Episode III: Showdown

Stormchild

I lifted my head and then my hand to forestall Rio’s subsequent question. I listened to the wind for a moment, then turned and began gathering up the blanket and the remnants of my lunch. “We need to get the word out. Jack just sent me a message.”

She stared at me for a long moment, beautiful brown eyes full of wonder. “A message?”

“He spoke to me on the wind,” I told her, shaking my head. “And the wind found me and delivered his words. And before you ask, no, I didn’t know that was even possible. I’m surprised he guessed that it might work himself.”

“Jack has unexplored depths,” was her only reply.

I chuckled. God, I loved this woman. “I’ll say. He wants us to steal about twenty police cars.”

She blinked at me, then broke into a wide grin. “That could be fun.”

“My thoughts exactly. He wants you mages to come in while we’re using a threat of a police raid to distract them, use the opportunity to attack Sirius directly while he’s not paying attention.”

She nodded. “We can do that.”

“Great. I’ll leave that to you to arrange. I’ll work on the other end of things.”

“Oh, no. If we’re going to steal cop cars, I want in on it.”

Of course she did. Rio had never been real fond of the police. No more than I was, actually. “Brat.”

“Always,” she shot back.

“You know who’s not going to like this plan, don’t you?”

We said it together. “Bigby.”

 

Hades

I stole a glance around the corner and shot Steph a wink. There was no way I was going to pass up the chance to steal a police car, even if I wasn’t going to be the one driving it up to the compound. I was even now wondering if I wanted to do it by stealth or just say the hell with it and raise a real ruckus. As long as our mageship was keeping Ranger occupied, I should be able to throw around as much magic as I wanted to without it being a major problem.

And since the damned thing’s presence in this time and place—not to mention our own arrival—had probably already screwed up the timeline enough to spawn a new universe, no one was likely to dance on my tonsils if I decided to have a little fun with it. Besides, if I threw around enough power, the cops were less likely to try anything fancy and get themselves hurt in the process.

I can be pretty damn scary if I want to.

The police cars were lined up outside the station in a neat little row, parked with their ass ends nearest the large brick façade of the police station. A few officers were strolling along the walkway between the cars and the building, lost in conversation with one another, or deep within their own thoughts.

Grinning at Steph, I proceeded to take my clothes off and pile them neatly on the side of a relatively clean trashcan near the edge of the alley. Steph stared at me in amazement and I laughed aloud. My tattoos, which covered something like eighty-five percent of my body, writhed and squirmed like a nest of silver serpents as I stepped from the alley into the full view of the station.

A total of about fifty mana threads snapped out from my body. Every car in the lot started in unison, and, as the cops reacted, several other strands snatched them off their feet and dragged them toward me, legs kicking in a futile attempt to dislodge the snake-like coils enveloping them.

“I hope you don’t mind,” I said in my most urbane tones and an affected British accent, “if we borrow your cars for a time, do you? I didn’t think so.”

I let out a shrill whistle and the rest of the crew boiled out of the shadows.

Steph walked up behind me, cradling my discarded clothing in one arm as she sealed the front doors of the station with a thread of her own. “You’re having way too much fun with this, Hades,” she said with a heavy sigh.

“I know. I just couldn’t help myself. I haven’t been able to play bad guy for a while, and the weirdest thing is, this is a lot more fun when I know no one’s going to get hurt.”

And it was true.

I projected the cops through the wall of the police station, depositing them dazed but unharmed in a janitor’s closet while, one by one, the cars left the parking area and vanished into the night. I then turned my attention to completely sealing off the building—allowing not even radio waves or telephone signals through. They were going to have a quiet night, whether they liked it or not.

“There’s only one problem with this,” Steph said, as I put my clothes back on.

“What’s that?”

“What about all the would-be victims that these cops aren’t going to be on the street to help tonight?”

