There’s a pressure behind my eyes I do not have time for tonight.
“You never said anything,” I manage.
“It wasn’t mine to say. It was yours to keep until you set it down.” She rises then, and crosses to me, and takes both my hands in hers. “I’m glad you set it down tonight. Now I can stop pretending the anomaly is a mystery and start being useful. A pair of them, this strong, this early. There’s old magic moving through you, and I have theories, and we’ll test every one of them when you come home.” A pause, and the warmth deepens until it nearly takes the legs out from under me. “Congratulations. I’ve wanted to say it for weeks.”
Not tonight. You can fall apart after we win.
I don’t fall apart. I squeeze her hands once, hard, the closest I can get to everything I don’t have time to say, and she squeezes back like she heard it anyway.
Simone last. On my own. However I want it.
She’s in the small room off the garden where she’s been staying, and she opens the door before I knock. She’s felt me comingher whole life, two kids learning to read a floorboard’s creak to know which parent was home. She takes one look at my face.
“Okay,” she says. “Whatever it is, just say it. You’ve got your bad-news face.”
So I say it. The chair is buried under folded clothes she hasn’t put away, because Simone folds everything and stores nothing. So I sit on the floor, my back against the wall, the belly making the position less comfortable than it used to be, and I give her the real version, not the tactical one I gave the conference room.
“I’m pregnant,” I tell her. “Twins.”
Her face does about four things at once.
“There’s more,” I say, before any of the four can pick a direction. “They’re strong, Simone. They’re already doing telekinesis, through me, without asking. And I’m walking into a fight tonight with them inside me, and you’re hearing it from me now because you were never going to hear it from someone else. Or from a debrief. If it went bad.”
Then she crosses the room and grabs me, both arms, hard, like she grabbed me the night I got her out, and she holds on for a long time.
“You’re an idiot,” she says into my shoulder, muffled and thick, her arms still locked.
“I know.”
“You’re pregnant with twins and you’re going to a war.”
“I know.”
“And the twins can apparently do telekinesis. Through you. Without permission.”
“That’s the part where I need you to focus.”
She pulls back. She looks at me. Her eyes do the Simone version of processing. Fast, all of it at once, and I recognize all of it, inherited from the same childhood of learning to read a room before anyone in it reads you.
“You’re pregnant with twins,” she says again, and the second time it comes out scared instead of furious, “and you’re going to a war.”
“I know.”
“You couldn’t have led with the part where I’m going to be an aunt? You had to do the whole tactical briefing first?”
“I didn’t do the tactical briefing on you.”
“You did a little.” Her eyes are wet and furious and shining all at once, which is the most Simone expression there is. “So I’m getting two at once.”
“Apparently I don’t do anything halfway.”
She makes a sound that isn’t quite a laugh and isn’t quite a sob, and her hand comes up to her mouth.
“And you told me.” Her voice cracks on it, and I understand exactly what she means. Every year of the distance I put between us and called protection. And what it’s costing me now to stop. “You’re really not doing it the old way anymore.”
“No.” My voice shakes, and I let it. This is my sister and she’s earned the version that shakes. “I’m not doing it the old way anymore.”
She holds my face as our mother never did for either of us and presses her forehead to mine. “Then go win,” she says. “Come back. Both of you. All four of you.” A breath. “And next time lead with the aunt part.”
