Page 6 of Starfighter’s Salvation

“Just a game.” I pressed accept. Corvan’s image smiled, slow and certain, and my whole body leaned toward the screen before I stopped myself.

“Welcome to Velerion.”

Another face appeared. General Aryk. I recognized him from the player boards and a thousand game briefings.

“Welcome, Starfighter. We’ve been waiting for you.”

The monitor popped. Everything went black.

“Gina?” Alisha’s voice crackled once through the dead headset. “Gina, answer⁠—”

Silence. The same thing had happened to Priya’s equipment. I sat in the dark with my fever, on my excellent couch, with a heart rate that would have earned any patient an EKG.

“Okay,” I said to the empty apartment. “Either I just broke a very expensive gaming computer, or I’m about to be abducted by my not-fake alien boyfriend.”

I sat in the dark for hours.

Nothing happened. Nothing. I checked my temperature. Still a little high. Then I packed a go-bag. Toothbrush. Underwear. Scrubs. Couple old photos. Favorite bra. Three of my favorite books. My favorite jewelry and a first-aid kit. That one made me laugh. Like they needed rubbing alcohol and bandages in outer space. Hah!

I called in sick for my next shift, and texted Alisha that I was alive. Then I sat on the couch facing the door, go-bag at my feet, pulse pounding, afraid to leave the apartment in case I missed Corvan magically appearing to take me away to an alien world.

3

Gina, Denver, Four Days Later

* * *

Nobody came that night. Or the next morning. By noon, I had convinced myself that was a good thing. Aliens were not real. The game had crashed. And Corvan — the man who’d looked at me like I was the only woman in the universe — was a hallucination with a good voice and nothing I could keep. The untouched go-bag seemed to suck all the air out of the apartment. Every time I looked at it, my pulse kicked — the same useless tachycardia I’d been suffering from since Corvan’s cut scene blew up my computer.

A broken heart was one thing I couldn’t chart and wouldn’t treat. I shouldn’t have it at all.

Very reasonable. I kept the go-bag by the door anyway. Day two, I went back to work. Yes, I still had a fever. No, I didn’t tell Doctor Okafor. Nurses are excellent at recognizing bad decisions in other people. The trauma doors opened thirty-seven times during my shift. I looked up thirty-seven times, and thirty-seven times some animal part of me expected to see him standing in the doorway.

I got an ambulance crew instead. A police officer. A woman holding a dish towel around her husband’s hand because a bagel had fought back. Each chime of the doors announced exactly zero sexy alien soldiers. I choked down stale coffee and disappointment in equal measure.

“Expecting someone?” Dr. Okafor asked after my tenth trip to the registration desk.

“No.”

“That answer was suspiciously fast.”

“Don’t you have patients?” I walked away before he could ask anything else. Walter came back that night with too much fluid in his lungs and not enough shame about ignoring my instructions.

“I took one of the pills,” he wheezed through the oxygen mask.

“One pill? You need to take it every day. You know this.”

“Stop nagging. You sound like my dead wife.” He caught my wrist before I could move away. His fingers were cold, too cold. I adjusted the blanket and checked the monitor. “You keep looking at the door. Expecting someone?”

Twice now, I’d been asked that question. Eighty-one years old, breathing like every lungful had to be dragged uphill, and still making time to pry into my personal life. “Maybe,” I admitted. “But I don’t think he’s coming.” If I’d made him up, I was going to have to grieve a man who never existed.

“Then he’s a damn fool.”

“Thanks, Walter.” He really was sweet.

Day three passed. So did day four. No alien. No news from Priya. No explanation for the dead computer in my living room, its dark screen a mirror I kept catching my own worn-out face in. Every ordinary sound had turned into a flicker of hope, followed by more disappointment. Elevator bell. Footsteps in the hall. A knock on the door two apartments down. Every night I lay down half-listening for a knock, one hand flat over my galloping heart.

Hope was a bitch.