Archive of Our Own ^beta

The thing that changes is, a month before Phoenix would have been bombed by the Pykkt, is that Michael takes an early afternoon to watch a movie. He's not a film buff, not before everything and not after, sitting with either his grief or his remade self, when he's too busy creating of a monument, a titan of intellect and agglutinating wisdom, to really care about cinema. When he watched a movie, he would have his own thoughts, totally unrelated to the filmmaker's intentions. Paula would ask him what he thought and he would never have anything to say about the movie they'd actually just seen, but about his work, or a problem he'd been usefully tooling away on. "Oh, I like this," Alanna will tell Michael, ninety three trillion miles away, "I don't understand it, but I like it." Movies are not susceptible to the same process that he puts everything else through: they cannot be transformed into his understanding. They're just out there.

The eye interpolates what it perceives.

Michael watches Smultronstället.

It's very easy after that. He called Wonder Woman, and she alighted gently on a balcony in Falls Church, Virginia. Michael was not present for the following confrontation but her narrative outline is appended to his report to the Justice League. It had been so close-run a thing: Diana set one red booted toe down on the balcony of the Stranges' hotel suite, the setting sun arrayed behind her giving her spectacular raiment, a verifiable goddess against the vast dark of falling night, her diadem glinting with righteousness, and Adam pulled the trigger of a .357 revolver against his breast. "I told him he couldn't have his pistol," Alanna will tell Michael. "We locked it in the hotel room safe together. I didn't leave my suicidal drunk husband alone in a room with an energy blaster that he knew how to fire." With anyone else, Adam would have blown a clean hole the size of a child's fingernail through his throat and into his mouth, continuing up through his brain and out the back of his head, near where the skull meets the cervical vertebrae: with Diana, who ran through the thermally-treated glass, shattered it through the sitting room in her wake, slid across the bed and wrapped her fist around the bullet in the interval when it exploded from the barrel and when it would have touched the thin place between his collarbones, he'd been left merely badly-shaken. "I didn't know that he was playing around with your Earth projectiles," Alanna will tell Michael. His throat was fine, he could speak: he confessed to Diana.

That evening, Alanna had been out. She was talking to the mother of the man who Adam had killed. They hadn't been close, the woman said on the news, but it seemed the right thing to do. Alanna didn't know very many people on Earth, so turning the evening into work at least filled up the time. They sat in the tan kitchen, mugs of coffee before them and Alanna had asked about the woman's son. She'd learned how he had felt injustice very keenly, that he had liked wintertime best, that the dog he'd loved as a child had been called Spock. Once they had finished talking, she went out into the twilight and looked up at the stars. Her star was up there. Overhead, Diana tripped a Pykkt commander and shouted at another one to lower the blaster aimed at her back: she'd been at the door to the small suite where Aleea had been kept. The fire from the blaster raked the door and disabled the access panel, so Diana had punched it open and gathered Aleea up in her arms. The jetpack had been heavy on Alanna's back, and she'd wondered if she was always going to feel this grief.

Half a month later, Alanna was interviewed for the evening shows. "'His claims are true except for the details,'" she recites, from an op-ed, "well, Jen, what an extraordinary way for claims to be." The fake eyelashes had been bothering her all day but openly weeping on television news because her family wasn't dead would be hard to find relatable. Coming from ninety three trillion miles away, Alanna needed to appear relatable. She blinked and kept her hands on her knees. "It's a miracle to have our daughter returned to us. She's a little dehydrated, but she's doing really well. On Rann, we don't usually –" Alanna had taken a breath, the pause before a lie or a revelation looking similar, "we don't like to talk about our private ethical systems, so this is a little difficult for me. I am overwhelmingly thankful toward Miss Prince for her heroic actions. My husband's book, I hope, doesn't appear less noble for the truth that our daughter was wonderfully returned to us when we thought that she was –"

"The report's not very useful," Michael tells Jordan. He would rather have spoken with Diana. Jordan has a way of assuming responsibility for everything within range while claiming that he's doing nothing of the sort, not entirely dissimilar from Alan, a modern Cavaradossi, and this is really more a discussion he would prefer to have with someone who has some actual capacity for leadership. For restraint. No one gets into superheroing because they like easy problems with uncomplicated solutions, though, so he muscles through it like a man. "I read their archives. They were fighting a brutal, stupid war. He thought there was a solution, what he'd done his second day out there, in a gamble against a group calling themselves the Eternals. The Rannians had a city called Samakand, hidden in a pocket dimension. Adam had been there, to beg for a breakthrough, something that would preserve the planet from the Eternals. I guess that's where he got the idea."

On screen, Jordan listens attentively until Michael's finished. "Thanks. I don't really care about the report. I'm glad you were there," Jordan has a precise way of speaking when he's being complimentary: Michael hasn't yet been able to determine conclusively if Jordan is unaccustomed to sincerity, or merely lives his life with such piercing clarity due to how close death is all the time and he truly means it, unworried about being the baddest guy in the room if he can save someone. Precise, not mild: Michael's been called to understand several militaries, none of which have anyone obviously like Jordan affiliated with them, although maybe the key's that Jordan's not obvious. Flies under the radar. As it were. The T-spheres have been curious about drag and lift, previously: he should let loose on more USAF flight manuals, maybe some congressional committees. What type aircraft. He's not really a political guy. Jordan is, though. That could be where the sincerity comes from, the ease with which he gets what he wants when it comes down to the wire. Only in the utmost extremity. "And that you're writing it rather than someone else, obviously: you should see some of the approaches to a prose style that are out there." Jordan smiles. His face is haggard. He's been back and forth from Oa and building the ship with Stewart. They'd promised to do this, grace and technical know-how to make a machine powered by visions. There's been some fairly significant back and forth with the Guardians regarding lustration and stellarium. The precise manipulations of their far-flung correspondents have been shrouded in secrecy, so presumably someone's giving up much more than they'd like to, but notwithstanding the catastrophe that this secretive shame has brought to Rann and Earth both, Michael's uninterested in the details. He's got a genius for learning, not for caring about magical politicians. "It's your insight, right, that saved him."

Expression fails him, somewhat. He falls back on himself. "It's in their archives. Back then, he'd asked for a breakthrough and they'd given him a ship. He says he didn't need a ship, he needed a feint, and he used the ship's relative gravity to give them a chance. Opened the envelope of space with some fancy flying," Michael knows who he's talking to, a pander: "and folded the Eternals up as neatly as a letter. The ship was incidental: what saved them all was physics, replicating the hidden dimension that the scientists at Samakand had already discovered. Ship could have been anything; it was all in service of solving the problem. He saw it and he tried it."

"Yeah, so we'll get him a ship. Another ship, powered by the galaxy's one truly inextinguishable resource. I already feel like the world's worst friend for turning him down when he needed a ride, you think I could top off the guilt?" The edges of the screen go a little fuzzy: Jordan's on Earth, but not nearby, and not close to a decent signal. Somewhere on the coast. "She's not a good looking craft, by the way. Stewart's an expert, he'll explain more of it to you, but we can't make anything really beautiful that will also punch a hole through to another dimension. You can pilot a box, though, right?"

Michael can do anything. "Not a problem."

"Sorry to give you what amounts to a space van powered by pain." Jordan's undiplomatic cheer breaks through.

Michael never knows how to respond to good feeling. He doesn't handle his emotions by deflecting them. He handles them by processing them and understanding what he's experiencing in both his mind and his body. "The Pykkt rolled out of Martian space after they met Diana. Their ships should take about six weeks, Earth time, to get to Rann, so we should have a result shortly after that. It'll be immediately apparent if it doesn't work, because they'll probably bomb Rann flat in a fit of pique."

"What we do," Jordan says, meditatively. "What we do. You know when I killed approximately everyone, rounding up, and destroyed the Central Power Battery, I thought I was fine with it. I'd be walking around, sun shining, the world in a major key, and I'd think, this is what I did. This is exactly what I had wanted so badly that I was willing to kill them all for it. And then I'd take off with the ring. Just, way up, anywhere that I could cry until I couldn't breathe. That's what I'd do."

After Paula died, Michael used to cry in the car. She'd been driving a newer model, fully-featured, side air bags and impact attenuators. The change in momentum had been something he'd modeled there, in the front seat of the Benz. Classical mechanics hadn't quenched his rage. "Who wouldn't." Who hasn't. Everyone's fine until they aren't.

This weeping doesn't sound anything like something that Jordan's not still doing. "Ah, desolation's really a common experience. You sure you don't want to keep signing off on all the outpatient care? JSA'd be better with you back in it. JL wouldn't forgo your talents either."

The JL is a disaster. Michael would much rather keep Alanna Strange from murdering her husband in the week it will take the vamped-up generation ship to get to Rann and cut a line in space than spend any real concerted time with them. "I could be here prosecuting a losing battle with the rest of you."

"Alright, we're lucky. I'm glad we didn't pick the fight this time."

"I'll be gone for a while. Try to pick your battles while I'm away."

"Mister Logical Positivism," Jordan says, not meanly. Michael likes knowing things. He knows Jordan: he considers himself an iconoclast yet he makes a good commander. Anyone who seeks command for itself is not worthy of the role: Jordan's recurrent psychosis probably gets his way, but he's doing what he does well. "Can't stop it with these guys. You, me. Clark, Scott. It's not an unknown condition." There's no bright line. What people miss about the truth, what Michael cannot test and be certain of, hence Jordan's dig, is every situation's phenomenological uncertainties. There's not some great well of truth to which he has access, a system of knowledge that no one else knows. He is exceptional precisely because he uses the exact same tools that anyone else has, he only does so better. He attempts to work consciously. With intent that he can describe. Anyone can read Montesquieu, the talent is in inquiring what De l'esprit des loix can explain of space aliens and ray guns. Applied skill. Michael loves knowing more than he knew before and using it. When Jeff had seen the world, what he had thought of it. How to model the friction against the side of the Porsche. What a psychotic break feels like, if Jordan could ever summon back the totalizing freedom of those moments of terror where anything could be real and wiping out a planet was not only the best choice, it was the right one. Where is the distinction in 'going into space to fight a threat larger and deadlier than ever before and 'going into space to die.'

