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In the outskirts of the galaxy, the forest planet Sorjak is nearly invisible; the population is too small to be considered a threat and the surface is too barren to be worth anything to the Ta’Kume. It’s the perfect location for Althaea’s needs. The twin suns near Sorjak do little to brighten it. They hide behind constant scarlet thunderclouds, casting dim light over the surface.

Althaea’s tan skin is washed a dusty pink, the gray of her armbands and wrapped tunic are almost black. Even her hair—plaited around her head like a crown, a warrior’s style—looks burgundy compared to its usual brown. Althaea keeps one hand on the pistol at her waist as she winds cautiously through dense skeletal trees, glancing at the device on her wrist to confirm her coordinates. She reaches a small clearing. It's the right spot.

Weeks of coded messages led to this. The last he sent was simple: Meet with me, come alone. She’d chosen Sorjak without hesitation. Anxiety ate away at her bones during the flight here and it throbs in her fingertips even now. She’d be imprisoned for treason if her commander—no, anyone fighting against the Ta’Kume—found out. They won’t, Althaea tells herself. She’ll be back before anyone notices she was ever gone.

Wiping the sweat from her brow, she tugs the leather strap of her pack tighter across her chest and strides into the clearing. Some ways off is a mountain curving like an arched spine and spiking into the sky. Thunder growls distantly. There’s no sign of him. He’s late. Not for the first time, Althaea wonders if this is a mistake. Perhaps he wants to kill her. Maybe he thinks she wants information to give to the United Army. But her gut tells her that’s not why they’ve traveled so far for so few moments. 

 

This is the last chance either of them are giving each other.

A sweet, humid breeze tickles her face. Across the clearing, a black figure slinks from the shadows of the tree line. He’s dressed in the fitted attire of the Ta’Kume Court, red insignia of the Father stitched across his chest, billowy cloak pinned to his shoulder by the gleaming badge of a general. Yozu’s face in an impassive mask, but he looks generally the same, just a bit older. For a moment, they only stare at each other. Then Althaea steels herself and says, “The Court’s outfits keep getting more ridiculous.”

Yozu, traitor to the cause they dedicated their lives to, once her closest friend, now an enemy, simply shrugs. The movement is a ghost of his past self, and fondness seeps through her despite her efforts. When she approaches him, he meets her halfway.

They stand much closer than enemies should. Yozu’s gaze moves over her features almost impatiently, as if committing each new freckle of hers to memory. Althaea cranes her neck up at him and notes the smooth scar on his bottom lip, the sharper jawline. His eyes are the same, almond-shaped and nearly black, but they glint with things entirely new: cunning, loss, uncertainty. It strikes her as wrong and sets the rest of him off, like she’s looking at him through a broken scope.

“Let’s skip pretending we’re here to catch up with small talk,” Yozu says, words biting, but she’d expected them. His voice—melodic, just how she remembers—wraps around her, a familiar blanket she’s been longing for. Part of her hoped they wouldn’t talk at all, that they could step out of their roles on opposite ends of the war and just be near one another again.

“Why are we here?” she asks. It comes out harsher than she meant it, but she doesn’t know if it’s from nerves or being so close to him. His eyes search hers.

“You tell me,” he says. Althaea grits her teeth. They’ve barely said anything, yet it feels just like they’re fifteen again, sparring in the training fields on the rocky islands of Lortach.

She lifts her chin. “No true member of the Ta’Kume would rendezvous with a United soldier like this.” Yozu takes a deep breath and the slightest step back. It doesn’t matter that they were childhood friends, maybe something more, once. She can tell he knows she’s right.

Her wrist device beeps. The time limit Althaea set for herself is coming to an end already. Something worms beneath her skin that whispers you’ll have to leave him soon, and her chest tightens with sudden panic. The next words that leave her mouth lose any sense of antagonism. “You could come back with me,” she rushes out. “You could defect.”

It’s a child’s wish, vulnerable desire; it’s why she came. Yozu turns away. She watches his throat as he swallows.
“I can’t,” he says.

“Why?” She cringes. That wasn’t what she meant to say.

His eyes meet hers again. “You know why I can’t.”

She shakes her head. “No. Why did you leave me?” It comes out hoarse. Finally, there’s a crack in his mask; his brows furrow. The pieces begin to fall.

“Why didn’t you come with me?” he asks. She doesn’t miss the bitterness in his voice. It’s a frustrating representation of the endless loop they’ve caught themselves in. Althaea knows why he left, knew it the moment he’d slipped out from the sleeping quarters at the academy and into the velvet night: Yozu wanted power more than he wanted the future the Priestesses were providing for them all. He wanted more glory than democracy could get him. He wanted more than her, and the Father could give it to him.