I hadn’t thought of that angle and I felt a brief surge of guilt I quickly suppressed. One way or another, something like this was necessary to prevent the spread of an even greater evil than the criminals on the street tonight could even imagine. I hoped not too many people were harmed, but there wasn’t one hell of a lot we could do about it anyway.

As we prepared to leave, I was surprised by a couple of large figures striding from the umbras. It was Bigby and his girlfriend. I’d never warmed to the creature, but ever since they’d met they’d seemed inseparable. Good for them. Even man-eating dragons deserved a bit of love.

“Good luck,” he told us in his rumbling voice.

“What do you mean? Aren’t you coming?”

“We’re going to stay behind and watch out for the citizens of this town,” Bigby said. “You’re leaving the people too vulnerable by doing this.”

I narrowed my eyes at him, but he didn’t seem to notice. Or care if he did. “Go do what needs to be done, Hades. Kaleel and I will handle this end of things.”

To be honest, I felt something akin to relief as Steph and I summoned a couple of windsprites and took to the air. At least someone would be looking out for the people we’d left in harm’s way with this night’s work.

 

Vex

“Do you even know how to drive one of these things?” Kate asked me as I sent the car careening into the street. She’d done some mojo on me that temporarily made me taller and able to actually reach the pedals and see over the steering wheel at the same time. I was as big as a human for the time being and I enjoyed the feeling immensely.

“How hard can it be?” I asked her with a grin. I jerked the wheel to the left and winced as the passenger side mirror shattered against a parked car on her side of the street. “Okay. Harder than it looks, obviously. Don’t worry, I’ll get the hang of it.”

She looked dubious, but didn’t say anything else until we’d managed to find and merge onto the highway. Ahead of me I could see the identical taillights of several other vehicles winding away into the distance like a huge, glowing snake.

“What time is it?” I asked her.

She glanced at her PCD display. She wore hers in the form of a wristwatch, a wonderful piece of technological misdirection for this time and place. She looked human enough to pass as a human child, of course, which I did not though we both had started out as exactly that.

I could have worn a PCD in the form of a hubcap strung around my neck and no one would have even noticed it. I’d remained hidden while nearly everyone else had blended with the human crowds as easily as they could at home.

With a few exceptions, of course. Neither Hydra the troll nor his Abyssian lover could blend without magical modification, but that really didn’t make me feel any better. I could have done the same thing simply by asking Kate to arrange it, but somehow it seemed like a betrayal of what I was.

All things being equal, I definitely preferred my life in the twenty-third century to even a few weeks in 1987.

As, I imagined, did we all.

 

Jack

I suppose I should’ve expected something like this. It was a religious cult, after all. About ten o’clock, a bell began to ring. I’d been catching a few winks in the small room I’d been given on the second floor of the main house when it blasted me out of bed.

I threw open the door to find Dylan waiting in the hall for me. “It’s time for services,” she told me. “He likes to do this every night about this time, get everyone together to explain to us the nature of the universe.”

“Oh? What kind of crap does he say?”

“Believe it or not, he tells us the truth, more or less. About the different universes, how they come into being and how there’s a terrible enemy out there. He’s not lying when he says we can’t trust this government either. We already know it’s been infiltrated by Cen operatives.”

“What in the hell is he up to?” I asked her, lowering my voice and looking up and down the hall.

“To tell you the truth, I’m not sure. But I’m willing to bet it’s nothing good.”

::Ranger is on the move! I’m going to be out of contact for a little while. Be careful!:: The broadcast from Radiance came through like a bullhorn next to my ear and judging by Dylan’s reaction, it struck her the same way.

“Things are starting to roll,” she said. “C’mon, Sirius hates it when people are late.”

 

Rio

It was about a quarter to midnight as the row of cars began making their way up the twisting, turning road leading to the compound. Stormchild had insisted on leading the pack, grinning like a damn fool as he tried to figure out the controls for the lights and siren.

