Chapter 32
Matthew
The alternate Matthew hit the training deck wall hard enough to crack the reinforced plating, and the sound that came out of him was not pain.
It was rage.
I’d asked him to show me what happened when he lost control. Not the story — he’d told me the story yesterday, in the conference room, and his words had hit me the way Samson’s fists hit a wall: with force that left marks. I wanted to see it. I wanted to understand, in my body and my bones, the thing that lived inside both of us, because understanding something in concept and understanding it in the muscle were two different educations, and this one mattered more than any other lesson I was likely to learn.
His David had agreed. The alternate David stood at the edge of the training deck with his arms folded across his chest, his expression carrying the precise quality of a man who had watched this demonstration before and did not enjoy it but understood its value. Our David stood beside him, and the two men could have been carved from the same stone — the same reserved intensity, the same pastoral patience thinned to an edge by years of carrying weight alone, though our David carried it with more ease now because he had five other shepherds sharing it.
“I’m going to push,” the alternate Matthew told me. He stood in the center of the deck, his body trembling faintly, his blue eyes — my eyes, exactly my eyes — already beginning to change. “I need you to watch what happens to the control. Watch the sequence. It matters.”
“I’m watching,” I said.
He closed his eyes. His fists clenched. And then he started pulling power.
I could feel it through my own gift — the way a tuning fork vibrates when its twin is struck. The energy built in him the way a thunderstorm builds: pressure first, then heat, then the particular atmospheric weight that says something is about to break loose that cannot be controlled once it starts. His face contorted. His body tightened. The air around him began to shimmer, and the shimmer had a color I recognized because I’d felt it in myself during the worst moments of the last year — when I’d seen the human farms through the dimensional fold, when I’d heard what the Nephilim did to the people they took, when the fury rose in my chest like a wave and I had to grip something to keep from letting it crest.
The alternate Matthew’s power spiked. The training deck’s containment fields activated automatically, blue walls of energy snapping into place around the perimeter, and I felt Amy’s hand find mine from where she stood behind me — her cool, steady fingers threading through mine, the binding carrying her concern like a current. Alita was six feet to my left, and I didn’t need to look at her to know she was ready. Her energy blades hadn’t manifested, but the hum was there, the sub-frequency that said the blades were one thought away from being real.
The power hit its peak. And the control broke.
It didn’t fracture slowly. It shattered. One instant the alternate Matthew was a shepherd channeling energy with discipline and direction — the next he was a weapon without a target, and the energy pouring off him was indiscriminate, striking the containment fields from every angle, cracking two of the six emitters, shattering a section of the deck plating, and filling the room with a sound that was not a scream and not an explosion but something between the two that made my teeth ache and my soul flinch.
His David moved. Not fast — deliberately. The alternate David stepped inside the containment field, walked through the energy discharge the way Samson walked through weapons fire — absorbing it, not on his skin but in his spirit, the pastoral gift converting destruction into something quieter — and put both hands on the alternate Matthew’s shoulders.
“Come back,” the alternate David said. His voice was steady. The energy scorched his arms. He did not let go. “Come back. You’re here. You’re not there. Come back.”
The alternate Matthew’s face crumpled. The rage collapsed like a building imploding — structural failure from the inside — and what replaced it was grief so naked and so absolute that I took a step backward, not because I was afraid of him but because the sight of my own face wearing that grief was the most terrifying thing I had ever witnessed that did not involve a weapon.
The energy dissipated. The containment fields powered down. The alternate Matthew dropped to his knees on the cracked deck plating, his hands over his face, his breathing ragged, and his David knelt beside him and stayed.
Silence. The training deck fans cycled, pulling the ozone from the air.
Our David spoke first. His voice was low, pitched only for me. “That’s the sequence. Anger, power, loss of discrimination, indiscriminate destruction. It happens fast. Three seconds from controlled to catastrophic.”
Three seconds. The same amount of time their Sammy had been exposed. The same amount of time between precision and annihilation.
“I have that in me,” I said. Not a question.
“You do,” David said. No comfort in it. No softening. Just truth from a man who had spent years learning that love and honesty served each other better than love and gentleness. “The difference is that you’ve seen it now. You know the sequence. You know the speed. And you have twenty-six people who’ll be watching for it.”
The alternate Matthew raised his head. His eyes were wet, and his face was the face of a man who had just relived the worst moment of his life for the sole purpose of giving another version of himself the information that might prevent it.
“It doesn’t announce itself,” he said. “That’s the part that gets you. The rage doesn’t show up wearing a sign. It shows up feeling like righteousness. It shows up feeling like justice. It tells you that the evil in front of you deserves everything you can bring, and it’s right — the evil does deserve it. But the power doesn’t differentiate between the evil and the people standing next to it, and by the time you realize you’ve stopped choosing your targets, the choosing is over.”
I knelt in front of him. My knees on the cracked plating, my hands on his arms, my eyes level with his. Mirror facing mirror. The version of me who had fallen, speaking to the version who hadn’t — yet.
“Thank you,” I said.
He gripped my forearms. The grip was too tight, the grip of a man clinging to a lifeline, and I let him hold on for as long as he needed.
“Don’t become me,” he said. “You have everything I didn’t. Six shepherds. Twenty wives. Samson. Don’t become me.”
“I won’t,” I said. And I meant it in every cell of my body, in every corner of my soul, with every ounce of the faith that had sustained me through hibernation and awakening and loss and resurrection and a year of fighting a war I hadn’t asked for. I meant it the way a man means a vow — not because the temptation is small but because the promise is bigger.
Amy’s hand tightened in mine. Through the binding, I felt the love she was channeling — not outward, not in a flood, but focused, concentrated, aimed at the two Matthews kneeling on a cracked training deck, a river of warmth that carried forgiveness and hope in equal measure. Amy’s love had always been the oldest thing in our family. It had watched over me for nearly five centuries. And it was wide enough to hold two versions of the man she had been built to protect.