"I know. I'm taking them back." He's not foreclosing the possibility. He'll return. Jordan's guilt, Strange's shame. And here is the day that someone's emotions will do something useful for them.

The generation ship is completed nearly a month after that. It looks very much like a big-box hardware store in the suburbs of a large American city, so much so that Michael first believes that Stewart, who never jokes, must have shammed this up and the real ship is behind it, the usual sleek chrome lines common to all spacefaring cultures. Engineers will create a dream of any necessity. There's no need for aerodynamics without an atmosphere. The ship's ugliness is inessential so long as it will slice through the curved space around Rann and split the local universe into two exactly equivalent planets. Rann's objections had been answered by no longer losing a war; the Pykkt had stacked their chipped stone cores on the table as the Lanterns had looked on. On the ship, there are no windows and no wings. He and Alanna had driven past a Menards that looked very approximately like this.

Stewart's there as they take delivery.

"How lovely," Alanna tells him. "It looks like a prison. Thank you for making this." She had said goodbye that morning to Aleea, who has been easily absorbed into an elementary school in, of all places, La Paz. Jordan apparently knew a kid.

She turns from them to talk to an aide: "we can step it down a little, if you think that's wise. The inhibitor, next? Sure." Michael should not be surprised by how Alanna's charisma works, that she is able to instantly persuade those around her to do useful things for her, because it is working on him, but seeing it close up and seeing in in action are quite different. She waves them on, staying to talk about drug interactions.

They stand in the cavern of the ship. In a week's time, this space will be filled with highly processed agony and guilt, enough to carve out a new world. "It's an interesting challenge. It was an interesting challenge." Stewart's a precise guy. "Not a trip to navigate in any comfort, but you'll get there. The controls are binary. Although Jordan wanted to put in a joystick for you two."

"I'm honored," Michael tells him, "thank you for getting the better of him on that. And everything else." The size of the ship, a generation ship, make it intimidating even merely at harbor. Its exterior resembles a mid-period Richard Serra, if he'd gone into shipbuilding instead of demolishing the notions of sculpture. The ship is large enough to make the rest of the space appear as a landscape around it, warping a variety of visions, of engineered marvels, into this, only this. The interior dimensions are those of a field, a vast rectangle with the controls at one end and the power chamber at the other. Michael has selected rations, water, a sleeping bag, for the outward journey. A lesser man would have felt curiously pathetic at this gathering process: the sleeping bag is dark blue, the same as the color of Alanna's dress when he first met her. Michael had gone to the camping supply store with a list.

"We have to put you somewhere. We are, as you may imagine, overjoyed that Earth is no longer under the threat of this particular enemy, and your negotiations bought a great deal of good will, something which must periodically be renewed. I wouldn't test it, but you probably could. Earth should be safe until the next bully shows up, and by then, you'll be well out of firing range." Stewart scowls a little in anticipation of this next battle. "All of this knowledge, these people from far-off worlds, and we're stuck playing out battles with death. The same zero-sum games that every war is meant to win, the chessboards that they always think they can knock over."

"The pocket dimensions ebbing around Rann make it an unusually feasible spot to try doubling the planet. For once, we might get somewhere with negotiation and agreement."

Stewart indicates the vastness above them. This ship is sufficient to answer any question. "It does seem likely, doesn't it. All this time, they're carving through worlds, making themselves a menace, ruining lives, and they wanted a home. I can almost believe it. You wouldn't want to have this conversation with the Rannians in earshot, but this is the best outcome possible." He rests a hand over a weld. "Everyone fights an awful war, we actually get somewhere with a peace agreement and in four generations, it'll be like nothing ever happened. All that brutality, and it comes to an end with a sufficiently smart technical answer. I don't think I'm that optimistic."

That clears it up. Michael was having a little bit of trouble fitting those particular figures into the equations of interstellar conflict that the Lanterns use. Stewart's a realist. How he got into this very particular racket, and, more pertinently, stayed in, would be a wonder to a lesser man than Michael. Heroics are a calling for the indefatigable, a home for the wounded, and a test for the talented. Stewart seems to have come to it as a decent backup plan, when making partner at an architecture firm seemed a little too far off, the Marines in the rearview mirror, and he's grim about the prospects for any plan because he doesn't fundamentally need the success that he's granted. There's no weakness that's begging to be cured. Michael's thought about this in parallel to his own hurt: for Stewart, the continuation of Earth, where some of his friends live, is a prospect to be enhanced, but the process itself is simply an interesting challenge. He could move somewhere else, if Earth weren't here. This makes Stewart sound bloodless, which isn't accurate. He takes to an interesting challenge as anyone would, something to solve and solve well. He just doesn't need the validation that everyone else seems to crave. He'd save the world not for itself alone. He knows exactly who he is and what he can do. Michael admires this about Stewart. He doesn't, himself, know the outer limits of what he can do, and this makes his a less-stable personality than Stewart's. Stewart's power is perfection. "We don't need to be optimistic if the plan works as intended."

"It will."

They'll embark here, and under the full power of Adam's guilt, get back to Alpha Centauri in one hundred seventy hours. They'll drop the ship and, like the first astronauts, land in the sea. Their retrieval is, of course certain: Alanna's the smartest person on the planet and Adam hadn't betrayed Rann. The dimensional duplication will be like sliding a knife through a cake, and instead of sectioning out the cake, the cut reveals that there was a second cake all along. "They asked for a planet: it is within our power to give them one."

Michael hadn't particularly intended to stay on Earth anyway. The life of the mind is a taste of immortality.

"A good idea. I always thought it was clear-sighted of the JSA to dissolve, for other than the obvious reason. Being able to help one another in a tough corner is not limited to combat." Stewart pauses in the way that people always pause before they reveal a secret they'd like to keep, as though this is the last moment for pride before the free-fall of shame. Perception is incorrect: knowledge is never like that. Michael has a pretty good idea of what Jordan was talking around, though, and Stewart hasn't only negotiated for an end to the Pykkt wars. Rannian wars. They'd carve up the omniverse in the end, if left to it, Everything is someone's fault, they can only be relied on in this. "You're doing the right thing. It's going to look ugly once you're up there and you have the perspective to see how you could have done better, but that's not a reason not to have done it in the first place. Crisis management is never attractive in retrospect. It matters in the moment."

If they're talking about it – "they were going to flatten Phoenix," Michael shares. "That was to start. To show us that they really meant it, when they'd cut their deal with Strange. And for once, it wasn't nominative determinism: they don't have a myth of a transmigratory bird, as far as I can tell. They don't have very many shared myths at all. No superheroes of their own."

Stewart's high and tight hides the gray. The Green Lantern Corps has always seemed to Michael, who doesn't really care for any organization larger than himself and the T-spheres, to be a hard job done well. He'd never loved actually running Cyberwear. The company had always been a way to channel his ideas into making money so that he'd have the capacity for new designs, for more training. Chairing the JSA had been about finding a purpose again, but he's not going back.

"The trajectory is pre-planned, although you can adjust it. We learned a little lesson there. Did you watch the movie like I mentioned?"

Michael simply frowns: Bergman's enough.

"Should have. The mimarobe's an intriguing premise. She self-destructs in the original. I liked the idea, though, of using that power. The eternal recurrence of the cathartic dream. We use energy exactly this way all the time, so the adaptation was remarkably straightforward. In the original, the generation ship dies and like lotus eaters, the occupants prefer the solace of dreams to the truth of their doomed future. Engaging stuff: Carter and Shayera saw it with me."

That sounds bleak and somewhat tasteless to Michael, although people make calls like that all the time.

A lesser man would probably say, I'm in your corner and leave it at that.

Stewart continues: "what if the potential of those dreams were made physical, tangibility being the great burden of most solutions? The engineering and design of the ship and the mimarobe, at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, have some intriguing physical properties that would become apparent with repeated flights: the models we've run so far show a tendency toward ghosts. Recurrent emotional presences persist where the mimarobe has routed them. The same type of feelings tend to cluster together. It's strange." Michael reconsiders if Stewart has ever told a joke before. Is he being set up here. "This shouldn't have any practical consequences for your journey."

"They're both troubled, yes." Michael has looked at the equations. The guilt, rage, and shame should do nicely. He dislikes how that sounds. He's not punishing Adam for his betrayal of Earth, or for having the temerity to marry Alanna. He is instead relying on Adam to experience these feelings in a way that looks identical to a retributive aim. Cesare Beccaria, Dei delitti e delle pene: it is confounding all relations, to expect that a man should be both the accuser and accused; and that pain should be the test of truth, as if truth resided in the muscles and fibers of a wretch in torture.

"Should be some forward thrust, although I'd let it come about slowly: I'm not a nautical designer by any means. Once you're there, all you have to do is get into the mimarobe," Stewart clears his throat defensively; Michael's not going to call it that, "jettison yourselves, and let it drop. Should punch a hole through space in no time." Stewart brings his fist up to his shoulder and mimes the dimension-splitting action by swinging his arm down a few inches and expanding his fingers. "Whoosh."

"Impressive," Michael says.

"Cool effect," Alanna says, rejoining them. Her hair swings over her shoulder, tremendously glamorously. In the even light from the hangar, it gleams brightly. Her face is in shadow. Michael doesn't believe that any of this will show in his expression. Stewart's playing him.