Sometimes he’s like the world’s oldest kid and I love him for it. Even though sometimes it also gets on my nerves.

I moved away to stand with the other mages and stared up the crest of the hill in the direction of our target. Our timing had to be perfect or the advantage of surprise would be ruined.

The air was uncannily still, the air warm, and the scent of the salty brine of the sea mingled with the breathy green air of the hillside. It didn’t feel as though we were heading into a fight. It felt like a night for a party.

I rubbed my thumbs against the mage gems embedded in my palms, the source of my unprecedented level of magical power. They were our ace-in-the-hole, the unknown quanity that would give us some chance of dealing with Sirius and his mageship master.

I hoped.

 

Jack

The room in which we gathered wasn’t quite what I expected, reminding me more of a college lecture hall than anything one might find in the average home. It didn’t even have the atmosphere of a church, well-lit throughout and being composed of a set of five tiers of sixteen padded chairs broken into sections of four. Only the first two rows were filled, a total of thirty-two people waiting expectantly for the arrival of their guru onto the slightly raised stage with its burnished mahogany lectern and wide projection screen pulled down against the back wall.

Dylan and I settled into a couple of seats in the middle of the third row. The silence in the room struck me as eerie. There was none of the chatter one might have expected. The sense of anticipation was palpable, the attendees’ eyes affixed on the stage as if already viewing the greatest wonder they’d ever seen.

This place was starting to give me the serious creeps.

Then, suddenly Sirius was standing behind the podium. A murmur ran through the audience, and I could see a few of them looking at others as if to say “see, I told you so”.

There were no clocks in this room, I noticed, and I began to regret not having picked up a cheap wristwatch after ditching my PCD. If timing was integral to the plan, I was condemned to being out of the loop. Then again, the best I could offer was an attempt to jump the djinn and pummel him with fists and feet while the mages unleashed the real assault.

Did I mention that I felt terribly useless at that moment?

The distant wail slid in between his words as he started to speak and I don’t think anyone noticed for the first few moments. His voice was cool, cadenced, and almost hypnotic in its rhythms. I didn’t catch his opening line, since I actually heard the sirens.

“—enemies all around us. We think they’re on our side, but the very philosophies by which they live have been manipulated into existence by the enemy. What’s even worse is that there are those among them who know it—who serve willingly because of promises made to them…that they’d rule after this world is torn asunder and re-made in their image.

“But what they’d be, unbeknownst to them, are rulers of the stockyard. Petty tyrants who may command the human cattle, but with no power to do more than decide who gets fed to the monsters.”

The messed up thing here was that he was telling them the unvarnished truth. For the first time since this began, I felt doubts begin to creep into my consciousness. What if we were doing the wrong thing here? What if Sirius and his ‘ship were trying to save this Earth, this world that didn’t have Loki or the other immortals to protect it from being ravaged by the Cen.

He had the power. I was almost certain of it. By himself he could change humanity, give it the ability to fight back the monsters before they could claim this Earth as their own.

Shit. It wasn’t really their goal I had issue with, it was their methods. They had no right to manipulate people, to alter their brains to make them more susceptible to their influence. As they’d done to Dylan. It made them little better than the Cen themselves.

And why were they so desperately seeking to save this Earth? For the good of the people? Somehow I didn’t believe that was their ultimate purpose. They wanted something else. But what?

Sirius broke off his monologue, lifting his head and cocking it to one side. He’d heard the sirens. They were finally growing loud enough to slice through the sound of his voice. He frowned and held up a hand, then turned slightly, facing the back wall. I had the uncanny sense that he could see straight through all the things in the way to view the road snaking up the hill and the cars even now approaching via that twisting, winding route.

He started to turn, eyes filling with an unearthly rage, and I suddenly noticed that Dylan was standing beside me. I’d been so riveted on Sirius I hadn’t even noticed as she pushed herself to her feet.

