Page 27 of Veiled Vixen

“Well.” I chuckle a little. “It doesn’t hurt to have a partner called Luck, right?”

“It wasn’t Luck, Valor. And it wasn’t luck, either. We… we’re…”

“We’re what?” I ask. Because my heart is skipping right now. Skipping with the knowledge that he’s going to say something I already knew, but couldn’t admit to.

“We can’t die.”

“Draden died,” I say. And I don’t even know where it comes from. Because I know there’s a chance that’s not true.

“Did he?” Crux asks. “Did we ever see his body?”

“Look,” I say. “I get it. Some really weird shit has happened to me too. Lots of things I don’t really understand. But—”

“But nothing,” Crux interrupts. “Dude. Luck shot a fucking plasma rifle at me at point-blank range and I died. I… I went places, Valor.”

“What places?”

“I don’t know. But it was gold. It was like a golden cloud of… space dust. Or star dust. Or like… a giant gold nebula.” He walks towards me, grabs my upper arms and shakes me. “Have you ever seen that? While you and Luck were out there? Did you ever see a gold nebula?”

“Nebula?” I ask dumbly.

“Think! Valor! Think hard. Did you?”

“I don’t know. I… I don’t know. I’d have to think about it, I guess.”

“Think!” he says again. “Think about it right now! Because…” He lets go of me and turns away. “Because I need to know if it’s real.” He turns back. “I need to know what happened to me. Because…”

He stops to stare off at… nothing. Just to stare. Lost inside himself, I think.

“Because why, Crux?” I ask in a whisper.

“Because it was not good, Valor. It was terrifying. And there were others there too.”

“Who?”

He shakes his head. “Other… things. And before you ask me what things, I don’t know. I just know I came back screaming. Like you. And that’s why I thought—”

“No,” I say. “I mean, I don’t know why I wake up screaming like that from cryo, but… I have never seen that place.”

“You’re sure? Maybe you just forgot. What do you remember from cryosleep?”

“I don’t remember shit, dude. That’s the point of cryosleep, right?”

Crux begins to pace the length of his dark living room. Back and forth several times. And I suddenly can’t think. I don’t know anything. You could ask me my name right now and I wouldn’t be able to tell you, that’s how empty I am.

“We need to find out what that place is. Because it’s real. I know it’s real. And I died and went there.”

“Like… an afterlife?” I offer. Generally, as a rule, none of us Harem brothers believe in that shit. I mean, how do you believe in God when you live with him? And he’s just circuits, and wires, and data cores? But I think that’s what Crux is getting at here. And that’s the only reason I say it.

He stops pacing and grabs his hair with both hands. Like he’s frustrated, or bewildered. Or scared. “I think it was Corla,” he says. “Because when I woke up…” He looks at me. And now his eyes are bright fucking violet. Lit up like he’s some lost Cygnian prince. “When I woke up, Valor, she was sending us messages.”

“What kind of messages? Because Tray… I mean, listen. Our story about what happened to us while we were gone is long, and I don’t really have time to get into it right now because most of it has nothing to do with any of this. But he said Corla was sending messages to Brigit when she was in her cryopod.”

“Who the fuck is Brigit?”

And hell. How the fuck do I answer that without starting a spin-long conversation about what we learned about the Akeelian girl twins and how they have been turned into minds?

“She’s just a girl in a cryopod—”