Heather appeared in the training deck doorway. She’d felt the energy discharge through the ship — her healing gift registered damage the way Jenny’s empathy registered emotion, a constant background awareness of where the hurt was. Her green eyes took in the cracked plating, the scorched containment emitters, the two Matthews on their knees, and her face cycled through alarm and assessment and then settled on the expression she wore when the healing needed to happen and everything else could wait.
“Anybody hurt?” she asked.
“Not physically,” I said.
She looked at the alternate David’s scorched arms. He shook his head — a small, dismissive gesture, the gesture of a man who had absorbed worse — but Heather was already crossing the deck, her hands reaching for him, the green glow of healing energy beginning to build in her palms. She didn’t ask permission. She never asked permission when someone was hurt. She just healed, and the fact that the burn was minor didn’t matter, because Heather’s gift didn’t differentiate between a scrape and a shattered bone. Pain was pain, and she was made to take it.
The alternate David looked at her with an expression I had seen on his face yesterday when he’d watched our council interact for the first time — the expression of a man witnessing abundance after years of scarcity. In his universe, there was one healer: his Heather. Here, there were two, and the second one had crossed a room without hesitation to heal a man she barely knew because that was simply what she did.
“Thank you,” he said quietly.
Heather smiled — the fierce, luminous smile that made her the most dangerous and the most comforting person in any room she occupied. “That’s what we’re here for.”
I watched her work. The green glow sealed the burns in seconds, and the alternate David flexed his hands experimentally and nodded. Heather didn’t step away immediately — she held his forearms for an extra moment, reading for damage beneath the surface, the way she always did. Satisfied, she released him and turned to me.
“You okay?” she asked. The question wasn’t about physical injury. Her green eyes were searching my face for the kind of damage her healing gift couldn’t touch.
“No,” I said. “But I’m supposed to be not okay. That’s the point.”
She studied me for another moment, then nodded. Heather understood better than anyone that some pain needed to be carried rather than healed, that some wounds were instructive, and that the man she loved was better served by the weight of what he’d witnessed than by the relief of having it taken away.
The alternate Matthew was standing now, the alternate David’s hand on his shoulder. They were silhouetted against the viewport, two men who had been through something that should have destroyed them both and who had survived because they refused to let go of each other.
Our David moved to stand beside me. “I want to run the councils through paired exercises this afternoon,” he said quietly. “Their David has combat sequences we haven’t seen. Multi-gift chain attacks, coordinated defensive formations using mixed abilities. The kind of tactics you develop when you fight outnumbered every time.”
“Set it up,” I said. “All four councils. Samson included.”
David nodded. Then, in the silence between words, he said: “The demonstration was the right call. You needed to see it in the body, not just hear it in the telling.”
“I know.”
“And the plan that comes out of the intelligence briefing this afternoon — rescue first, fight second — that plan is the direct result of you seeing what happens when a shepherd doesn’t put the people before the rage. One lesson, one policy. That’s how it works.”
I looked at David. The man who had spent years alone carrying a calling he couldn’t explain to anyone, who had trained himself in isolation, who had arrived in our lives carrying scars and silence and a wisdom that came from suffering I couldn’t fully comprehend. I was grateful. Grateful for him, for Matt, for Jonathan and Stephen and Paul and Samson. Grateful that when the rage came, I would not be standing alone the way the alternate Matthew had been.
“Thank you, David.”
He put his hand on my shoulder. The same gesture he used with Samson, the same weight, the same steadiness. The hand of a shepherd. “That’s what we’re here for,” he said, and the echo of Heather’s words was not accidental.
Alita
The alternate Alita fought like me, and she fought like a woman who had been fighting for longer with fewer people watching her back.
We were on the training deck — the undamaged one, two levels below the one Matthew and his mirror image had cracked an hour ago. The alternate David was leading the session, and our David stood beside him, and between them they carried more combat experience than anyone else on either ship. The alternate David’s experience was harder-edged, sharper, the product of being the only tactical mind in an entire universe. Our David’s was broader, tempered by the other shepherds, refined by the months of coordinated training with Matt and Jonathan and Stephen and Paul. Together, they were teaching the kind of combat lesson that no simulation could replicate.
“Cross-gift integration,” the alternate David said. He was pacing the deck in front of us — all twenty wives, both universes, lined up like students in a seminar that happened to involve lethal energy. “In our timeline, we learned this because we had to. Two shepherds, nine wives. We couldn’t afford anyone to be limited to a single gift. Heather had to learn to project energy while healing. Tiffany had to learn to shield while maintaining a rift. Sarah had to learn to open small rifts while holding a barrier. Everyone does everything.”
“Your primary stays strongest,” our David added. His voice carried the careful precision of a man who understood that nuance mattered in training. “Heather will always be the best healer. Alita will always be the best blade fighter. Rachel will always hit hardest. But after today, none of you should be limited to your primary. You should be able to operate in any gift at an advanced level.”
I felt the energy blades hum in my hands — not manifested, not yet, just the potential, the familiar vibration that lived in my palms like a second heartbeat. My blades were my identity. They were the gift that had made me a warrior before I’d understood that being a warrior was the same thing as being loved.
But the alternate Alita had shown me something yesterday during our sparring that had rearranged the way I thought about my gift. She’d been fighting me at full intensity — her blades against mine, the sharp crystalline crack of energy meeting energy, the footwork patterns we shared because our bodies had been built from the same neural architecture — and midway through the third exchange, she’d dropped her left blade, opened her palm, and fired a concussive blast that hit my shoulder and spun me sideways.
A concussive blast. Rachel’s gift. Coming from Alita’s hand.
“How?” I’d asked, picking myself off the mat.
