Worlds of Faith and Fear

Matthew

The governor knelt in front of me, and I had no idea what to do with my hands.

This was the fourth planet we’d visited since the mission began in earnest, and it was the first where someone had responded to the gospel by kneeling. Not in worship of me—he was clear about that, lifting his palms upward in the gesture his people used to address God directly—but in front of me, because I had been the one standing there when the words of Jesus Christ landed in his heart like a seed hitting fertile ground. His name was something I couldn’t pronounce without making Sammy laugh, a rolling arrangement of consonants that his people shaped easily and my American tongue mangled every time. I’d taken to calling him sir, which he accepted with the gracious patience of a man who understood that some guests were worth accommodating.

Behind me, Amy was walking through the medical facility with three of the planet’s senior healers, explaining the healing beds. Her voice carried the particular quality it always carried when she was teaching—warm, precise, luminous with the intelligence that four hundred and seventy-three years of observation and five months of being human had woven into something entirely her own. The healers were writing down everything she said. One of them had tears in his eyes, and I understood why. The healing beds couldn’t cure genetic disorders—not yet, not with this version—but they could heal injuries, regrow tissue, mend breaks that would have crippled a person for life. On a planet where a broken leg could mean starvation for a family, the beds were a miracle wrapped in technology.

Rachel was in the courtyard with a cluster of the governor’s guards, demonstrating energy projection. I could hear her from here—the particular sharp crack of concussive force hitting a target stone, followed by the enthusiastic shouts of men who had just watched a woman half their size pulverize a boulder the size of a cart. Rachel was grinning. I didn’t need to see her to know it. Rachel grinned the way other people breathed—constantly, especially when things were exploding.

“She’s going to break all their targets,” Alita observed, materializing beside me with the quiet precision of a woman whose warrior training made her footfalls optional. She slid her arm through mine and leaned into my side, warm and present and entirely unconcerned about protocol on an alien world. “I counted twelve stones. She’s on number eight.”

“They seem to have a lot of stones.”

“They’re a quarrying culture. Stones are their primary currency.” Alita paused. “Rachel is literally destroying their money.”

I closed my eyes. “Someone should probably tell her.”

“Already did,” Sammy said from behind us, her tone carrying the specific dryness that meant she had handled a situation and found it entertaining. “She said, and I’m quoting: ‘They offered them to me. I’m not going to insult them by not blasting their rocks.’ She has a point. Culturally, she’s correct. I checked.”

“You checked the cultural significance of stone-blasting?”

“Someone has to.” Sammy crossed her arms. Her blue eyes were sharp and warm and tracking everything in the courtyard simultaneously—the governor’s body language, the guards’ reactions, the civilians gathering at the gates to watch. “The governor is truthful, by the way. Everything he’s said since we arrived. No hedging, no calculated phrasing, no political maneuvering dressed up as hospitality. He believes. He actually believes, Matthew. I haven’t sensed deception from a single person in this compound.”

I looked at the governor, who had risen from his knees and was now speaking earnestly with Tiffany about the logistics of distributing healing beds to the outlying settlements. Tiffany had her data display open and was cross-referencing population density with transportation infrastructure, her fingers moving with the focused precision of a woman who expressed love through efficiency. She was asking him about road conditions between the capital and the northern provinces, and he was answering with the fervor of a man who had just discovered that the God of the universe also cared about infrastructure.

“How many settlements?” Tiffany asked.

“Forty-seven primary, over two hundred secondary,” the governor said. “The northern roads are poor in wet season. But your healing technology—if we place units at the regional centers, we can transport patients by cart within a day.”

“I can do better than carts,” Tiffany said. “Give me the coordinates and I’ll calculate optimal placement so no one is more than half a day’s walk from a bed.” She glanced at me. “We have enough units?”

“Adam?” I said.

Adam’s voice came through the communicator Tiffany wore at her wrist, clear and precise. “I can replicate forty-seven healing beds within six hours. Material availability is not a concern—solar energy collection is optimal at this orbital position. I recommend medical training teams accompany each deployment to ensure proper operation.”

The governor stared at Tiffany’s wrist as though God Himself had spoken through it. Given the circumstances, the analogy wasn’t entirely off.

“How?” the governor asked. “How can you make so many so quickly?”

“Because God prepared us for this,” I said. “And because we have very good engineers.”

Heather was inside the medical facility, hands pressed against the chest of a child who had been carried in an hour ago—a boy of maybe six, with a fever that the local healers couldn’t break and lungs that crackled when he breathed. I could feel her through the binding—the warm pulse of healing energy flowing from her palms, the sharp bite of transferred pain as the child’s infection moved into her body, the immediate flood of Matthew’s own healing washing the pain back out of her. The cycle took two minutes. The child sat up, looked at Heather with enormous eyes, and said something in his language that made the healers weep again.

Heather emerged from the facility a few minutes later, her red hair damp at the temples, her green eyes blazing with the fierce satisfaction of a woman who had just ripped a child away from death by the collar.

“He’ll be fine,” she said. “Lung infection, systemic. Already resolving. The bed can handle follow-up, but he needed the initial intervention manually.” She pressed her hand against my chest as she passed—the brief, deliberate contact that allowed my healing to flush the residual pain from her system. Her fingers curled against my shirt for a moment longer than strictly necessary, and the lingering was Heather being Heather: every touch an act of both care and claim.

In the courtyard, Sarah had positioned herself at the perimeter, maintaining a shimmering barrier that arced over the entire medical compound. It was a precaution, not a necessity—this planet showed no signs of hostility—but Sarah had developed the habit of shielding first and questioning later, and none of us objected. Her barriers were gossamer-thin at this low intensity, nearly invisible unless you caught the light at the right angle, and they gave her the steady, grounded look she always wore when she was protecting something: calm, alert, quietly immovable.

Jenny was sitting with a group of women in the shade of a wide-leafed tree, listening. She did this on every planet—found the women, sat with them, listened with the full weight of her empathic gift and the full warmth of her heart, and let them talk. The women were speaking quickly, gesturing, some of them crying, and Jenny was absorbing it all with the particular focus that meant she was processing not just their words but their feelings, the emotional landscape of an entire community laid bare through the stories of its women. She would tell me later what she’d learned. She always did. And what she told me always changed how I understood the planet we were serving.

Melissa stood near the entrance to the governor’s hall, still and quiet, her dark hair catching the amber light of this world’s sun. She wasn’t watching the activity. She was watching something I couldn’t see—the prophetic gift drawing her attention inward, or upward, or to whatever place the Heavenly Father stored the things He wanted her to know. She noticed me looking and gave me a small smile—the smile that said I’m here, I’m listening to Him, I’ll tell you when there’s something to tell.

