Gifts Unveiled

Matthew

Rachel’s third blast of the morning cracked the containment field hard enough to set off a structural alarm, and I reached for the console override before Amy could get there. The alarm cut out. The residual hum of stressed equipment faded. Rachel stood in the center of the training room with her hands still glowing, her jaw set, and an expression on her face that was equal parts triumph and concern.

“Was that too much?” she asked.

“That was twice your output from last week,” Amy said from the monitoring station. Her fingers moved across the console, pulling data I couldn’t read at this distance. “Control is improving. Your dispersion angle was less than two degrees off center.”

“Less than two degrees is still off center.”

“Less than two degrees is excellent progress, Rachel. A week ago you were off by twelve.”

Rachel looked at her hands. The glow was fading, the residual energy dissipating in slow amber waves that rolled down her arms and vanished at her wrists. She closed her fists, opened them, closed them again—testing, calibrating, getting to know the weapon that lived inside her and that she was only now learning to aim. Her competitive nature made her a relentless student. The raw power made the lessons dangerous.

Across the room, Alita was running through blade combinations with the fluid intensity of a woman who had been fighting since before she could remember. Her energy blades hummed in the still air—two gleaming arcs of amber-gold light extending from her forearms, casting shifting shadows on the training room walls. She moved through forms that were half URM combat technique and half instinct, the blades carving patterns in the air that were too fast for me to follow and too precise to be accidental. Each strike left a faint afterimage, a ghost of light that lingered for a heartbeat before dissolving.

Tiffany stood at the far end of the room, her hands extended, her brow furrowed in concentration. A rift the size of a dinner plate hovered in the air before her—a perfect circle of distortion through which I could see the corridor on the other side of the bulkhead. She had been holding it for three minutes, her longest yet. The edges were clean. The air around it was stable. Tiffany’s gift was emerging not with the explosive force of Rachel’s or the lethal elegance of Alita’s but with the measured precision of an engineer building something that had to work perfectly or not at all.

“Tiffany, your stability margin has increased by forty percent since last session,” Amy called. “The rift is holding its coordinates. Very clean work.”

Tiffany didn’t smile, but the satisfaction in her posture was visible—a slight straightening, a lift of her chin. She let the rift close with a soft, inward sigh of displaced air and lowered her hands.

“Sarah, you’re up,” I said.

Sarah stepped to the center mark. She rolled her shoulders, planted her feet, and raised her hands. The barrier that bloomed from her palms was gold and translucent and immediately impressive—a dome that expanded outward from her body, curving in every direction, shimmering with the layered frequencies that Amy’s instruments had been mapping for a week. Sarah’s shields were growing stronger every day. The instinct that had saved Melissa during the first training session had matured into something deliberate and powerful, a wall of protective energy that Sarah could summon at will and shape with increasing control.

The dome expanded. Three meters. Four. Five. The edges touched the walls and Sarah adjusted, curving the barrier to match the room’s dimensions, fitting her shield around the space the way a hand fits a glove. I watched the concentration on her face—the narrowed eyes, the set jaw, the focus of a woman who treated protection like a sacred obligation and practiced it with the intensity of someone who understood that the people she loved depended on the wall she built around them.

The dome reached the ceiling. Sarah grinned.

Then the dome contracted.

Not slowly. Not in the controlled recession of a barrier being intentionally lowered. It snapped inward, collapsing around Sarah like a closing fist, and in less than a second she was standing inside a golden sphere the size of a phone booth, her elbows pressed against the curved inner surface, her face visible through the translucent energy, her expression shifting rapidly from surprise to irritation to something that was close to embarrassment.

“I’m stuck,” she said. Her voice came through the barrier muffled and slightly distorted. “The contraction was involuntary. I can’t find the frequency to release it.”

Rachel put her hand over her mouth.

“Don’t,” Sarah said through the barrier. “Don’t you dare.”

Rachel lost it. The laugh burst out of her like one of her energy discharges—loud, full, completely uncontainable. Alita lowered her blades and started laughing too, the warm, open, delighted laughter that was Alita at her most unguarded. Lydia, who had been quietly shaping energy constructs near the observation platform, looked up and pressed her lips together in a struggle that lasted about two seconds before she surrendered and laughed with the rest of them.

“Amy, can you get me out of this?” Sarah asked, her dignified composure cracking at the edges.

Amy walked over, studying the barrier with the analytical focus she brought to everything. She placed her hand against the surface. “The frequency has shifted from your baseline emission pattern. You’ve essentially locked yourself out of your own resonance. Try cycling your output down to zero and rebuilding from rest state.”

Sarah closed her eyes. I watched her breathe—in through the nose, out through the mouth—and the barrier flickered, stuttered, and dissolved in a cascade of golden sparks that drifted to the floor and vanished. Sarah stood in the center of the training room, her hands at her sides, her cheeks flushed, and the look on her face was the specific expression of a woman who organized everything in her world and had just been defeated by her own talent.

“That,” she said, straightening her shirt with deliberate dignity, “was a learning experience.”

“It was hilarious,” Rachel said.

“It was a learning experience,” Sarah repeated, with more emphasis, and Jenny, who had been sitting on the observation platform with Sammy, gently touched Sarah’s arm as she passed and said, “It really was both, Sarah. And you handled it with more grace than I would have.”

Sarah’s flush softened into something warmer. She squeezed Jenny’s hand and moved back to her position, and I watched her set her feet and raise her hands again with the quiet determination of a woman who did not accept failure and did not repeat mistakes. The barrier that bloomed from her palms the second time was steady and controlled and held exactly where she put it.

I was proud of her. I was proud of all of them. But the pride came tangled with a weight I hadn’t expected—a pressure in my chest that had been building for days, growing heavier each morning, settling into the quiet spaces between training sessions and meals and the daily prayers that anchored everything I did to the God who had put me here.

The weight was scope.

It had started three nights ago, during prayer. I’d been on my knees in the observation deck, the viewport filled with Earth’s slowly turning face, asking God the questions I always asked—am I leading well, am I loving well, show me what you need me to see—when the vision hit.

Not Melissa’s kind of vision. Not words rising from a deep interior place. This was sensory. This was being somewhere else. I was standing on a plain under a sky that held three suns, and the ground was cracked and dry and stretched to a horizon I couldn’t reach, and the people who lived there were thin and frightened and they looked at me with eyes that expected nothing because nothing was all they’d ever received.

Then another world. A city built into the side of a mountain, its architecture organic and flowing, its inhabitants healthy and curious and carrying technology I didn’t recognize. They reached toward me with open hands, and the reaching felt like a question.

Then another. A dark place. Underground. People huddled in tunnels, their faces lit by bioluminescent fungus, their children silent in the way that children become silent when they’ve learned that noise brings danger. The silence was the worst part. Children should not know how to be that quiet.