He knows she's into him. They'd felt each other out on the topic. He's attached to her, she's attracted to him. They both kept her husband from betrayal, and shouldn't that be enough. Some kind of pleasure that could be earned by right action. Paradoxically, if Adam had completed his betrayal, giving Earth over to the Pykkts to escape with his family, then Alanna would have been justified in her own betrayal. If Adam had died, this would not be an incorrect action. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf set in space this time. He is doing it for her. Michael remembers the feeling of Alanna's necklace under his hand, their kiss together in the car. It is his duty to see this through.

To Michael, Stewart says: "we included a manual." To Alanna, Stewart says, "congratulations on the world peace."

They board the ship. Alanna takes Adam's arm. Today she is wearing the same gray and yellow sweater she had worn when they went to the bar together in Minneapolis. The vision distracts somewhat from the sight of the two of them, so close. Alanna, solicitous over her husband. Her necklace glitters over her sternum. The Stranges walk immediately to the cell that will power all of this might: Michael waits, one hand on the low back of the pilot's chair. This is going to be uncomfortable. Heroes aren't heroes because they attempt to seduce married people, except for all the times they do exactly that.

"Michael," Alanna says. He looks at her, one last moment to back out and make this easy. It never comes. It's the same sweater.

"Alanna."

She gazes at him. Wherever she looks is enhanced by her attention, like the calligrapher's brush, which both depicts the landscape and suffuses it with light. He flips on the display, which unfolds like an old fashioned map. Soon the map will have Alanna look upon it and will enriched by the experience. There's nothing sweet about this. Why has he done this to himself.

They stand there, each at a chair, the ship building in guilt, the exquisite pain of choosing the right course. From outside, the noises of the locking mechanism disengaging are hushed. This enormous ship, to end a war, and they're standing here looking at one another. Abstraction is a refuge: if he thinks about the feeling of her hand in his, the rasp of her voice, working with her all week will be sustaining. Applying a term like 'love' would make it unendurable.

Although haven't they all learned that anything is endurable.

Michael looks away first.

"I don’t think," Alanna says, sitting down, hands on the armrests of the co-pilot’s chair, "that I like my husband very much."

Just the facts. Michael taps the code to bring the ship about. They’re cruising to Rann, ninety three trillion miles. Alanna’s husband has knocked himself out to get them here. He reads the manual. The blue spray of light from the instrument panel draws Alanna like a basalt statue. Her nose is slightly hooked at the tip and her face is broad, each eyebrow neatly spooled into submission, her cheekbones severely winging upwards. In the picture of her face, she’s beautiful. It's a very precisely crafted picture. At Thonis-Heracleion, the statues of Osiris were lowered into the water on purpose-built boats in tribute to a poorly-understood natural world, a fully-realized theology, and left there. Two stelae, three hundred and fifteen complete statues, and uncountable fragments of others have been retrieved. Beloved daughters, honored parents, prayers to the gods. The water makes the basalt shine, flecks of crystal inclusions shining in the deep aquamarine of the Mediterranean. The reed boats, the finery floated out, the cypress boxes with fine dovetail joinery, the ambergris and distilled rose water in fluted glass, have all rotted and drifted away. The delights were gone before the basalt came to rest on the sea floor. The basalt outlasts it all. It will outlast them.

“Is it his treason, or his betrayal?”

“That's the same. Betrayal of me is treason. I'm a scientist: we're correct. He knows this, he agreed to this. He nearly won a war for this. His treason in buying Rann from the Pykkt was in lying to me. I would have known. He wanted to assure her a childhood, and he gave her to them. Those lies are the same. They arise from the same transactions, they offend the same senses, and they should be punished the same way. He told me that our daughter was dead so that I would pursue a war with him on another world.”

Flown this way, most of the journey from Earth to Rann is a straight line.

"When my wife died, people would send cards. They said things like ‘we’re sorry for your loss,’ and tried to explain that God had so loved my family that they had been recalled to Heaven. As though a celestial plan of any worth could not take place without the effort of a child who didn’t even have bones yet." Michael considers his words: thinking back to that time is like flying into gravel, each tiny resentment shattering in his face, the friction and the sharpness of how inapt their words had been turning his grief into a hundred unreachable private wounds, isolating him in pain. He’s flown through meteor fields less dangerous than hearing his neighbors assure him that death was part of a greater plan. He could have killed them if he had not recently become so agonizingly aware of the void that death left. No one else should suffer like he suffered.

"I would kill my husband if you weren’t here. I think I really would. I would cut his throat on that bed. I would shoot him. I’ve been thinking about this." Alanna pauses, her voice shattered. “I would do it.”

"He couldn’t do it."

"He couldn’t do anything. Not once you showed up and started asking questions about our conduct in this war. You made him weak. You made us weak."

Michael's seen Jungfrukällan. It was playing in the student center, foreign language film club, when he was doing research on just war theory. He can put the pieces together. The week-long journey will admit no communications, since the generation ship is to be torn apart as it creates the dimensional rift. Michael thinks he'd want to talk to a kid recently relocated from a POW suite onto a new planet that all was well, or if things were going poorly, at least he'd know about it, but it's a truism that he doesn't have a kid. This is perhaps how parenting is done around Alpha Centauri. It would explain how Alanna is. All the isolation.

One of them has to be in the mima all the time, to keep the ship powered. "I didn't put anything together which wasn't already there. You hadn't spent a continuous month with him until the war: perhaps he was always this compromising. He'd given up before. Why come to Rann if he could stand Earth. What makes you believe you can see something I can't. That you love him. Respect him." If he makes her cry, the ship will move faster.

The horror of that sinks within him. How can he do this.

"I don't, but have some pride. He can't control the zeta beams and no one was willing to help. You know what he asked his friends? He was leading a charge and he was brought back to your planet and no one would bring him to us. As he was on Earth, our unified army was slaughtered. The Pykkt don't believe in quarter. They knock out teeth. That's what they do, to their captives. They kill them and they knock out their teeth, sometimes in that order. They have a special stone they use for it. The Hellotaats have fangs, which I used to find incredibly frightening." Alanna taps her control to bring up a heads-up projection of the region of space they are traversing. There is nothing of interest to observe, which Michael already knew. They've left the sun behind and are headed to another star. "Adam beat one of them to death: that's how we became allies."

"I read that. It was in the book."

Talking to Alanna is dangerous. He loves how unkind she is, how honest her feelings are. She has volunteered, like her husband, to power the ship; whereas his guilt is a leaching thing, unending, a perpetual source of energy, hers burns hot.

Everything about this scenario seems an inciting incident, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. "Fun, wasn't it." Adam is Agamemnon. "I thought those details were nice, which is why I put them in. He had blood inside his ears, in his mouth, and they welcomed him. He's the greatest military commander the planet's ever seen. He led the charge and no one would bring him back. And then they all died, and I got to see one of the Pykkt take their special sharp rock to a dying Hellotaat and smash out a whole set of fangs. Right there, on the field. That's how they go to war. He isn't missing these things because he has the ability not to, Michael."

Michael is unsurprised that it's Alanna's book. He's read Adam's writing: brief post-engagement reports in the Rannian archives, dry professional emails about deep space preservation practices to researchers on Earth, a few JL bulletins in between. Someone else gets the blood in his mouth.

Alanna's defenses of Adam are as reactionary as anything else she's done. She lied to the government for him. She believed in him. She still takes pride in his achievements. Of course she wrote a book for him.

"He's not strong right now, but I do think that the suit for peace will give you both the time you need to recover. The Pykkt aren't coming back. They don't exist only to test you: they wanted an end to this war."

They're quiet for a long time after that. He and Alanna eat their rations in silence. William Golding, The Lion in Winter: she smiled to excess, but she chewed with real distinction. They're going to be sleeping in shifts, cycles gently adrift. There's a sleeping bag on the floor, the zipper drawn down where Alanna will be lying. Adam is sleeping and dreaming at the other end of the ship.

He had almost missed it. He had almost missed it. But-for that night in, he would have missed it. He wouldn't have researched Alanna's book like it was a code, attacking the cipher, if he hadn't seen Bergman's hand at work in the delicate progression of the Professor's life. For a moment, everything was purposive and he could do anything. Mania. He had looked up Psalm 31, because the one aptitude he had neglected was scriptural knowledge, and had found the guilt lodged within it. He would have missed it and he would have not done as good a job because he would have been responding to a disaster rather than averting a crisis. The luxury of the first mover is to do anything he wishes. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica: therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, moved by no other; and this everyone understands to be God. Without Smultronstället, he would not have contemplated the world of guilt, the guilt of guilt, the second order effects of Adam's catastrophe.

"The Frees invited us for dinner," Alanna says, obvious to Michael's
luck. "I told her next time I was on Earth, we should get drinks. You know them, right?"

The Frees, the Stranges. "Yes, I know them. We've worked together." He supposes Barda and Alanna would get along. Fury of Apokolips is not completely dissimilar from adored scientist of Ranagar, and they would probably enjoy being mean, talking about some of the other trials they've both encountered: violence, loneliness.

"Do they seem nice? I heard that he's charming despite the –" Alanna makes a sort of ripping gesture at one wrist, "and I thought it could be encouraging to have a friend. Shayera's smart, but she doesn't really have experience with this."

"Barda can be vicious. Gracious, too." Michael says gently. He'd like to make this easy, easy on her, set expectations appropriately. Michael is not trying to be condescending, he must remind himself. He wants them to like one another. He wants her to have a reason to come to Earth. That he will see her. What an image: the betrayer, the betrayed, the women they love, around a table. That he's included is absurd. Other people might have some perspective on this, but Michael's not be able to take anyone else's contributions seriously since his seventh doctorate. Alanna's snobbery is unconscious: she simply believes herself to be the finest person and most spectacular in the room, or on the spaceship. His is entirely intentional. He can no more imagine good fellowship over a bottle of wine with them than he can imagine exposing his guilt to the ship and letting it move them. "She can drink. We went out together and I had to give up after the third bar."