Lydia was kneeling in the courtyard garden, shaping energy constructs for a group of children who had gathered around her like iron filings around a magnet. A golden butterfly drifted from her fingertips, traced a lazy spiral above the children’s heads, and landed on the nose of a girl who shrieked with delight. Lydia laughed—the warm, open laugh of a woman who found beauty in everything and made it visible for everyone else.

I stood in the middle of all of it—the healing and the teaching and the stone-blasting and the shielding and the listening and the beauty—and I prayed. Not formally. Not on my knees. Just a man standing in an alien courtyard, watching his family do the work of God on a world that had never heard of Jesus until three days ago, saying the only prayer that fit: Thank You. Thank You for this. Thank You for them.

We left missionaries and three healing beds behind when we departed. The governor wept. Sammy confirmed the tears were genuine. Tiffany had the deployment logistics mapped to the settlement level before we reached orbit.

In the shuttle back to the Enterprise, I briefed the council on the next three deployments. Adam had identified a cluster of inhabited planets within rift range—a medieval-technology world with fragmented kingdoms, a second world whose initial communications had been cautiously positive, and a third whose silence, Adam noted, could indicate either a pre-technological civilization or a deliberate refusal to respond.

“Matt,” I said, and he straightened in his seat across from me. He had the look he always had during briefings—alert, earnest, the pastoral warmth in his face tempered by the gravity of a man who understood that mission plans sometimes came apart. “I want you and Cindy on the medieval world. Construction materials, basic technology, the healing beds. Build alongside them. Show them what service looks like before we talk about the One we serve.”

Matt nodded. “Hands first, words later. I can do that.”

“You’re good at that,” Amy said from beside me. She said it simply, without embellishment, the way Amy said things that were both true and important—with a precision that left no room for doubt. Matt glanced at her, surprised, and a faint color rose in his face. He was still adjusting to Amy’s particular brand of directness: the woman who had spent five hundred years observing human behavior and who now told people exactly what she thought of them, warmly and without warning.

Cindy squeezed Matt’s hand. “We’re good at that,” she corrected, and the correction carried the full warmth of a wife who had no intention of being left out of any sentence that described her husband’s strengths.

“The cautiously positive world—that’s us?” Sarah asked.

“That’s us,” I confirmed. “Full council. Diplomatic approach. Jenny on point for emotional reads. Sammy watching for deception. Standard protective formation. We go down, we talk, we listen, we offer what we have.”

“And if they say no?” Rachel asked. She was already running her fingers along the edge of her seat—the restless habit that surfaced when she sensed action approaching.

“Then we respect the no and we leave. Same as always.”

Rachel nodded. She didn’t argue. Rachel never argued with the principle of nonviolence; she just wanted to be prepared for the moment the principle stopped being relevant.

Heather

The leader of the second planet met us at the edge of a wide stone plaza, flanked by soldiers in polished armor, and his smile was the most carefully constructed thing I had ever seen on a human face.

I knew smiles. I knew the smile Melissa gave when the prophetic gift was pressing at the edges of her voice. I knew Rachel’s grin, all teeth and challenge. I knew the particular softness that settled over Lydia’s mouth when she saw something beautiful. I knew Matthew’s smile—the real one, not the diplomatic one—the one that showed up when one of his wives said something that caught him off guard, the one that crinkled his eyes and dropped his shoulders and made him look ten years younger. I knew smiles the way a healer knew wounds: by type, by depth, by what they were hiding.

This leader’s smile was hiding everything.

“Welcome,” he said, through the translation system Amy had calibrated during our descent. “We are honored by your presence. Your technology—we have heard of it. The healing. The building. We wish to discuss terms of cooperation.”

Sammy’s hand found mine behind my back. Two taps. Our signal. He’s lying.

I kept my expression neutral. Beside me, Jenny was motionless, her eyes half-closed, her breathing measured—the posture she held when she was extending her empathic sensing beyond the immediate room. I could feel her concentration beside me, the steady expansion of awareness radiating outward from her like ripples in still water.

Jenny’s fingers twitched. Her brow creased. The crease deepened.

“Matthew,” Jenny murmured, barely audible. “It’s not just him. It’s the whole population. I’m reading—” She swallowed. “Fear. Everywhere. Not the fear of strangers visiting. The fear of people who’ve been told what to be afraid of. It goes deep. Generational. And underneath the fear—hatred. Coordinated. Directed. Someone has been teaching these people to hate outsiders for a very long time.”

Matthew’s jaw tightened. He didn’t look at Jenny. He kept his eyes on the leader and extended his hand in greeting, because Matthew was the kind of man who shook the hand of a liar and smiled back, not because he was foolish, but because he believed that the God who sent him to this plaza was bigger than whatever was waiting behind the polished armor and the constructed smile.

I respected it. I didn’t share it, not entirely—the healer in me saw the wound before the faith in me saw the cure. But I respected it.

They took us inside. The hall was impressive—vaulted ceilings, carved stone, light filtering through windows of colored glass that painted the floor in fragments of red and gold. It was designed to intimidate, and it did a reasonable job, except that the people I came with could not be intimidated by architecture. Alita walked through the hall the way she walked through everything—with the loose, balanced gait of a warrior who had assessed every possible threat within three seconds and dismissed most of them as manageable. Rachel’s eyes were tracking the soldiers along the walls. Sarah’s shield shimmered faintly at her fingertips, ready to deploy.

Tiffany was watching the exits. Counting them. I could see her doing it—the methodical sweep of her eyes, the slight movement of her lips as she cataloged distances and angles. Tiffany was not a worrier. She was a planner. The distinction mattered.

The leader seated us at a long table and began a speech about mutual benefit and shared prosperity, and Sammy’s hand found mine again. Two taps. Again. And again. The man had not stopped lying since we entered the building.

Jenny pressed closer to me. “The soldiers along the wall,” she whispered. “They’re afraid too. But their fear is different. It’s the fear of people who’ve been given orders and know what happens if they fail.”

I looked at Matthew. He was listening to the leader with the expression of careful attention he wore in diplomatic settings—the polite, engaged focus of a man who was simultaneously praying for wisdom and calculating how quickly he could open a rift if this went wrong.

It went wrong.

The first shot came from behind the colored glass, a pulse of concentrated energy that punched through the window and struck the wall six inches from Melissa’s head. Melissa flinched but didn’t scream. She never screamed. She pressed herself flat against the floor with the economical motion of a woman whose reflexes had been trained into her body by months of practice, and Alita was already over her, blade in hand, the blue-white energy humming along its edge.