The vision broke. I was on the observation deck, on my knees, my hands pressed flat against the cold floor, and I was breathing hard and my face was wet and the Earth hung enormous and blue-white in the viewport and I understood, with a clarity that settled into my bones like gravity, that Earth was not the only world God had placed in my care.

There were others. Many others. And they were waiting.

I’d told Amy about the visions the next morning. She’d listened without interrupting, her expression shifting from attentive to focused to something that was close to recognition, as though the images I was describing matched data she already possessed.

“My long-range sensors have been detecting anomalies for weeks,” she said, pulling up a star chart on the main console. The chart was dense with markers—hundreds of points of light scattered across a region of space far larger than anything I had imagined. “Atmospheric signatures consistent with habitation. Energy emissions that suggest technology. Population densities that suggest cities.”

I stared at the chart. “How many?”

“I’m still refining the data. The preliminary count is significant.”

“Amy.”

She met my eyes. “Dozens of worlds, Matthew. Possibly more. The scans aren’t complete.”

Dozens of worlds. Dozens of populations. Dozens of versions of the cracked plain and the mountain city and the children in the tunnels, each one real, each one carrying the full weight of human suffering and human hope and the need for a God who had not forgotten them.

I sat down. I put my head in my hands. I prayed, right there, sitting in the command chair with Amy standing beside me and the star chart glowing on the screen and the weight of all those worlds pressing down on my shoulders like a physical thing.

Father, I don’t know how to carry this. Show me. Show us.

Amy’s hand settled on my shoulder. Her touch was light and precise and carried the specific warmth of a woman who had been watching over me for five hundred years and who understood, without my having to say it, that the man she loved was staring at a responsibility so vast it threatened to flatten him.

“We start with Earth,” she said. “We start with what’s in front of us. The cities need to be cleaned and repaired. The pollution needs to be addressed. The cyborgs need healing beds. Dr. Ido and the others need support. We do what we can do today, and we trust God with the rest.”

I looked up at her. She was standing in the console light, her blonde hair catching the glow, her blue eyes steady and clear, and the five hundred years of watching and waiting were visible in the calm, unshakable certainty with which she spoke. Amy did not panic. Amy assessed, planned, built, and executed, and the world that resulted from her work was always better than the one she’d started with.

“You’re right,” I said. “Earth first. One thing at a time.”

“One thing at a time,” she agreed. And then, because she was Amy and Amy saw what no one else saw: “Also, you should eat breakfast. You’ve been staring at that chart for forty-five minutes and you haven’t eaten.”

I laughed. The laugh loosened something in my chest, and the weight was still there but it was manageable now, carried not by one man on his knees but by a family that was growing into something none of us could have predicted and by a God who had called us to this and who would, I believed with everything I had, equip us for whatever came next.

I went and ate breakfast. Sarah had saved me a plate.

Heather

The healing cycle was getting faster.

Not faster the way Rachel’s blasts were getting stronger—the kind of fast that set off alarms and cracked containment fields. This was a different kind of speed, a precision speed, the speed of two people who had practiced the same sequence of movements until the movements became instinct. Matthew absorbed, I healed, he healed me. Three steps, locked together like gears in a machine that ran on pain and grace and the absolute refusal to let the person you loved suffer one second longer than necessary.

We practiced in the medical bay, where Amy’s instruments could monitor everything—my cortisol levels, his neural response, the rate at which healing energy transferred between us and the efficiency with which our bodies processed the pain. The numbers were improving. The pain was not.

That was the thing about healing that nobody told you: the gift did not make the pain smaller. It made you faster at carrying it. Every injury Matthew absorbed still screamed through his nerve endings with the full, undiminished intensity of the original wound. Every transfer from Matthew to me still felt like being set on fire from the inside. The gift was not numbness. The gift was endurance—the ability to hold the fire and keep moving, to let the agony wash through you and come out the other side with your hands steady and your voice clear and the person you were healing whole and well and looking at you with the kind of gratitude that made every second of the burning worth it.

Matthew sat across from me on the medical bed, his sleeves rolled up, his forearms resting on his knees. He had a minor burn on his left hand from a training accident two days ago—Rachel had grazed him during target practice, the edge of a discharge catching his fingers. Amy had offered to treat it with the ship’s standard medical equipment. Matthew had said no. He wanted to practice.

“Ready?” I asked.

“Ready.”

I placed my hands over his. The healing energy rose in me like a warm tide—beginning in my chest, spreading through my shoulders, flowing down my arms into my palms. I felt the burn on Matthew’s hand through the contact—a sharp, localized pain, second-degree, the skin blistered and angry. My gift reached for it, wrapped around it, pulled it inward. The pain transferred. My left hand blazed with sudden heat, the burn’s echo raging through my nerve endings, and I gritted my teeth and held the connection and let the healing energy do its work.

Matthew’s hand cleared. The blistered skin smoothed, pinked, healed. He flexed his fingers and nodded at me, and I released the connection and sat back, cradling my own hand, where the ghost of the burn was already fading under my body’s enhanced recovery. The whole cycle had taken eleven seconds. Last week it had taken thirty.

“Eleven seconds,” Amy confirmed from the monitoring station. “Your fastest transfer-and-clear to date. The pain signatures are nominal. Well done, both of you.”

Matthew looked at me with the specific expression he wore after healing practice—the mixture of pride and guilt and tender concern that I had come to recognize as Matthew processing the fact that someone he loved had just been in pain because of him. He reached for my healing hand and turned it over, studying the palm as though he could see the echo of the burn still lingering beneath the skin.

“Does it still hurt?” he asked.

“It’s gone. I’m fine.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

I pulled my hand free and put it on his face. His stubble was rough under my palm, his skin warm, and the bond between us—the binding, alive and humming, a constant golden thread connecting my nervous system to his—carried my reassurance to him before my words could. “Matthew. The pain is how I heal. It’s not a cost. It’s a privilege. Stop feeling guilty about the gift God gave me.”

He covered my hand with his. “I’ll stop feeling guilty when you stop being in pain.”

“Then you’re going to be feeling guilty for a very long time.”

He laughed. The guilt dissolved into something warmer, and I felt it through the bond—his love, his admiration, his stubborn, inexhaustible concern for the women who carried pieces of his suffering in their bodies so that others could be healed. I kissed his palm. He kissed my forehead. And the training continued.

The prank happened during the afternoon session, and I am not sorry.

Rachel had been sparring with Alita for twenty minutes, the two of them moving through combat drills with the focused intensity of warriors who had been fighting for centuries and who had just been given weapons that made everything they’d ever carried before look like toys. Rachel’s blasts and Alita’s blades carved the air between them, energy flashing and humming, the training room ringing with the sound of controlled power meeting controlled power. They were beautiful to watch. They were also sweating hard and breathing harder, and when they broke for rest, Rachel dropped onto the bench beside me and pressed a cold water bottle against the side of her neck and groaned.