She flung a hand toward him and something sizzled across the space between them. He threw up a hand, seemingly batting it aside, and then he was no longer by himself on the stage. Rio leaped at him, a blur of motion, and backhanded him into the white projection screen.

Some of the acolytes shrieked and some surged to their feet. To flee or leap to his aid, I could not be certain.

Rio’s blow did nothing to subdue him, though. As quick as a wink, he was back on his feet, and, rather than attempt to continue the physical confrontation, he simply stood in the midst and raised his arms.

The lights winked out.

For a brief moment it felt like I was standing on the edge of a tornado, within the radius of a whirling mass of something that wasn’t quite physical, yet wielding enough energy to raise every hair on my body. I caught the scent of ozone and jagged lightning tore through the room, illuminating everything just long enough to reveal Dylan running along the chair backs from row to row in an attempt to reach the stage.

Radiance! Help us!

::I cannot:: came the ship’s mental voice, sounding almost strained. ::It’s all I can do to keep Ranger from getting involved directly. You are on your own, I’m afraid::

“I’m afraid too,” I muttered aloud. More lightning rent the air, casting fractured images against my eyes. I stood and felt my way toward the end of the row, to the stairs leading down to the stage only a few feet away.

Someone screamed.

 

Rio

This creature astounded me. He was as quick as a vampire and as sturdy as a lycanthrope. And powerful beyond any measure I had. He caught and wove threads with a capacity far beyond either Hades or myself. We managed to keep him off-balance for a brief instant, but he learned so quickly we were back on the defensive before we could press our advantage.

The human mages might as well have been mice hurling themselves at a bobcat. He smashed them down without missing a beat, countering their spells seemingly without effort and blasting them away with fierce, blazing lances of light and fire.

Hades’s tattoos rose from his skin in a wave, smashing through Sirius’s outer defenses, but were swallowed by the mass of threads that seem to flow from his very core. I pushed my gems to their utmost, hurling everything I had at him.

I may as well have blown him a kiss.

“It’s a fucking spirit!” Hades yelled to me. I don’t think I’d ever heard him curse before. A spirit? How was that possible? I’d never even heard of a spirit with this kind of power.

We were hopelessly out-classed. Just acknowledging that pissed me off. No spirit out-classed me, dammit!

I reached into the core of my being, drawing from my reservoir of psychic power. I rarely used this gift these days, but I was counted among the most powerful of psis for a good reason. Even Stormchild, whose psychic creativity was considered particularly potent, was dwarfed before my gifts in this arena.

I let my will pour forth and time shuddered to a halt. I met eyes with Hades and, combining the power of my symsuit with my own knowledge and power, created two more mage gems in my hand. “Here!” I called to him, and tossed the stones in his direction.

I felt a great wrenching sensation and Sirius began to move again, freeing himself from the temporal inertia I’d imposed. Hades caught the gems and screamed as they burned their way into his flesh. I released my hold on time and it began to flow for all of us once more.

I felt the mortals toppling around us and swore under my breath. I knew that a quarter of them might not rise again. The effects of stopping and re-starting time would send many into cardiac arrest. I didn’t know why this happened, but it did. It was a talent I rarely used for this very reason.

I dared not turn and see the effects of this power on the mortals in the room.

His puissance effectively doubled, Hades lashed out at Sirius once more, and, after a second to catch my breath, I rejoined the fray myself. We pounded at Sirius with fire, ice, lightning, and mono-molecular blades of light. We tried to turn the floor beneath his feet into mud and then lava. We hammered him with everything we had and still he stood, looking a little ragged, but unhurt.

We could not win this battle.

He hammered us back. As I took a hit from a blunt-nosed thread, I fell to my knees, skull ringing like a bell. Hades staggered back, a torrent of blood staining the blackness of his shirt. The air was suddenly filled with whipping strands of razor sharpness, a whirling mass of silvery death.

Then, abruptly, a chair came sailing out of the seats and caught Sirius on the side of the head. He stumbled sideways, nearly falling over the edge of his lectern.