Sarah’s shield erupted. It was instinct now—not the tentative, shaking barriers of the early months but a solid dome of shimmering energy that covered the entire table in a heartbeat. The second shot hit the barrier and splashed. The third hit it and splashed. The fourth, fifth, sixth—a sustained barrage from multiple angles, the soldiers along the walls lifting weapons that had been hidden beneath their ceremonial cloaks, and firing into the dome with the coordinated precision of men who had rehearsed this.

“Ambush,” Alita said. Her voice was flat and focused, the battle mode engaged, and the warmth she carried in every other moment locked away behind the warrior. “Prepared positions. They knew we were coming.”

A blast struck Sarah’s shield from a new angle—above, through a gap in the ceiling that hadn’t been visible from the floor. The shield buckled. Sarah gritted her teeth and poured more energy into it, her arms extended, her face rigid with concentration. The strain was visible—her muscles trembling, her breath coming in sharp bursts, the barrier thinning at the edges as the barrage intensified.

“They’re cycling frequencies,” Amy said. She was crouched beside Matthew, her brilliant mind processing the attack patterns with the speed of five centuries of accumulated analysis. “Three distinct weapons signatures. Sarah’s shield is absorbing the first and second frequencies, but the third is partially penetrating.”

A shot from the third frequency punched through Sarah’s barrier. Tiffany saw it coming and threw herself sideways, trying to open a rift between the blast and its target. The rift flickered—a shimmering oval that wavered and collapsed before it fully formed—and the shot caught Tiffany in the shoulder. She spun and hit the floor. I was on her in two seconds, hands pressed against the wound, healing energy surging from my palms. The burn was deep—muscle and tissue scorched by an energy weapon designed to defeat protective technology.

“Tiffany, stay down,” I said. “Don’t try another rift. Let me work.”

“I almost had it,” Tiffany said through her teeth. Her face was white with pain, but her eyes were focused, already analyzing what had gone wrong with the rift. “Half a second more and I would have redirected it. My coordinates were right. The destabilization came from their weapons interference.”

Even wounded, even in pain, Tiffany was precise. The precision was how she held herself together.

A second blast penetrated Sarah’s barrier at the thinning edge. Lydia twisted away, but the shot clipped her hip—a glancing hit that tore through the outer layer of her protective jewelry and left an angry red burn across her skin. She cried out, and the cry was brief and sharp and immediately followed by Lydia doing what Lydia always did when she was hurt: reaching for beauty. Golden light pulsed from her hands, involuntary, her gift responding to pain with creation.

Rachel was on the offensive. She stood inside Sarah’s dome with both hands extended, channeling concussive force through the barrier in controlled bursts that knocked the nearest soldiers off their feet. She was growling under her breath—not rage, but the focused intensity of a woman who had been told nonviolence and was interpreting the instruction as nonlethal with considerable creativity.

Matthew raised his hand. I saw the rift begin to form—his rift, the one that always shook at the edges, the one held together by willpower and faith rather than Tiffany’s precision—and a blast caught him in the chest. The protective jewelry absorbed most of it, but the third-frequency component punched through, and Matthew staggered. He caught himself on the table. Blood appeared at the corner of his mouth.

“Matthew!” I released Tiffany—her wound was stabilized, healing but not yet finished—and lunged for him. My hands found his chest. The damage was internal—bruised organs, stressed tissue, the beginning of a hemorrhage that my healing could stop if I got to it fast enough. The pain hit me like a hammer as the transfer mechanism kicked in, his injury becoming mine, and I pressed my teeth together and rode it out and poured healing into him until the bleeding stopped and the tissue knitted and the pain ebbed to a dull ache that I could manage.

He healed me back. His hand on my arm, the warm surge of reciprocal healing, the pain draining out of my body. Two minutes. Both of us whole.

“Thank you,” he murmured.

“Stop getting shot,” I said.

Sarah screamed. Not in pain. In effort. Her shield was cracking under the sustained assault, fractures spreading through the barrier like ice on glass, and she was holding it together through pure force of will. Her whole body was shaking. Jenny and Sammy were pressed against her on either side, their hands on her shoulders, feeding their energy into her as best they could, and it wasn’t enough.

A rift opened behind us.

Not Matthew’s rift. Not the trembling, faith-held shimmer I knew as well as my own heartbeat. This rift was clean. Stable. The edges didn’t waver. The energy was so steady it looked solid—a doorway cut into the air with the precision of a surgical instrument. I had never seen a rift this controlled, this powerful, this certain of itself.

A man stepped through.

Caucasian. Approximately thirty. Athletic build, brownish-blonde hair. He moved with the quiet economy of someone who had done this before—many times, in many places, and who did not need to announce himself. He looked at Sarah’s cracking shield. He looked at the weapons fire pouring through the gaps. He raised one hand.

The weapons stopped.

Not one at a time. All of them. Simultaneously. Every soldier in the hall found the weapon in his hands suddenly, quietly, permanently inert—the energy signatures dying as though someone had reached into each one and switched it off. The barrage ended in a silence so complete I could hear Tiffany breathing through her pain on the floor behind me.

The man crossed the room. He knelt beside Tiffany. His hands found her shoulder, covering my half-completed healing, and I felt—through the binding, through the residual connection of my healing energy still active in Tiffany’s tissue—something I had never felt before. Healing that operated on a completely different level from mine. Not just tissue repair. Not just closing wounds and mending breaks. Something deeper, more thorough, more complete—as though the healing itself understood the architecture of the body in ways my gift had not yet learned.

Tiffany’s wound closed. Not gradually. Completely. She gasped, and the gasp was the sound of a woman experiencing the total absence of pain in the same instant she had been expecting another wave of it.

The man rose. He moved to Lydia, took her hand gently, and the burn on her hip vanished as though it had never existed. Lydia’s eyes went wide. Her golden constructs, still drifting involuntarily from her fingers, shifted in his presence—brightening, sharpening, as if his healing had not only repaired her body but energized her gift.

He walked to Sarah. She was on her knees now, her shield dissolved, her body trembling with the exhaustion of holding a dome against a sustained military assault. The man placed both hands on her shoulders. Sarah straightened. Color flooded back into her face. The exhaustion drained out of her like water from a tipped glass, and in its place was something I could only describe as reinforcement—not just restored energy but more energy, a deepening of her gift that I could feel through the binding like a note dropping an octave.

Then he turned to Matthew.

His hands found Matthew’s chest—the exact place where the blast had penetrated, the exact tissue I had healed two minutes ago. I watched the healing flow. It was not correcting my work—my healing had been sufficient. It was going deeper, finding micro-fractures in the protective jewelry, reinforcing the tissue at a cellular level, and doing something I did not have a name for: leaving behind a strengthening that would make the healed area more resilient than it had been before the injury.

Matthew met the man’s eyes. “Who are you?”