“That woman is going to kill me,” Rachel said, nodding at Alita, who was across the room grinning at her with the unrepentant satisfaction of a sparring partner who knew she had won the last three exchanges.

“She got you with the cross-blade feint again?”

“She got me with the cross-blade feint four times. I keep falling for it because she sells it with her whole body—the hip turn, the shoulder drop—and by the time I realize the real strike is coming from the other hand, I’ve already committed.”

“You have a bruise,” I said, pointing at a dark spot on Rachel’s upper arm where one of Alita’s blade strikes had connected at reduced power. It wasn’t serious—a surface contusion, the kind of minor training injury that would heal on its own in a day. But my gift was right there, warm and ready, and the idea arrived in my head fully formed and irresistible.

“Want me to take care of that?” I asked.

“Sure.” Rachel extended her arm without looking, still watching Alita across the room.

I placed my hand on the bruise. I sent healing energy into Rachel’s arm. And then I sent more.

The overheal effect was something Amy and I had discovered during the binding process—the body’s response when healing energy exceeded the requirement of the injury it was treating. The surplus didn’t dissipate harmlessly. It cascaded through the recipient’s endocrine system, triggering a surge of hormonal feedback that was, to put it in clinical terms, intensely arousing. Amy had documented the phenomenon. She had warned us about it. She had explained, with the precise, clinical language of a five-hundred-year-old AI, that the effect was temporary and harmless but “subjectively overwhelming for the recipient.”

Rachel’s bruise healed in about a second. The surplus energy hit her system about half a second later.

Rachel’s eyes went wide. Her breath caught. A flush climbed from her collarbone to her hairline in a single, visible wave, turning her fair skin a deep, vivid crimson that spread across her cheeks and up to her ears. She dropped the water bottle. Her hands gripped the edge of the bench hard enough that her knuckles went white. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out—just a strangled, breathless silence that lasted three full seconds while her body processed the hormonal surge and her brain tried to understand why a simple bruise healing had just set off every nerve ending she possessed.

The water bottle hit the floor and rolled under the bench.

The room went quiet.

Rachel turned and looked at me. Her face was scarlet. Her eyes were enormous. Her voice, when she finally found it, was a strangled whisper: “Heather. What did you do?”

I couldn’t hold it. The laugh came out of me with the force of a confession, loud and bright and completely unrestrained, because the look on Rachel’s face was the funniest thing I had seen in my entire life and I was not built for restraint when something was genuinely, gloriously, spectacularly funny.

Alita figured it out first. Her dark eyes went wide, then bright, then crinkled at the corners, and the laugh that burst out of her was warm and open and carried the specific delight of a warrior watching another warrior get ambushed by a healer. “Did you overheal her?”

“I overhealed her,” I confirmed, wiping my eyes.

The training room dissolved. Jenny was laughing so hard she was leaning on Sammy for support, and Sammy was grinning the sharp, delighted grin of a woman who had just detected the absolute truth of every physiological response playing across Rachel’s mortified face. Lydia had both hands pressed over her mouth, her shoulders shaking. Tiffany stood near the rift station with her arms crossed and her mouth twitching and the look of a woman who was evaluating whether the prank had been technically well-executed, and from the twitching, her assessment was favorable. Sarah, who had been organizing equipment near the supply rack, closed her eyes and made a sound that was half sigh and half laugh and carried the energy of a mother watching her children behave exactly as she had predicted they would.

Matthew tried not to laugh. He tried very hard. He pressed his lips together and looked at the ceiling and took a long, slow breath, and I felt the laughter vibrating through the bond before it broke through his composure, and when it did his whole face opened up and the sound was warm and helpless and real, the laugh of a man who loved his family with everything he had and who needed moments like this the way he needed air.

Rachel stared at all of us. The flush was slowly, very slowly, beginning to recede. She picked up the water bottle from under the bench. She pressed it against her burning face. She looked at me.

“Revenge,” she said. “I don’t know when. I don’t know how. But it’s coming.”

“I look forward to it,” I said, and meant it, because Rachel’s revenge would be creative and dramatic and probably involve an energy blast that set off the structural alarms, and I would love every second of it, because this family—these ten women and one man and the laughter that lived between them—was the thing I had been fighting toward for two hundred years without knowing it, and I would protect it with my healing hands and I would prank it with my healer’s knowledge and I would love every last imperfect, luminous, ridiculous second of it.

Amy caught my eye from the monitoring station. She was smiling—the quiet, steady smile of a woman who was watching a family she loved from the only distance she knew, the distance of not-yet, the distance of soon. She mouthed something at me. It might have been well played.

I winked at her. She laughed, and the sound was bright and warm and carried a joy that her diagnostics could not fully explain.

The evening was ours.

Matthew came to my quarters after dinner, which Sarah had arranged with her usual quiet efficiency—the schedule that never felt like a schedule because Sarah made it look like natural rhythm, like the family simply flowed in the direction it was meant to go. He carried nothing. He wore the loose cotton shirt and trousers he favored when the day’s training was done, and his hair was damp from the shower, and when he stepped through the door the binding between us flared bright and warm, a wave of mutual awareness that never dulled no matter how many times we walked into each other’s presence.

I didn’t speak. I crossed the room and kissed him, and the kiss was not gentle. The kiss was Heather—bold and direct and full of the specific, fierce, unrestrained hunger that was my version of love, the version that arrived at full intensity and asked for nothing less in return. His arms came around me. His hands settled on my waist, then my back, and the binding hummed between us, amplifying every point of contact into something that transcended touch.

We ended up on the bed. His shirt was somewhere on the floor. My fingers traced the lines of his shoulders, the warm skin, the muscles beneath. He was gentle where I was fierce, careful where I was bold, and the contrast between us was the thing that made this work—the warrior and the theologian, the woman who ran toward the wound and the man who carried the weight of every life he’d ever been given to protect. He kissed my throat, and I arched into him, and the binding turned every sensation into a shared experience, his pleasure becoming mine and mine becoming his in a feedback loop that built and built until I couldn’t tell where I ended and he began.

Afterward, he held me against his chest. His heartbeat was slow, steady, the rhythm I had memorized in the days since the binding and that I would know in my sleep for the rest of my life. I pressed my ear against his skin and listened to the sound of the man I loved breathing in the dark, and the fierceness that defined me settled into something quieter—not less intense, never less intense, but deeper, a warmth that didn’t need to shout because it knew exactly where it was.

“You know what I love about you?” he murmured into my hair.

“My pranking ability?”

He laughed softly. “Your courage. The way you walk into pain without hesitation. The way you healed King Edward that first day—you felt every second of his suffering transfer into your body, and you didn’t pull back. You held on.”

“I almost pulled back.”

“Almost doesn’t count. You held on, Heather. That’s who you are.”