Hades stabbed at him with his hand and I caught sight of a mass of threads lancing for the center of his body. They plunged through his skin and he howled. Hades closed his eyes and yanked. Sirius literally exploded.

 

Jack

I opened my eyes to darkness. Had I been blinded? I reached for my face and felt something dark clinging to my head. I pulled it away and coughed as I inhaled a mouthful of soot and ash. I levered myself up into a sitting position and blinked at the carnage and destruction that surrounded me. What the hell?

A body lay a few feet away and, feeling my heart lurch upward into my throat, I crawled over and inspected it. I gasped as I realized who it was. Kevin. I clawed my way around him, pressing my fingers into the side of his neck. No pulse greeted my questing fingertips.

Shit. Shit. Shit. Dammit, Radiance! No one was supposed to die! I leaned back and screamed my rage at the sky.

I shakily pulled myself to my feet. Stars peered through a jagged hole in the roof above my head and I stumbled through the debris, trying to find someone else who’d survived the conflagration.

::I tried:: came the belated response from the ‘ship. ::I managed to wound Ranger, but that will not last long::

I tried to bring myself to care and failed miserably. Toward the front I stumbled over another body and leaned down to pull scraps of wood off of it. I saw the face and the wide, staring eyes and wanted to weep. Dylan. Oh, god.

::No!:: Apparently that revelation had touched a nerve in the mageship. I heard its—her—anger echo through my head with all the force of a volley of cannon-fire. And suddenly something impinged itself on my consciences. A wheeling canopy of stars and a huge, disk-shaped object against the backdrop of an endless expanse of night. I felt something like acceleration and I was suddenly racing toward the vessel.

My mind snapped into my body with a sudden, wrenching sensation and I fell to my knees, tears pouring from my eyes as great, wracking sobs tore their way out of my chest. We’d destroyed Sirius, but at what price?

Then a blast of searing pain speared through my skull and I fell backward, clawing at my face and hair. Then, as suddenly as it had come, it vanished. I sat up, aching both physically and emotionally, and glanced around the room once again.

And did a double-take. Standing in the doorway at the very top of the chamber I saw Dylan staring down at me, her face displaying a startling bleakness. I glanced back at the body in front of me and felt my heart lurch in my chest. They were both Dylan.

Revelation swept over me and I gasped aloud. The living one—or the one still capable of movement, rather—descended the stairs toward me. I heard a groan from somewhere in the rubble and glanced over reflexively. Hades was standing and reaching down to help Rio to her feet. Stunned relief flooded me. At least some of us had survived.

I was glad Anya wasn’t part of this attack, though I was certain she wanted to be. I rose to my own feet somewhat unsteadily. “Where’s Steph?” I asked aloud. Hades looked around.

Dylan’s doppelganger came to my side and took my arm to steady me. I met her gaze and nodded, telling her silently that we would talk when the time came, but for now we had more important things to do. Like find survivors. She seemed to understand this unspoken communication, and nodded in reply.

We dug through the wreckage, my heart growing heavier with the discovery of each new body. So many dead. It didn’t make me feel any better to realize that most of them were Sirius’s hapless recruits. Slowly, carefully, and without speaking, Hades, Dylan, Rio and I sifted through the debris.

After about a half an hour, I straightened, wiping at my eyes with the back of my hand. I’d been quietly sobbing throughout the whole ordeal, moving chunks of wood and stone and sorting the dead from the injured and dying. It was difficult for all of us, but the strain on Hades was tremendous. I could tell it was all he could do not to simply hurl all the wreckage aside with his magic, but if Steph was alive somewhere underneath all of it, such an act could potentially kill her.

And he knew it.

A shadowy shape descending from the vaulted ceiling caused us all to look up, but it was merely Stormchild. He bore Anya in his arms.

“She doesn’t need to be here,” I told him angrily, but the girl shook her head.