The man looked at him. His eyes were full—not with tears, not yet, but with something vast and aching that I recognized because I had seen it once before, in the eyes of the man who had knelt beside Matt’s dying body and poured healing alongside us without saying a word. But this was a different man. The one who had healed Matt had been larger, darker-haired, built like a fortress. This man was leaner, quieter, carrying himself with the particular stillness of someone who had learned to be alone.

He didn’t answer Matthew’s question. He turned. He walked toward the rift. And at the threshold, he paused and looked back—not at Matthew, not at me, but at all of us. The look was brief and full and aching, the look of a man who wanted more than anything to stay and who could not, for reasons that were written in the set of his shoulders and the careful distance he kept from everyone he had just healed.

His eyes were wet.

He stepped through the rift. It closed behind him with a whisper of energy that left the air humming, and then he was gone.

Alita

The soldiers hadn’t moved.

I was watching them the way I watched everything in combat—completely, with the part of my mind that never stopped evaluating threat levels even when the immediate danger had been neutralized. They stood frozen, weapons dangling uselessly in their hands, and I understood their paralysis: they had just watched a man walk through a hole in the air, disarm their entire military force without touching any of them, heal four wounded people with his bare hands, and leave without speaking a word. Their worldview was in ruins on the floor alongside their operational capacity.

The leader was still at the head of the table. His carefully constructed smile was gone, replaced by the raw, white-faced terror of a man who had built an ambush around the assumption that his guests were vulnerable, and who had just learned exactly how wrong that assumption was.

I sheathed my energy blade. The blue-white glow faded from my hand, and I felt the familiar shift from battle mode to the rest of who I was—the warrior’s focus giving way to the warmth and the anger and the overwhelming impulse to put my arms around Tiffany and Lydia and hold them both until the last tremor of the attack had passed through their bodies.

I hugged Tiffany first. She was still on the floor, flexing her healed shoulder with the methodical attention of a woman verifying that a repair met specifications. She looked up at me as I knelt beside her.

“The rift almost worked,” she said. “Another half second and I could have deflected the shot into empty space. The weapons interference collapsed the field coherence, but I think I can compensate for that with a different approach to the initial formation. If I start the rift wider and then narrow the aperture—”

“Tiffany.” I put my arms around her. She stopped talking. She let me hold her, and after a moment, her arms came up around me, and the precision and the analysis and the compensatory calculations went quiet, and she was just a woman who had been shot and healed by a stranger and who was allowing herself three seconds of being held before she went back to solving the problem.

“Three seconds,” I said.

“That’s enough,” Tiffany said. But she held on for five.

Matthew was addressing the leader. His voice was steady, carrying the particular authority that surfaced when he was angry and choosing, deliberately, not to let the anger lead. “Your ambush failed. Your weapons are disabled. My people are unharmed. We came here to offer healing and the gospel of Jesus Christ, and you responded with violence.”

The leader said nothing. His soldiers said nothing. The hall was silent with the specific silence of people who had exhausted their options and were waiting to discover what the consequences would be.

“We’re leaving,” Matthew said. “We’ll leave missionaries behind, and healing technology, for anyone in your population who wants them. The offer stands. The gospel stands. What you do with both is between you and God.”

He turned. He walked toward the entrance. The ten of us followed, because when Matthew walked away from a fight he had every right to escalate, we followed with a pride so fierce it was almost indistinguishable from worship.

In the shuttle on the way back to the Enterprise, Matthew sat with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, and prayed. I sat beside him with my hand on his back, feeling the rise and fall of his breathing, and I let him pray without interrupting because some prayers needed space to find their shape.

“The man,” Amy said. She was seated across from us, her posture straight, her eyes carrying the focused intensity of a mind processing multiple streams of analysis simultaneously. “His rift was unlike anything in my database. The stability exceeded Matthew’s by a factor I can’t calculate precisely without more data, but the estimate is significant. His healing operated on principles I’ve never observed—not just tissue repair but systemic reinforcement at the cellular level. And the way he disarmed those soldiers—a single pulse of directed energy that selectively neutralized every weapon in the room without affecting anything else. The precision required for that is extraordinary.”

“He didn’t speak,” Rachel said. She was leaning forward, her blue eyes intense, her body still humming with the energy of combat barely concluded. “Didn’t say a word. Just came, healed everyone, shut down the whole attack, and left.”

“He was crying,” Lydia said softly. She was examining the place on her hip where the burn had been, her fingers tracing skin that was now perfectly smooth. “When he looked back at us. His eyes were full.”

“The prophecy,” Matthew said. He lifted his face from his hands. His eyes were red, but his voice was clear. “Queen Esther’s prophecy named shepherds. David—the lone shepherd who walks alone with God. We’ve seen the man who healed Matt—large, long-haired, built like a wall. That fits the description of Samson. But this man today was different. Leaner. Different build. Different energy. If the prophecy is accurate—and Sammy, has anything Queen Esther has told us ever been less than truthful?”

“Nothing,” Sammy said. “Not once.”

“Then this could be David. The lone shepherd. Walking alone, appearing when we need him, leaving before we can thank him.”

The shuttle was quiet. I thought about the man’s face. The ache in his eyes. The deliberate distance. He had healed Tiffany with a tenderness that suggested he knew her name, and he had walked away from all of us with the rigid posture of someone resisting a gravitational pull.

“He wasn’t just helping,” I said. Everyone looked at me. “He was carrying something. The way he held himself—the shoulders, the posture, the way he kept distance from us even while he was healing us. That’s not a man who doesn’t care. That’s a man who cares so much he’s afraid to be close. I know what that looks like.” I paused. “I used to look like that. Before Matthew. Before all of you. When I was alone and I thought alone was all I’d ever be.”

Matthew’s hand found mine. He squeezed. The squeeze said: you’re not alone. You haven’t been for months. And neither will he be, when God is ready.

Cindy

The village elder handed Matt a wooden mallet like he was conferring a knighthood, and Matt accepted it with the same gravity he would have given a scepter, which made the elder beam and made me bite my tongue to keep from laughing.

The medieval planet—the council had started calling them by informal names based on their characteristics, and this one was “the Kingdom” until someone thought of something better—was exactly what Adam’s preliminary scans had suggested: a civilization that had developed along roughly the same trajectory as Earth’s medieval period, complete with stone buildings, agricultural economies, feudal governance, and a charming absence of plumbing that I chose not to think about too carefully. The people were human. The planet was temperate. The gravity was close enough to Earth’s that my knees didn’t ache, which was more than I could say for the last three deployments.

Matt was in his element. He had stripped off his outer jacket within minutes of arrival, rolled up his sleeves, and joined a group of men who were building a granary at the edge of the village. The men had stared at him—this stranger who had appeared from the sky in a small ship and who spoke their language through a device none of them understood—and Matt had responded by picking up the nearest heavy stone and carrying it to the foundation, which was the universal language of I’m here to work, not to talk about working.

