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Lonely, lonely was the surface of the moon and lonely the boy who lived upon it.
Tim had been sixteen years old when he first read those words — sixteen and spider-limbed and spider-hearted: defensive, habituated to isolation, to seeing the world in terms of predator and prey, the fist and the bruise left by the first. He’d flipped the book open in a store that he always visited alone because he didn’t want the guys at school knowing he was into all this “geek shit”, and the first line had burrowed its way into him then and never left.
Lonely, lonely, lonely: back then, being as self-aware as the average teenage male, and perhaps even a little less than that, he had probably thought it was the chant-like repetition that hooked him. In fact, he probably hadn’t even thought about it at all, just bought the book with the next day’s lunch money and stayed up all night to finish it. Funny how it worked like that with books he actually liked, but a biology textbook was torture.
Lonely, lonely: thirty years later and six weeks after Valentine’s day, Tim sat up in bed alone and turned to that first page again, testing the softness of the aged paper with his fingertips. He’d been putting this moment off, half out of fear of discovering the book that had practically saved his life was a schlocky potboiler and half out of the certain knowledge that the angry, gangling boy he had been would come crawling out of the pages like a ghost, scowling and trying to cover up his bruises.
In a way, those last two years at home had been the worst of all. He’d finished his growth spurt by then and started to fill out, to the point where he was too big to knock around quite so easily. His father had sensed the cracks forming in his control and responded by doubling down, shouting louder and hitting heavier. For his own part, Tim had found it harder and harder not to kick against the pricks, no matter how much Genny begged him “not to make Dad yell”.
Lonely: God, I was lonely enough back then, thought Tim now, staring at the open book in his lap without seeing it. The memory of it sprouted as an ache in his chest, but nothing near as bad as the savage, black maw that used to live there, trying to chew its way through his ribs. He’d spent enough time in therapy since then to realise that he’d enlisted at eighteen with the half-serious hope of dying overseas. Of course, that had been before he’d had any true idea of the ugliness of death in combat: there was nothing like sustained enemy bombardment to make you realise how attached you were to your own skin. But as a clueless teenager counting down the days until he could leave home, dying in a rain of shrapnel hadn’t seemed that much worse than living in fear of the next beating. So in between whiles, he’d played football like his life depended on it and reread this silly, overwrought space opera every other month.
And now here he was, forty-six and face to face with the desperate, battered ghost of his child-self. Tim stayed frozen at the first page, waiting for the usual squirm of profound self-disgust that tended to come with those memories. By now, he was convinced that it was a fairly natural reaction, experience having taught him that victims were only ever really noble or admirable in books and movies. In real life, they made you want to avert your eyes, like a tramp passed out in a gutter: your conscience writhed at the sight of them. Tim had been avoiding his own gaze for a very long time. But now he looked into that sad, lonely kid like a mirror, and to his shock, all he felt was a sense of pity so sharp it nearly cut him.
“Still up late reading by yourself?” He could so easily imagine baby-Tim saying it, could visualise the well-practiced sneer he’d serve up on the side. “The more things change, right?”
The bitterness seemed so unfamiliar now, like an old shoe that didn’t fit anymore. With another shock, Tim realised that he’d finally lost that old feeling of being stranded on an island, watching the distant world drift by. He’d always wondered how it was that other people made it to the mainland: they married, had kids, never carried a gun, never threw a punch. And it wasn’t like Tim hadn’t tried. He’d made solid efforts to swim against the current, more than once. There’d been Isabel, of course, and that girl between deployments who said she’d write and then never answered a single email, and Rachel, and Ashley. What was it that other people had that he didn’t? What was it that made the difference between drowning and landfall?
Maybe it was having someone who swam out to meet you.
”Why, you’re not a moonwalker at all.” The girl’s eyes widened behind her holo-goggles, and her chest heaved noticeably under the confining astro-suit. She reached a hand toward him, and the boy flinched away, knowing that humans only ever touched him to inflict pain.