“I’ve seen worse, Jack.” He set her down and her soft gaze roamed the room. “Where’s Steph? And Kev…” Her voice trailed off as she noticed the row of dead bodies laid against the back wall. What was left of it, anyway. She walked slowly over to them and I could see her gaze tracing along until it reached Kevin’s body.

A lump formed in my throat and I fought to swallow. It wasn’t easy. I almost felt as if it would be easier to die myself than deal with the aftermath of this battle.

“We were lucky this wasn’t worse,” Dylan murmured in my ear. I shot her an icy look but said nothing. What was there to say, really? She was right. Didn’t mean I wanted to hear it. “How are we going to get home?”

“I can get us there,” she told me.

Anya had found Dylan’s body and was standing there looking from one to the other, face twisted in confusion and tears streaking her face. She was willing to ask the question I was afraid to ask myself. “How are you here but there too?” she asked Dylan, jabbing a finger at the broken body lying with the others.

“Radiance sacrificed herself to destroy Ranger, but at the same time responded to Jack’s silent cry that told her I was dead. She caught my soul in a net of magic and wove it into a pattern of energy so complex that it could never hope to escape.

“I am now what Sirius was.”

“He was evil,” she spat.

Dylan shook her head. “I don’t know if he was so much evil as simply misguided. Sirius was the product of the being that created him, as, to a certain extent, the mageship was a product of him.” She glanced around the room, then her gaze settled on the survivors, most of whom were injured. Perhaps the pilot was initially imbalanced and infected the ‘ship with it, who then passed it on to the djinn he created using his pilot’s essence.

She passed her hands over me and abruptly the aches and pains simply vanished. “We were so very lucky. Had Sirius truly understood the scope of his power, you—we—would never have been able to defeat him.”

“And you understand?” I asked her pointedly. I agreed with her for the most part about the motivation behind their actions, at least to some extent. The danger he’d been outlining had been quite real. Sirius had been more forthcoming with these people than the immortals had been with the government on Prime…at first.

There was something to be said for that. But I had as many questions as answers at this point, and knew those answers weren’t likely to be forthcoming. Dylan might be the only one who knew any of it, and it was anyone’s guess whether she’d tell me or not.

Stormchild went to Rio and swept her into his arms. She accepted this with obvious reluctance, but, after a moment, levered herself free again. “We need to clean up the scene,” she said, “and return all the police cars.”

“Consider it done,” said Dylan, and the scene seemed to blink before us. Literally a heartbeat later, the bodies were gone, the room was repaired, and the rest of the group that had been waiting outside were standing in our midst.

“What the hell?” Hydra looked around, found Hope sitting against a wall, applying a bandage to a wound on her leg, and rushed to her side. “Are you okay?”

She looked up at him and smiled grimly. “Better than some,” she answered in a small voice.

“Bigby and Kaleel stayed behind to protect and serve,” Stormchild told her. “The big guy didn’t like the idea of leaving the town completely unprotected when we trapped the cops in their headquarters building.”

Dylan nodded. “I’ll see if I can bring them here too.” She wavered a second, then groaned. “No. Their draconic nature makes it difficult to get a handle on them. We’ll have to contact them and get them to join us on their own.”

“Shouldn’t be a problem,” I told her. “Just need a PCD…we connected them to our mini-network.”

“I’ll take care of it, boss,” Boneyard told me. He quickly activated his PCD and was soon murmuring into the vocal pickup. I heard what I assumed was Bigby’s voice, sounding much too thin and tinny over the connection, in what I could only assume was assent.

“Once they arrive, I’ll open a time gate back to our century,” Dylan told us. “I’m very sorry that this turned out the way it did.”

“What did you do with the bodies?” Anya asked her.

“I gave them all a proper burial,” Dylan answered. “It seemed the least I could do.”