Within an hour, they were teaching him their construction techniques. Within two hours, he was laughing with them. Within three, a group of children had attached themselves to his legs and were hanging off his arms while he pretended to be unable to shake them loose, which produced a level of shrieking delight that could probably be heard from orbit.

I watched my husband with the children and felt something expand in my chest—the particular warmth that arrived when Matt did the thing that Matt was best at, which was being present. Not impressive. Not powerful. Just there, fully, with his whole self, building a granary with strangers and letting their children climb on him and treating the work of his hands as an act of worship so natural it required no explanation.

I had my own work. The village women were curious about me—a woman in strange clothing who carried herself with the physical confidence of a trained fighter and who smiled too easily for anyone’s comfort. The elder’s wife, a sturdy woman with gray-streaked hair and kind eyes, had appointed herself my guide and was showing me the village with the proprietorial pride of a woman who had helped build everything in it and wanted credit for every beam.

“This is the well,” she said through the translator, pointing to a stone structure at the center of the village. “We dug it four years ago. Before that, we carried water from the river.”

“Four years,” I said. “That’s impressive.”

“My husband said it would take six. I told him it would take two. We compromised.” She smiled. “He compromised.”

I laughed. She laughed. And the laughter was the bridge, the way laughter always was—two women from worlds separated by technology and centuries and the cold vacuum of space, standing beside a well and finding common ground in the universal experience of husbands who underestimated their wives.

I helped with the evening meal. The women showed me how they ground grain between flat stones, how they baked bread in clay ovens heated with wood, how they seasoned the stew with herbs I didn’t recognize but which smelled like something between rosemary and honey. I worked alongside them, hands dusty with flour, and I talked. Not about God—not yet. Matt had taught me that. You don’t start with the sermon. You start with the bread. You start with the work and the laughter and the simple act of feeding people, and the sermon comes later, when they trust you enough to listen.

One of the women asked me about my husband. She gestured toward Matt, who was now sitting cross-legged on the ground with a child on each knee, telling a story through animated gestures that crossed every language barrier known to man.

“He is good,” the woman said. It wasn’t a question. It was an observation made by a woman who had spent her life evaluating men by what they did rather than what they said.

“He is,” I said. “He almost died, once. For people he’d barely met. Because God asked him to, and he said yes.”

The women looked at Matt. The children were climbing on him again. He was letting them.

“A man who dies for strangers,” the elder’s wife said slowly, “and lives to build granaries. Your God must love him very much.”

“He loves all of us that much,” I said. “That’s the part that’s hard to believe. But it’s true.”

The woman studied me. She had the eyes of someone who had lived long enough to recognize truth when it stood in front of her, and she was deciding whether to reach for it or let it pass.

She reached.

“Tell me more,” she said. “About your God.”

I sat beside her on the low stone wall and began.

Jenny

The emotional residue of the ambush followed me back to the Enterprise like a scent I couldn’t wash off.

I stood in the corridor outside the medical bay, my hands flat against the wall, breathing in the deliberate rhythm that Heather had taught me during the months of captivity—three counts in, four counts out, steady, measured, the breathing of a woman who was learning to manage a gift that sometimes felt like standing in the middle of a hurricane with no walls. My empathic sensing was fully operational, fully restored, and on a day like today, fully overwhelming.

I had felt the entire population.

Not individuals. Not the specific emotional signatures I was accustomed to reading in a room full of people. The entire population. Millions of people, spread across a continent, all carrying the same coordinated fear and hatred, all vibrating at the same terrible frequency, like a single enormous instrument tuned to a note of despair. I had felt it the moment we entered the atmosphere. It had hit me like a wall of sound, and I had nearly staggered, and I had held myself steady because Jenny holding herself steady was what this family needed from me, and I would not fall apart when they needed me standing.

But God, it had been heavy.

“Jenny.” Sammy’s voice, behind me. Her hand on my shoulder. “You’re still carrying it.”

“I can feel it in my chest,” I said. “Millions of people, Sammy. All of them afraid. All of them hating. Not because they chose to—because someone taught them. Someone shaped that fear and pointed it at outsiders and maintained it for generations. And underneath all of it, buried under layers and layers of conditioned hatred, there were people who wanted something else. I could feel them. Little sparks of something different—hope, maybe. Curiosity. The desire to reach out and not knowing how.”

Sammy squeezed my shoulder. Her blue eyes were steady and sharp and carrying the particular directness that made Sammy the person I needed most in moments like this—the person who never lied, not to others and not to me, and who could look at something ugly and name it without flinching.

“The leader was lying from the first sentence,” Sammy said. “Every word. He welcomed us so he could destroy us. The soldiers were telling the truth about one thing only—their fear. They were genuinely terrified of failing whoever gave them orders. The terror was more real than the hatred.”

“And the man who came?” I asked. “The one who healed everyone?”

Sammy was quiet for a moment. She turned her head, the way she did when she was accessing a reading that had been particularly strong, replaying it in her memory like a recording.

“No deception,” she said. “Not a trace. Not in anything he did. His intent was exactly what it appeared to be: he came to help. He healed because healing was what was needed. And he left because—” She paused. “I don’t know why he left. There was no dishonesty in the leaving. But there was pain in it. Enormous pain. Like he was walking away from something he wanted more than anything to walk toward.”

“I felt him,” I said quietly. “When he was in the room. I felt his emotional signature.”

Sammy waited.

“Love,” I said. “Overwhelming, bottomless, aching love. The kind that comes from years of carrying other people without being carried yourself. He loves us, Sammy. Not in the abstract. Not as a mission or a duty. He loves us. Personally. Like he knows us. Like he’s been watching us and praying for us and waiting for the moment he could step into that room and help.” I pressed my hands harder against the wall. “And the loneliness. Years of it. The specific loneliness of a person who has God but no people. He walks alone. He’s been walking alone for a long time. And the loneliness hasn’t killed his love—it’s deepened it. The longer he’s alone, the more he loves. It’s beautiful and terrible and it makes me want to find him and tell him he doesn’t have to be alone anymore.”

Sammy was quiet. Then: “That matches what I read. Every piece of it.”

Footsteps. Amy appeared at the end of the corridor, moving with the purposeful stride that meant she had data to share and no intention of waiting until a more convenient time.

“There was something else during the ambush,” Amy said. “I’ve been analyzing sensor logs. A small technological device appeared near Tiffany’s protective jewelry approximately two seconds before the third-frequency blast struck her. It emitted a reinforcing pulse—brief, highly targeted, precisely calibrated to counteract the penetrating frequency. The pulse held for approximately four seconds, then the device self-destructed. I recovered fragments.” She held up a small container. Inside it, I could see tiny shards of material that caught the corridor light with an iridescent shimmer. “The technology is impossibly advanced. More advanced than anything in my database. More advanced than the Enterprise’s own systems.”