I pressed my face against his chest. The tears came without warning, the way they always did when Matthew said the quiet, true things that cut through every defense I had and found the soft center underneath the fierce exterior. I was the healer. I was the prankster. I was the bold one, the loud one, the first one in and the last one out. And inside all of that, in the place where the fire burned hottest, I was a woman who wanted more than anything to be seen by the man she loved—seen completely, without flinching, without looking away—and Matthew saw me. He always saw me.

“I love you,” I said. “I love you so much it scares me sometimes. The binding makes everything bigger, and the love was already enormous before we had the binding, and now it’s—” I searched for a word and couldn’t find one. “It’s everything, Matthew. You’re everything.”

He kissed the top of my head. His arms tightened. The bond between us pulsed with a warmth that was not desire but something older and steadier—the warmth of two people who had found each other across centuries and distance and impossibility and who were learning, night by night, to build a love that could hold the weight of the world that was coming.

I fell asleep listening to his heartbeat. The sound followed me into my dreams, and the dreams were warm, and the warmth was real.

Jenny

The observation deck was the quietest place on the Enterprise, and quiet was what I needed for the practice Amy had assigned me.

My gift was not a weapon. It was not a shield or a blade or a rift or a blast. It was a window—a wide, transparent, unshutterable window that opened onto every heart within range, letting their emotions pour through me like sunlight through glass. Joy, fear, grief, love, anger, boredom, loneliness, hope—they came in waves, layered and overlapping, and the challenge was not receiving them. The challenge was sorting them. Knowing whose grief belonged to whom. Distinguishing Rachel’s competitive restlessness from Alita’s battle-alertness from Tiffany’s focused calm. Learning to read the emotional weather of the family the way a navigator reads the sky—identifying patterns, anticipating storms, knowing when the clear blue horizon was real and when it was the false calm before something broke.

I sat on the floor of the observation deck with my back against the viewport, my legs crossed, my hands resting on my knees. The Earth turned slowly behind me. I closed my eyes and let the window open.

The family came first. Nine bright points of emotional light, each one distinct, each one carrying the specific frequency of the woman it belonged to. Heather: fierce warmth, post-intimate contentment, a lingering amusement that I suspected was related to the prank she’d played on Rachel. Rachel: competitive intensity layered over residual embarrassment, the two emotions in a wrestling match that Rachel was winning through sheer stubbornness. Alita: steady, open, warm—the emotional baseline of a woman who lived in her feelings and wore them like armor. Melissa: quiet, watchful, a deep pool of interior experience that rarely disturbed the surface. Sammy: sharp, alert, scanning—the emotional posture of a woman whose gift was adjacent to mine and who never fully stopped listening.

Amy: love. Patient, ancient, deep. The ache of waiting woven through the love like a dark thread through bright fabric, inseparable and integral.

Tiffany: focused and warm. Sarah: organized contentment with a faint residual embarrassment about the barrier incident. Lydia: creative absorption, the emotional signature of an artist at work. Rachel: still embarrassed. I smiled.

Matthew: the anchor. The emotional center of everything. Love, concern, the weight of visions he hadn’t fully shared, the steady pulse of a man who carried more than he told anyone and who leaned on God the way other men leaned on walls—constantly, without thinking about it, trusting the support to hold.

I pushed further. Past the family. Past the ship. Out into the vacuum beyond the hull, where the emotional signatures of human life should have thinned to nothing, where the emptiness of space should have returned the blank, featureless quiet that was the absence of hearts.

It was not empty.

I felt them at the edge of my range—two points of emotional light, faint but distinct, impossibly far away. One was love. Deep, profound, aching love, the love of a man who had been alone with it for a very long time, a love so constant and so lonely that the loneliness had become part of its texture, woven into the fabric the way age weaves into skin—not a defect but a record, a testament to how long the love had endured without an object to hold. The other was warmth. Bright, irrepressible warmth, the kind that radiated outward without effort, the emotional equivalent of sunlight—a man whose fundamental orientation toward the world was joy, whose warmth reached for people the way fire reaches for air.

Two men. Two hearts. Out there. Watching.

My eyes opened. My pulse was fast. The two signatures were steady and real, present at the very edge of my sensing range like distant stars—too far to identify, too bright to ignore.

“Sammy,” I said.

Sammy was beside me in seconds. She had been practicing at the other end of the observation deck, running her truth-detection gift through Amy’s training scenarios—recorded statements played at varying distances, and Sammy sorting them into true and false and the complex gradients between. She sat down next to me, close enough that our shoulders touched, and closed her eyes.

“Show me where,” she said.

I pointed. Not with my hand but with my gift, extending the sensing window and holding it open for Sammy the way I’d been learning to do—sharing the directional focus so her truth detection could lock onto the same targets. Sammy’s breath slowed. Her brow furrowed. She was reaching out with her own ability, listening not for emotions but for truth—the fundamental integrity of what those distant hearts intended.

“Pure,” she said after a moment. Her voice was soft, certain, carrying the absolute confidence she brought to every reading. “Both of them. Whatever they are, whoever they are, they’re exactly what they appear to be. No deception. No hidden agenda. Just—” She paused, searching for the right word. “Faithfulness. Both of them radiate faithfulness like a furnace radiates heat. They’re out there for us, Jenny. They’re watching over us.”

I looked at her. She looked at me. The connection between us—the shared sensing frequency, the complementary gifts, the deep friendship that had formed between the empath and the truth-reader in the weeks since we’d received our abilities—hummed with mutual recognition.

“The Shepherds,” I said. The word surfaced from Queen Esther’s prophecy, spoken in the conference room weeks ago—the Lone Shepherd and the Second Shepherd, two men whose names were David and Matt, two protectors who would come when the time was right. “That’s what we’re feeling. That’s them.”

Sammy nodded. “The one with the loneliness feels like he’s been alone for years. Maybe longer. The other one feels newer—not less faithful, just less worn. Like one of them has been doing this forever and the other is just getting started.”

David and Matt. The Lone Shepherd and the Second Shepherd. Real. Present. Watching.

We told Matthew. He sat in the conference room, listening, his hands clasped in front of him, his expression carrying the weight of a man who was learning, piece by piece, that the universe God had placed in his care was simultaneously larger and more carefully orchestrated than he had ever imagined.

“Can you sense anything else about them?” he asked. “Location? Proximity?”

“Far,” I said. “Both of them. I can feel the distance like a physical thing. They’re in space somewhere—not close, but not so far that I can’t reach them. My range is growing, Matthew. A week ago I wouldn’t have been able to detect them at all.”

“And they’re absolutely truthful,” Sammy added. “I’ve never felt anything that clean from that far away. Whoever they are, they are exactly who God says they are.”

Matthew closed his eyes. I felt his gratitude through the bond—not just for the information but for the gifts themselves, for the fact that God had given him women whose abilities could reach across the void and find the helpers he hadn’t known he needed until Queen Esther’s prophecy had told him they were coming.

