred and pressed back against me without waking, and the binding hummed between us, warm and constant and absolutely sure.
God hadn't answered. Not yet. Not with words, not with visions, not with the irrefutable clarity that I'd been waiting for since the first night I'd understood what my ability could do.
But He was there. I could feel Him the way you feel sunlight through a closed window — present, warm, patient. Waiting for the right moment. The right moment that He could see and I couldn't, that the ten couldn't, that Cindy couldn't, that nobody on this ship or this planet or this galaxy could see except the One who made the galaxy and the planet and the ship and the man lying in the dark beside his wife, holding on to faith the way a drowning man holds on to a hand.
I closed my eyes. I held on.
The storm was coming. I could feel it in my bones. But I wasn't going to run out to meet it. I was going to wait until He called my name, and then I was going to walk into whatever He asked me to walk into, and I was going to trust that the God who had woken me up and given me a ship and led me to a battle I couldn't win and planted a wife in a stone room and sent an army of machines to tear open a prison — that God knew what He was doing.
Even if it killed me.
Even then.