“Someone placed a device near Tiffany before the attack?” I said.

“Placed or projected. I can’t determine which. The device simply appeared, functioned, and destroyed itself. It’s the same pattern as the device that appeared during the battle at Zalem—identical energy signature, identical self-destruct mechanism.”

I closed my eyes. I reached backward in my memory to the battle, to the chaos of weapons fire and Sarah’s cracking shield and the mysterious man stepping through his impossible rift. And I found it—a presence I had noticed in the storm of emotion and then lost in the overwhelming wave of the healer’s arrival. A third presence. Not Matthew. Not Matt. Not the man who had stepped through the rift. Someone else.

Watching. Caring. Distant.

“There’s a third one,” I said. My eyes opened. “The man who healed us—that’s one. The man who healed Matt at the battle—Samson, we think—that’s two. But the device, the technology. Someone else was there. Someone I couldn’t get a clear read on because the healer’s signature was so strong it flooded everything. But he was there. Different emotional signature. Closer to an engineer’s mind than a warrior’s—focused, precise, deeply caring. Not lonely the way the healer was lonely. More—” I searched for the word. “Purposeful. Like a man who expresses love through building rather than through presence.”

Amy processed this. “Queen Esther’s prophecy named a shepherd whose gifts involve uniting spiritual power with technology. If someone is placing impossibly advanced devices near our protective equipment during combat—”

“Then we have at least three shepherds out there,” Sammy finished. “The healer who came today. Samson, who healed Matt. And a technologist who keeps saving us with devices we can’t even identify.”

The corridor hummed with the Enterprise’s systems. Three shepherds, watching from the edges. Appearing when we needed them. Leaving before we could reach them. And God, somewhere above it all, orchestrating something so much larger than any of us could see.

“We pray,” I said. “For all of them. Every night. Until they come home.”

Sammy nodded. Amy was already moving toward the lab to analyze the fragments, her mind working at the speed it always worked—brilliantly, relentlessly, with the warm precision of a woman who had spent five centuries solving problems for people she loved.

Sammy

The transmission from Matt came through during the council debrief, and I was the one who caught the important part.

Matt’s report was characteristically warm and brief: the medieval planet was receptive, the people were kind, the construction was going well, and Cindy had won over the village women with a combination of charm, flour-dusted competence, and the particular gift she had for making people feel seen. He spoke the way he always spoke in reports—plainly, without embellishment, focusing on what mattered and trusting us to fill in the emotional weight ourselves.

“There is one concern,” Matt said. The warmth in his voice thinned. “The local governor. He oversees the region. He visited the village today. Said all the right things about welcoming us, cooperating with our mission, wanting the healing beds for his people. Cindy and I have been here one day, and the village elders already don’t trust him. That tells me something.”

Matthew leaned forward. “Did he seem dishonest to you?”

“I’m not Sammy,” Matt said with the faint humor of a man stating a limitation he wished he didn’t have. “I can’t tell if a man is lying by looking at him. But something about the way he watched the healing beds—he wasn’t looking at them like a leader who wants to help his people. He was looking at them like a man evaluating an asset.”

I leaned into the transmission feed. “Matt, next time you speak with him, I need you to relay a conversation to me live. I can read him through the communicator. The bandwidth is thin—I won’t get the full picture I’d get in person—but I can tell you if he’s lying.”

“Can you do that?” Matt sounded genuinely surprised. “From orbit?”

“I’ve been doing it from farther than that,” I said. It was true. My gift had been extending its range since the early missions—from individuals in the same room, to crowds at a distance, to leaders speaking through communication channels. The truth didn’t care about physical proximity. Lies sounded the same whether you were standing in front of them or listening through a relay on the other side of a planet.

Two hours later, Matt called back. The governor was visiting again. Cindy was making conversation, keeping the man talking, her instincts sharp enough to ask the questions that would generate the most useful data.

I closed my eyes and listened.

The governor spoke about the healing beds. Every sentence was saturated. Not with the careful hedging of a diplomat choosing words strategically—that was ordinary, and I could navigate it. This was something different. The man was enjoying the deception. Each false statement carried an undertone of pleasure, the specific satisfaction of a person who had learned to weaponize trust and who found the process gratifying.

I opened my eyes. The council was watching me.

“He didn’t just lie,” I said. My voice was flat. It was the flatness that arrived when I encountered something that offended the deepest part of my gift, the part that existed not just to detect truth but to honor it. “He enjoyed lying. The way a craftsman enjoys using a tool he’s mastered. Every word was calculated to build trust so he can exploit it. He doesn’t want the healing beds for his people. He wants them because controlling the beds means controlling who lives and who dies, and that’s power, and power is what he actually worships.”

The room was still.

“Matt,” Matthew said into the communicator. “Pull back. Don’t give him the beds yet. Stay with the village, stay with the people, but keep the governor at arm’s length until we can work out a distribution plan that puts the technology directly in the hands of the communities, not his.”

“Understood,” Matt said. His voice carried the particular gravity of a man who had just learned that the mission was more complicated than a granary and a stack of healing beds. “Cindy’s got a read on him too. She says she’s seen men like this before. Intelligence work taught her to recognize them.”

“Trust her instincts,” Matthew said. “And trust yours. We’ll be in contact.”

He cut the transmission and sat back. Around the briefing table, the council was processing. Heather’s hands were clenched—the healer’s response to learning that someone wanted to use healing as a weapon of control. Jenny was quiet, her eyes distant, still processing the emotional landscape of an entire planet. Sarah was already working through the logistics of a community-based distribution plan that would bypass the governor entirely. Alita’s jaw was set—the warrior assessing a new kind of threat.

Tiffany was studying the tactical display. “If we place the beds in the villages directly and assign missionaries to each location, the governor loses leverage. But we need to anticipate the possibility that he’ll use military force to seize them. Do we have enough personnel?”

“Matt’s ship has the Battle Angels,” Amy said. “Adam can deploy a small contingent as security for each healing station. The Battle Angels aren’t affected by dampening fields, and their presence would deter most military action without requiring us to use force.”

“Do it,” Matthew said. He rubbed his eyes. The day had delivered a joyful planet, a deceitful ambush, a mysterious healer, and a corrupt governor, and the weight of all of it was visible in the set of his shoulders. Rachel, sitting beside him, noticed. She put her hand on his arm—the firm, grounding touch of a woman who showed love the way she fought: directly, without hesitation, all in.

“Hey,” Rachel said. “We’ve got this.”

Matthew looked at her. His eyes softened. “Yeah,” he said. “We do.”