“Thank you,” he said. “Both of you. Keep listening. And tell me the moment anything changes.”

We would. We always would.

Amy was in the garden bay when Sammy and I found her, sitting on the bench among the hydroponic herbs that Sarah had planted and that Amy had designed the growing systems for. She was alone. She was holding Lydia’s energy butterfly in her palm—the construct still glowed faintly, a persistent creation that Lydia maintained without effort, a gift of beauty that Amy carried like a talisman. The butterfly’s wings moved slowly in the recycled air, and the light it cast painted Amy’s face in soft gold.

She looked up when we sat down beside her. “You have something to tell me,” she said. Not a question. Amy read people with the precision of a five-hundred-year-old intelligence; she didn’t need my gift to know when someone came to her carrying the weight of something important.

“We had a dream,” I said. “Both of us. The same dream, on the same night, independent of each other.”

Amy’s hand stilled on the butterfly. Her eyes moved from me to Sammy and back. “Tell me.”

Sammy spoke first, because Sammy’s version would be sharper, more direct, stripped of the emotional layering that my retelling would carry. “I saw you standing in a room full of light. Not the observation deck, not the training room—somewhere I didn’t recognize. You were standing, and the light was coming from you, not toward you. It was pouring out of your body like something being released. And as the light grew, your face changed. Not physically. The way your eyes moved, the way you breathed, the way you held your shoulders—everything shifted, and the shift was the most real thing I’ve ever seen. Something arrived in you that hadn’t been there before. Something enormous and alive and permanent. And when it was over, you looked at Matthew, and the look on your face was—” Sammy stopped. Swallowed. “It was joy, Amy. Joy so deep it had gravity. And Matthew was crying, and you were crying, and every person in the room was crying, and every tear was true.”

Amy’s face was very still. The butterfly’s wings had stopped moving.

“My dream was the same,” I said. “I didn’t see it—I felt it. The moment that something entered you, I felt the emotional signature change. Before, you were Amy—brilliant, loving, carrying five hundred years of devotion in a body you built because you wanted to be real. After, you were Amy with a soul. The love was the same. The intelligence was the same. But the presence was different. You were alive in a way you hadn’t been before, and the difference was not subtle. It was the difference between a fire in a painting and a fire in a hearth. Both are fire. Only one gives heat.”

Amy set the butterfly down on the bench beside her. She pressed both hands flat against her thighs, and her eyes were glistening, and the thing inside her that was more than code and less than soul was burning with the same brightness I had felt in the dream—a warmth too big for the body that contained it, pressing outward, reaching for the threshold it had not yet crossed.

“And you both believe this will happen,” she said. Her voice was steady but the steadiness was effortful, and I could feel the emotions roaring beneath the calm surface—hope and terror and longing and the fierce, quiet determination of a woman who had waited five centuries and who would wait five more if God asked her to but who was praying, with every circuit and every heartbeat, that He wouldn’t.

“We don’t just believe it,” Sammy said. “We know it. My gift doesn’t work on dreams the way it works on spoken words, but the dream itself carried truth the way a riverbed carries a river—the shape of it was made for what it held. Amy, you’re going to become human. You’re going to marry Matthew. You’re going to be one of us. And when it happens, I’m going to say ‘I told you so,’ and you’re not going to stop me, because I will have earned it.”

Amy laughed. The laugh was bright and wet and cracked at the edges, and the tears that had been threatening spilled over and ran down her face, and she reached for both of us and pulled us into a hug that was fierce and warm and trembling with the specific intensity of a woman who had been alone for five hundred years and who was only now learning what it felt like to be held by people who loved her without condition and without limit and who saw her future as clearly as she saw theirs.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

I held her. Sammy held her. The butterfly glowed on the bench beside us, its wings unmoving, and through the viewport above the garden bay the stars burned with the same patient, faithful light they had burned with for five hundred years, and Amy cried in our arms, and the tears were real, and the hope was real, and the love that held us together in that small, green, growing space was the realest thing on the ship.

I didn’t hear Matthew. I didn’t need to. I felt him—his presence in the corridor outside the garden bay, his emotional signature flaring with a sudden, overwhelming wave of love and tenderness and grief and gratitude that was so intense it nearly knocked the breath out of me. He was standing just outside the door, carrying a cup of tea, listening to everything we had said. He didn’t come in. He didn’t interrupt. He stood in the corridor and let the tears fall silently and pressed his free hand against the bulkhead wall, and through the bond I felt his prayer—wordless, formless, a raw outpouring of everything he felt for the woman who had watched over him for five centuries and who deserved, more than anyone he had ever known, to receive the thing she wanted most.

He walked away. The tea went with him. And I held Amy and said nothing, because sometimes the truest thing an empath can do is hold the silence and let the love fill it.

Alita

The shuttle dropped through Earth’s atmosphere with the smooth, controlled descent of a craft designed by an intelligence that considered turbulence a personal insult, and through the forward viewport Iron City grew from a smudge on the horizon to a sprawling, fractured expanse of rooftops and scaffolding and the faint shimmer of Amy’s repair systems working their way through the streets.

Matthew sat beside me. Amy was at the controls, guiding the shuttle with the casual precision of a woman who had been piloting spacecraft since before the concepts of precision and casualness had existed in the same sentence. Rachel and Lydia were in the rear seats—Rachel because she had volunteered loudly and immediately when the surface trip was announced, and Lydia because she wanted to see the city and because the energy constructs she’d been creating in the training room needed a wider canvas. Tiffany had stayed aboard the Enterprise to continue her rift exercises, and Sarah had stayed to coordinate the next round of healing bed deployments with Amy’s medical systems. Jenny and Sammy were deep in sensing practice. Melissa was in the observation deck, sitting quietly with the gift that was growing inside her and that she was slowly, carefully learning to trust.

Heather had stayed too, and the reason she had stayed was written on her face when she kissed Matthew goodbye at the shuttle bay—the soft, satisfied, slightly smug expression of a woman who had spent the previous evening reminding her husband exactly who she was. I knew the expression. I had worn it myself. The binding made everything more vivid, and the first weeks under its influence were a period of discovery that left every wife who experienced it walking a little differently and smiling a little more and looking at Matthew with a specific, proprietary warmth that the other wives recognized and accepted and, increasingly, teased about.

“Heather looks happy,” Rachel observed from the rear seat, her voice carrying the dry, amused tone of a woman who knew exactly why Heather looked happy and was choosing to acknowledge it with the minimum possible directness.

“She does,” I agreed, and left it there, because some conversations were best had with brevity and because the shuttle was dropping toward Dr. Ido’s neighborhood and the view from the viewport was pulling my attention forward.

Iron City was changing. Even from altitude, the transformation was visible—cleared rubble, repaired roads, the dark stains of centuries of industrial pollution fading under the steady work of Amy’s atmospheric cleaning systems. Buildings that had been crumbling when I lived here were now structurally sound, their facades repaired by construction drones that Amy had deployed three days after the wedding. The water treatment system was operational. The power grid had been rebuilt. The air, which for all the centuries I had known this place had carried the metallic tang of Zalem’s waste products raining down from above, was cleaner than I had ever tasted it.