Althaea looks at him and sees who he once was. Just a boy back then, now a stranger that wears his face. His fractured demeanor is a vivid mirror of what it was the night she gave her heart to him many years ago. The past floods to her, unbidden.

 

She was returning to Lortach from recruitment duty in the mid-sector. It was late and she needed to report to the academy’s main temple, but Althaea dragged her feet on her way from the starship hangar where she touched down. She could have taken the well-worn path straight there, but something called to her from the seashore. Perhaps it was because of the clear sky that night, or fate’s meddling hand that she detoured along the lapping shoreline and suddenly Yozu was there.

Althaea knew him, everyone did. He was the most talented of all the students. Skilled with any weapon, a master strategist, a prodigy. She was often paired with him for exercises, but he kept to himself mostly. She thought he was shy. When Althaea spotted him in his nightclothes, standing in the water deep enough that it brushed his waist, she called out to him. Yozu turned to her. He seemed utterly lost. That spurred Althaea to drop her rucksack to the ground, wade out to him, and tug him back to shore.

Then they were sitting silently next to each other, nearly pressed together from hip to shoulder. Yozu didn’t even put up much of a fight when she’d told him to talk. I’ll just listen, Althaea murmured. And she did.

My dad visited today, he said, rubbing the fresh bruises on his forearms. Her heart lurched at the sight. He always makes it clear just how much he expects from me. The rest of his story came tumbling out like it had been sitting inside him for years, locked up, screaming to be heard. Althaea supposed it had. Sometimes, he makes me feel like I’m nothing at all.

She nodded, not quite knowing what to say. Althaea didn’t pretend to know his pain; she never met her father, and though her mother was usually off-world for diplomatic reasons, she never knew anything but love from the woman who raised her. Everything became bleary on the pebbled shore, as if the stars began to slide away in the sky. Althaea did the only thing that felt right in the moment: she took his hand.

At some point, after he finished speaking, her gaze shifted from the water to his face. Moonlight danced on his skin. Had she ever been this close to him? During training, probably, but she’d never been close enough for long enough to know what he smelled like, or how is pulse beat under his jaw. His palm was sweaty in hers.

As they walked back to the academy near dawn, she ended up saying, You’re more than he will ever be. Though she could tell Yozu didn’t believe her, the gentle twitch of his lips was the beginning of something fragile and startling between them. They found each other that night beneath the moon.

​

Now Althaea wishes she has no memory. Lightning shatters Sorjak’s muted skies. A shrill sound comes from her wrist. Her time is up. She reaches for the anger that’s fueled her for years, the hurt that’s caused her countless sleepless nights, but they’re no longer there. All she feels is despair. In this moment, this stormy bubble of time where neither side of the war has caught up with them yet, she puts her pride away and accepts what he did.

Althaea knows if she doesn’t do anything now, she will never forgive herself. So, she reaches out, just like the night on the shore, and takes his hand. Yozu watches her turn it over in her grip, running her fingers over the lines of his palm just like she used to.

“Do you remember what you told me not long before you left?” she asks, past caring about the depravity of their situation.

“That we were written in the very fabric of the universe,” he says softly, twining their fingers together.

“Look at us now,” says Althaea, “we couldn’t be farther apart.”

Yozu’s shoulders sag. He leans forward, resting his forehead against hers. “Time hasn’t healed my regret,” he says. “Even now, I look at you and see my whole world laid before me. That hasn’t changed.”

It doesn’t matter if you regret it, she thinks. Althaea closes her eyes and imagines him as he once was, young and grinning at her like she was the only person who ever mattered. She’d have torn the galaxy apart for him. She still would. What about you? Would you do the same?

“Choose me,” she whispers.

“I want to.” Althaea knows what he left unsaid. But I won’t. The ache of it nearly overwhelms her. She pulls away, blinking back stinging tears. The suns have set, but there are no stars here, only cracks of lightning above them. Althaea squeezes his hand in hers and reaches to cradle his cheek with her other palm. It’s clear now that what they had, what they could have been, has died out. Once luminous, now sunk to ash.

“You are burning,” Althaea says. “And you will burn out. Maybe you’ll come back again, but I won’t wait for you.” She takes a breath, runs her thumb near the corner of his mouth then steps away.

There is nothing more to say; the only thing to do is let him go. He doesn’t call after her when she leaves. What hope she had fades to nothing. When she makes it to her ship, resolve settles inside her. If they meet again, it will be on the battlefield.