“Necessity,” she’d said. “When there’s no Rachel to call for covering fire, you learn to make your own.”
Now, standing in the training deck with the alternate David and our David tag-teaming instruction, I watched the lesson unfold across both groups. The principle was simple. The execution was not. Each wife’s spiritual gift was a manifestation of the same source — God’s power, channeled through individual vessels. The gifts were distinct but not separate. They were facets of the same light, refracted differently through each woman’s personality and calling. What the alternate council had learned through desperation, we could learn through intention.
The alternate David paired us off — each of our wives with her counterpart. Each pair working on the gift the other had mastered.
Rachel and the alternate Rachel stood face to face in the far corner, their identical blonde hair, their identical blue eyes, their identical competitive fire visible from across the deck. Our Rachel was trying to open a small rift — Tiffany’s gift, not hers — and the air in front of her was shimmering, distorting, almost tearing but not quite. Her face was red with effort and she was grinning, because Rachel grinned when something was hard, and I loved that about her.
“Push the intent sideways,” the alternate Rachel said. “You’re treating it like a blast — directing force outward. A rift isn’t force. It’s a fold. You’re not punching through space. You’re persuading it to bend.”
“I don’t persuade,” Rachel said, still grinning. “I punch.”
“Yeah,” the alternate Rachel said. “Me too. But I learned.”
The air in front of Rachel shuddered. Then it folded — a small, unstable tear that lasted two seconds before closing — and Rachel let out a shout of triumph that shook the deck, and the alternate Rachel laughed, and the laughter was the same sound coming from two mouths, and it made my heart hurt and sing at the same time.
Tiffany was across the deck with her counterpart, working on the inverse: channeling raw concussive energy through her portal gift. Our Tiffany’s precision was extraordinary — her rifts were the cleanest, most controlled spatial tears in either universe — but her energy projection had always been secondary, functional rather than devastating. The alternate Tiffany was teaching her to weave offensive power through an open rift, creating what amounted to a portal-cannon: a rift that opened in front of an enemy and delivered a blast from a position the target couldn’t anticipate.
“It’s not about brute force,” the alternate Tiffany said, her voice carrying the same precise cadence our Tiffany used, but rougher, the precision worn to an edge by months of improvising under fire. “It’s about geometry. You’re already the best geometric thinker among us. Use that. The blast doesn’t need to be as strong as Rachel’s if it arrives from an angle the enemy can’t defend.”
Tiffany’s eyes narrowed. The rift she opened was small — a foot across — and the energy she channeled through it was modest by Rachel’s standards. But it exited the rift twenty feet away, at a downward angle, and struck the training target from above and behind. The target shattered.
“Geometry,” Tiffany said. The satisfaction in her voice was quiet and total.
I turned back to my own counterpart. The alternate Alita stood across from me, her dark eyes steady, her energy blades already humming. She was thinner than me — months of running had carved away the last softness from her frame — and her blade technique had developed a particular economy of motion that spoke of a woman who couldn’t afford wasted movement.
“You want to learn healing,” she said. Not a question.
“I want to learn everything,” I said. “But healing first. If Heather goes down in a fight, someone else needs to be able to keep people alive until she’s back on her feet.”
The alternate Alita’s face tightened. The muscles around her mouth flexed, and for a moment I saw the memory move through her — the battles where their Heather had gone down and no one else could heal, the injuries that had to wait, the fear that accompanied every engagement because healing was a single point of failure.
“It’s not like blades,” she said. “Blades are about focus and direction. Healing is about reception. You have to open your gift in the other direction — instead of projecting energy out, you’re drawing damage in. It’ll hurt. The pain transfer is real regardless of which wife is doing the healing. But Heather’s threshold is higher than ours. We can sustain it for short periods. Enough to stabilize someone. Enough to keep them alive.”
She drew a shallow cut across her own forearm with an energy blade — the kind of precise, controlled self-injury that only a warrior comfortable with pain would attempt casually. Blood welled immediately.
“Heal it,” she said.
I put my hands on her arm. The energy blades dissolved as I redirected my gift inward, searching for the frequency Heather described when she talked about her healing — the particular wavelength of compassion that bridged the gap between one body’s pain and another body’s capacity to receive it. I found it. It was thin, distant, nothing like the broad, powerful current that flowed through Heather’s palms. But it was there, and I pulled on it, and the cut on the alternate Alita’s arm began to close.
The pain hit my forearm like a hot wire. I gasped — not from surprise but from the visceral reality of feeling someone else’s wound migrate into my own flesh. The cut that appeared on my arm was shallower than hers, and it faded within seconds as my body’s natural resilience absorbed it, but the sensation was searing and immediate and humbling.
Heather did this every day. She took the worst injuries anyone suffered and pulled them into her own body, and she did it with a smile, and she never once complained about the cost.
“Good,” the alternate Alita said. Her arm was healed. My arm was already healing. “Rough, slow, painful. But functional. In a crisis, that’s all that matters.”
I looked at my hands — the hands that had held energy blades and Hugo’s memory and Matthew’s heart and our children’s futures — and they were the same hands, but they could do more now. Not as well as Heather. Not close. But the door was open, and I was walking through it.
Sarah was practicing with her counterpart in the adjacent zone, and the sight of it made me pause. Sarah’s shields had always been her defining contribution — the barriers she could raise around the family, the protective walls that held against barrages that should have destroyed them. Now the alternate Sarah was teaching her to project the barrier energy forward — not as a shield but as a blade. A shield-sword. A wall that moved.
Sarah’s face was tight with concentration, her blonde hair pushed behind her ears, her blue eyes focused on the training target across the deck. The barrier she projected was thin and sharp, and it crossed the distance in a straight line and bisected the target cleanly.
“That’s terrifying,” Sarah said. She was staring at the two halves of the target with the expression of a woman who had just discovered that her gift for protection could also be a gift for destruction, and who was not entirely comfortable with the discovery.