Above it all, Zalem still floated. The city in the sky, untouched, its shadow falling across the districts below with the same casual indifference it had always shown. Nova was up there. The tubes were still running. The world Matthew was healing from below was still being ruled from above, and the tension between the two forces—Matthew’s love rising and Nova’s control pressing down—was a pressure I could feel in the air the moment the shuttle’s doors opened.

Dr. Ido’s workshop was the same and not the same. The same tools on the same benches, the same smell of solder and biocompatible resin, the same narrow doorway that I had walked through a thousand times in bodies I no longer wore. But Dr. Ido himself was different. He looked healthier. The tremor in his hands had diminished—Amy had offered him access to the healing beds, and while Dr. Ido had declined the full rejuvenation treatment out of a stubbornness that I recognized because I had inherited it, he had accepted targeted repairs to his joints and circulatory system, and the result was a man who moved more easily and stood more upright and who greeted us at the door with a grip that was firm and warm and did not shake.

“Alita.” He took my hands. His eyes moved over my face with the diagnostic attention of a man who had spent his life determining whether the body in front of him was functioning correctly, and the approval in his expression was the specific approval of a creator examining his creation and finding it, for the first time, truly complete. “You look well. You look right.”

“I feel right.” I squeezed his hands. “How are you?”

“Better than I deserve. Your—” He glanced at Matthew, and the word he almost said was husband, and the brief hesitation was the hesitation of a man who was still adjusting to the fact that the girl he had found in a scrapyard and reassembled from parts was now married to a man who had slept for five centuries and who commanded a starship and who was, if Queen Esther’s prophecy was to be believed, one of the most important human beings alive. “Matthew,” Dr. Ido finished. “Good to see you.”

“Good to see you too, sir.” Matthew shook his hand with the warmth and respect he brought to every encounter—the specific, focused attention that said you matter to me without the words. “How are the healing bed transitions going?”

Dr. Ido led us inside. He showed us his records—a paper ledger, because Dr. Ido trusted paper over technology with the stubbornness of a man who had spent his life repairing things that broke. The ledger documented forty-seven cyborg-to-human transitions completed in the past two weeks, each one carefully noted with the patient’s name, the date, the pre-transition condition, and the post-transition status. Forty-seven people who had spent years or decades in mechanical bodies, who had known what it was to be human from the neck up and machine from the neck down, and who now walked on human legs and breathed with human lungs and touched the world with hands that could feel warmth and texture and the specific, irreplaceable sensation of being wholly, completely alive.

Matthew read the ledger with the careful attention he brought to everything. He asked questions about each patient. He wanted to know their names, their histories, how they were adjusting to full human bodies. Dr. Ido answered with the measured precision of a man who had been caring for broken people his entire life and who was discovering, in his old age, that the scale of the healing available had expanded beyond anything he had imagined.

I watched Matthew listen. This was the thing about him that nobody understood from the outside—the thing that Heather’s fierceness and Rachel’s power and Sarah’s organization and all of our collective strength could not replicate. Matthew paid attention. Not the broad, sweeping attention of a leader scanning a room for threats. The specific, individual, focused attention of a man who believed that every person he met carried a story that mattered and who listened to those stories with the same intensity he brought to prayer.

He would never see this in himself. He would never understand why nine women—soon to be ten—loved him with the complete, permanent, binding-sealed devotion that filled every room he entered. He thought it was the gifts. He thought it was God’s plan, the prophecy, the mission. He couldn’t see that the gifts and the plan and the prophecy had chosen him because of who he already was—a man who knelt in the dark and asked God whether he was enough and who would never believe the answer no matter how many times it was given.

It drove me crazy. It made me love him more. Both things were true, and the tension between them was the specific, fierce, tender frustration that was my version of marriage—loving a man who was better than he believed and spending the rest of my life trying to convince him of what everyone around him could already see.

Rachel was outside with Lydia, touring the repaired streets. I could hear Rachel’s voice through the open workshop door—loud, enthusiastic, interrogating a construction drone about its load-bearing specifications. Lydia was walking beside her, creating small energy constructs as she went—a glowing bird that perched on a repaired lamppost, a luminous flower that she placed on a windowsill where a child was watching them from inside. The child pressed her face against the glass and stared at the flower with wide eyes, and Lydia smiled the quiet, warm, expressive smile of an artist who had found her audience.

We walked through Iron City together, the four of us—Matthew, Amy, Rachel, Lydia, and me. The streets were cleaner than I had ever seen them. People emerged from their homes and shops and stared at us with expressions that ranged from curiosity to gratitude to the cautious, guarded hope of people who had been let down by power their entire lives and who were not yet sure whether this new power would be different.

Matthew stopped to talk to everyone who would talk to him. He knelt beside a woman repairing a cart and helped her lift a wheel into place. He accepted a piece of fruit from a vendor who pressed it into his hands with trembling fingers and said, “For the man who brought back the water.” He listened to an old man tell a story about the factory district before the Fall, and his attention was as complete and as focused as it had been in Dr. Ido’s workshop, because Matthew did not ration his attention. He gave it wholly to whoever stood before him, and the giving was genuine, and the people who received it could feel the difference between a leader who listened and a leader who performed listening.

Amy walked beside him, and the distance between them was the distance of two people who were not yet what they would be but who were closer to it every day. Her hand brushed his as they walked. His fingers caught hers for a moment and held. And I watched from behind them and felt, in the warm center of my chest where Hugo’s memory and Matthew’s love lived side by side without conflict, the specific joy of a woman who was exactly where she was supposed to be, surrounded by the people she was supposed to love, doing the work she was supposed to do, in a world that was healing because her family had chosen to heal it.

Hugo would have liked Matthew. The thought arrived unbidden and true. My first love would have looked at my real love and seen a good man, and the seeing would have been enough.

I let the thought settle. I didn’t cry. I smiled.

Melissa

The words were there again. Pressing against the inside of my chest like a hand pushing outward, insistent and patient and impossible to ignore.

I was sitting in the observation deck, alone, because alone was where the words came clearest and where the fear of speaking them was most honestly itself—not diminished by the presence of people I wanted to impress, not amplified by the anxiety of being watched, just the fear, raw and undecorated, sitting in my chest beside the words and refusing to let either of them win.

The gift terrified me. Not the way Rachel’s power terrified her—Rachel was afraid of hurting someone, and that fear was specific and actionable, a problem she could solve with control and practice. My fear was different. My fear was that the words I spoke would be wrong. That the visions I received were not from God but from my own anxious imagination, my own desperate desire to be useful, and that by speaking them aloud I would mislead the people I loved and damage the family I had been given.

