Chapter Text
The skeletal frame of the storehouse casts long shadows across the western clearing where the entire colony has gathered to raise its walls. Two days of work show in the structure overhead — beam fitted to beam, the grain of cut timber still raw and pale where bark has been stripped away.
Cal stands under one of the north wall’s primary support beams with his hands braced against the roughhewn wood. Sweat drags down his back in slow, irritating paths. His shirt sticks to him. To his right, DA-14 (or Dala, as she prefers) compensates for the fluctuating weight. To his left, Brother Rostok, the anchorite quartermaster, shifts his grip and mutters some complaint Cal doesn’t bother paying attention to under his breath.
“Little more—hold it!” Greez yells from his place on the scaffold above, his voice rough after a long day of shouting orders. The driver in his hand nails the beam in place, and for a moment everything looks aligned. “Beautiful! Okay, you—no, wait… hold on! Don’t let go yet. Nobody breathe!”
The wood makes a noise that Cal has learned wood likes to make when it is not doing what it is supposed to do. BD lets out a beep of alarm right next to Cal’s ear and launches off his shoulder to shoot up and inspect Greez’s handiwork.
“Joint four is not seated properly,” Dala announces, unasked. “If we continue, potential failure will exceed acceptable thresholds.”
Brother Rostok swears, loud and heartfelt. The curse ripples outward. The workers visibly wilt.
“Hey,” Bode calls from his perch on a stack of lumber, one hand shading his eyes as he peers up along the beam. “Take a break and we can fix the joints. Then we go ahead and try again.”
“Everybody take five!” Greez hollers down. “Go cool off while we check this out.”
The settlers all groan and grouse but waste no time scattering when given the go-ahead. Some take off to fetch better tools, others argue over whose measurements are wrong, a handful of the youngest adults joke about whether Tanalorr’s perfect climate is conspiring against them. Cal eases his hands away from the beam, letting Dala and the temporary struts take the load. The wood settles with another ominous creak, but the support straps tighten and hold as intended.
The moment his palms pull away, a droning hum surges in to claim the space that opens within his attention. It’s the same pitch that has been clogging his senses for weeks, but its volume suddenly soars from distracting to aggressive; it pushes up behind his eyes and against his skull. He blinks and everything appears to swivel ninety degrees in conflicting directions. The frame of the storehouse tilts a fraction too far in his vision, shadows crawling away on the breeze. For a moment, he’s sure the whole structure is about to crumble apart into a waterfall of spent casings and embers.
“Easy,” Rostok says, clapping a broad hand against Cal’s shoulder. “This heat’s no joke. You oughta go get some water, find some shade."
"Yeah," Cal murmurs, his voice distant. "Yeah, good idea.”
He spares a glance up at the structure to confirm it remains steady, then drifts several steps away until the nearest argument about misaligned joints is happening at a safer distance. Defaulting to the easy gratification of following instruction, he meanders toward the water station. It’s a simple card table set up to the side of the clearing, no more than a collection of sweating canisters and a stack of metal cups; it sits beneath a tattered bedsheet someone has draped from four poles to keep everything shaded. The table wobbles when he sets his hand on it. He holds his breath, grabs a cup, and pours until it’s nearly full.
A few paces beyond the last line of stakes marking out the storehouse’s footprint, he spots Cere sitting on a crate under the gaunt shade of a half-grown tree. She looks smaller these days than she does in his memories. Her boots are dusty and a sheen of sweat glints along her scalp. He hopes she isn’t overexerting herself, that she’s heeded at least some of his pleas to take it easy. With his water in hand, he strolls toward her. She looks up and her eyes soften at the sight of him. Serenity finds its way into him, smothering the uneasiness that had tried to sneak in.
“Give up on the barn raising already?” Cere asks.
“Dala and BD are trying to fix Greez’s math.” Cal sinks down beside the crate rather than on top of it, stretching his legs out in front of him. Being lower than her feels safer. The planet emits a gentle tenor outward through its surface.
Her mouth twitches into a knowing smirk. “Oh, I’m sure he’s taking that well.”