Alanna looks delighted. Her smile transforms her face. "You? Calling quits? I was going to count on you to never give up." When they'd kissed in the car, her necklace had snagged on the placket front of his shirt. While he had been unhooking them, the bevel of each stone caught next to the buttons, she'd kissed his neck, put her hands down the back of his collar. Her necklace fastened at her throat, and at her back. "That does sound nice, though. I doubt we'll be back on Earth any time soon, but that's reassuring."

The marriage is survivable. Michael has to remember this. "Do you mind keeping an eye on this? I'll be up in a few hours."

When he next wakes, eight hours along, Adam is in the co-pilot's chair. He is neatly eating one of the rations they've brought. He's growing his beard back in, at least for the duration of their journey. Michael is already regretting his own unshaven state: he doesn't like how he looks with a beard. He will seem silly as it comes in all patchy, especially with the mask. Adam's beard, on day two here, looks rather like a lion's mane. "Good look, man," Michael tells him.

Adam looks down from the stars. "Thanks. There's breakfast, if you want?" He indicates the box on the floor. The generation ship is cavernous with all the potential energy it will store, but this means that the interior can't really be arranged. Everything they've brought is in two boxes and a bag. Presumably Alanna is dressing herself from the contents of the bag. Mascara, things of that nature. Michael had brought socks, underwear, a shirt, his uniform. Adam is wearing his space suit, although without the laser pistol, jetpack or helmet. When they have to drop the generation ship, the mima is going to be a very close fit for the three of them.

Perhaps it is the most unusual camping trip he has ever been on. He takes a dehydrated potato pouch. "Do you like these ones?"

Adam looks at him curiously, then considers the packet in his hand. "No, whatever. I hadn't really noticed that they had flavorings." He tilts his head, presumably reading the label for the first time. "That's unexpected." Adam was a freak before the war, and the war hadn't made him more normal. As Michael watches, Adam alternates between bites of MRE and pulling at the skin of his knuckles with his teeth. At least he doesn't seem to be drawing blood. Michael's seen some odd behaviors before, seen some of them over lunch even: graduate school had been a haven for people who found the rest of the world a challenge for all sorts of reasons. As he perceives it to be so early, perhaps he has a greater awareness of the enduring crisis: Adam is really not well.

"Do people cook on Rann. I mean, they must have some sort of specialties that they make. Celebratory meals." Michael's a good chef, but he is endeavoring to start small. Wine pairings to come later. "Do the flavors taste different there. Most pre-modern cooking on Earth tastes bland to a modern palate because the way they used spices, as a fragrance, is so different from how we cook now."

"Alanna and I ate –" Adam considers. "Sorry. I thought that story was going to go somewhere I could tell it."

"That's alright."

"You know, everything's fine until I say it out loud, and it becomes intense and sad."

“Do you have a feeling about that.” Michael doesn’t even try to nail the intonation that would have made it a question. Questions are what the T-spheres pose to him; they're not for other people.

"I don't like it anymore than anyone else would. It hurts." Words are ultimately without meaning. "It's like it's all happening again, you know."

Breathtaking. At least the pain is practical. The most natural thing in the world – the universe, Michael needs to update his idioms – is that a hero would understate a challenge. Of course Stewart framed it generously, he watched a science fiction movie with an adrenaline junkie who named her obliques and her spiritual partner through the ages. Adam's a traitor. They're not reenacting Middlemarch here. The problem with superpowers is how conclusively they trick those who possess them into thinking a challenge will be easy. Michael doesn't understand Stewart's sympathy at all. Their situations are completely different. "The mima isn't soundproofed." What's there to say to this, Michael thinks, even now. Alanna knows what her husband is like and Michael is learning this as naturally as he learns anything. What's Adam's defense.

"Most aliens do," Adam says, finally, incomprehensibly. "They do have ears. It's very common, actually. Carter's done research, although he thinks it's a little bit beneath his dignity to count them, and always looks it up in the local encyclopedia database. Most of the galaxy can hear. The Pykkt can." He touches the shell of his own ear with two fingers to politely indicate: an ear, for hearing. "They can hear. I can't tell when I'm screaming in there, I can't really tell when I'm screaming."

Michael thought this plan had some strategic value. It looks like it might have a therapeutic one. "You're having flashbacks?" Some measure of security has been bought by the generation ship and its glass room for screaming. Let no one say anything against Green Lantern guilt or space know-how, for all will be healed.

He's read this book before.

The Lanterns of Sector 2814 have hidden one of their number away from the Guardians and any Earth authority. There's a condo in Los Angeles being watched over by a New God while one of their own recovers. The Stranges had united the factions on Rann: the Rangarians, the Hellotaat, the Rock People, and found themselves still losing a war against an enemy who would only be satiated by total victory, and Adam had made a catastrophic bargain.

It was all a dream is not exactly solace when the dream's about being strangled, burnt, shot, bombed, stabbed. Despairing.

"Isn't that the point of this. That I suffer and my choices are wiped out. No prison can hold me other than my own mind. I don't object to it. Powering the ship is pleasant."

Adam is slightly toothy, Michael observes. Before this conversation, he hadn't seen Adam on the ship. His guilt grinds it on, but Michael's not been in the mima to see him. Since his encounter with Diana, Adam has appeared drug-sodden and numb, a stroke-like drag to his mouth as though he really had somehow succeeded in giving himself a brain injury in that hotel room. Even embarking, with Alanna close at his side out of some notion of honor or press attention, his gaze had been dull. In the interval, it's been extremely convenient for Michael, hasn't it, that Adam's crazy. Alanna's compelling and beautiful, the mima consumes the required hallucinations, and Adam's been inside it, dreaming, for two days now. Waiting here, an MRE cracked open in one hand, some life has been restored to him. Anything other than laxly gazing was bound to make Michael feel ashamed.

"I asked you to investigate." Adam's eyes are very, very blue. "I wanted to be found out."

"I wouldn't have figured anything out if you hadn't told me how you felt. All of this," Michael indicates his achievements with a sweep of one hand, "and for what. My superpower is my knowledge of the world, of our galaxy, and I missed your lie. How pitiful. I could spend a decade listening to cheap and nasty deceits and still not be so fooled as I was by your betrayal. I missed your lie as though no one had ever lied to me before, not even someone who looked like you. I'm angry at you for selling your kid to the enemy, for betraying Earth when it's your responsibility as much as it is mine. The force that gives life meaning isn't treason and it's certainly not our own feelings.

"You killed someone, You could have killed us all. And for feelings. For shame. It was perfectly clear who you killed and how many. You didn't have to lie. There's war, Adam, and there's diplomacy. I put that in my report."

Which could be true, if he wanted it to be. It wasn't, not yet, but that was only because he hadn't done it. Truth is an effect of social relations. Michael is not in the habit of leaving things undone, but oh, these Stranges. They make him livid. Mad. Wounded.

Adam's eyes are huge. He points to the controls, two narrow fingers in a golden glove. "I'll do this. If you want to – go do something else."

What else is there. There's hurting and there's flying. Michael can only long for Alanna so many hours in the day. He leaves anyway.

He works out on the floor, goes running around the slowly-filling ship. The T-spheres keep pace, quizzing him. His path takes him behind Adam and Michael says nothing. His cross-trainers squeak on the floor as he turns. There's always the chance that the noise will annoy Adam.

Michael passes the mima. Alanna's in it right now: her grief and her rage shuttling them ever closer. The Pykkt had been placed very much on the back foot, which the successful defense of Earth and the revocation of their deal with Adam. Michael privately suspects Alanna of knowing more of this than she will tell, but the generation ship trundles onward, regardless of what emotion is firing. Layering in, as Stewart explained. Michael's not getting in there, not until the end. He's here in a moderately supervisory capacity. Earth's bleak, right now.

After his run, Michael brushes his teeth and cleans up. Everything on the ship will be consigned to fire or to the new dimension for the Pykkt, so he's wearing the same shirt as he had yesterday. Why bring what will only be destroyed. He lies atop the sleeping bag and does not look at Adam or toward Alanna. He falls asleep.

When he awakens, Adam and Alanna have clearly conferred. Michael would hate it for the lying but it feels so vindicating, that they're trying to suborn him. He picked up on the right note. He thinks about them in that little room together. If he does this enough times, he will stop loving Alanna. "I would have cut him loose without the problem-solving intelligence," Alanna picks up. It's dark, the stars smeared into nothingness. They've begun talking like colleagues in an office: one continuous conversation, unending, to be resumed at any point. They have all week. "It's his best quality."

Michael contemplates the map without speaking. He hasn't had a cup of coffee in three days. He's feeling, if not malleable, then certainly vulnerable.

"He sticks to things and he solves them. It's what he loves doing. I hate that he felt like he had to quit, that he couldn't answer why he should be in the world any longer. That this is the the one problem he couldn't solve and he could take it, you know, it's not like this is the first war to hand us some setbacks. We fight a lot of wars. Like on Earth. Your armies fight a lot of wars: I was scheduled to talk to some generals. Before."

"Earth or America's?"

Alanna stares steadily out at their unknowable path. "What's the difference. Adam's told me about Peru. We were going to go up to the highlands, you know. Before he tried to betray everyone and decided to die. He was going to show me where he did his fieldwork."

"Your husband studied pre-Columbian architecture. What was he going to show you."