“You don’t have to use it that way,” the alternate Sarah said. “But you need to know you can. Because the day you can’t afford to only defend is the day you need another option.”
I caught Heather’s eye across the deck. She was working with her counterpart on ranged healing — extending the radius of her gift beyond physical touch, learning to project healing energy across a distance. The alternate Heather was demonstrating, and the green glow emanating from her hands was covering an area the size of a shuttle bay, rippling outward in waves that I could feel even from here — a warmth that settled into the muscles and the joints and the places where old training bruises still lingered.
Heather watched her counterpart heal an entire section of the deck and her face held the expression I knew best: the fierce determination of a woman who had just been shown what her gift could become and was already planning how to get there. She caught my eye and grinned — the sharp, radiant grin that was Heather at her most alive — and I grinned back, because my partner, my warrior-bond, my closest friend in this family or any other, was about to become unstoppable, and the joy of watching her grow was one of the purest things I knew.
On the far side of the deck, Matt was working with Cindy and Stephen’s wives, running combined-council defense drills. Matt’s raw power was formidable — less refined than David’s, more instinctive, the kind of power that came from a man who had learned to fight by fighting rather than by training. But his pastoral warmth made him the perfect partner for Robin, Emily, and Julia, whose spiritual gifts complemented his energy-based ones in ways that were only now becoming apparent. Robin’s intercession amplification was strengthening every gift on the deck when she prayed, and she was praying now, her red hair falling around her face, her lips moving steadily, and the effect was measurable: every wife’s output had increased since Robin had started.
Stephen stood with his three wives, his quiet presence anchoring them the way it anchored everything he touched. The Presence of God gift required physical contact between Stephen and one of his wives to activate, and Emily had her hand on his arm, and the warmth radiating from them was unmistakable — not heat, not energy, but something deeper, something that made the room feel safe in a way that had nothing to do with shields or barriers and everything to do with the God who stood behind every gift in this room.
I heard Matthew laugh. Not loud — a brief, surprised sound, the sound he made when something caught him off guard in a good way. I turned and saw him watching Jenny practice empathic projection — not just sensing emotions but broadcasting them, pushing calm and confidence outward to counteract fear and confusion. It was a combat application of her gift that the alternate Jenny had developed, and our Jenny was picking it up with the speed of a woman whose emotional intelligence made her a natural at anything that involved feeling the world and choosing what to send back into it.
Matthew caught my eye. The laugh faded, but the warmth remained, and I felt the warmth of it like sunlight on skin. He mouthed three words — I love you — across the training deck, and I mouthed them back, and the exchange was ours, private in a room full of people, the particular intimacy of a couple who had fought and bled and prayed and loved together and who could say the most important thing in the world without making a sound.
Jenny
The training deck was a kaleidoscope of emotion, and I was standing in the center of it trying not to drown.
Twenty wives, four councils, seven shepherds, the combined emotional output of two universes’ worth of warriors and healers and prophets and women who loved fiercely and feared fiercely and poured everything they had into whatever was in front of them. The empathic noise was immense. If I’d been the woman I was three months ago, it would have flattened me. But David’s training had deepened my range and refined my filters, and the months of practice had taught me to ride the wave instead of being crushed by it.
Sammy stood beside me. She always stood beside me in situations like this, not because she needed me but because the complementary nature of our gifts created a synergy that was greater than either of us alone. I read feelings. She read truth. Together, we could map the emotional and factual landscape of any room with a precision that made Matthew call us his “intelligence service,” which made Sammy roll her eyes and me laugh every time.
“Samson’s shifting,” Sammy said quietly, her blue eyes tracking the massive man across the deck.
I nodded. I’d been watching Samson’s emotional architecture change for days — since the alternate Matthew had told his story, since the words if we’d had someone like you had landed on Samson like stones that weren’t thrown in anger but in the desperate honesty of a man who had learned the cost of absence.
Samson was training with David and the alternate David. Both Davids were attacking him simultaneously — David with his precise, surgical strikes, the alternate David with harder, faster combinations that came from years of being the only tactical combatant in an entire universe. Samson absorbed every blow. The energy transferred into him, and his body hummed with it, his massive frame vibrating at a frequency I could feel across the room. But the thing that was changing wasn’t the way he absorbed the energy. It was the way he distributed it.
He touched Sarah’s shoulder as she passed. Just a brief contact, barely a second. Sarah’s shields, already impressive, suddenly doubled in density. She felt it — I could see it in her face, the sudden expansion of capacity, the sensation of being filled with power that wasn’t hers but that her gift could channel. Sarah’s eyes widened, and she looked at Samson, and the gratitude in her expression was the gratitude of a woman who had just been shown that her shields could protect not just her family but a city.
Ten minutes later, Samson crossed the deck and touched Rachel’s arm. Rachel had been practicing her rift technique — still crude, still unstable, but improving with every attempt — and the touch of Samson’s empowerment redirected into her primary gift. She raised her fist, fired a concussive blast at the far wall’s reinforced target, and the blast punched through the target, through the wall behind it, and through the reinforced hull plating beyond that. Adam’s voice came over the intercom: “I’d appreciate it if we could avoid depressurizing the training deck. Repairs estimated at forty-seven minutes.”
Rachel’s mouth fell open. Then she turned to Samson, her competitive fire momentarily overridden by astonishment. “What did you just do to me?”
“Gave you back what I absorbed,” Samson said. His voice was quiet, humble in the way that had defined him since his arrival, but there was something new beneath the humility now — not pride exactly, but a growing recognition that the gifts he carried had a purpose that extended beyond simple survival. “It’s better when it goes through you. You know how to aim it.”
Rachel studied him. Then she laughed — the bold, full-throated laugh that was Rachel at her most genuine — and put her arm around his shoulders, which required her to reach up significantly given the difference in their heights. “We’re going to be very dangerous together, big man.”
