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EPILOGUE
Borbala Ferank lay down inside her cryopod.
“I’ll see you on the other side,” Anax Therion said, perched on the lip of the pod.
“Will you?” said the batarian with some amusement. “Tell me a truth, Anax. I listened to all those lies. Tell me one truth about yourself and I’ll see you there, I’ll even keep a house for you, waiting on whatever homeworld the Pathfinders find for the batarians. Somewhere nice and dry.”
Anax gazed down with her dark eyes.
“They were all true.”
“Tell me another one.”
“All right. I was never bonded to a hanar. I have been alone all my life. I watched other drell be chosen, but I had to carve my own way. I was not wanted. Except by the Shadow Broker, who only wanted the secrets I could send. The stories are true, but the names are false. It has always only been me, occasionally in company, mostly alone.”
“Is that true?” said Borbala Ferank.
“Perhaps,” smiled Anax Therion, and leaned down to kiss the batarian on her gouged-out, withered eye, and then, almost afraid to do it, on her lips. “Sleep well. Do not dream. Find me in Andromeda.”
Batarian skin looks almost white in cryostasis. Drell skin, too.
* * *
“Systems report, Grandmother,” said Senna’Nir as he activated the stasis cascade on his own pod. He immediately began to feel the drowsiness overcome him.
Call me Keelah Si’yah. Never thought of myself as old enough for grrrrrr—all systems optimal, Commander.
There. It had begun. She had lost her name. By the time someone from the Nexus found them, his ancestor would be completely subsumed into the ship’s databanks. A tiny fish in a great sea. Not dead, not gone, but not Liat, either. But perhaps… Perhaps he could visit her, still, from time to time. In his old quarters, where she, so briefly, came very nearly alive.
The cryostasis came on fast. He tried not to think of Qetsi, to fear dreaming of her, a dream in which he had to decide whether to tell the others what had happened, or simply deny them boarding rights until full decontamination procedures were followed and report the usual plague story—unexplainable, devastating, over now. Done. The rest was a decision for the warmth of arrival, not the cold forgiveness of sleep.
If there was any forgiveness to be had.
“Goodbye, Grandmother,” he whispered.
Goodbye, ke’sed. May flights of angels sing thee… sing thee… thee sing…
Incoming message, Commander.
But no one was awake to receive it. The Keelah Si’yah flew on in silence, a glimmer of light in the dark, toward a home that was already calling to them.