Cal huffs out a papery laugh and tilts his head back against the crate. “How’re you feeling?”
“I’m fine, Cal. You worry too much.” Her tone is teasing. The corners of her eyes crease, warm.
“Maybe,” he admits easily. “It’s just hard not to, I guess, after how close it was.” He takes a long drink of his water and does his best to ignore the painful sting he feels every time he remembers finding her prone and wounded on the floor of the burning archive.
She makes a thoughtful hm. “Well, perhaps now you understand why we fussed over you so much after retrieving the holocron.”
He tilts his head back and forth a little, pretending to consider this, and laughs when he hears Cere’s scoff of playful exasperation. Then he adds, “On the bright side, now we have cool matching scars.”
“Matching tattoos would have been too passé, I suppose.” She rolls her eyes, undeniably fond.
Cal smirks and drains the rest of his water. He looks out past the clearing and regards the mess they are gradually developing into a town: a handful of completed structures and tents, half-walled huts and leaning scaffolds, all arranged like spokes around a large, grounded shuttle. People move through it in a pattern that has become familiar, though he doesn’t quite know how to trust it yet.
“I’m really glad you’re here to see this.” If he doesn’t let the words out now, they will calcify inside him. “All of this.”
“It’s coming together well.” Cere leans forward, her gaze following out past the clearing as she takes in the community he is desperately trying to believe in. Her approval a warm wave that surges through him, renewing his commitment.
“You should’ve seen it the first week. None of us knew what we were doing. Nobody knew where anything was. We had people sleeping in shifts in the shuttles before we realized there wasn’t any wildlife out here that wanted to kill us.”
“And now?”
“Now it’s…” He searches for the right word but can’t find any singular word that encompasses all the hope and the fear and the breakneck stress and optimism. “We’re more organized. We’ve got schedules and routines. We haven’t figured it all out yet, but at least we’re arguing about which side of the town to put the storeroom on instead of who we’re going to eat first.”
Cere laughs like it’s a joke, so he manages an awkward smile, but there had been nothing funny about the day they’d concluded Tanalorr was devoid of both predators and potential prey.
“Somehow we’re doing it, though,” he continues. “I almost can’t believe it, like I’ll wake up and none of this will be real.”
“It’s a marvel, truly,” she says, and there’s no hesitation in it. “You deserve to feel proud of everything you’re doing here.”
“We’re doing,” he corrects automatically.
An argument is already underway by the time Cal reaches the fire. Voices aren’t raised to shouts yet, but the words being exchanged already contain all the elements of impending escalation — a fuse waiting for a spark. The fire itself is small, built low within a ring of stones; a few crates and salvaged chairs make a loose circle around it. Beyond the circle, Tanalorr falls off into the jewel-toned dim of evening. Merrin sits with Kata tucked against her side, both of them half-turned toward the source of the tension. Greez is perched on an upturned crate, arms folded, mouth pressed tight. A cluster of anchorites and refugees fill the rest of the space, gazes converging on the single man who is standing.
Cal recognizes him, vaguely. His name is Emik, and he’d arrived with the second wave of Path rescues. His hands are tightly wrapped for support, and he wears a jacket with the symbol of the porters’ guild on the sleeve, frayed almost to nothing. Ever since his arrival, he has been reserved; Cal had thought of him as quiet but hardworking — nothing of particular note beyond that.
“I’m not saying we leave tonight,” Emik is saying when Cal comes within earshot. “I’m saying we start planning for when we do.”
Someone mutters agreement. Someone else swears softly.
Cal glances at Merrin, and she sends him a look that suggests he should hurry up and handle whatever is brewing before it goes any further. It’s not a request for help; Merrin is, in fact, likely better suited to stopping an argument in its tracks, but she acquiesces that sometimes a gentler touch can avoid additional conflict further down the line. This is a show of her trust in him: a situation that she has expectations for, and no doubt that he will rise to meet them.
“Is everything alright?” Cal asks as he steps closer. He keeps his tone light, but his voice still rings clear and carries on the wind through the colony.
