An End

Her smile was so sad.

We found a school of unknowns on screen and raced

like vultures to the

toward them, hoping beyond hope that air would last.

I tried to breathe less, slower, but I knew that she didn’t really need the air anyways, hybrid of silver and something, calm to my rage, cool to my heat, heart to my heart. Target locked, we flew. I let the system drive. We huddled together as best as shielding and timing allowed, allowing precious hours to slip by unprotected until the jabbing started along fingers and wrists, behind eyes, and I retreated behind liquid glass.

Can you appreciate the touch of a lover not marred by distance, flesh to flesh, swimming into, entering, not echoed through phase, cold, wet, not shivering and yet feeling the same pang, the same pain, the same

The realization of distance physical.

I was so scared that the galleons wouldn’t be friendly.

How I miss home, or the idea of home: safety, family, parents still alive, teddy bear unburned, cartoons on the television, no grocery store walks past a little girl, waving. I miss an idea that would have prevented this love. Which life would I choose?

Better to have loved and lost…Is bullshit.

I’ve killed her. Weight of body, smell of sweat, tack of blood. I’ve killed

Lies since birth, all that they taught, all that they taught. I’ve known truths, but I’ve assembled them myself from fragments of Us. I’ve known the silver, the stillness, the loss, the night. I know. i Know. You. Do you? You?

Focus. Inhale. moment

It isn’t like books or movies, holograms or

a boy a girl and the end of the

No words.

A mind dissembles.

I’d passed out by the time we were in range. Lilith activated the beacon, mindful that it might draw unfriendlies too. There was nothing more we could do, dead ship, cold and silver onset within me. I remember snap of static and gush of warmth as they released the cockpit seal in the galleon hangar, shadowed images, old men in miner’s jumpsuits, jaws agape at my passenger. Woman. Shielded.

Weakness: they lifted me up, out. Conversation like waves, echoes, forth and back. I knew it wasn’t English. French.

I remember fever: slurred speech, sweaty brow, cool floor, a man squatting beside me, looking from his shipmates to the sick destroyer captain and his companion. Deactivated my shielding, let me breathe deeply of old air, taste of ore, reach out to Lilith, please, just let me hold

She was uncomfortable. Center of attention, moreso than I was. Because. Just because.

A new man, my vision fading from black to

Silver was retreating.

He knelt, touched my cheeks, forehead. Spoke to his shipmates with foreign tongue.

Lilith: standard? english? anyone?

oui. yes.

I don’t remember what happened after that, but waking up in their sickbay. Warm. Normal, stabbing gone, heart regulated. Rested. I panicked but she was at my side, shielded but there. I wanted to hold her hand, but knew that it was getting too close. To time. The time. When we could no longer be together. She kept her distance, a distance that I knew could only grow. You know. You do. grow.

She’d spoken with the man in broken Standard. Told him everything. Incredible story, but she was the proof. She. was the proof.

It was a group of three galleons, miners. They worked around the periphery of a single system where they’d found the closest approximation to Sol that they could. Dead system, planets harvested of almost everything, but still breathable atmosphere, a little water. Nothing left but desert, flattened cities, a spire…Three ships, a few hundred crewmen. When she asked where they came from, they told a story as incredible as ours, yet there it was, intersections, intersections, paths crossed in the night.

Many of the colony came from rogue Fleet vessels. Soldats perdus. And now I knew, and I knew.

His name was Berard, and he’d known my father.

There are histories hidden between these stars, histories that die before revelation. I feel them; they bring poignant tears to tired eyes.

out of the hell of whatever it was

Do you know of France, interior struts of Guerra’s midsection, wine country converted to bulkheads? Do you know of Paris, the war, the hole in the earth that led to

Berard served under Jean Reynald and Joseph Windham after the war, during Mother’s rise. He knew Whistler, the original projection. He was responsible for the Paris Compound. He was the Pierce de Paris, taking his boys to the sky when the “alien” invasion began, for a while turning them into good little soldiers, later breaking target and killing angels and leaving the master plan of the jihad. Berard saw through the plan. Maybe Pierce did too.

They hid. Found a home. Became soldat perdus of a friendlier persuasion.

He knew of her beginning, those precious secrets held by precious few: ice, wind, blade. He knew. Maybe she saw it all: intersections in the night. Maybe she let him escape.

He said I looked like my father.

Joseph Windham was the strongest man in the world. I saw tears in his eyes once, that day that he left and I knew he would die only months and centuries later, in the cold of this, bathed in a bridge sea, bubbles of gelatin glass, the sound of cracking shell, an instant of

My father never trusted his path, chose to tell a small circle of his officers that which he’d seen in Mother’s eyes. He wanted them to distrust. He needed them to distrust, because he knew.

My father told him of

long summer bonfires, those stupid cushions we put around the fire that get wet as the air cools, sending everyone else off to play hide and seek so we can be alone, a cute girl throwing dandelions at me, the time when we first laid by the fire and i explored every inch of your face with my lips because we were both too terrified to kiss.

i could go on. i think too much. i wish things had not changed.

i still love you.

The child is dying. Younger and younger. The process speeds. Tears of frustration and fury. She begs.

This weapon is

The ice plain slipped toward night and

i win

I know now of a system of two stars, a species with two hearts who buried their god in the center of the world. I know of centuries of civil war, a fragile peace enacted by machine angels. I know of a woman from the edge of the worlds, trees that swam through the sky, an alien called silver, between times and whens. Silverthought. I know.

She could have talked, but she was action. She could have talked, but no one would have listened. She heard the whispers in her blood, whispers in her single silver heart, and she acted.

Berlin, Kath, others. They had access to the lumbers, had access to the inexplicable resonance of flight and time. They helped her at first, wanted to make a difference, wanted things to change. They knew that their god was asleep, that machines were taking key positions in the power structure, that left unchecked, the machines could decide to replace biologic with mechanic.

and this heart, for

They never knew that she would try to kill them all.

His superiors found out about Berlin’s involvement after she struck, after she was captured. They had no intention of letting him off the damaged planet. He would have died in the cold and the dust if he hadn’t found the photographer Task and his machine lover Elle. They tried to stop it all, tried to warn Hannon of the contamination. They were caught in the phase flux and followed Maire’s exile craft to Earth, where it this all began in earnest, where eons of waiting culminates in a man, a gun, a child, a desert.