"Houses. Laboratories. Not much of it is left, after their wars. More's still left than if his plan had succeeded, I suppose. They didn't really build cities. That was his thesis, the intensification of intellect in their society. That with just a few people, they did everything. How they had an economy, science, a complicated world like ours, all in cities of a few thousand people. Just enough to meet everyone. It's like that on Rann: we have cities, we're civilized, we bomb each other and there's no more cities. No more of us. There were never that many of us. Like the Inca."

"Do you think he was always suicidal. The US military isn't the only one on Earth." Michael is honestly curious as to what Alanna knows about Earth. Why did that work. She's a compelling public speaker, excellent at appealing to emotion. She has charisma. When she's not set against him, the way it had been, it's interesting to listen to her talk, to hear her ideas. He'd like to hear more of them. "They'd like you to believe that."

"He thought that the buildings everyone else thought were," Alanna pauses for the word, "sanctuaries were in fact observatories. That they may have produced usable stellar data for the purpose of knowing it. I've heard about other places, I assumed they'd worked out some kind of collective defense principle, which is how your world wasn't always getting destroyed."

"It's not destroyed at all. You saved it."

"I backed into it by making my husband buy a gun that wouldn't instantly kill him when he shot himself, thanks."

Michael pauses, considering. "He didn't kill himself. The war didn't ruin him. We're going to Rann to solve the underlying problem which led the Pykkt to invade." Oddly, he's very confident about this working. Perhaps it's that of all the heroes he's ever worked with, the Stranges seem most capable on their own. Most like they actually can solve problems in total isolation, the weird lonesomeness of the zeta beams and a different sun only contributing to the unshakeable certainty that the problem ahead can be solved by the person looking at it. The pleasure of a team is that there's a space to talk things out, to debate any moral dimensions that may be implicated by a particular problem-solving technique, and to see who can work most efficaciously. That's not necessarily an argument for having a team, though. Sometimes everyone else is in the way, and he already knows what he's going to do: that's why he's built up his mind as he has, to always have perfect clarity for his next step. He likes working alone. He understands why the Stranges would as well.

"Hiram Bingham the third was the first modern archeologist to systematically explore Machu Picchu. He started in 1911. He went back, year after year, and he mapped it out. It was in the jungle, having been abandoned near 1530, likely when the population collapsed due to smallpox." Curious to think of the Stranges as being alone in any sense when there are two of them. Alanna's anger at Adam's thwarted betrayal is at least partly because he didn't include her in the negotiations. Impossible to know what the shape of her anger would take if things had gone farther, if there'd been some real damage to Earth, but they'd only bristled at the Pykkt and then got Aleea back. Michael's not trying to be a homewrecker.

He might be succeeding at it anyway: another natural aptitude of his.

"He wore tiny round glasses." Michael finds that as Alanna impresses him, he'd like to impress her. He's gone on her.

"You know I like smart guys. My husband's a bisexual."

Michael hadn't expected that. "I thought you said he tried to kill us all."

"Well, before he tried to kill everyone on Earth, he sometimes dated guys. He was into guys. He told me; I'm telling you." Alanna frowns.

"Thank you."

They sit there quietly, Alanna in the pilot's chair, Michael in the co-pilot’s chair.

When they'd kissed in that car, Michael hadn't been thinking about anyone else. Alanna was lovely, she caught his hand, they'd kissed. After everything that's happened, he can see how it looks, that he found out how Adam killed a man in apprehension of his betrayal of Earth and Alanna's infidelity is a reaction to this organized sequence of events. Even his participation in this particular odyssey could appear to be graceless winning. Michael's a graceful winner.

He's not trying to shame Adam. Or Alanna, or himself. No one else is here to see this, which is why it matters that it is a private point of honor. A man doesn't cheat with a woman. He should have thought like this before he pulled Alanna close in that car.

The optics are bad. The optics do not matter. Michael is going to behave in a way consonant with his ethics and Alanna is going to remain married to her husband.

"When Bingham returned to Connecticut, he served as governor for one day, and as a senator for six years. He was censured for scandal when he used government funds to pay a lobbyist for the Manufacturers' Association of Connecticut to work as his staff and allowed the lobbyist to attend closed meetings on tariffs." Quite what background Alanna has on United States political history is murky. She appeared before Congress to speak on the threat posed by the Pykkt; but a fisherman doesn't need to understand the global circulation of oceanic currents to catch fish. Presumably any hearings will be canceled now that the danger has receded.

"So," Alanna presses her hands together between her knees, "we're interested. You're interested?"

Michael has always taken refuge in his talents. They grant him respect. After Jeff, after Paula: the part of his life that he could make safe was learning. Grief was derogatory, knocking down what he had built up. There was nothing purposive about it, no greater lesson: grief made him as weak as everyone had always wanted to see him. He'd been contrarian before Jeff's death, scowling at teachers, showing up skeptics, but it was only after that he determined how to prove to everyone that he wasn't hurt. Grief stole what he loved away from him, making his family smaller and smaller. When Jeff died, his parents had not known what to do with their surviving child. That afternoon, he'd gone to school, to read at the library. He hadn't known what to do with himself either. When Paula died, he understood what he was feeling. He couldn't control how people reacted to him, how everyone he loved died, but he could make himself better and better. Stronger. Wiser.

Alanna's smile is very beautiful. Her hair is soft-looking and she's wearing that yellow and gray sweater again. Her eyes are the color of an ocean he's never even seen.

"I had been hoping to romance you a little more."

"It's a romantic setting. Most of my dates with Adam have been disasters, quite literally: we meet, we experience a disaster, we solve it. It took us months to coordinate the first time we had sex: he was very worried that he would be carried away as soon as we got to bed, you see. In the end, we agreed that whenever the zeta beams next brought him to me, we would simply retreat to bed immediately. That's combat pragmatism. Naturally, the next time there was a dimensional distortion, and then an attack from outer space, so we still couldn't. I think, the third time after we'd made that agreement, when he appeared, I knocked him to the sand and accidentally gave him a bloody nose. In my enthusiasm. He's good."

Michael rubs a hand over his face. Well, it probably could be worse. "You should get some rest. I'll look out for us, make sure we don't run into an asteroid."

Alanna relinquishes the controls even though she plainly does not believe him about the asteroids, and pulls the cuff of the sleeping bag up between her hands. She falls asleep that way, a hand curled under her chin. Michael does not, apparently, have to stop this.

With Adam absent and Alanna asleep, Michael investigates. In Alanna's bag, there's a wallet. Army green polypropylene. It holds a debit card, a folded two dollar bill, and a blue passport. Adam's. His passport expired several years ago, because what does Adam Strange care for international borders, he flies using a jetpack. Perhaps he used it to buy that revolver. In the picture, he'd been handsome enough that Michael could understand why Alanna sent out a request to bring back a man from Earth and kept him. Even through the security printing, that much was apparent. Alanna thinks he looks vulnerable now. The passport's stamped with entries and returns from Peru, Malaysia, a flurry of entries where Adam must have been tracking the zeta beams to Rann. He'd been to Canada once. Michael puzzles at this for a moment, flipping the passport open and shut. How unlikely, but of course. That Detroit Lions hat; he'd gone to see the TiCats play the Redblacks, 30-13. The image is weirdly poignant. Adam's fondness for an underdog. Alanna doesn't have to be realistic about her husband, Michael will do it for her. He likes crummy football, lost causes, dangers he doesn't understand. If Adam's vulnerable now, what must he have been like when he first arrived on Rann. The year runs differently around a second sun, so the calculation isn't instant. Denying it is only preservation from ego damage: he had been impressionable at best. Without the call of the zeta beams, Alanna's intelligence and fortitude, Adam would be at the beginning of his career as an archeologist, categorizing pots, a big day out of indifferent football.

Wouldn't that all be better. A world where no one started a war in space, where the Pykkt ravaged a thousand different worlds, but posed no threat to Earth. There was no way to stop it, nothing they'd be able to do.

At the next change of watch, Alanna changes her sweater. Michael already knew she didn't wear a bra. Seeing the entire uncomplicated line of her back, when she returns from the head, the sinusoidal wave of her spine, is nearly too much. Michael goes for a run. It doesn't take him anywhere different than where he's been for the last four days. As he laps the room, he sees the back of Alanna's head. Knowing that she doesn't wear a bra from the general run of things as they'd kissed is quite different from having seen her undressed. He startles himself with his own levity. Alanna is an alien genius, why would she bother with Earth underwear. The thought is so ridiculous that he's almost charmed.

They watch the stars.

Alanna steals looks at him.

Michael has no idea what his next move could be.

"You could talk to him."

This is a terrible idea.

Michael waits it out a day. The main cavern of the generation ship is almost completely full of the smog of emotion. There's no prismatic difference that Michael can perceive, feeling to feeling. He can move his hand between the layers. This part isn't bad. Michael does curtail his training, though: running though this is as unpleasant as running through smog anywhere. Breathing in Adam's guilt doesn't actually taste or smell in any way, but he's aware that no one has tried this before. He does a thousand sit-ups as Alanna makes needless adjustments to their course. He starts in on his push-ups. Notwithstanding Stewart's claim, he doesn't feel anything especially ghostly. Or even any kind of malaise. He asks Alanna if Rann has any ghost stories, and ends up telling her the Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Macbeth. Under Alanna's current sweater, there is a ripple of silken skin from under her arm to her waist. He knows what that looks like, now.

"Should I check on him." Michael is doing his sit-ups. Standards have declined precipitously. He is wearing his uniform; Alanna is wearing his jacket. She's looking at the white color-block along his inner thighs.

Alanna sneers. Every awful quality of hers is something that he's charmed by: her sneer makes her lower lip bow enticingly. When no one else noticed, Alanna kept Adam alive. Her determination is remarkable. The lovely Alanna. "I told him he couldn't have his pistol. Nobody else on Rann carries one. It's the third biggest reason they think he's inferior."