Emik spins toward him and his shoulders tighten upward, already on the defensive. “We’re talking about exits,” he says. “Or trying to.”
“You’re scaring people is what you’re doing,” one of the anchorite women hisses in agitation. “There’s no reason for us to leave here. Tanalorr is safe.”
“That’s what they tell us, but this place is wrong. Don’t any of you feel it? The planet doesn’t want us here,” he shoots back. His gaze flicks to Cal and overflows with the twin fires of vehemence and distrust.
Cere has followed Cal to the fire and idles at his back, assuming the position of a trusted advisor. Be honest, but not recklessly so, she conveys through a brief brush of their bond. He draws in a deep breath, feels his chest swell, and squares his shoulders before he responds.
“You’re right. It doesn’t feel like any place I’ve been before. The Force is… louder here.” He lets that sit, holding Emik’s eyes and searching for the truth behind them. “And I don’t know what that means. But I do know that this planet is the only place the Empire won’t look for us. Here, we’re hidden, and for some of us that’s a miracle in and of itself.”
“So we just have to accept that? Trust you without question and hope we get used to—” Emik flings his hand up, gesturing emphatically all around him. “To how wrong this all feels? To the feeling of living on a dead planet? Or are we just stuck here for the rest of our lives because you’re making all the calls for everyone?”
Cal can feel a dozen sets of eyes flicker between them.
“No, of course not. I don’t want to take anyone’s choices away from them,” he says. “That’s not why I’m here. That’s not why any of us are.” He lets his gaze travel around the circle, landing for a moment on Merrin, on Greez, on Kata’s wide, anxious eyes. “We came here to give people choices they didn’t have before, a way to live without having to always be on guard.”
Emik’s shoulders ease half an inch. “Look, spare me the sales pitch. And maybe you didn’t know this, but before the Path found me, I was being held in a labor camp.” He shares this tragic revelation with aplomb, like it’s a performance he’s been practicing, and all at once Cal understands that Emik’s complaints about the planet were a means to an end. What this man really wants is to be heard, to be perceived and understood and deemed valuable. “I’m grateful to the Path, really, I am. I’m not trying to rock the boat just because I want to see it capsize.”
Definitely rehearsed, Cere agrees.
Cal manages to keep a straight face.
“But I’ll be damned if all I’ve done is trade one prison for another. Decisions about this place deserve to be made by all of us who are going to be living here, not just by you and the Nightsister.”
A murmur of uncomfortable agreement goes around the circle.
Cal waits for a moment before responding, truly considering his words before he speaks them. “You’re right. Decisions about this place shouldn’t belong to just me and Merrin.”
That gets a flicker from Emik, like he wasn’t expecting agreement.
“This should’ve been addressed already, but we’re figuring a lot of this out as we go. We’re not infallible, and to be honest, I don’t even want to be responsible for every big decision.”
A mild chuckle ripples from the crowd.
Cal presses on, unwilling to pick apart that reaction. “So, things have been too informal up until now, but we can change that. We can do meetings with everyone, on equal ground. We’ll talk, and we’ll vote.”
A few heads lift at that; the murmur shifts, less sharp.
“And if you and the Nightsister don’t like what we decide?” Emik asks. It comes out softer, but the edge is still there.
“Then we argue,” Cal says with an unbothered shrug, a hint of wryness in his voice. “I’m not any more important than anyone else here. I’m just the guy who found the compass and was crazy enough to give this whole thing a shot. My first priority is always going to be keeping everyone here safe, but I’m not going to chain anybody to this planet. I don’t have the right to take that kind of choice away from anyone.”
A hush falls over the group as they all take in his proposal. Cal stands up straight and holds himself openly before their judgment. His eyes skim across the crowd in the flickering firelight. He spots Bode far past the others, idling outside the ring of crates and chairs, present but removed.
Eventually Emik huffs out a thin, skeptical laugh, but his eyes have lost their anger. “Meetings. Votes. It’s naïve as all hell, but I guess we can give it a shot. Trust a Jedi to reinvent the Senate.”
