I couldn’t breathe.
I stumbled toward the door, slamming my badge against the scanner as I clutched at my chest.
The door hissed open.
And I ran.
I didn’t know where I was going—only that I was trapped in a floating metal tube thousands of miles away from her. I could run for hours and still end up in the same damn place. Nowhere. My boots screeched againstthe metal floor as I skidded to a halt. I bent over, hands braced on my knees, trying to catch my breath. Or maybe to vomit.
I wasn’t sure.
I was having a fucking heart attack. Solace was—Solace was on Earth.Alive. She had to be.
“Captain, I am alerting the medical bay that you are in need of assistance,” SOL said calmly beside my head. “Take deep breaths through your nose—”
I shoved the floating orb away from my face and dropped to my knees. My stomach lurched violently, I was going to be sick.
“Captain Ransom requires medical assistance,” SOL continued. “Ring four, bay five.”
“SOL, mute!” The orb fell silent as I braced my hands on the floor, breathing hard, staring down at my shaking fingers.
Alive.
She was alive.
I considered myself to be pretty level-headed—at least when it came to my job. I’d invented SOL in my bedroom with supplies gathered over the years from garage sales, thrift shops, and Mr. Mikey, my tenth-grade science teacher. Boot camp had been less pleasant, but I’d still managed to keep my cool even while standing half-nakedin the pissing rain for hours on end. I could take a beating. I’d even survived implementing SOL’s software in Echelon One and every single station alongside Elias, who never shut up, and was a perfectionist to a fault.
But Solace’s song playing on repeat throughout the conference room had me grinding my jaw and tapping my fingers against a useless mug of tea.
Elias elbowed me again, shooting a sharp look at my hand. “Fuck off with that,” he whispered. I flipped him off, because apparently I was fifteen again.
My breaking point had finally come—nearly a decade after the end of the world. In the form of my best friend who’d embedded herself so deeply into my marrow that even the thought of her being alive had landed me in the med bay, working through my first ever panic attack.
Commander Zhang was coordinating with the next shift’s translator to establish a new connection. The timing was off and our signal was delayed. Not to mention the small thread of contact we’d managed to maintain over the years was riddled with interruptions. It could be days before we reached Solace again. And goddamn it, I just wanted to hear her voice.
Part of me knew it was crazy—that I might be hearing things that weren’t there. Creating ghosts out of my own haunting. There was another part of me, small but stubborn, that was so certain I’d be willing to bet everything on it. On her. On the piece of my life before—the piece I’d lost too many times already.
“Lieutenant Jones,” Commander Zhang snapped without looking up, “get Ransom home, will you? He needs sleep. Drug him, knock him out—whatever needs to be done so that he sleeps.”
“With all due respect, Commander,” I said, “I’m not fucking going anywhere.”
She tilted her glasses further down her nose. “We don’t know that it’s her, Captain. And even if it was, we have zero way of maintaining constant communication.”
“It’s her.”
“And if it is?” she replied coolly. “What exactly is it you plan to do?”
Bring her home.
Home was such a trivial word these days. Nothing was home since the Scourge.
Solace was home though, and more importantly, she was mine.
14
Do You Copy
Solace