Adam contacted us an hour later with something unexpected.

The council was still in the briefing room, working through the medieval planet strategy, when Adam’s voice cut through the discussion with the particular modulation he used when reporting anomalous data: calm, precise, and carrying a faint undercurrent of something that, in a more developed AI, might have been curiosity.

“I’m detecting a faint energy signature,” Adam said. “Distant. In unexplored space, well beyond our current operational range. The signature does not match any known species, any Nephilim—” He caught himself on the word, which we all used provisionally, Matthew’s hypothesis still unconfirmed. “Any of the unknown fleet vessels, or any natural phenomenon in my database.”

“How faint?” Amy asked.

“Barely detectable. I would have dismissed it as sensor noise, but the pattern is too consistent. It reads as a directed signal rather than a natural emission. And Amy—” The pause was uncharacteristic. “The energy profile is similar to the Enterprise’s own systems. Similar, but not identical. As though something in that region of space was built by a technology base that shares a common origin with our ship.”

The briefing room went quiet. Amy’s face was still, her brilliant eyes processing the implication at a speed the rest of us could only approximate.

“Log it,” Amy said. “Full spectrum analysis. Track the bearing. If it shifts or strengthens, notify me immediately.”

“Already logging,” Adam confirmed.

Amy turned to Matthew. Her expression was careful, which meant something was bothering her that she didn’t yet have enough data to articulate.

“Something built with technology related to the Enterprise,” she said. “In unexplored space. I don’t know what it means. But it means something.”

Matthew nodded. He filed it the way he filed everything—with the calm discipline of a man who had learned that God’s plan revealed itself on God’s timetable, and that the correct response to an unanswered question was faith, patience, and a good filing system.

“We’ll deal with it when we know more,” he said. “Right now, we have two planets that need us and a third we need to go back to.”

He was right. The welcoming planet needed continued support. The medieval planet needed protection from its own governor. And the hostile planet—the one that had tried to kill us—still had people on it. People Jenny had felt reaching through the hatred, hoping for something better.

Lydia had asked to go back. That was the thing about Lydia that people underestimated: beneath the artistry and the gentle spirit was a woman who, when she saw something broken, could not leave it unrepaired. She had seen something on that planet, she said, and she wanted to go back.

Matthew said yes. He always said yes to Lydia, because Lydia never asked for things that weren’t worth saying yes to.

Melissa

The girl was small and fearless and carrying a withered flower in both hands like it was the most important thing in the world.

We had returned to the hostile planet the next day—a small team, deliberately non-threatening. Lydia, myself, Jenny, Heather, and a contingent of missionaries. No weapons display. No shields. Just women with open hands and the gospel in their hearts and a stubbornness about leaving that the planet’s leaders had not anticipated.

The reception was hostile but not violent. The soldiers whose weapons had been disabled watched us from a distance with the wary attention of men who had learned, in a single devastating demonstration, that the calculus of force was not in their favor. The civilians were different. They watched too, but their watching was not the watching of soldiers. It was the watching of people who had been told all their lives that outsiders were dangerous and who were now confronted with women who had been ambushed, shot, and nearly killed, and who had come back the next morning to help.

Lydia set up near the edge of the marketplace, in a spot where the afternoon light fell in long amber shafts through the gaps between buildings. She sat on the ground with her legs crossed and her hands open, and she began to create. Energy constructs drifted from her fingers—small, beautiful, luminous things. A bird with golden wings that perched on a market stall and preened. A fish that swam through the air above a woman’s head. A flower that bloomed in her palm, petal by petal, glowing softly in the afternoon light.

The marketplace was not friendly. But it was curious. And curiosity was Lydia’s battlefield.

The girl appeared from behind a stone pillar. She was approximately eight years old, thin, wearing a rough dress that had been mended many times, her feet bare on the warm stone. She walked directly to Lydia with the fearless purpose of a child who had not yet learned that strangers should be avoided, and she reached out her hand and touched the golden butterfly that had settled on Lydia’s wrist.

The butterfly pulsed. The girl’s eyes went wide. She laughed—a high, bright sound that cut through the marketplace’s ambient hostility like a struck bell—and the laughter was so genuine, so completely free of the fear that saturated every adult around her, that I felt something move in my chest. The prophetic gift stirred. Not with a vision, not with words, but with the quiet pressure that meant God was drawing my attention to something He wanted me to see.

I watched.

A woman appeared from the crowd—the girl’s mother, her face tight with the particular terror of a parent whose child has walked into a situation the parent cannot control. She grabbed the girl’s arm and pulled her back, shooting Lydia a look that mixed fear and rage and something else, something that flickered beneath both—a curiosity that the fear was trying to bury.

The girl protested. Of course she protested. She was eight years old and she had just touched a butterfly made of light and the light had pulsed against her fingers, and no amount of parental fear was going to erase that.

Lydia didn’t chase them. She didn’t call after them. She watched the girl being pulled away and her face held the specific expression I had come to know as Lydia’s version of prayer: a stillness that was not passive but attentive, a waiting that was not resignation but faith. She believed the girl would come back. She believed it because Lydia understood something about beauty that the rest of us were still learning: that beauty, once touched, leaves a mark. And marks have a way of leading people home.

The next morning, the girl returned.

She came alone this time, moving through the marketplace with the determined stealth of a child who had waited for her mother to be occupied and then bolted. In her hands she carried a flower—a real one, plucked from somewhere in the city’s sparse vegetation. It was wilted, its petals brown and curling, the stem bent where she’d gripped it too tightly. She held it out to Lydia the way a child holds out a gift she is not sure will be accepted—with hope so raw it was almost painful to witness.

Lydia took the withered flower. She held it in both hands. She looked at it the way she looked at everything that moved her—with the full attention of a woman who saw beauty not in what things were but in what they could become.

Then she created.

The energy construct formed in her palms, surrounding the wilted flower, and the construct was the flower—but alive. A perfect replica in golden light, every petal full and open and glowing with the warm luminescence of Lydia’s gift. It was the flower the girl had intended to give: the flower before the wilting, the flower as it existed in the girl’s imagination, the beautiful thing she had seen and wanted to share and couldn’t preserve.

Lydia placed the glowing flower in the girl’s hands.

The girl stared at it. Her mouth opened. She looked at Lydia, and her eyes were full of something so large and so simple that it did not need a name, because the name was written on every child’s face who had ever been given something beautiful by someone who understood what beauty meant.

The girl turned and ran.

She ran through the marketplace. She ran through the crowd of watching, wary, hostile adults. She ran with the glowing flower held above her head, trailing golden light through the morning air, and the light touched the faces of the people she passed, and for one moment—just one—the hatred and the fear parted like curtains, and underneath was something human and hungry and reaching.