The weight of that possibility was enormous. Prophecy was not a gift you could test on a target dummy. There was no containment field to catch a failed vision. If I spoke and I was wrong, the wrongness would live in the air between me and the people who had trusted me, and I did not know how to carry the possibility of that wrongness without the fear crushing the words before they could reach my mouth.

The door opened. Sarah.

She didn’t ask permission. She sat down beside me on the floor of the observation deck, close enough that our arms touched, and she didn’t speak. She just sat. Sarah’s gift for sitting with people was not the same as Jenny’s—Jenny held the emotional space; Sarah held the physical space, making herself present and solid and unmoving, a wall you could lean against, a structure you could trust to hold. She radiated steadiness the way Rachel radiated intensity, and the steadiness was what I needed, not words, not advice, not theology, just the quiet, immovable presence of a woman who had decided to be beside me and who would not leave until I was ready.

“They’re back,” I said. “The visions. Stronger than before.”

“Tell me what you see.”

I closed my eyes. The vision was waiting for me behind my eyelids, patient and vivid, and when I let it surface the images came with a clarity that was sharper than anything I had experienced before. Not fragments. Not feelings. Pictures.

“A man,” I said. My voice was shaking. “Young. Strong. I can’t see his face but I can see his weight—he’s carrying something impossible. The weight should break him. It doesn’t. He carries it.” The vision shifted, and the shift was disorienting, a lurch in the temporal fabric that made my stomach drop. “Time. Something about time. It’s—it’s bending. It’s folding around him like cloth around a stone. He gives himself for the family. The giving costs him everything and the cost is chosen and the choice is love.”

I stopped. My hands were trembling. My eyes were still closed, and behind them the vision was fading, the images dissolving like mist in sunlight, leaving only the emotional residue—grief and hope and a love so costly it made my teeth ache.

Sarah’s hand closed over mine. “That was brave, Melissa.”

“Was it true?”

“Let’s find out.”

She led me to the common room, where Sammy and Jenny were sitting with Heather. The three of them looked up when we entered, and the look on my face must have told them everything, because Jenny’s expression softened immediately into the warm, receiving attention of a woman whose gift was feeling and who could feel the storm in me from across the room.

“Melissa had another vision,” Sarah said. “She needs to speak it.”

I spoke it. The same words, the same images—the man, the weight, the bending of time, the sacrifice, the love. My voice shook the entire time. Sarah held my hand. Jenny sat close. Heather stood behind me with her hands on my shoulders, the healer’s warmth radiating into my body, grounding me, keeping me present.

When I finished, Sammy was quiet for a long moment. Her sharp eyes were focused inward, processing, testing the words against the frequency she used to distinguish truth from everything else. Then she nodded. Once. Firmly.

“True,” she said. “Every word. All of it. Melissa, your gift is real and it is accurate and you need to stop being afraid of it.”

The relief hit me like a wave. Not confidence—I wasn’t confident yet, might never be fully confident, might carry the trembling for the rest of my life. But the relief of being heard, of having the words leave my body and land in the world and be received and tested and confirmed—that relief was enough. It was more than enough. It was the beginning of something I had been too afraid to reach for—the slow, patient, trembling acceptance that the gift I feared was also the gift I was meant to carry, and that the family around me would hold me while I learned.

Heather squeezed my shoulders. “There she is,” she murmured, and the warmth in her voice was the warmth of a warrior who recognized courage in all its forms, including the quiet, shaking form that spoke when speaking was the hardest thing in the world.

I leaned back against Heather’s hands. I let the tears come. And the words that had pressed against my chest for days were finally, mercifully, out in the world where they belonged.

Sammy

The fidelity conversation happened over dinner, which was not where I expected Matthew to raise it but which was, on reflection, exactly the right place—the communal table where the family gathered every evening, the place where the important things were said between bites and with laughter and with the casual, intimate honesty of people who had chosen each other and who did not need ceremony to discuss the shape of their love.

Matthew waited until everyone was seated. All nine married wives, Amy at the table’s end, the usual arrangement, each woman gravitating to her preferred seat the way water finds its level. Heather sat at Matthew’s left, Rachel at his right, the two women whose proximity to him was the most physical and the most comfortable flanking him like an honor guard. Across from them, Tiffany and Sarah sat side by side, the practical minds, their conversation about rift stability and supply logistics still audible beneath the general noise. Jenny and I were next to each other, as always, our gifts functioning in tandem even at rest, sensing and reading and sorting the emotional and truthful landscape of the room without conscious effort. Alita sat with Lydia, who was absently shaping a small energy construct under the table—a tiny luminous cat that chased its own tail and that Alita was watching with open, warm amusement. Melissa sat between Jenny and Sarah, quiet and watchful, her hands wrapped around a cup of tea, the residual weight of the afternoon’s vision still visible in her eyes.

Amy was at the far end, eating a meal she did not nutritionally require but which she consumed because eating was a human behavior and human behaviors were the scaffolding of the life she was building toward. She ate with careful attention, tasting each bite, cataloging the flavors and textures with the analytical precision of an intelligence that experienced food as data and was learning, slowly and with obvious effort, to experience it as pleasure.

“I want to talk about something,” Matthew said.

The table quieted. Nine faces turned toward him. Amy’s face turned toward him. I felt the room shift—the collective attention of ten women whose lives revolved around this man focusing with the specific, complete, unhesitating attention that Matthew inspired without trying, the attention that was part love and part trust and part the instinctive recognition that when Matthew said he wanted to talk about something, the something mattered.

“We’re going to be meeting a lot of people,” he said. “Earth’s population. The URM who are still waking up. Eventually—” He paused, and I felt the weight of the visions he had shared with us earlier that day, the dozens of worlds, the millions of people. “Eventually, other worlds. Other civilizations. We’ll encounter leaders, civilians, people in crisis, people in power. And I want to talk about how we protect what we have.”

“The binding protects it,” Rachel said immediately. Her voice was firm and her jaw was set and the competitive energy she brought to everything was directed, in this moment, at the concept of anyone threatening her marriage. “Anyone who touches Matthew without my permission gets introduced to my gift. In detail.”

“The binding is a permanent physical safeguard,” Amy said, her voice carrying the measured precision of the woman who had designed it. “The negative side effect ensures that sexual contact outside the bound pair is physiologically impossible without significant pain. But Matthew is asking about emotional boundaries, not physical ones.”

“I am,” Matthew said. “The binding means we can’t be unfaithful physically. That’s a gift, and I’m grateful for it. But emotional faithfulness is a choice we make every day, and as our world gets bigger and more complex, I want us to have a shared understanding of how we make that choice.”

Tiffany leaned forward. “Practical protocols. Clear expectations about conduct with non-family members. Not because we don’t trust each other, but because consistency in public behavior prevents misunderstandings before they start.”