Samson’s mouth curved. Not a full smile — Samson didn’t smile easily yet — but the beginning of one, and from where I stood, reading the emotional shift beneath it, the almost-smile was enormous. It was the expression of a man who was beginning to accept that his power was not just for enduring but for empowering, and that the people around him didn’t see him as a shield to be deployed but as a member of their family to be loved.
Clarisa found me during the afternoon break.
She was sitting in the corridor outside the training deck, her knees drawn up, her blonde hair falling around her face, her blue eyes carrying the particular clarity of a woman whose gift for exposing hearts to themselves was working overtime. Clarisa wasn’t using her gift deliberately — she didn’t need to. Her gift operated on Samson like gravity: constant, inescapable, gentle. Every moment they were connected, Samson’s own heart was being held up in front of him, and the man who had spent years telling himself he wasn’t worthy was being shown, daily and irrevocably, that his own heart said otherwise.
“He prayed this morning,” Clarisa said. She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at her hands, folded in her lap, as if the truth of what she’d witnessed was too new to look at directly. “Before anyone was awake. I felt it through the binding — not the words, just the shape of it. He wasn’t asking God to tell him he was worthy. He was asking God to help him be the man the councils needed him to be.”
I sat down beside her. The corridor was quiet, the training deck sealed behind us, the hum of both Enterprises’ systems blending into a sound that was almost like breathing.
“There’s a difference,” I said.
“A huge difference,” Clarisa said. She turned to me, and her eyes were bright. Not with tears — with the particular luminosity of a woman watching a prayer get answered. “For weeks he’s been praying to be told he’s enough. This morning he started praying to be made into what God needs. That’s — that’s not the same man.”
I put my hand on her arm. My empathic gift reached into the contact and found what I expected: bone-deep exhaustion from the intensity of the binding’s constant operation, genuine fear about whether she was equal to the gift she carried, and underneath both, a bedrock of faith so solid it made the Enterprise’s hull plating look fragile by comparison. Clarisa was a woman who had grown up in a village on a planet nobody had heard of, and she carried a faith that could anchor a universe. She didn’t need me to tell her that. But I told her anyway.
“You’re doing what God built you to do,” I said. “And you’re doing it beautifully.”
Her hand covered mine. “I’m still afraid of using it on strangers,” she admitted. The honesty cost her something. “On Samson it’s safe because I love him and the binding is there. But when we go out — when we meet the people on those planets — touching someone and showing them their own heart could break them. I’ve seen what it does. It strips away every defense. And some people need their defenses, Jenny. Some people can’t survive seeing themselves.”
“That’s why Amy goes with you,” I said. “Love first, truth second. By the time your gift shows them who they are, Amy’s love has already told them they’re safe enough to look.”
Clarisa nodded slowly. “Melissa said something similar. She said the prophetic gift showed her the same thing — that truth without love is a weapon, and love without truth is a comfortable lie, and God gives them together for a reason.”
Melissa would have said exactly that. The prophet who trembled when she spoke and spoke anyway, whose quiet, careful words landed with more force than Rachel’s concussive blasts.
“How is Melissa?” Clarisa asked.
“Her vision is mostly restored,” I said. “Heather’s been working on it, and the rest is coming back on its own. The prophetic blindness was temporary — the price of seeing something that big. She’s tired, but she’s strong. She always is.”
Across the corridor, the training deck door opened and Samson emerged with David beside him. They were deep in conversation — David speaking with the low, steady intensity he brought to mentorship, Samson listening with the focused attention of a man who was no longer deflecting wisdom but receiving it. David’s hand was on Samson’s shoulder, and the gesture was identical to the one I’d seen yesterday on the observation deck: not a grip, not a pat, just presence. The hand of a shepherd resting on the shoulder of a man who was becoming one.
Clarisa watched them pass. She didn’t call out. She didn’t need to. Through the binding, Samson knew she was there, and the small tilt of his head in her direction was as intimate as a kiss — the private acknowledgment of a man whose heart was being held by a woman who loved him enough to show it to him, even when what it revealed was hard to see.
Amy
The intelligence data was worse than anything I had anticipated, and I had anticipated quite a lot.
The alternate Amy and I sat side by side in the primary data analysis lab, our screens filled with tactical overlays, sensor logs, captured communications, and the accumulated intelligence of a council that had been fighting the Nephilim with fewer resources and higher stakes. The data she had brought was not just military intelligence. It was a map of horror.
“Hidden transport ships,” the alternate Amy said. Her voice was controlled, analytical, carrying the same measured cadence mine held when the information was too large for emotion to process in real time. “Scattered across the galaxy in dimensional pockets similar to the staging ground our Matthew destroyed. The transports are always the last ships to move in a Nephilim offensive. They carry the human captives.”
I studied the data. The Nephilim’s operational pattern was consistent across both universes: warships deployed first to establish dominance, followed by ground forces to suppress resistance, followed by the transports to collect human captives. The captives were taken to processing facilities — the human farms that had driven the alternate Matthew to his catastrophic act — where they were sorted, cataloged, and used for labor, experimentation, or genetic harvesting.
“In our timeline,” I said, “we’ve identified the warships and the staging areas. We haven’t found the transports.”
“Because they’re not in normal space,” the alternate Amy said. She pulled up a dimensional scan. “They’re folded into micro-dimensions — pockets of spacetime too small for standard sensors to detect but large enough to hold dozens of ships. Adam’s current sensor array can’t resolve them. With the upgrades I’ve brought, he can.”
Matthew had come in during the briefing. He stood behind my chair, his hand resting on the back of it, close enough that I could feel his warmth. I could feel his reaction to the data — the controlled horror of a shepherd confronting the scale of the evil he was called to fight, and underneath it, the razor-thin edge of the rage that the alternate Matthew’s demonstration had shown him that morning. The rage was there. It would always be there. But Matthew was holding it in his hands now instead of letting it hold him, and the difference was everything.