From the floor, Michael says, "what."

"What-what," Alanna mimics, without looking down. She prods at the inside of his elbow with one bare foot. "Everyone thinks that. They'd better get better about not saying it to his face since he won the war." She correctly interprets his frown. "I'll tell them how you won the war, too. The war on two planets." Her toenails are painted blue. "Adam calls it rustic xenophobia. I think it's improved since the alliances we made, but I'll knock heads together if I have to."

Michael finishes his set. "That sounds charming. Why am I coming to your planet, again."

"Because you love me."

Michael wraps his hand around Alanna's ankle. She has lovely ankles.

"Also, all of my friends live on other planets, so if I have to nag Sardath into an edict about how we respect our visitors, I won't feel that I'm bullying anyone I actually like. I really do not have a lot of friends on Rann. It's pretty much Adam. And shortly, you." She dimples down at him. "I wasn't asking about other teams for no reason, Michael."

What about Aleea, Michael contemplates asking, before realizing that Alanna and Adam have certainly considered this. There's any number of very good reasons that Aleea has been safely established with a reliable family on Earth: she'll be looked in on by superheroes, ferried to therapeutic interventions, and she'll have a chance at growing up into a good, kind, and wise person. The aversion that her parents have to Earth because her father murdered someone is a solid indication of why the Stranges have given their daughter up. They aren't avoiding her due to selfish Rannian parenting, or some fear that they will raise her wrong. Rann is not a good place for a child to live. There are no other children there because Rann is, for all its advancements, not suited to child-rearing. They aren't born and they don't thrive. Alanna and Adam are bitterly aware that, currently, they are not good parents. They might become better in the future, but they are worried that Adam will kill her.

"We locked it in the hotel room safe together."

"Worrying about being a good parent is part of being a parent."

Alanna flexes her foot. "I know. I used to read alien child-rearing manuals when I was a kid, to understand." She curls her toes under, birdlike, and looks at him. "That's what they said. But after what happened to him, and what happened to her, I. He wanted to die because of it. Do I think he'd want her to die about it? You know what he's lied about. I believe him. I can't trust that I can leave them alone and he won't do it again. The shame's something he's going to have to deal with it, and hasn't yet. Not to my satisfaction. We're supposed to understand the people we raise children with, and I do know him. I didn't leave my suicidal drunk husband alone in a room with an energy blaster that he knew how to fire, you know, Michael. I took it away from him. I can't leave them – I didn't know that he was playing around with your Earth projectiles."

Michael holds onto her ankle.

They swap positions, Alanna on the ground, looking up at the expanding smog, Michael piloting. There is not really anything to say. They both eat a ration. Alanna peels the entire package open and licks the inside of it.

He sleeps for four hours. When he awakes, Alanna settles on the sleeping bag next to him. "No, no, you don't have to get up just yet. It's fine. Adam's dreaming." Her chin digs into his shoulder. "We're not going to hit anything. There's nothing here to harm. Tell me another story."

He retells the Cask of Amontillado. He puts on a fresh shirt and takes the co-pilot's chair. While they navigate through the vastness of space, she tells him, haltingly, then with greater facility, about eating the dead among the Rock People: "nothing's actually that disgusting when you're hungry. Don't try it, though."

He's so impressed by her.

He listens to her.

On the sixth day, Michael ducks into the mima. Adam is there. It's possible, Michael considers, in rapid consultation with the T-spheres, that Adam has not left this crawl-space of a psychic engine in some time. He certainly hasn't meaningfully left it. Michael had overheard the Stranges speaking to one another eighteen hours ago, approximately yesterday morning.

"Good evening," Michael says.

The light in the mima is a dull orange, like a digital image that hasn't been color corrected. Adam appears to be about the same color as his clothing, all a dark shape. It's dim enough that Michael could plausibly deny how awful Adam looks, if Alanna were to ask, which she won't. Sometimes all there is the cold certainty that the hero who nearly killed them all, whose wife Michael has been flirting with, has been crying for so hard and for long that the blood vessels in his eyes and around his nose are broken open. Michael's glad he left his jacket on the co-pilot's chair. He's condescending at his best, smug when he's trying, and the jacket is a palpable reminder of all the ideals Adam has lately failed to live up to.

"Hi," Adam says. "I just woke up."

"I came to see how you were." The mima is warmer than the rest of the ship, almost a little hot. It's not dissimilar from crawling into a wood-fired oven, as sensory experiences go. There's the second reason to be glad that he doesn't have his jacket. One of the T-spheres floats above Adam's head. They're close, in here. "This is a small space to spend all your time."

The two of them, in a grave. Michael considers how alright he is with this. He probably could have objected to the plan more strenuously, left the Stranges to pilot and power the ship themselves. Not gotten involved emotionally. He's also good at that. These space guys stick together, though: the Lanterns, obviously, giving them this tank, and a number of other heroes had checked in, called Michael, which had been unexpected. Adam's a war criminal on two worlds, only unsuccessful on Earth because Michael was thinking about how guilt looks on a person. Even he can't eliminate every contingency. Victor Sjöström's creased-up failure in Smultronstället to Carter Hall's boustrophedonic emails in under twelve hours. The only way that could happen is the way that it did.

"It seems okay."

"Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress: 'the grave's a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace.'"

"I had a pretty good education," Adam says. He and Michael are both looking at his knuckles, which are badly chewed-up.

"I don't doubt it." An interesting thing about being a superhero, among the many other interesting things, is how wildly educational attainment varies among his colleagues. When he'd been defending his doctorates, Michael had been sure, like a rush of blood, that this was the finest work anyone could do. He was making a mark and this would be universally recognized. Walking these hallowed halls, brave and unique. And so: John Stewart, who visualizes tungsten welds that really stick. Alanna Strange, who got buzzed, explained grand unified theory, and asked him what chewing gum was when she found it on the underside of the table. "You could stand to be a little gentler."

"Carter told me that I shoot like an archeologist."

"Maybe you shoot like a physicist. The shot both is, and is not. Why'd you choose a revolver?"

They lie there in silence for a while. The freckles across the bridge of Adam's nose and high up on his forehead are probably fading without any sunlight. Michael remembers when they first shook hands, how surprised he was. "I thought it would keep her safe. I just want to keep everyone safe."

"Your death would make who safe."

"Let's game out what would have happened if I hadn't shot myself." Michael doesn't correct the slip. Adam had shot himself: he only hadn't hit himself due to a great stroke of fortune. Ursula LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven: to let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven. "I carry on, explaining the war to the people I brought it to. More people die. Alanna cries because I lie to her. More people die. Maybe the Pykkt bomb Earth like they bomb Rann. More people die. Aleea's still on the Pykkt ship and I think about them doing to her what they did to me. More people die. I go fully crazy. More people die."

"Your family would have been fine. You would have been together." Michael knows about the corrective counterfactual.

"More people die," Adam speaks over Michael, knuckles swollen like beetles coming up between them, "more people die. There is absolutely nothing I can do to stop any of it. Alanna probably discovers the truth, maybe she dies; Aleea is still with the Pykkt and I know it and I can do nothing about it. Maybe she dies. I don't want to live in that world, where more people die and it's my fault. Killing myself was the best option available to me. Alanna would have helped me."

Alanna locked away your gun, man: geez, Michael thinks of telling him, Alanna did not want you to die, Alanna wants to kill you in colorful and creative ways because she misses your kid and she's worried about you. She's entirely capable of shooting you. If she wanted you dead, she'd have let you lose the war. The wars. "People die all the time. What makes this unique, that they died because of you? That's the rising oceans flowing into the Sundarbans so the tigers starve and prowl into the towns to eat kids. Houses burn. Planes crash. Cars crash. Rann's got lossless energy, sure, but people die on Earth to make concrete, still poison themselves to pick at heavy metals, still die for no real cause other than having existed and that is the end. People are going to die, this is what they do. All we can do is what we do."

His voice does not sound the way he wants it to sound. He's stronger than this. He sounds scared. He doesn't like how he's done this. He's supposed to be talking Adam into staying alive, not demonstrating the impossibility of meaningful material moral action. Why not confront a man with suicidal depression over the great question of: why doesn't everyone kill themselves. There will always be that brightly-lit exit sign at the back of his mind, the possibility of escape, the option to leave when it gets too hard. Which is not how heroes are. This is not how they can approach the world.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet: I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

The central paradox of this, common to Michael, Adam, Terry, and a hundred other heroes: everyone has the capacity to do it. People are heroes in all kinds of ways at all kinds of times. Staying alive is a feat. Lasting more than a fight, though, means that the group of them start to have pretty irregular psychologies, that they aren't like everyone. That they cut themselves off from the animating concerns of why anyone would do this, how it allows them to live, because they are no longer connecting to people the way people do. Heroics becomes a series of skills tests instead of an expression of personal capacity.

Mechanistic. Yet another way to exhibit his personal best. On his own, alone, he's better than anyone else; and no one is at their best in isolation. He needs other people as badly as Adam had, when he'd come to ask for help, and nothing will ever clean away what he had done, outrance.

Terry didn't die for Michael to quibble about who, exactly, is a hero. Adam needs help; Michael is helping him. This, in some lights, is all that is needed.

Mister Terrific isn't a title. Mister Terrific isn't an achievement award. Mister Terrific is the fact of having incredible skill and turning it outward, making intelligence into compassion, talent into liberation, genius into truth.

It's the notion that one person matters. A single choice can change the world. This is so rarely the case in a structural analysis that it's quite easy to be misled by, for example, Adam's lies, into thinking that individual choices never matter. Michael doesn't have to forgive Adam to understand that the fearful, crazy, isolated choice that Adam made was of enormous significance. And it's like that all the time. For Adam, for Alanna, in the far reaches of a planet where they actually live, that every choice is reflective of a whole world and can change a whole world. How limited, then, to credit it all to – forces of history. Ideology.

