Page 203 of Every Almost

Reyna paused, looking down at the star pen again. It had been so long since she'd relived this memory. Somehow, it felt right that Charlie was the first one to hear it in full.

"After she waited for me to catch up, she took this out of her desk and told me to carry it. As my trinket." She glanced up at Charlie. "Everyone on a PERS-equipped ship carries one. A personal object, registered to your signature. If the system ever has to pull you back, it locks onto your trinket to find you. Without it, there's nothing for the retrieval to anchor to. Sometimes it's the only thing that brings a person home."

Charlie's eyes went to the pen with new weight. "So that's what would bring you back. If something happened to you."

"It is." Reyna turned it once between her fingers. "When she gave it to me, I already had a trinket, though. A fork."

Charlie gave her a look. "A fork."

Reyna's mouth quirked, not quite a smile. "It had significance," she quipped. Charlie nodded gently. Reyna rolled her eyes, their playfulness a welcome return. "It was one from the table where I met Elena and Jere our first night at the academy." Reyna's memory engaged again, going back to that first day. "I was sitting alone, making it very clear I wanted to stay that way. But Jere took one look at me from across the room and decided I was going to be his friend." Reyna shook her head, laughing softly. "He came over, sat down beside me, and set a drink in front of me and one in front of the empty chair between us. He'd only carried two over. One for what would eventually be where Elena sat, and one for me. None for himself. I hate toadmit I noticed that before I noticed anything else. In fact, it was the first thing I ever said to him, that he was either very generous or very bad at math." Reyna smiled softly. "I took the fork off the table on my way out that night. I didn't even know why. I just knew I didn't want to leave that table with nothing."

Charlie didn't say anything. She was listening.

"Elena asked for it. When she gave me the pen, she wanted the fork for her own trinket." Reyna's gaze dropped back down to the pen as she turned it over once more. "She told me she drew the maps, but I built the roads. That every route on those charts existed because I'd kept the ship running long enough to reach the coordinates she'd marked. Then she put this in my hand and closed my fingers around it." A pause. "I tried to refuse."

"Naturally," Charlie said quietly. Reyna smiled briefly before she continued.

"I have carried it every day since, and she carried the fork. She had it on her, the day she went down to the surface on the mission that went wrong. It was the only thing that could have pulled her home." Reyna felt her voice stay even as something bubbled to the surface. "The fork had been mine. I calibrated it, I made that PERS system work myself. I set every anchor protocol on this ship, and now, well, I know the whole generation was flawed. But I handed her the one thing that was supposed to keep her safe, the one thing that was meant to bring her back, and I?—"

Reyna stopped.

She'd said too much. She heard it in the quiet that followed, and in how close she'd come to handing over the rest. I gave her my anchor and it didn't bring her back. She had never said that to anyone. She wasn't going to start tonight, on a bench, to a woman who'd come here carrying enough of her own.

So she closed it. "It was a long time ago," she said again, and let the sentence close the door on the subject.

But, to Reyna's surprise, Charlie didn't take the opening Reyna expected her to take. She didn't ask the next question or fill the silence with something kind or playful. Reyna watched as Charlie just looked at her for a moment, steady, like she'd heard the entire sentence Reyna refused to finish.

Then Charlie just let it go. She didn't push or press. Instead, she just sat with Reyna on that bench, under the stars, and made room for the quiet.

Somewhere in it, Charlie's knee came to rest against Reyna's. It wasn't big. In fact, Reyna wasn't even sure it was intentional. But it felt small, just an ordinary fact of sitting close to someone, asking for nothing.

Reyna realized it was the same thing she'd been doing for Charlie all night. Listening, sitting close, asking for nothing. They both sat there, in the room surrounded by stars, leaving room for the other without barriers.

Reyna didn't move. She didn't want to.

"What happened?" Charlie asked, breaking the silence. "When she disappeared?"

Reyna let her hand close around the pen, closing her eyes and breaking her focus on where Charlie was sitting. "She was on a surface mission and the equipment failed. The PERS system began pulling members of our team back. Everyone returned, one by one. Jere, the rest of the crew." She looked down at the pen. "But Elena didn't. She saved a crew member who couldn't get the PERS activated on the surface. She did exactly what she needed to as a Captain."

Reyna paused, and Charlie waited. No pressure, no insistence. Quiet and calm and present. Nothing more.

"We searched for days. On the fourth day, Jere told me we had to call it. I told him no." The memory rushed to the front of her mind, the sounds of it coming back, even her own voice on the bridge and how it was too loud. "I did not take it well. I knowI shouted at Jere. The crew around us had gone silent while Jere held me. Right there, on the bridge. It was with him that I finally understood Elena was not coming home. Moments later, I gave the order to end the search for my captain. My best friend."

Charlie didn't speak.

"Elena was classified missing," Reyna continued. "Not dead. That matters, officially."

"And unofficially?" Charlie asked gently.

"Unofficially, I spent thirteen years learning that not knowing can be crueler than gone."

Charlie's face tightened.

"Jere and I worked through all of it together, after Elena disappeared. But as a Qorrathi, his species has something they call a soul match. It's technically a biological recognition that happens when their bodies suddenly know they've found their true match in a partner." Reyna began to laugh softly. "For a long time, he thought that I might be his." Her laugh quieted as her mouth softened. "But he was wrong, which he eventually informed me with great theatrical solemnity." Reyna rolled her eyes and saw Charlie smile gently. "He told me I wasn't his match because I was his family." The words landed differently here, after Reyna found out everything about Katie. "That we loved each other in an entirely different way, but no less important. At least, for that time." Reyna took a deep breath. "But then, ten months later, on a mission where he had to take on the shape of a human, he found his soul match. On Earth."

Charlie went very still.

"Yes, exactly, a non-contact planet, where he could not explain who he was, where every law that protects your world also took him from us. From me."