A few people laugh, and the knot of tension begins to untangle. Cere is quiet behind him, but he can feel her pride as tangibly as the warmth of the fire. Merrin’s gaze finds Cal’s over the flames. She gives him a small nod, approval and respect and obvious love gleaming in her dark eyes.
By the time the fire is banked to coals and most of the settlers have drifted back toward their bunks, the air has cooled significantly. BD had peeled away with Kata an hour or so earlier. Merrin has retired to their shared home. Night settles over Tanalorr with a deep, shimmering dark that feels like the deep sea.
Cal winds down the same way he does every night. He walks through the budding town and observes it without any distractions, surveying and cataloging each new development in his mind. He follows the worn paths between structures, letting his feet choose the route. It always feels like he’s tucking the settlement in for the evening as he tends to whatever small tasks he finds that need doing: pulling a tarp over a pair of crates that won’t withstand a sudden shift in the weather; double-checking that their vaporators have run efficiently throughout the day; rounding up the couple of misplaced tools he spots and dropping them off in the work shed. He likes the way the settlement feels different at night. The half-built walls and scaffolded frames that look ramshackle in daylight turn into simple silhouettes.
When he turns a corner at the very last row of in-progress homes, he sees a figure sitting on the low edge of the retaining wall that crudely marks the slow roll of the valley. As he approaches, he realizes it’s Bode, sitting with one knee hooked up, one boot braced in the dust. There are no lamps nearby, only the spill of light from a distant doorway, enough to cut his profile out of the dark. Cal stops. For a second his breath catches, like he hasn’t seen Bode dozens of times since everything that’d happened, like he hasn’t spent months picking apart the differences between the man he thought he knew and the one who’d shot Cordova.
“Thought you’d called it a night,” Bode says, not looking over. His voice is tired around the edges, humor ground out entirely. He gives the impression that he’s been here a long time already, waiting in the dark.
Cal crosses the last few steps and lowers himself onto the edge of the wall, leaving a gulf of distance between them; the stone is still faintly warm from the day. Below, the valley is a dark bowl. Above, the sky is drawn with charts of unfamiliar constellations. For a moment, they sit in silence. Cal focuses on his breathing, keeping it slow. A hum crawls along his jaw and into his teeth, restless.
“You did alright earlier,” Bode says. “With Emik.”
Cal doesn’t bother trying to stem the tired sigh that escapes. "It was bound to come up sooner or later. It was something we would’ve had to deal with eventually.”
“Still, you won him over.”
“I wasn’t trying to. I just told him the truth.”
Bode laughs like he finds Cal’s answer genuinely amusing.
“What?” Cal huffs, suddenly self-conscious and annoyed for it.
“Nothing. It’s not bad. You’re just so…” Bode shakes his head faintly. “You’re a real optimist, you know? I never expect it.”
All things considered, Cal has had a relatively good day up to this point, so he keeps the bitter response he wants to lob tucked all the way at the back of his throat and clenches his jaw to hold it shut. Once the impulse passes, they simmer in silence for a few beats more. Eventually Cal asks, “How has Kata been handling everything?” It’s a question that always lives close to the surface of his mind.
“She’s…” Bode trails off, searching. “She’s fine, as far as I can tell.” His mouth twists. “She’s not speaking to me,” he adds in a guilty rush.
Cal’s head snaps around to stare, startled to hear it. But then he realizes he hasn’t seen Kata with Bode in days — not that he can recall. He’s seen her with Merrin, with Greez, with the handful of kids that have gravitated toward each other like magnets. And he’s seen Bode working, putting in the hard labor to build things with the rest of them, doing perimeter checks of the settlement, hovering at the edges of the community.
Their two orbits don’t often intersect.
Bode gives him a pitiful smile, soggy with pain and remorse. “Every time I try to say good morning, or ask her how training’s been going, or even if I just look at her for too long… it’s all the same silent treatment. She just acts like I’m not there.” He lets out a thin breath. “At first I thought she was just bottling it up, and I kept waiting for her to explode on me. I was ready for her to scream or cry or tell me she hates me. But this… she won’t even give me a chance to apologize."