Paul appeared in the doorway. He leaned against the frame, his arms crossed, his brown eyes sharp. Paul’s strategic mind processed tactical information the way I processed engineering data — rapidly, comprehensively, with an intuitive grasp of implications that reached several moves ahead.
“If the transports are hidden in dimensional pockets,” Paul said, “and we engage the warships first, what happens to the transports?”
The alternate Amy looked at him. “They run. The moment the warships are threatened, the transports fold deeper into their pockets and move to secondary locations. You can destroy every warship in a system and the transports will already be gone, with every human captive on board.”
“Then we don’t engage the warships first,” Matthew said.
The room went quiet. Paul uncrossed his arms. The alternate Amy’s analytical mask slipped for one second — the second in which she recognized that this Matthew, our Matthew, had just articulated the lesson her Matthew had learned only after a hundred thousand deaths.
“We beam the humans out,” Paul said. He was already ahead of us, his strategic gift mapping the operation. “Before the first shot is fired. Use the enhanced sensors to locate the dimensional pockets, use beaming to extract the human captives, and only then engage the warships.”
“Can beaming reach into a dimensional pocket?” Matthew asked.
“With Paul’s displacement principle,” I said, running the calculations, “and the sensor upgrades from the alternate council — yes. It’ll take precision. The targeting has to be exact. But it’s possible.”
“Then that’s the plan,” Matthew said. His voice carried the particular authority of a man who had just watched himself lose control over a failure to prioritize, and who was not going to make the same mistake. “Humans first. Always. We rescue the captives before we fight the captors. Every operation, every engagement, every planet. The battle plan starts with the people, not the enemy.”
Paul nodded. “I can map the extraction protocols. Amy, I’ll need the dimensional coordinates as Adam resolves them.”
“You’ll have them,” I said.
The alternate Amy was watching Matthew. The control had returned to her face, but her eyes were bright, and through my analytical awareness — the part of me that had watched over a man for nearly five centuries and learned to read every micro-expression his face could produce — I could see what she was feeling. Relief. Not personal relief, not the relief of being rescued or receiving technology. The relief of seeing a version of her Matthew who had not made the mistake that haunted hers. Who had watched the demonstration and learned the lesson and built it into doctrine before the test arrived.
“He’ll be different because of you,” I said to her quietly, after Matthew and Paul had moved to the tactical console to begin the planning.
She looked at me. The mask held, but behind it, the analytical mind that mirrored mine was processing something that had nothing to do with data.
“That’s why we came,” she said. “Not for the technology. Not for the healing beds. We came because God showed us there was another version of us who still had a chance to do it right.”
I reached across the console and took her hand. It was a mirror of my own — the same shape, the same skin, the same fingers that had spent centuries tending to the ship and the man who slept inside it. The difference was the calluses. My hands were smooth. Hers were worn. The hands of a woman who had been building with limited resources and fighting with unlimited love for longer than she should have had to.
“You did do it right,” I said. “You kept them alive. You kept him alive. You brought them here. That’s not failure. That’s faith.”
Her grip tightened. She didn’t answer, but she didn’t need to. The data spoke for itself — the hundreds of improvised solutions, the engineering brilliance born of scarcity, the healing beds that cured diseases our technology couldn’t touch. Everything she had built, she had built with love. And love was the only engineering principle that mattered.
Lydia found me in the engineering bay that evening.
She settled into the chair beside me with the quiet grace that defined her — the grace of an artist who moved through the world noticing the beauty in everything and the pain in most things and who carried both without complaint. Her sketchbook was in her lap, but she wasn’t drawing. She was watching me.
“You’re sad,” she said.
I looked at her. Lydia’s gift for reading people wasn’t empathic the way Jenny’s was — it was artistic, intuitive, the product of a woman who had spent her whole existence studying the way light fell on faces and the way posture told stories that mouths wouldn’t. And she was right. I was sad.
“She spent five hundred years alone, Lydia,” I said. “The same years I spent. But I had resources. I had this ship in good condition. I had hope. She had less, and she built more, and looking at what it cost her makes me —” I stopped. The emotion was precise and difficult: the sorrow of seeing your own potential pain reflected in someone else’s actual pain, and the guilt of having been spared what she endured.
“Makes you grateful and angry at the same time,” Lydia said. “Grateful that your timeline went the way it did. Angry that hers couldn’t.”
“Yes.”
Lydia opened her sketchbook. She’d been drawing the two Amys working side by side — our hands on the same console, our faces carrying the same expression of focused intensity, the same blonde hair catching the same artificial light. It was a beautiful drawing. It was also, somehow, a drawing about loneliness — because Lydia’s gift for constructs extended to her art, and the lines she drew carried emotional truth the way her energy shapes carried light.
“Keep it,” Lydia said, tearing the page from the sketchbook and placing it beside my console. “For when you need to remember that God put you both in the same universe at the same time for a reason.”
I pressed the drawing flat on the console surface and looked at it, and the two faces gazing up at me were the same face and were not the same face, and the love I felt for both of them was the oldest and gentlest thing in my heart.
Sammy
The alternate David was the most honest person I had ever scanned, and I’d scanned a lot of people.
He sat across from me in the small briefing room adjacent to the main conference area, his hands flat on the table, his expression open and patient. He had offered to provide a complete tactical briefing on every Nephilim engagement his council had fought, and Matthew had asked me to sit in as verification — not because anyone doubted the alternate council, but because my gift was a tool, and smart people used their tools.