“Don’t be scared,” she breathed. “I’ve the gift of true-sight. I can see what you are beneath all those mutations. Why, you’re as human as I am!”
Tim heaved a sigh and lifted his head from the book. He’d been right: it was dated, cringy and slightly fixated with sex in that nerdish, “I’ve never had an actual conversation with a woman” sort of way that seemed normal when you were a teenager at the mercy of your hormones. But that wasn’t what was bothering him. In spite of the ‘80s kitsch, the book still had its old magic, its trick of making the world fall away, making him forget he was alone. The problem was he’d stopped wanting to forget.
He put the book face down on the bedcover and reached for the phone on his nightstand. There were no new messages, but he hadn’t actually expected any. Lucy wasn’t scheduled to check in again until morning, and if there was news in the meantime, it would be an emergency, and Grey would call, not text. All the same, he liked to check — reaching for her when his mind strayed to dark places had become an automatic reaction. But all his phone showed him was the time, which was gone eleven already, and unlike high-school Tim, he couldn’t just sweet-talk his mom into letting him take a sick day in the morning. Sighing again, Tim marked his page with a strip of photobooth pictures that Lucy had strong-armed him into taking during one of those trips to the mall for more shelving soon after she’d moved in.
“It’s cheesy,” he’d protested.
“So? You’re not the one who’s lactose intolerant.”
In the face of that breathtaking lack of logic and the biggest, most beautiful brown eyes in southern California, Tim had folded like a sheet of paper and let her lead him into the booth. Now he had a strip of goofy photos that lived between the pages of his book, because Lucy Chen never got tired of finding ways to say she loved him.
Even when she wasn’t there.
He laid the book carefully on his nightstand and switched out the light. Eventually, he slept.
“Cannot survive without me?” Huelean made a guttural noise that might have been a curse in her own tongue. “Are you not a warrior?” she demanded. “Have you not survived the wastes of the moon long before meeting me?” Her words goaded him, even as her eyes and her hand on his arm soothed him. “Fynn, I tell you, you were made for such times as these.”
And so saying, she pressed the hilt of a laser lance into his clawed fist. As ever, the contact of her flesh on his made reality ripple, and for a moment, Fynn saw his skin revert to its true form, shedding the scales and talons left by the moon’s radiation. But then she pulled away, and his mutations returned, as they always did.
“There is something of a pattern here. You do see that, don’t you?”
Tim’s therapist was pissing him off, but that was basically what he paid the man for, so he just rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, I like women with commitment issues. Insecure attachment shit, right?”
Dr Alan folded his arms and raised an eyebrow. He and Tim were pretty used to each other by now, so he didn’t generally bother with kid gloves. “Why don’t you try that again without the negative self-talk?” he suggested.
“Fine.” Tim took a deep breath and let it out, exhaling the irritation with it. Then he crossed his legs at the ankle, tilted his body back in the chair so he was looking up at the ceiling and interlaced his fingers. Sometimes it was easier to say these things aloud if he could pretend he was just talking to himself. “It’s not fair to Lucy to say she’s afraid of commitment,” he said after a moment. “She moved in with me when I asked her to, and that was after a pretty traumatic breakup.” He stared at the ceiling some more, noting a small blemish in the paintwork. “Actually, it was like she was just waiting for me to give her the opening. Like she was waiting for me to let her back in.”
“But you’re still angry with her for leaving now?” Dr Alan prompted.
“No. Yes.” Tim tipped himself forward again and actually found himself making eye contact. “I do understand why she had to go. She’s just so… kind. Her heart’s too big to be filled with just one person. She has to try and fit the whole world in there. That’s why I love her.”
“And so, the pattern is…?”
“Women who care,” Tim murmured, his eyes going round with the dawning realisation. “Women who want to… protect.”
Fynn staggered from the throne room, blood sizzling and burning along the length of his holo-blade — blood from the False King and himself. It splashed on the floor as he walked, leaving dark puddles on the moonstone tiles. Too much to lose and survive, he knew.