The sympathy comes automatically, a habit hard to kill. It reaches toward the version of Bode who made bad jokes in cramped ship corridors, who’d fought at Cal’s side for months as a brother. Behind it comes the memory of a blaster shot to his chest, an intangible hand around a Nightsister’s throat, the wild terror in a little girl’s eyes.
“If that’s how she wants to deal with all this, you need to respect it,” Cal says, careful but firm. “You know that.”
“I know,” Bode says. “I’m not trying to get you to change anything. This is… just how it’s going to be from now on, I guess.” He leans forward, forearms on his thighs, hands dangling. “If she ignores me for the rest of my life, at least she’ll be safe while she does it.”
“Bode,” Cal sighs out his name, disappointment and compassion and anger all warring within him. “She’s not ignoring you just to spite you. You have to know that she still loves you, but everything you did scared her, and it hurt her. She’s well within her rights to be mad at you. That’s not something you can take from her.”
Bode flinches. “Yeah,” he says softly. “I know. I just… I miss my kid. And I know it’s my own fault, but it’s… It feels worse than I expected.”
Cal sits and chews on the inside of his lip for several long seconds, trying to think of anything to say other than no shit. Eventually he offers, “I think you’re finally doing the right thing now, at least. You’re showing up, doing the work. I can see it, so I’m sure she can see it too. For now... give her space. She’ll come to you when she’s ready.”
Bode looks down at his hands. Cal has to fight the instinct to console him any further. They lapse into silence again, existing in the frayed ends of the day.
A thought suddenly materializes within Cal: the notion that Bode is playing at emotions, that he's trying on different demeanors to see what’s most effective, that he’s sharing a sob story as a means of finding a new opportunity to manipulate Cal. It’s like a bolt of lightning; Bode hasn’t given him any reason to think anything else. He pushes himself abruptly to his feet.
“I should try to sleep,” he says. “You should too.”
“Sure thing, scrapper,” Bode says. There’s the ghost of a smile there, but the shape doesn’t quite fit anymore.
Cal nods and turns away. He doesn’t hear Bode stand. When he reaches the next row of frames and glances back, the low retaining wall is already empty.
The next day rises to meet the colony, bright and noisy. Cal wakes up with a headache pounding behind his eyes. He still puts in a long morning of work with all the others, and the storehouse is finally holding itself up under its own power by lunchtime. In the afternoon, Merrin pulls him aside and asks him to help with Kata’s training. She has been doing this more and more lately, and even though her intentions are perfectly transparent, he still says yes, because he does like them both and enjoys their company.
Through no fault of her own, Kata has become an ongoing point of contention. Merrin has told Cal previously that she thinks he should train her, given her obvious talent in the Force, but he disagrees every time it comes up. He tells Merrin he’s too busy with the rest of the settlement, that he can’t spare the time she deserves — which they both know is an excuse. The truth is simply that he doesn’t feel qualified; he’d never even finished his own training. If Kata wants to be a Jedi, she would be best served by the tutelage of a real one. Cere and Bode are both better options than he is. Unfortunately, neither of them has shown any intent; Cere is still focusing on her recovery, and Bode is… complicated. Merrin has taken Kata under her wing for now, determined to at least teach her a solid grasp of the basics — enough to be able to defend herself.
“Again,” Merrin says. Her tone is patient but expectant.
Kata stands opposite Cal, her small body drawn up into a defensive stance. Cal waits for Merrin’s nod, then steps forward in an exaggerated, telegraphed attempt at an arm grab, his hand closing on Kata’s forearm with enough pressure to give her something to fight against.
“What do you do first?” Merrin asks.
“Um, you assess the threat while drawing your weapon,” Kata says, pulling a dull training blade out of a sheath at the small of her back — the same place Merrin keeps her own.
“Good,” Merrin says. “Next?”
“I should…” She furrows her brow in thought and rotates her tiny arm in Cal’s grip experimentally. “I turn my arm toward his thumb, right?”
“Correct. Tell me what your other hand is doing at this time.”
