Page 109 of Shadows of Stardust

My warrior has known great pain.

Some part of me already knew, but having the confirmation of it stirs something low and dark in the bottom of my soul, something that seeks impossible justice and retribution for her suffering.

But all of that is pointless right now.

There’s no justice to be had for some nameless, faceless Vrosri strike force carrying out orders in a war happening several galaxies from here. There’s no chance for retribution even remotely near my grasp. There’s nothing to do but hold Ros to me and give her what little comfort I can offer.

Because it was there, in Roslyn’s voice, in the way her whole body went still when I touched her scars and asked about how she got them. A pain threaded all the way through her. A pain I recognize.

The scars she carries from someone else’s war, the sense I know she’s tried to make of them, the weight of knowing they never will make sense, not entirely.

In sleep, Roslyn curls even closer to me. She nestles into my embrace, tips her head up to nuzzle against my jaw, and tightensher grip on the arm I have wrapped around her like she’s making sure I don’t leave her.

Fates, I wouldn’t move from this bed for anything in the universe.

As the night grows later and the Eritin moons track their paths through the sky, sleep evades me.

My mind won’t quiet. It’s filled with plans for tomorrow and the echo of everything Roslyn shared with me tonight.

But there’s nothing I can do about any of it now, and that, more than anything, is the most difficult to accept.

The contradiction of it all hounds me into the early morning, when my eyelids finally begin to grow heavy.

I am a being of action.

Of doing, of fixing, of getting to the heart of a matter and tackling it directly.

To rest and offer solace and simplybeis not in my nature.

But here, tonight, it’s all I can do.

Here, with Roslyn beside me and my heart slowing to beat in time with hers, there’s nothing for me to do but accept it, difficult as it may be.

When I finally drift off, my last thought is one of wry amusement and disbelief at how easily sleep comes once I finally accept it, once I let it in. This peace, this quiet, this moment of nothing to do and nowhere to be but here, with her, offering the comfort I can.

31

Zandrel

As if on cue, storm clouds roll over the beach just as Roslyn and I are about to make our daring escape.

A large contingency of the cast and crew left for their off-site filming location an hour ago, and the weather moving in has the rest of us drifting off to our accommodations. The afternoon has all the indicators of being slow, unremarkable, and almost too good to believe as Roslyn and I ease ourselves up and out of the bedroom window.

From there, our good luck continues.

With the sensors disarmed, there’s no record in production’s systems of us leaving, and with the lack of activity on the beach, most of the cameras are currently offline. I only have to intercept and redirect a handful that get close to the route we’ve mapped from the bungalow to the fence to the yard where they keep the hovers. It all goes exactly according to plan, and in a few short minutes, we’re letting ourselves out through a hidden gate in the perimeter fence.

Darting quickly through the underbrush, I do one last security scan as we reach the craftyard. The closest guard is over two hundred meters away and walking in the other direction, the closest camera back inside the fence.

“Clear,” I murmur to Roslyn, and she leads the way to the hover we’ve picked out.

Just big enough for the both of us, it’s a sleek, compact ride with a charge range that should get us easily to the village and back.

I keep watch while she goes to work on the control panel, fingers quickly crossing wires to fire it up. I’ve already taken the opportunity to hack into its tracking module in the Mate Match systems and create a false record of it being here and accounted for.

If anyone comes to verify that fact for themselves, we might be in trouble, but with most of the crew already gone and the rest unlikely to be doing a lot of travel around the beach today with the approaching storms, I tuck the concern away.

“It’s ready,” Ros murmurs as the hover hums to life and we both climb on.

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