“The Nephilim use a three-phase operational pattern,” the alternate David said. His voice carried the economy of a man who had been the only tactical thinker in his universe for too long. Every word was chosen, placed, deployed. “Phase one: orbital suppression. Their warships establish dominance over any defending fleet or planetary defense system. Phase two: ground infiltration. Nephilim warriors — large, heavily armored, physically stronger than any human combatant — deploy to the surface. Phase three: collection. The transport ships arrive, and the human population is taken.”
Every word registered as true. My gift wasn’t just a lie detector — that was the simplified version people used when they didn’t have time for the full explanation. What I actually did was read the integrity of information as it was delivered. Not just whether the speaker believed it, but whether the information itself was structurally sound — consistent, complete, grounded in genuine experience. The alternate David’s briefing was as structurally sound as the hull plating on the Enterprise.
Jonathan sat beside me, listening with the focused intensity of a man whose tactical mind was building operational frameworks in real time. Jonathan didn’t speak much in briefings — he absorbed information the way a sponge absorbs water, silently and completely, and then he deployed it later with devastating effectiveness. His hands were folded on the table, no datapad, no console. He was committing everything to memory, processing it without technology, and I knew from watching him train that this was deliberate. Jonathan practiced without technology the way a musician practiced scales — repetitively, meticulously, building capability in the spaces where instruments couldn’t follow.
Leah sat beside Jonathan, her blonde hair pulled back, her blue eyes moving between her husband and the alternate David with the particular attention of a woman who understood that what Jonathan learned today he would teach tomorrow. She was recording the briefing on a small device, and the care she took with the recording was the care of a wife who knew that her husband’s memory was extraordinary but who also believed in redundancy because she loved him enough to plan for the unexpected.
The alternate David continued. His briefing covered fleet formations, weapon types, common defensive configurations, known weaknesses, and — critically — the locations of dimensional pockets where transport ships had been hidden during previous engagements.
“We found seven pockets in our universe,” he said. “Three were empty by the time we reached them. Four contained transports. Between them, several hundred thousand humans.” He paused. The pause was the kind that carries weight — the weight of a man who had seen those humans and could not unsee them. “We got some of them out. Not enough. Never enough.”
True. All of it. The data, the locations, the numbers, the grief — all true.
“Adam is integrating your sensor data now,” I said. “Once we can detect the dimensional pockets in our universe, Paul and Matthew want to use beaming to extract the humans before engaging the warships.”
The alternate David’s face changed. The tactical mask he wore during briefings cracked, and what came through was something I almost never saw in military men: hope so raw it was indistinguishable from pain.
“We tried that,” he said. “We didn’t have beaming technology. We had to breach the pockets physically — fly in, fight through the defensive screens, dock with the transports, evacuate manually. By the time we reached the captives, some of the transports had already moved. The ones we saved —” He stopped. “We saved them because we were willing to die to get them out. Beaming would have changed everything.”
“It will,” I said.
He looked at me. The honesty in his face was so complete that my gift barely registered it as information — it was just reality, unadorned, a man telling me what he knew because truth was all he had left.
“Then use it,” he said. “Use everything we brought you. Don’t make our mistakes. Save the people first.”
I nodded. My truth-detection gift confirmed what my heart already knew: this man had crossed the barrier between universes to give us the knowledge his council had bought with blood and grief, and the only currency that mattered to him was that we use it to save the lives he couldn’t.
Matthew found me afterward in the corridor, walking beside Jenny.
“Everything clean?” he asked.
“Every word,” I said. “Their David might be the most honest person I’ve ever scanned outside this family. The intelligence is solid. The dimensional pocket data is consistent with what Adam’s finding with the new sensors. And the operational pattern matches everything we’ve observed from our own encounters.”
Matthew nodded. His face held the expression I’d come to know over the past months — the expression of a man who was carrying the weight of decisions that would affect millions of lives and who was choosing, deliberately, to carry that weight with prayer instead of rage.
“Rescue first,” he said. Not to me. To himself. Testing the words, embedding them into the architecture of his identity the way a builder sets a cornerstone. “Always rescue first.”
Jenny put her hand on his arm. The touch was brief, warm, the empathic wife’s way of saying I feel what you’re feeling and it’s okay. Matthew covered her hand with his for a moment, then let go, and the three of us walked the corridor of a ship that was carrying the combined knowledge of two universes and the combined love of twenty-seven people who were determined to use both.
Lydia
The letters were the hardest part.
We’d been with the alternate council for three days, and the training had transformed us. I could feel it in my own gift — the constructs I shaped now were denser, more complex, capable of functions I hadn’t imagined a week ago. I’d learned to form constructs that weren’t just beautiful but tactical: energy scaffolds that could brace a collapsing structure, containment fields that could hold a wounded person stable during transport, delicate manipulators that could perform tasks requiring precision beyond what human hands could achieve. The alternate Lydia had taught me all of it with the patient intensity of a woman whose creative gift had been pressed into military service by necessity and who was grateful, finally, to share what she had learned with someone who could appreciate both the utility and the beauty of it.
But now the training was ending, and the farewell was beginning, and the farewell meant letters.
I sat in the observation lounge, a sheaf of paper Amy had replicated from the ship’s stores spread across the table in front of me. Real paper — not a datapad, not a console. The alternate council had asked for real paper for the letters, and Melissa had been the one to suggest it: Some things need to be held. Melissa had said it with the quiet authority of a woman whose prophetic gift gave her an instinct for what mattered, and no one had argued.
Around me, counterparts were writing.
Heather and the alternate Heather sat together at the end of the table, their red hair catching the starlight from the viewport, their green eyes focused on the pages in front of them. They weren’t writing separately — they were writing together, comparing healing protocols and personal observations in the same document, a letter that was also a medical manual, because Heather’s way of expressing love had always been through her gift, and the most loving thing she could give her counterpart was the knowledge that might save a life on the other side of a dimensional barrier.