Just one man. It would have been very easy for the Pykkt to kill Adam. Michael considers this, mentally turning it over with rapidity. That's the stubborn conclusion. They had him, and he's been extremely circumspect, in Alanna's retelling, about what they had done with him, before submitting Aleea to them, but they hadn't in the end, killed him.

The offense, is what, that any of this happened on Earth, that Earth was just another planet where more people die, rather than somewhere unique and exceptional, where Adam's betrayal could never really hurt anyone. Not Mister Terrific, but that's only Michael's role. And it's Michael's planet, sure, he has a sentimental attachment. That's why he saved it. There is no way he can argue this to Adam, who approaches the problem with his own sentimental attachment. He's the man of two worlds, and that ought to include not betraying either. Earth, though, is full of heroes. That's why Adam had come to them, when he wanted to be found out. Rann only has one superhero. What a lonely, noble thing to do, to become protector of a planet. To die doing so.

"I don't know, Adam. I don't know." Nothing and nowhere is safe. Death is inexorable.

"How presumptuous of me to imagine that I bore some responsibility for the suffering of the world? Michael, I do. Maybe everyone else is in this together, but I do. I believed I could, because that's what we do. I wanted to save everyone. Not in a religious way: I wanted them to not have to work as hard for so little, and because I have extraordinary skills, I could do extraordinary things for them. And then I was captured on Anthorann and everything extraordinary drained out of me. I was there for less than two months."

"Is that what you're seeing."

The drive on the ship is true science fiction stuff: Stewart had given it the working title of mimarobe, after the movie. As is the way when anyone mentions anything, Michael had checked the databases. Stewart had been largely correct. A poem, an opera, a movie. Once Earth is lost, humanity retreats: the generation ship which they board is equipped with a room for dreaming of the past, a quiet safe sink for all emotions, overseen by the protagonist of the piece, who works as a mimarobe. This room, the mima, becomes the solace and the wound as the ship gets badly off target. Everyone and everything dies. It's as apocalyptically brutal a story as the Lanterns have ever told.

Adam turns toward Michael. To anyone else, he would be a mere outline. "I can't get over it. I was only there a month. I did something I'd never want to do, just so I would be allowed out. They wanted the prize, they wanted to get at Earth, and they said they'd keep her safe. There was nothing to worry about. It's called the Tower of Rainbow Doom, and I'd been there before. I knew nothing worse would happen to her than happened to me. The solar system is a friendly, safe place." Until this moment, Michael had always thought that the cheap metaphors like 'the bottom of the world dropped out,' and 'the pain made a hollow,' were inapt ways of expressing emotions, the ways that people spoke when they didn't have access to Goethe. It happens now, hearing Adam admit that he'd offered his daughter up to the Pykkts, that all of those clumsy phrases are entirely true. Luckily, Michael's lying on the floor already. His rage doesn't have far to go. "They couldn't put her inside a volcano, or knock her teeth out to let them grow back and get knocked out again, though. I swallowed them. Once they were headed to Earth, they couldn't put her in the Tower. The idea appealed, at the time. They'd be far away from it, unable to – do any of that stuff to anyone else."

That part hadn't been in the book. None of this had been in the book. Adam's torture had been horrific, grisly reading when he'd choked in airless space, but he'd gotten out of it. It justified his actions as a combatant, intensified his resolve, that he was stronger for having been taken apart and having put himself back together. The book had ended and Adam had survived.

Aleea had been in the care of her father's torturers when the book ended.

Michael is smart. To say this is an understatement. Michael is brilliant. Lying on his side in a cabinet, hurtling through space on the strength of a man re-living his worst choice, Michael finds that there is nothing he can say.

"I beat him to death. The man who was responsible for that. I'm responsible for what happened to Aleea. It logically follows that I should be dead."

Adam's recent induction into schizophrenia cannot be the end. The zeta beams have been part of him on a cellular level for decades. That the world is other than it appears cannot be the concept which he allows to destroy himself, not now. "Are you expressing the just world fallacy to me like I haven't heard it before. Adam. Come on." Equally, the fact that it would be enormously convenient for Adam to be dead means that Michael needs to find a way to keep him alive.

"Yeah, I just rejoiced in telling my wife this." Adam tilts his head back. His throat is a long line. "I drowned. I knew what it was like to die. I thought, this has happened to me. Anything that happens to my kid will be wiped away because I earned it all already. I earned the punishment. What the Pykkt were going to do to her, it couldn't be as bad. You know? Because she's a little kid, she can't betray anyone. But I could betray her, and so that meant that everything that had happened to me, I deserved. That I could even conceive of swapping our places meant that it was fine how he hurt me. I burnt – alive. My hands set on fire first, and then my arms." He lifts his elbows in remembered agony. "Nothing there was anything I didn't deserve."

"You'd encountered it before, though. The Tower. Nobody killed you with it then." Sounding reasonable while making objectively insane statements is the largest part of fellowship. Michael is mirroring. Psychology is the abstraction of pain. "You didn't deserve it then, when no one was doing anything to you. So how could you deserve it later."

Adam draws a breath in, startling. Michael watches him closely. The spread of his red uniform across his chest seems perverse. "Because I earned it."

"On account of how you are a war criminal and handed Aleea over to war criminals, I see."

"I thought I could keep the secret!" Adam turns away from him in the dim glow. "There was no way to stop it. Nothing he wanted to do was anything I could stop him from doing. I'm – I'm ashamed of how weak I was. It wasn't just at the end, either. From the beginning, I would have done anything to stop the pain. Alanna, Aleea, they believe I'm stronger than that, but I'm not. I would have betrayed anyone to get out of there. It hurt so bad, I would have done anything. And I should be better than that."

Michael reaches out to touch Adam's shoulder. "No one's better than that. I think you, quite frankly, blew it. You made the wrong choice. So, what are you going to do with your life." The fabric of Adam's spacesuit is seamless and so finely woven that Michael's fingertips slip on it. "They wanted to hurt you and they did. That means they knew you had a body that could be hurt. Who doesn't."

"I should have overcome it."

"Nobody can overcome it. Nobody's that tough. You thought you could emerge triumphant and Aleea would be fine?"

Adam makes an awful noise. "No."

"No?" Michael rephrases. He has been here. He has seen what people do to themselves.

"I thought I was going to die. I thought I would die and it would all be fine."

Michael traces the wing of Adam's shoulder with his thumb. "No, you didn't. You thought you would be dead and it would be someone else's problem. That's how it works. You thought you were irredeemable and if you were dead, some other person without all of your flaws would be prepared to solve the problem. Guess what, Adam: there's no one without our flaws. There's no one who survives torture. No one who gets out of life alive. You can't atone by being dead. The only person who can repair your betrayal is you."

Under Michael's touch, Adam's shoulder shudders.

"Adam. Aleea's safe. You aren't doing this alone. You are responsible for it, but you aren't alone in it."

"My job is to put myself out there, Michael. My job is to keep her safe. I failed, catastrophically, and there's no way of coming back. I should have stayed there, I should have let him torture me forever."

Michael digs his thumb in harder. "Let's play this out. You stay there, in the Tower of Rainbow Doom. Let's say, it's bad, like it was this time, and you know to expect it, instead of thinking that everything will be basically okay, as you have experienced before, because you're a real tough guy, you know, Rambo, instead of a scientist who was magically caught in a zeta beam. You have your revolver, for once. You shoot your torturer after three months, after he's banged you around the galaxy and stretched you to breaking, maybe made you eat your tongue a couple of times. The Pykkt show up to make a deal and you do what to them."

"That's not what happened."

These guys. "It's a story," Michael insists. "Here's what happens next. The Pykkt shoot you and you're dead."

"Great," Adam says.

"Don't be obtuse. The Pykkt win the war, more people than you are dead. They show up on Earth and instead of your deceit, twisting their arrival into something we can combat because we're aware of the stakes, they pursue their brutal, miserable war, and they surprise us. They bomb us, like they threatened. The Justice League get involved." Adam sobs. Michael brings his hand to Adam's waist. "Right, great, they're always able to pull out the win by teamwork." Adam turns toward him, moving into Michael's arms. Michael holds him close. He moves his hands over where he dug his thumb earlier, soothing and kind. He moves his hand across the radiation-resistant, space-durable, wholly-contained suit. His finger catches on the bare skin of Adam's spine, above the starred collar of his uniform. "They're superheroes. They do this all the time. They don't really get hurt."

Diana had caught a bullet that Adam intended for himself. Michael strokes the soft straight hair behind his ear.

"I asked them for help," Adam says, once the tears have subsided. "I couldn't do it alone."

Criticizing Adam for telling anyone, much less telling anyone too late, places the blame correctly, but irrelevantly. Adam needs to survive. Michael uncovered the mystery, and has appointed himself the task of bringing these heroes home.

Alanna had told a wonderful story of bravery. Adam can tell nothing without his treason. Michael needs to edit their stories together, to create an enduring truth of shame, pride, rotting bodies, the clear pure sunrise over Ranagar. There may not be an immediately satisfactory answer, which is why they need to stay alive to find out.

Adam brushes his palm over the damp spot on Michael's shoulder where he wept. "Sorry. I can't stop myself. I used to be able to hold it together."

"Yeah. Everyone's fine until they aren't." Michael considers this. "Going cold turkey off alcohol and starting anti-psychotics would be rough for anyone, even if we didn't need to you to refine flashbacks to your mistakes so that your old enemies could have a home identical to yours. I saw the pills in Alanna's bag," he explains.