For a moment, his strength wavered and he collapsed against one of the great silicone pillars that framed the entrance to the halls of the False King, squinting towards the mirrored doors that led out into the city and to safety. If he hadn’t known better, he would have sworn that his reflection looked nearly human.
“Penn deserves a second chance.”
“Good morning to you too,” Tim said drily. “Most people knock before barging into a superior officer’s space.”
Nolan glanced around at the corner Tim was occupying during the reconstruction of his office, blinking in confusion. Then he stepped back a pace and mimed rapping his knuckles on a non-existent door frame. “Got a minute?”
Tim gestured impatiently for him to come and sit down on the opposite side of his new desk, but held up his hand before Nolan could start speaking.
“This isn’t Penn’s second chance,” he said. “Hell, it’s not even his third. Since day one, he’s been demonstrating that he thinks the rules should be bent for him. And you and I have seen first-hand where that road leads.” He leaned forward, making sure Nolan understood the seriousness of what he was saying. “At this point, it’s more than just rookie stupidity. It’s a career-ending character flaw.”
Miraculously, Nolan spent a minute absorbing that in silence, his jaw working as though he were chewing on some indigestible thought. “Sir,” he said softly. “Do you believe that people can change?”
Well now, that was a bit of a low blow. Sixteen-year-old Tim seemed to materialise at Nolan’s shoulder, staring hungrily out at the world for the thing that might quench his sharp-edged, all-consuming longing. And twenty-six-year-old Tim came too, with his military buzzcut and so much blood on his hands, and thirty-six-year-old Tim, clinging to the dying shreds of his marriage until there was a whole host of past Tims crowding around, blocking out the rest of the station — lonely, lonelier, loneliest. Present-day Tim tapped his pen on his desk and glared half-heartedly at Nolan.
“What I believe is that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is an excellent definition of insanity,” he told him sternly. “If Penn’s going to change, his training needs to be different. You need to be different.”
Nolan bowed his head and grimaced. “I haven’t been at my best with him,” he admitted. “That’s another reason I think he should get another chance. Things at home have been… challenging. I haven’t given him my full attention.”
They shared a look of mutual understanding, each remembering what it took for a rookie to flourish when their training officer was overwhelmed by personal problems. And Miles was no Lucy Chen. Tim stewed on it, rolling his pen thoughtfully between his fingers. He had put a lot of time into training the kid, and he had been impressed by how intensely he cared: enough to choose a life in debt, at the bottom of the food chain, when there had been so many easier routes available to him. It would be a damn shame to waste all that potential…
“If — if — we do this, then he can’t get off lightly,” he stressed, but of course, Nolan perked up immediately, clearly only hearing the first half of the sentence. “I said, ‘if’,” he repeated hastily. “We would have to come down on him like a tonne of bricks for this. Hit him with consequences so severe, he may never have any sort of career beyond a patrol beat.”
“I understand,” said Nolan, nodding far too eagerly.
“He may not even want to stay under these terms,” Tim warned him.
“He’ll stay,” said Nolan confidently. “He’ll do anything to stay.”
Tim didn’t bother asking how he knew, because he knew the answer already. It was because he’d been faced with the same choice himself once, much like Tim had, and they’d both stayed, because deep down, they believed this was what they were made for.
“We’ll have to suspend him for at least two weeks,” he said instead, aware that he was now departing from the realm of hypotheticals. Nolan nodded more soberly this time, the reality of Penn’s situation hitting him now that he’d gotten what he wanted. “And he’ll get a six-month extension in the programme, long sleeves and all. None of which is going to reflect particularly well on his T.O.”
A flicker passed over Nolan’s face, his mouth pressing into a grimace and then relaxing. “He’ll still take it,” he said. “You don’t need to worry about me.”
“I’m the Watch Commander,” Tim reminded him. “Worrying about you people is my job now, God help me.”
That won a chuckle from Nolan, and Tim felt a trickle of relief that he would never in a million years have admitted to. He didn’t have so many friends in this world that he liked alienating them, even when the job called for it.
“Can I tell him then?” He had that eager light back in his eyes already, like a damn Golden Retriever.