“Oh, right! I need to—”
—listen.
Cal finds himself suddenly and violently alone. The sunlight glitters down from the sky in distinct beams before it suddenly hardens into kyber, splinters, and explodes. Its shards flash from within and slash the atmosphere into dilute ribbons of color: pink, ivory, inhuman lilac. The pieces shuffle into waxing and waning bands of reality. He feels the planet shifting, tectonic plates more like glacial floes drifting over an ocean. Deep beneath, something stirs. His perception lurches sideways, independent of his vessel.
“What is this?” he mumbles out. He sways, his eyes strained wide and unblinking under the ransom-note sky.
Here.
A small weight tugs his arm one way; a larger force pulls him the other. His awareness of his own body drops out from under him, a tether cut somewhere between his mind and his senses.
He comes back to himself on his back in the grass. Merrin and Kata both lean over him, their faces slightly out of sync with their heads. Their mouths open and shut and open and shut. The hum crowds in to fill the space he's ceded, delighted and relentless, like water rushing to fill a footprint the second the boot is sucked away from the mud. It expands with each new vacancy and throbs along his jaw, settles under his teeth, then floods down into his lungs.
“Cal.” Merrin’s voice finally cuts through, low and firm. “Look at me.”
He does. Her eyes are profoundly dark but they’re glazed by the soft colors of Tanalorr’s sky. Kata’s face hovers behind hers, brows drawn together.
“Can you hear me?” Merrin asks.
The hum underneath — it’s Tanalorr; it told him as much, didn’t it? — flares and then subsides. Sound snaps back into place with a small, unpleasant pop.
“Y-yeah. I hear you.” His voice comes out rough, too loud in his own head.
“Good,” she says. Her hand is on his shoulder, firm and unshaking. “Stay there for a moment. Do not sit up yet.”
He becomes aware of his own body in pieces. His right shoulder throbs where he probably landed on it. His right hand is still half-curled, fingers flexed around nothing, the memory of Kata’s arm fading. The sky has resolved into one continuous rosy plate again, clouds floating overhead in a completely unremarkable way.
“I’m okay,” he says. That’s what he’s supposed to say, and saying anything else would require him to find words for a sensation he doesn’t understand. “Just lost… something. Lost a second.” He’s breathless. He tries to count backward from ten and discovers that he is not entirely sure where seven and two go.
“Was it an echo?” Merrin asks, an island of calm beside him.
“Not sure. Didn’t… it felt different,” he mumbles, feeling thick and viscous.
“You stopped,” Kata says. Her voice is higher than usual, like someone has tightened a string inside her. She is trying — he can see it — to present an expression that matches what the adults do when something frightening happens: controlled, slightly annoyed, brisk. But she’s nine, and her eyes are shining and her fingers are trembling on the hilt of the practice knife. “You... let go. You didn’t say anything.”
“Sorry.” He wishes he had anything more to give her, to assuage her fear, but when he focuses too hard, the horizon feels like it might shear itself into ribbons again.
“It was scary.” She sucks her lips together and holds them shut between her teeth.
“Do you remember what happened?” Merrin asks, her tone carefully level.
“We were working on the grab.” He lifts his hand a few inches and lets it fall back to the grass. “After that it… skips. I was standing and then I was here.”
“You did not simply drop,” Merrin says. “You went away first. Your eyes went somewhere else. Then you fell.”
He searches for some trace of that moment and finds only a smear, like he’d dragged his fingers through the ink of his memory before it’d dried. The hum swells, pleased to find another gap it can occupy. The sensation crashes at him, then recedes, like a wave that has spent itself against rock and is forced to retreat.
“Breathe.” Merrin’s thumb presses lightly against the side of his neck. “Slowly. Do not rush ahead of yourself.”
He listens to her instead of Tanalorr. He draws air in, notes the smell of bruised grass and dust and the faint, tangy smoke from a campfire on the far side of the settlement. He lets it out, and after a few breaths the hum has edged back from a roar to its usual constant presence, and the world balances into one coherent layer again.