Adam's eyelashes are clumped together with tears. In his disorderly sadness, he looks very much like Aleea had looked, the time Michael had seen her hugging her parents. Adam had stroked Aleea's hair; Alanna touched the tip of her nose and told her to be brave. For one towering moment, he is livid at a universe which would accept such a sacrifice.

How does this imperfect universe hold such grace.

"It's working, though. It's working, for you and Alanna?" Michael nods, caught out in Adam's sight. "There's a science solution to everything. I'm so glad."

There is not. Michael contemplates saying this. "Nearly full. The explosion should tear the new planet into existence."

He retreats from the mima, leaves Adam to his salutary nightmares. More than anything else in this moment, Michael wishes he could take refuge in a decent Anglo-Saxon tetragrammaton, in blasphemy. Instead, like a fool, he closes his eyes and takes two deep breaths. The T-spheres buzz around him, in an almost fretful cloud. They don't, of course, have feelings. Michael wishes he didn't have feelings.

There is no graceful way to join this divide, the uncertainty between two people. Michael knows. The only way through is raw pragmatism.

The bare facts: he's been thinking about putting his hands on the curve of Alanna's back, that small hollowed out place elided by the fall of her shirt and jacket, and how she would put her hands on his arms, and then they would kiss. He's been thinking about how her face would feel, about the warmth of her hands, what she would say when they came apart. On the ship, she hasn't been smoking, but her voice is still deep. He likes listening to her talk even when she's not imparting information.

Michael permits his mind to skip a little, a needle on a 78, a solid grasp of the generalities if not the specifics. Is he ready to do this? He has worked through to his own satisfaction how this is not a betrayal of Paula's memory, that he's getting worked up about a pair of war criminals, but if that's a dealbreaker for him now, if he's drawing that line, then he'd better get back to Earth and figure out a way to bring Terry back from the dead permanently.

That's not what he wants to do. What he wants to do is answer this question. He thinks of them as a unit: Alanna's hands, Adam's mouth, Alanna's hair, Adam's eyes, Alanna's legs, Adam's throat, Alanna's breasts, Adam's stomach. They're both interested. Michael knows who he is. They're committed to one another and he's brave enough to have come all the way to Alpha Centauri again. He can envision it: the Rannians as smug as they ever were, Alanna radiant, he and Adam finding a way forward. Michael's not sure what that is, but he doesn't have to know right away. They have all of the future for that. He might try a drink, see where it takes them.

Alanna brushes her hair and puts on a dark blue sweater and her necklace. Michael nudges the ship into position: 64.6, 184.4, 78.1. So much less precise than five, four, three, two, one. The ship is almost entirely full up. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead: love is holy because it is like grace – the worthiness of its object is never really what matters. He starts the countdown. The guilt that has built up inside the generation ship will, when dropped at speed through the unstable well around Rann, power a tear into another dimension. The Pykkt will fly in and claim their own homeland, the new planet a perfect mirror to Rann.

"What would you have done," Alanna asks, "if you hadn't become a superhero."

"Exactly what I do now," Michael tells her, "look out for fools, drunks, and children. I might have become a writer. You know, a self-help book. How to teach yourself everything you want to know. Hints on discus-throwing."

"Really."

Michael fakes a throw. "Yeah, I kinda think I've got something to offer." He's not so as vivid as Alanna, but he's fairly colorful. An expression of a feeling of excellence. "I once met an alternate version of myself who had become a minister. A calling to pastoral work is giving individual self-help lectures, over and over. I was surprised, at the time, as his life had gone so differently than mine had, at the joy he found in it. There haven't really been a lot of of things I've enjoyed, since she died. I think I could do it."

"Thank you," Alanna says, "for this. I can't imagine that living out of a bag while Adam stays crazy is really what the defender of Earth was hoping to be doing. I. You could have written a book?"

He reaches toward her; she leans into the touch. The pilot's and the co-pilot's chairs are just close enough to allow this. When they'd kissed in that car in Minneapolis, they'd both been a little sloppy, her hands on the back of his arms; his hands on her neck, the solace of no longer being alone with these horrible responsibilities. They've got some real problems. Michael doesn't deny this: Alanna's a piece of work, Adam's profoundly mentally ill, a wretch and a traitor. Understanding from whence this arises excuses none of it. Aleea is better off without them, in Bolivia. But the twist to social relations is not that everyone's bad; it is that people will always surprise with their grace. Anyone could have the penetrating insight that Adam's sick, that Alanna's been covering for him for months, maybe even years. That torture broke something inside Adam. Regard: this marvel, that cruelty hurts.

Michael's relationship with God is complicated. How could a loving, omnipotent God do any of this. Take away his family, twice; observe Adam's betrayal and do nothing. What does it matter. God doesn't create the situations Michael finds himself in: Michael creates them. He's the one who said that he'd accompany Alanna and Adam back to Rann, he's the one who started asking questions. Alanna believes that Adam would have killed himself out of shame, or that she would have shot him. Adam believes that he should be dead. Michael doesn't believe in anything except the power to change what is before him. The qualities of the locally real do not matter: the universe is unloving, so what. He's a superhero.

Grace is not a function of the truth of God. Grace is bringing to bear compassion. So it's arranged by God or it isn't, what does that matter. Michael's made the choices he's made, and he's going to this inexplicably preserved, awful, undeserving, safe planet. This is all anyone can do, even someone of his talents. Neither Earth nor Rann could explain why the Pykkt shouldn't be allowed to bomb them into glass, because no one can justify their own existence. It is a matter of grace that existence continues. This is a grace ungranted by God, a grace unsupervised by God, a grace made in an agreement between people.

They get into the mima. "This isn't less comfortable than the bridge," Michael says, mostly to Alanna's hair. It's nice hair, although he'd like not to have it all over his face. Nothing for it, really. The scent of cinnamon, or some space oil that she must put on, is warm. If this plan fails and they float aimlessly to their doom, at least he'll go down knowing what her hair smelled like.

The mima was intended to sleep two: the pilot and the co-pilot. Human factors: the hypothetical pilot and co-pilot would need to be about sixty kilos each, no more than five and half feet tall, and already fairly friendly with one another. If Alanna were any more statuesque than she is already, Michael a little broader in the shoulders, they'd have to give up. Adam, who has spent much of the last week in here, doesn't give up. That's not what any of them do. In the moment, it is nothing so much as compassion, and it is hot. Michael is briefly, uncomfortably aware that the Stranges are in love, that notwithstanding their recent history, they've been this close before. He gets over it. "Sorry," he tells Adam, trying to disentangle their knees.

"No problem," Adam says. For all that he's a narrow kind of guy, less physically possessing than Michael, he's not small. His legs are pressed to Michael's, hip-to-hip, thigh-to-thigh, shin-to-shin. The slick solid feeling of Adam's boot against Michael's ankle, resting against the cuff of his cross-trainers, is almost soft. Michael can feel a lot of places where Adam's blood is moving: the anterior tibial artery, the femoral artery, the left radial artery. Adam's hand is pressed to Michael's shoulderblade. Michael stops screwing around and lets Adam rest his knee on Michael's thigh.

"This does answer why they call it a generation ship."

"Alanna," Adam says.

"Adam," Alanna says. "Am I making you blush."

Adam's face is hot against Michael's neck. "Yes."

At least the T-spheres can float quietly out of the way, near the mima's low ceiling while the three of them wait in this coffin-like chamber for the crash.

Alanna turns her head. "Sorry." This close, Michael can see her dark eyelashes, the creases of her eyelid, each constituent strand of her eyebrow. There's a tiny starburst of a scar just above the inner corner of her eye, which Michael finds most wonderful: Alanna is spectacularly beautiful, the kind of beautiful with 'unearthly' affixed to it when that's still safely a metaphor, but her beauty is made real by who she is, and there's incredible longing in his heart, Michael can feel it almost drop through him, that Alanna had once been a teenager with bad teenage skin, and she'd grown up to be this brave, smart, capable person.

They're going to her home. He is going to go the distance with Adam. "It's fine. I'm just waiting to be torn apart."

"By us?"

"By the great tear we're introducing to the universe to give the Pykkt a homeworld. Event Horizon in reverse."

"Oh, I like this. I don't understand it, but I like it." Alanna lifts a brow and at Michael's nod, settles against him. Their chances of surviving the dimensional split and subsequent reentry into the atmosphere of one planet out of two are very good: nine hundred ninety seven thousand out of one hundred thousand. Almost never is the bet this good. He'll probably want to die if he's read this wrong, though. Thigh-to-thigh. He can't be reading this wrong.

Michael's jacket creaks under Adam's hand. "You know, it's basically never the wrong time to have a heavy psychological conversation. This trip, the time we were on Earth, my betrayal, the war, losing Aleea and getting her back. All that stuff's so close to the surface, it's easy to feel. And maybe this is just the serenity of my total psychic breakdown, and while we're stuck in a coffin here the certainty that we're not going to die in the next few minutes has stolen over me, because I think you should go for it. Alanna. Michael. We should go for it."

The world is ended and is reborn.

"'Where we're going, we don't need eyes,' like the movie says." Alanna's hand is hot on Michael's shirt. What a mind. She rubs a finger along the stitching of his pocket, tracing the hollow from his hipbone on down, her hand drifting a little. If they were touching for real – although what about this is not for real, just because they're dressed, and could die, that's all been true the entire time they've known one another and it was true before that too – the places where she's touching him are about to get exciting. "Sweetheart, let's tear a dimensional rift into space, crash down, and take Michael home."

Michael turns, twisting to grasp the chest strap of Adam's jetpack. At this angle, Adam's eyes are very, very blue where he looks at Michael.

"Don't take them out on my account," Michael says. "I'd like you to see what comes next."