“You’d better,” Tim snorted. “I’m gonna need that full two weeks before I can see him without yelling.”
“Ah, ah, ah, Fynn, you think to leave me?”
Caught half-way into an escape pod, Fynn looked up and swallowed. Huelean’s head and shoulders were framed in the entrance hatch above him, and she was clad in the thin silks favoured by the people of her home world, rather than her usual astro-suit.
“Fair’s fair,” he rasped, watching the rapid movement of her pulse at her throat. “You left me first.”
“Not forever,” she said sorrowfully and swung down into the pod bay beside him in one fluid movement of her supple body. She took his hand in both of hers and pressed it to her chest, right over her heart. “Never forever.”
There was only one person in the world who could have got Tim serving fries in a damn apron and a little paper hat, and it sure as hell wasn’t Angela Lopez. He did his best to ignore the gleeful way his self-proclaimed best friend’s eyes sparkled every time they landed on him and made a mental note to refuse the next time she wanted a babysitter. But it was hard to stay mad today, despite a steady stream of customers so rude he’d have booked them if he was in uniform (well, his actual uniform) and a pervasive stink of burger grease that was pretty much engrained in his soul by now. None of that mattered when he was seeing Lucy today, after three weeks of second-hand reports and more time spent reviewing surveillance footage than was strictly necessary. In a couple of hours, he was going to see her, talk to her, hear her voice — confirm with his own two eyes that that big heart was still beating on undamaged.
His own heart skipped a beat like a child’s on Christmas morning when she pulled up to the drive-through window, eating him up with her eyes. She was a little too in character, flirting with him in a way that he knew was going to cause a few sniggers back in the station. Sometimes, he missed the days when they would just openly rag on him in the locker room. But then came the moment when she had to hand over the cash to maintain their cover and she clung to that brief contact between them, tapping out a brief triple-rhythm against his fingers.
“See you soon,” she said, and gave him the tiniest of nods, making the words a promise.
“I’ll be here,” he said simply. Because where else would he be, if not waiting for her?
Fynn’s eyes widened. That was no mutated claw resting just above the plunging silk of Huelean’s gown, but neither was it a temporary reality flicker, imposed by her truth-sight extending to him. It was stable and it was staying: real, unblemished, human flesh on his hand, on his arm, on his shoulder. He groped blindly for his own face, felt human bone structure and human teeth, and laughed in hysterical wonder.
“How?” he stuttered, gazing into Huelean’s eyes for the truth he always found there. “How — what did you —?”
She was laughing and crying all at once, and the pain from the wound in his side dwindled to a forgotten scrape.
“I? Nothing that I did, Fynn of the Surface of the Moon. This is the form you yourself have now chosen.”
“I won in the end,” Lucy told him, and Tim let her have that because secretly, he liked it when she won. Something good always seemed to follow when Lucy got her way: realising he had to stop enabling Isabel and let her go; having his first relationship after the divorce; getting her as his sergeant’s aide; getting to go undercover with her; getting her. It had taken him far too long to figure it out, but when she won, he won. He wished he could go back to five-years-ago Tim and tell him to stop fighting it, that giving in to her care, her lovingkindness, was the far sweeter road. And he wished he could tell the blood-soaked, guilt-soaked Tim of twenty-six too, that there was a sea deep enough to drown his sins in, and sixteen-year-old Tim, that the black, scaly thing in his heart would not eat him alive forever. But they were gone for now, soothed back into the safe distance of memory by her presence, like a strip of photographs pinned between the pages of a book.
The boy watched the moon rise from the helm of the ship. Lonely and vast and remote and pale it was, a place for dead things and cursed deeds — a place where no one loved and nothing mattered. For a moment, Fynn felt the pull of that bitter, frenzied freedom once again, the same magnetic draw that lured the tides of Earth below. Then a hand slipped into his and he smelled the mixture of silk and space dust that was Huelean.
“Come back to me, Fynn of Mine,” she murmured in his ear. “No longer of the Surface of the Moon.”