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So, in other words, ummm, it seems like I’m a soldier from Zerestria.
Peter.
Oh. That was odd.
Why was that her first thought? None of the Zerestrian foot soldiers soldiers had appeared yet. Sixteen people still unaccounted for and Zeze could be any one of them -- that was if his wild stab in the dark even turned out to be true.
But Peter .
That had been her first thought. And not only her first thought but her immediate reaction had been nothing more than ‘Peter’.
Did she want it to be him? No, she didn’t think so. It wasn’t like that. She didn’t want it to be him. She didn’t need it to be him.
She just hoped it would be him.
Because she needed to apologise. Apologise for his trembling hands and the wild panic in his eyes and the fear in his voice as he forced himself to go against every human instinct of self-preservation imaginable and give up his life for the sake of another. Apologise for taking his life and running away with it to safety.
That’s what she did, isn’t it? She did take the earring -- his earring -- the ticket to a safe place. She couldn’t remember, couldn’t see the image of him dropping the small, round stone into her palm, her closing her fist around it, couldn’t remember turning her back on him and leaving him there but, somehow, she knew she must have done it. Because she was human. And she, too, was under those human instincts of self-preservation. She just wasn’t quite as strong as he was.
Zeze was leaving.
She had to know. There was no point guessing, no point hoping. Either he was Peter or he was not.
“Come here a sec, Zeze. You aren’t… Peter, right?”
“Petah?”
“Peter Arce, a Zerestrian soldier.”
“He your boyfriend?”
Oh. That was odd.
It wasn’t him. Or, at the very least, Zeze hadn’t remembered and he still wasn’t her Peter. Peter would have known how things stood between them.
He wasn’t him.
And she was disappointed.