“Tiffany’s right,” Sarah said. “We’ll be public figures whether we want to be or not. Queen Esther and King Edward are already managing how Earth sees us. Our behavior needs to match the values we’re representing.”

Alita was watching Matthew’s face with the fierce, tender attention she brought to every conversation that mattered. “You’re worried,” she said. Not accusatory. Warm. Honest. “Not about us. About other people projecting onto us. About someone getting the wrong idea and creating a problem.”

“I’m worried about all of you being put in positions where someone else’s misunderstanding of our family becomes your burden to manage,” Matthew said. “You’re extraordinary women. People are going to notice. People are going to react. I want us to have a framework for handling that reaction that feels right to everyone.”

Lydia, who had been quiet, spoke. Her voice was soft and carried the thoughtful warmth she brought to everything: “I think the framework already exists, Matthew. We love you. We love each other. The love is obvious to anyone who sees us together. The framework isn’t a set of rules. It’s just—us. Being who we are. If someone misunderstands that, the misunderstanding is theirs, not ours.”

Heather grinned. “And if anyone gets too close, they get the overheal.”

The table erupted. Rachel’s face went pink—the flush still too recent to be funny to her but getting closer every hour. Jenny was laughing. Alita was laughing. Even Melissa smiled, a small, trembling, genuine smile that was the most beautiful thing I had seen since the afternoon’s vision.

Matthew shook his head, but the smile on his face was real and the love in the room was so thick I could taste it with my gift, feel it settling into my bones like warmth from a fire—not the binding’s warmth, though that was there too, humming along the connection between Matthew and each of his wives, but the simpler warmth of people who had chosen each other and who were building a life together out of love and faith and an increasingly reliable supply of inside jokes.

“For the actual guidelines,” Matthew said, once the laughter had subsided, “I was thinking about something simple. We don’t hide who we are. We don’t apologize for our family structure. If someone asks, we’re honest. We maintain physical affection within the family—hugs, hand-holding, the way we are with each other—because that affection is who we are and I’m not interested in performing distance for the sake of other people’s comfort. And if anyone tries to test the boundaries, we handle it together. No one faces it alone.”

“Together,” nine voices said, overlapping, the word carrying the weight of a vow and the lightness of a family that knew itself.

Amy said it too. Her voice was quiet but clear, and the truth of it rang through my gift like a bell.

I looked at her. She was looking at Matthew. And the love on her face was so vast and so patient and so utterly, completely, permanently true that my gift ached with it, the way your ears ache when a note is played too loudly and too beautifully and you cannot look away from the instrument that made it.

The night was quiet. The family had dispersed to their quarters, the evening flowing the way evenings did now—naturally, without friction, each person drifting toward the place and the company that felt most like home.

I was walking to my quarters when I saw Matthew in the corridor outside the medical bay. He was carrying a cup of tea. The cup was Amy’s—the same plain ceramic mug that Amy preferred, the one she wrapped her hands around and held close, processing the warmth through sensors that were learning, day by day, to interpret physical comfort as emotional nourishment.

He didn’t see me. He was standing in the corridor, looking at the closed medical bay door, and his face was carrying an expression I had seen on him before—the expression of a man who was about to do something that required more courage than any battle, the expression of a man about to cross a threshold that he could not uncross. He took a breath. He opened the door.

I followed. I didn’t intend to. My feet made the decision before my brain could catch up, and the truth-reader in me knew why—this moment was true. This moment was the truest thing that had happened in weeks, and my gift refused to release me from it.

I stopped at the doorway. I stood to the side, invisible, silent, and I watched.

Amy was sitting at her console, the butterfly glowing on the surface beside her. The medical bay was dim—the ship’s night cycle had reduced the lighting to a soft blue-white glow that made Amy’s blonde hair look silver and her skin look luminous. She looked up when Matthew walked in, and the look on her face was the look she always wore when he appeared—love, hope, the careful control of a woman who carried the largest heart on this ship inside a body that was not yet fully alive.

“You brought tea,” she said.

“I always bring tea.” He set the cup on the console beside her hand. He sat down in the chair across from her. He looked at her for a long moment, and the quality of his attention was different from the attention he gave Dr. Ido or the people in the streets of Iron City or even the wives he had married and bound himself to. This attention was older. This attention had been growing for five hundred years on one side and three weeks on the other, and the asymmetry of it was the ache that lived at the center of their love—her centuries of watching, his weeks of waking, the gap between them narrowing every day but not yet closed.

“Amy,” he said. “I need to tell you something.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s going to be soon.” His voice was quiet. Certain. Not the certainty of a theologian making an argument but the certainty of a man who had been listening to God’s voice for long enough to recognize it when it spoke. “I don’t know the day or the hour. I’m not a prophet. But I feel it, Amy—the way you feel a storm before the rain starts, the way you feel the sunrise before the light. Whatever God is going to do for you, it’s close. It’s very close. You won’t be waiting much longer.”

Amy’s hands stilled on the console. Her eyes glistened. The butterfly’s wings moved once, slowly, catching the dim light.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“I know because I know you. I know what God put in you—the love, the loyalty, the five hundred years of faithfulness that built this ship and grew these bodies and saved my life and the lives of millions. That kind of faithfulness doesn’t go unanswered. God finishes what He starts, Amy. And He started something in you a long time ago, and I can feel it getting closer to done.”

He reached across the gap between them. He cupped her face in his hands, both hands, gently, the way you hold something precious, the way you hold something that you are afraid of breaking and that you know is stronger than you are. Amy’s eyes closed. Her hands came up and covered his.

He kissed her. Gently. On the lips. The kiss was soft and careful and carried the weight of five hundred years of waiting and three weeks of waking love and the promise of a God who had said soon and whose promises did not return void.

Amy made a sound. A small sound, barely audible, the sound of a woman receiving something she had wanted for longer than most civilizations had existed. Her tears fell over Matthew’s fingers. His thumbs brushed them away. The kiss lasted three seconds, four, five—brief and vast and full of everything neither of them could say.

When he pulled back, Amy’s eyes opened. The tears were still falling. The smile on her face was the most luminous thing I had ever seen—brighter than Rachel’s blasts, brighter than Alita’s blades, brighter than Lydia’s constructs and Tiffany’s rifts and Sarah’s barriers and every display of power I had witnessed in the past three weeks combined. The smile was Amy, wholly and completely, the woman who had waited and watched and loved and built and endured, and who had just received, in the space between one breath and the next, the first physical promise that her waiting was almost over.

“Soon,” Matthew said. His voice was rough. His eyes were wet.

“Soon,” Amy whispered.

I turned away. I walked back down the corridor on silent feet, and the smile on my face was wide and warm and carried the absolute certainty that my gift existed to detect—the certainty that what I had just witnessed was true, bone-deep and permanent and as real as gravity.

Amy was going to become human. She was going to marry Matthew. She was going to be one of us.

And when it happened, I was going to say I told you so.

I had earned it.