“Better.” Merrin shifts back a little, giving him space without moving away entirely. “Can you sit up, or do you need a moment longer?”
“I can sit.” He plants his hands, fingers digging into the soil, and pushes himself upright in stages. The field tilts once, a slow, queasy roll, then steadies when he locks his focus on her face. “It’s catching up.”
“Cal, wait. You are bleeding.”
He sniffs on instinct, feels the warm spill under his nose, and swipes at it with his hand, only to find that his fingers come away redder than he’d expected. Merrin produces a scrap of fabric from the pouch on her belt and wastes no time wadding it up under his nose. He feels instantly ridiculous and takes the fabric for himself, shooing her hands away.
“It’s fine, I’m fine. It’s just a bloody nose.”
Merrin and Kata look at each other over his head, a brief exchange that contains more worry than either of them seems willing to put into words. He pushes himself the rest of the way upright in a rush, riding the momentum so he doesn’t have to acknowledge the way his head swims.
“I’m okay, I promise,” he says. He raises a hand when they both move in the same step to steady him. “Probably went too long without eating something.”
It is a plausible lie. They have all watched him forget meals when there was work to be done. Merrin’s mouth flattens, but she does not contradict him in front of Kata. Kata latches onto the explanation with visible relief; this is a problem she understands. People get lightheaded when they don’t eat. You feed them; they get better.
“Let’s go see Greez, then,” she says, taking charge. “He said he was making soup today.”
Cal agrees easily. Merrin laces her fingers between his and leads him in the direction of the kitchen, Kata standing close by his other side. She moves with deliberate, careful strides, anchoring him in the present, and eventually he convinces most of his muscles to stop anticipating another fall. The paths between buildings have been walked into pale routes that hold still when he looks at them.
The settlement had arranged itself around the old shuttle without anyone deciding that it should. It was their first shelter, their first common room, the place where they stacked cargo and sleeping mats and gathered to share rations. Now that the worst of the improvisation is over — now that walls have gone up and roofs have been attached to them — the shuttle has become a hall, a kitchen, a meeting place, a place people drift toward when they don’t want to be alone. The smell of cooking hits Cal the moment he steps inside, thick and familiar, and every sound amplifies, bouncing off the metal walls.
His family is already gathered inside. BD is up on the long counter, scanning ingredients while Greez minces a mound of something green into confetti. He looks over at the sound of their entrance and squawks when he catches sight of Cal. “What did you do to yourself?” he demands before Cal has a chance to open his mouth. “You were fine when I saw you last!”
BD trills agreement and leaps forward to scan him. A small light flickers along his photoreceptor. Cal lets him; the gentle sweep of the scanner is less intrusive than the planet’s ongoing rummaging through his bones.
“It’s just a bloody nose, Greez. I’m going to go wash up.” He heads toward the fresher before he has to see the concerned looks he knows Greez and Merrin are exchanging and locks the door behind him.
The fresher is barely big enough for him to turn around in. He grips the edge of the tiny sink and leans over it, letting his breath seesaw in and out until his ribs stop buzzing.
His reflection looks worse than he’d expected. Blood has painted his upper lip, his mouth, the beginning of his beard; it has dried in dark flakes under his nose and smeared across one cheek where he must have swiped at it. His eyes look wrong: too bright, ringed by shadows that make him look older than he is and, at the same time, younger. For a second, he is twenty-four and simultaneously fourteen and staring into the mirror that hangs over the sink in Prauf’s apartment.
He twists the tap. The water sputters twice before flowing in a slim, ice-cold stream. When he cups it and splashes his face, the hum inside him responds, hissing like a prodded animal. It pushes against the inside of his skull, an insistent presence almost offended by this mundane discomfort. He braces his palms on the metal, head hanging between his shoulders, and waits for it to pull back. It doesn’t, not really; it resettles, like rolling over in bed.
He lifts his head, meets his own eyes in the mirror again. His pupils are still larger than they should be in this light. For a second the reflection shudders into the next plane, plunging with depth and time. His stomach lurches. He blinks hard until everything stacks correctly again.