Her Hand Was Never There

He had the angle and he had the grip. He went into the roll already composing the line he would say afterwards, because that is how it works: you land it, you smile, you move on and nobody asks how. Her hand was not there. He has run it back perhaps forty times since and it comes out the same every time — fingers closing on nothing, the heat coming up, a sound he has decided not to think about. Then the elf says it out loud on the shuttle, mildly, like a man handing back a dropped glove. Kael has not answered him yet.

The man on the table was going to die in eleven minutes or in one, and Verum-Gaea was already reaching for cloth. Mistarion did the arithmetic nobody had asked for and closed the distance to zero, then said the true thing out loud so it would not sit unsaid in the room.

The guard went through the girder a few minutes later, and Mistarion did not reach for him. He has noticed that about himself since, without much heat, the way one notices weather.

He was watching when Dr. Voss went — all of them were, except the one man diving for her. What he saw and Kael Vass did not is that there was nothing there to take hold of. He carried it the whole way to the shuttle before he set it down in front of him.

There was a weapon on the floor and a man beside it who had stopped being a man. She asked him what had happened here. He hissed. She stepped back with her hands open until he settled, and then she took the sword.

A blade is a question asked once. The three in that room had been asked something else instead, over and over, until they lost the ability to answer at all. Later, in the engineering chair, she moved power to the engines and then back to the shields and found none of it difficult. That is what she is for.

The ring was under a sheet of foam in a cracked crate, and when it went back on his finger he made a sound he has not made since the Citadel. Pearl of the Dawn Feather. His house is gone and the pearl is not, and he finds that to be a kind of argument.

He was three steps from the man on the table with his hands already full of bandage when the firebolt went past his shoulder. That is two men now this month whose dying he has attended and neither of whom he has saved. He is beginning to wonder whether the observing is all that is left of the Chief-Observer.

The coats were the wrong size. That was the whole of it — a doctor's shoulders in a nurse's seams, a nurse's name stitched over a doctor's posture — and the room reorganised itself into something legible. He said I wouldn't, and the woman thought better of the blaster on the floor, and he has been turning that over since, because it was the truest thing he said all day and it was also the thing that worked.

Three names now. Sable off a terminal, Chimera off a door, Lethe off a screen a woman was scrubbing clean. Somebody is going to want all three of them back.

The crystal was purple and he had never tasted purple, so really that answered itself. It sits in him now, turning slowly, and it tastes like morning dew off an elderberry under a red sun, which he accepts is not an answer anyone was hoping for.

He caught Kael Vass by the scruff over the fire and told him not to dare. He shouted blink dog at eleven separate people and it worked on precisely none of them. He watched a man he had called a friend through the bars beat Oot to death on a loading floor, and he has not yet worked out where to put that. And then the universe gave him back a bathrobe.