Tiffany and her counterpart worked at a console nearby, but they also had paper in front of them. Tiffany’s letter was precise — I caught a glimpse as I passed: rift-chain diagrams annotated with personal notes, the technical and the emotional woven together in Tiffany’s characteristically structured prose. The alternate Tiffany was writing back, and the letter she was composing was longer than our Tiffany’s, the words of a woman who had more to say because she had been alone with her thoughts for longer.
Sarah had organized the letter exchange, because Sarah organized everything. She’d set up the table, provided the paper, established a rotation so that each pair had time to write without interruption, and she was now sitting at the far end with her own letter in front of her — a single page, carefully written, every word chosen with the precision of a woman who understood that words were the only thing she could send across the barrier between universes. I couldn’t read it from here, but I could see Sarah’s face, and the expression on it was the expression she wore when she was taking care of someone she loved: focused, tender, and absolutely committed to getting it right.
I picked up my pen. The alternate Lydia had given me a construct — a small, luminous shape that hung in the air between us like a miniature star. It was a gift, she’d said. A piece of her art. Something she wanted me to keep because in her universe, there was no one else who understood what energy could be when it was shaped by love instead of necessity.
I held the construct in one hand and wrote with the other.
To the other Lydia, I began. You showed me that beauty can survive anything. That even when a gift is pressed into service for war, the beauty doesn’t die — it waits. You’ve been building barricades for months, but the barricades were still beautiful, and that tells me everything I need to know about you. Thank you for teaching me that my constructs can save lives as well as delight them. Thank you for the star. I’ll keep it lit.
I put the pen down. The words felt small against the weight of what we’d shared, but words were all I had that could cross the distance between two versions of reality.
Amy and her counterpart were in the engineering bay, still working. They hadn’t stopped — both Amys operated at a level of sustained focus that bordered on inhuman, which made sense given their origins, and the letter Amy had written was tucked into a data chip alongside the complete technical specifications of every system upgrade they had developed together. Amy’s love was like her engineering: comprehensive, meticulously built, designed to endure.
Melissa drifted through the lounge, her vision fully restored now. She moved with the careful grace of a woman who was relearning the world after days of blindness, and the expression on her face was contemplative in the way that Melissa was always contemplative — not distant, not detached, but deeply present in a way that most people were too busy to notice. She paused beside me, rested her hand on my shoulder, and said nothing. The silence was the particular Melissa silence that said everything: I see you. I see what you’re carrying. You don’t have to explain it.
“Thank you,” I said.
She squeezed my shoulder and moved on, and the touch lingered like warmth.
The space disturbance hit at 0300.
I was half-asleep when the Enterprise shuddered — a deep, structural tremor that ran through the hull like a bass note through a cathedral. Beside me, Sammy sat up instantly, her truth-detection gift firing before her eyes were fully open, scanning the ship’s systems for the anomaly with an instinct that didn’t require consciousness to activate.
“Something’s wrong with the rift,” Sammy said. Her voice was sharp and clear, all sleep burned away by the immediacy of the information her gift was feeding her. “The alternate Enterprise’s rift drive is registering dimensional instability. The departure window they were planning for tomorrow — it’s destabilizing.”
Adam’s voice came over the internal comm, calm and precise. “Dimensional fold disturbance detected. Origin: the rift corridor the alternate Enterprise used to arrive. The corridor is experiencing residual oscillations — likely aftereffects of the initial transit. The disturbance is not dangerous to either ship, but it is affecting the stability of any outbound rift in this sector. I recommend delaying departure until the oscillations subside. Estimated window: unknown. Minimum forecast: several days.”
Matthew’s voice came next, steady and calm, the voice he used when things were going sideways and he needed everyone to know it was handled. “All councils, stand down. No danger. The departure is delayed. We’ll assess in the morning. Get some rest.”
I lay back down. The miniature star construct the alternate Lydia had given me floated above my pillow, its light steady against the dark, a piece of another universe hanging in the air like a promise.
Sammy lay back beside me, but she didn’t close her eyes immediately. She was staring at the ceiling, her sharp blue eyes tracking patterns only her gift could see.
“They can’t leave yet,” she said quietly.
“No.”
“More time.” She turned her head to look at me, and the expression on her face was the expression Little Sammy wore when she was calculating odds and finding them better than expected. “More training. More letters. More time together.”
“More time,” I agreed.
The star turned slowly above us. The two Enterprises hung in the dark together, mirror images, their departure delayed by a disturbance that no one had planned and that God, as always, had.
Outside the viewport, the stars were the same stars that shone in both universes — constant, ancient, indifferent to the dimensional barriers that separated one version of reality from another. But the people on these two ships were not indifferent. They were writing letters and learning gifts and teaching each other to be more than they had been alone, and the training and the love and the knowledge would outlast the visit, would cross the barrier between worlds the way light crossed the void between stars: persistently, inevitably, because the source was inexhaustible.
Samson had prayed that morning to be made into the man the councils needed. Clarisa was showing him his own heart daily, patiently, the mirror that would not let him hide. David was mentoring him with the steady, wordless persistence of a shepherd who understood that some men had to be loved into their callings. And by the end of this visit, Samson would not be the man who stood on a ridgeline and told himself he wasn’t worthy. He would be the man who stood in front of everyone else, absorbing what they couldn’t take, and empowering them with what he could give, and doing it not because he was fearless but because he had finally stopped running from the calling that God had spoken over him before he was born.
The construct turned. Its light caught the viewport and scattered, painting the ceiling with tiny stars, and the tiny stars were beautiful, and beauty was the language I had been given to say the things that prose could not, and tonight, in a ship beside another ship in a universe beside another universe, beauty said: You are not alone. You were never alone. And the legacy of another world is the knowledge that God wastes nothing — not timelines, not grief, not the worst mistakes His children make. He uses it all.
I closed my eyes and slept, and the star kept turning.