An elderly woman at a market stall saw the flower. She was old—bent, scarred, wearing the expressions of a lifetime lived under the weight of fear and propaganda. She looked at the glowing flower in the child’s hands, and she began to weep.

The weeping was quiet. It was not the weeping of grief or pain. It was the weeping of recognition—the particular tears that come when something inside you that has been buried for a very long time is suddenly, unexpectedly, unearthed. The old woman wept, and the girl stopped running, and she looked at the old woman with the frank curiosity of a child who does not understand adult tears but knows they are important.

The girl held out the flower. The old woman touched it. The golden light pulsed against her weathered fingers, and the weeping deepened, and Jenny, standing beside me, closed her eyes and whispered: “She’s remembering. She’s remembering what it was like before the fear.”

The prophetic gift pressed. Not a vision. Not words. A certainty—the deep, unshakeable certainty that arrives when the Heavenly Father allows you to see, for one moment, the thread He is weaving through a situation that looks, from every human angle, hopeless. This planet was not lost. The hatred was not permanent. The fear was a cage, not a soul. And the key to the cage was a child with a glowing flower, running through a hostile marketplace, leaving light behind her like a trail.

I turned to Heather, who stood beside me with her arms crossed and her green eyes blazing with something that was not anger and not grief but the fierce, protective love that Heather carried for anyone who was hurting, anywhere, for any reason.

“We’re staying,” Heather said. Not a question. A declaration.

“We’re staying,” I agreed.

Lydia was still sitting on the ground. The girl had circled back to her, and now they sat together, the child cross-legged beside the woman who made light, and Lydia was shaping a new construct—a small golden bird that hopped along the ground between them, leaving luminous footprints in the dust. The girl was giggling. Lydia was smiling. Around them, the marketplace watched, and the watching was changing, degree by painful degree, from hostility to something that was not yet trust but was no longer its opposite.

I closed my eyes. The prayer came without effort, the way prayer always came when the prophetic gift was alive in me—not as words I composed but as a current I stepped into, a conversation already in progress between my heart and the God who held it.

Father, I see what You’re doing. The flower, the child, the old woman crying. You’re using beauty to open a door that violence nailed shut. I don’t know how long it will take. I don’t know how many flowers, how many children, how many tears. But I see the thread. And I trust You with it.

I opened my eyes. The sun was warm. The marketplace hummed with the noise of a population slowly, uncertainly, beginning to look at us without reaching for weapons.

Jenny put her arm around me. “You felt something,” she said. Not a question. Jenny could feel what I felt before I reported it, which was the gift and the burden of having an empath for a sister.

“Hope,” I said. “I felt hope. Not the population’s. God’s. He’s not done with this planet.”

Jenny smiled. It was the warm, tired, luminous smile of a woman who had carried the emotional weight of millions and was choosing, deliberately and with full knowledge of the cost, to carry it again tomorrow.

“Good,” she said. “Neither are we.”

That evening, aboard the Enterprise, the family gathered for dinner. All of us—Matthew, the ten wives, Cindy via communication relay from the medieval planet with Matt’s voice warm in the background, and Adam’s steady presence managing the ship around us like a good host who never needed to be asked.

Matthew prayed. Short, conversational, the way he always prayed—like he was talking to someone he loved and who was listening.

“Father, thank You for today. For the planet that received us with open arms and for the governor whose name I still can’t pronounce. For Matt and Cindy, building granaries and winning hearts. For Lydia’s flower, and the girl who carried it, and the old woman who cried. For Sarah’s shields, and Tiffany’s courage, and Heather’s healing, and Alita’s steadiness, and Jenny’s heart that carries the weight of whole populations and keeps beating. For Rachel, who wanted to blast every soldier in that room and chose not to because You asked her not to. For Amy, who keeps finding impossibly advanced fragments that don’t match anything in any database. For Sammy, who tells us the truth even when the truth is ugly. For Melissa, who hears Your voice when the rest of us are too loud to listen. And for the man who came through the rift today and healed my family and left without letting us love him back. Wherever he is tonight, Father—hold him. He shouldn’t be alone. And for the one who placed that device near Tiffany. Thank You for protecting us through hands we can’t see. Bring them home to us when You’re ready. We’ll be here. Amen.”

Heather said “Amen” fiercely. Rachel said it with a grin. Amy said it softly. Lydia’s golden light drifted across the table like scattered candlelight. Sarah passed the food. Alita leaned against Matthew and stole a piece of bread from his plate, and he pretended not to notice, and she pretended it was accidental, and the pretending was a ritual they had performed so many times it had become its own language.

Sammy caught my eye across the table and held it. Her blue eyes were steady and knowing and carrying the particular warmth that Sammy reserved for the moments when truth was not a weapon or a diagnostic tool but simply the acknowledgment that something good was happening and she could confirm it with certainty.

It was good. This family, this mission, this evening at a table in a ship orbiting a hostile planet where a child was carrying a glowing flower through streets full of fear. It was good. Not because the world was fixed. Not because the hatred was gone or the deceptive governor was defeated or the mysterious shepherds had come home. It was good because God was in it, and we were in it, and in the morning we would get up and do it all again.

I looked down at the table. At the food. At the hands passing plates and the voices overlapping and the laughter that came in waves—Rachel’s burst, Alita’s warmth, Cindy’s bright voice through the communicator, Matt’s quiet chuckle underneath. Tiffany was explaining her rift calculations to Sarah, who was listening with genuine interest while simultaneously ensuring that everyone had eaten enough. Amy was telling Jenny something that made Jenny laugh so hard she had to press her hand over her mouth. Lydia was shaping a small golden star above Heather’s plate, and Heather was pretending to swat it away, and the pretending lasted exactly one second before she smiled and let the star land on her fingertip.

The galaxy waited. It always waited. But tonight, in this room, with these people, the waiting was patient, and the stars were steady, and the mission was the mission, and the family was the family, and both were exactly what God had made them to be.

I finished my food. I said goodnight. I walked to the quarters I shared in the rotating schedule, and I knelt beside the bed, and I prayed the way I always prayed—quietly, tremblingly, with the voice of a woman who heard God and was still, after all these months, astonished that He heard her back.

Father, the man in the rift. The man with the devices. Samson, somewhere out there. Three shepherds walking alone. Bring them home. And the girl with the flower—protect her. She’s braver than she knows. Protect all of them. Protect us. And give me the words when You need me to speak. I’ll tremble. I always tremble. But I’ll speak. Amen.

The ship hummed. The stars turned. Somewhere out in the dark, a man who had healed us and walked away was carrying his loneliness to whatever place he went when the helping was done, and we were carrying his memory to the place where prayers go, and the distance between those two places was exactly as large as God intended it to be.

Not forever. Just not yet.