Stormchild affixed her with a piercing look, his ice-blue eyes seeming to bore into her. “How are you responsible for this? You were captured by Sirius. You had no say in what your ‘ship did in response.”

“In a manner of speaking, no. But when she brought me back, she also downloaded her persona to me. I’m me, but I’m also a bit of her as well. So part of me is responsible—or at least feels that way.” Dylan sighed. “I can’t even say how long it’s going to take to come to terms with what has happened—how I’ve changed. Doubtless my career with Fleet is over. I’ll never pilot another mageship. I’ll be lucky to retain my license at all and I’ll have to register myself as a preternatural with the Adjuster’s Office.”

“And dodge the media,” Rio snorted. She knew all about that, herself. She wasn’t a big fan of the Fourth Estate. She’d made no secret of that fact. “They’re really going to want to know what happened.”

Dylan nodded morosely. “And dodge the media. I can’t—I don’t want to—get stuck trying to explain all this to them.”

“Then don’t,” Rio replied. “I never explain anything to them. Of course, this doesn’t prevent them from postulating their own version of events, but I leave them to it. I don’t really care what anyone thinks.”

Anya came over and took my hand, leaning against me as if in need of support. I knew the feeling. Her face was stained with soot and the dried tracks of her tears and she looked as sad as she had when we’d first glimpsed her in the mirror all those months ago. I ran my fingers through her hair.

“Must be nice,” Dylan replied to Rio. “But I’ve never managed that degree of self-possession. It sounds as if you were that way even before you became a vamp.”

Rio shrugged. “It’s who I’ve always been. Becoming a vampire didn’t change that.”

“Some things never change,” Stormchild observed dryly, shooting an exaggerated wink in her direction. 

She smiled thinly and nodded to him. “When you’re right, you’re right.”

Bigby and Kaleel arrived a few minutes later and Dylan did her thing. In a swirl of light and warmth, we were instantly transported back to the Lounge. I was glad to note the place was empty and still in one piece. I’d actually been worried about it. Just about everyone dispersed at that point, leaving only me, Anya and Dylan.

I sent Anya up to the shower to get cleaned up, then aimed a level gaze at Dylan. “We paid a high price for your victory,” I told her.

She inclined her head in acknowledgment. “I’m truly sorry, Jack. I didn’t know your friends, I realize. But it’s never easy to lose them.”

It was then I realized that she too had lost someone important to her. The pilot and mageship bond is legendary and the loss of such an intimate partner had to be a wrenching experience. “It’s not your fault, Dylan, even though it may feel like it is. It wasn’t in your power to prevent any of it. I know that’s a small consolation, but, well, that’s all I’ve got for you.”

“Yeah. I know. Listen, Jack…I’ve got some things I need to do. Resign my Fleet commission, for one. And go talk to the Adjuster. Would I be welcome here if I chose to return at some point?”

I smiled at her. It wasn’t easy to do. I didn’t feel much like smiling right then. But she needed to see it, needed to know she’d be welcome. “I’d like that, Dylan.”

She returned my smile in much the same way it had been delivered to her. Fragile and revealing a great depth of sadness. “See you then.”

She vanished.

I sat down with my transcriber and recorded this record of the events for posterity, deciding at that very moment it would be a long time before I recorded another word. I was done with it for the time being. I needed time to grieve, and to heal.

It wasn’t going to be easy. I’d put on a brave, strong face for Anya’s benefit, but the place would seem empty without Kevin in it. Far, far too empty. 

I was surprised when Boneyard came through the front door. He stood at the lower end of the ramp. “We going to be open tonight, boss?” he asked.

I considered for a minute, then nodded. “Yeah. I don’t see any reason why not.”

He grinned back at me, but it seemed somehow half-hearted. “Me either. Remember what Spider Robinson said in his books about joy and pain, right?”

“Exactly,” I answered. “We’re a family, Bone. And we need each other. Now more than ever.”

“My thoughts exactly, boss. See you tonight.” And with that, he was gone.