Thresholder

Much Later

Perry was feeling restless. Either the enemy was taking a very long time to show up, or was in the world already and up to no good. There weren’t that many places to be, and with the peace between colonies settled and more comms satellites up in the air, the number of spots to hide was even smaller.

The peace had been decisively settled when Perry had brought back the elder mech and its pilot, Natalka. The terms of the peace weren’t particularly onerous, at least so far as Perry could tell given his limited experience with politics and incomplete picture of relations, but there was a surprise in there, which he didn’t learn of until three months later: Brigitta would be going to Heimalis City Seven, then she would be with Heimalis City Eight as it made its trip to the far west.

“Why?” he asked her once he heard the news. “You’re needed here.”

“I’ll install March here as one of my final acts as Head of Engineering, though it will take some time,” said Brigitta. “Then I’ll help with the final construction, make sure they make it to their destination, steal their secrets, and eventually, return.”

“It’s not really stealing if you take them as part of the terms,” said Perry.

“True,” she shrugged. “It will feel like stealing.” She grinned at him, eyebrow slightly raised. They didn’t have a history of heist movies, and Perry had shared the two he’d brought with him. She had instantly been enamored with the concept, particularly because of all the planning and overcoming challenges.

“So this is it for you and me?” asked Perry.

Her fingers twined with his. “Or,” she said. “You could come with us.”

“To the other side of the planet?” Perry asked.

“Yes,” she nodded. “It would send a message, given what they know of your combat prowess. Your mere presence would ensure peace. And Natalka fears you.” Natalka was not, officially speaking, a hostage, but she was a ‘permanent guest’ of the Natrix, at least until City Eight began moving.

“I’m not sure it’s good to be feared,” said Perry.

“We’ll handle it either way,” said Brigitta. Her hands had begun to rove his body, feeling the contours of his muscles. “What would you do here, if you stayed?”

“I don’t know,” said Perry. His eyes were on her lips. “I’d do what I’ve been doing. I’d help out where I could. Train. Work on magic with Mette. She got the blue sparks going, which I thought was pretty fast.” That had been a recent development.

“There isn’t a single person on the Natrix she hasn’t given a demonstration to,” said Brigitta. “You didn’t think it would work.”

Her fingers were still moving over his body, under his shirt now, touching the valleys between his abs. If she was trying to distract him, it was working. She’d grown more bold as the months passed, less instinctively defensive about the physical aspects of their relationship.

“I didn’t think it would work,” Perry agreed. “I thought the portals were altering me, warping me, but if it’s possible for Mette to learn magic, then it must have always been possible here.”

“Or the portals changed this world,” she said. “Or there’s no wider implication, and we were always capable of it, but other worlds might not have the same underlying,” she waved her free hand about, the other hand still touching him. Her fingers had slipped down further, past his waistband.

“I see what you’re doing,” said Perry with a hitch in his breath. “You’re making sure I know that if I go with you across the wastes, there’s some of this in store for me.”

“Is that what I’m doing?” asked Brigitta. She kissed his chest. “How devious of me.” She lifted up his shirt and pushed him backward onto his bed, and they were done talking for a time.

All that was going well enough, but the question of whether he would go with City Eight or stay with the Natrix was a serious one, and needed more consideration than just ‘where will the hot woman I’m sleeping with be going’. There was more to learn on the Natrix, he felt, especially with Mette wanting to be a partner on learning magic, putting real resources into the whole question of magic. She had a small working group, five people hand-selected for their potential, and she was planning to crack it all wide open using her copies of the books that Perry had scanned ages ago. The slow progress didn’t seem to daunt her.

“It’s not like the other things you’ve shared with us,” said Mette. “Everything from Earth and Earth 2 is either known to us or far, far outside our current abilities because it requires enormous supply chains we don’t have and can’t make. But this comes from a place filled with morons.”

“I wouldn’t say ‘morons’ is correct,” said Perry. “They were uneducated, largely farmers, malnourished, with a deeply weird culture to our sensibilities, but none of that was really their fault. You wouldn’t call your ancestors morons, right?”

“Fine, fine,” said Mette. She made the blue sparks with precise movements of her fingers. She did it almost as a nervous habit, but it was more that it was always something on her mind, and any momentary pause was an excuse to practice. She’d complained about some stress in her tendons, and Marchand had given her some stretches to help with the overexertion. “Point is, with our superior brains we might be able to just skip all the other stuff, all the work trying to make our own fusion reactors, all the time trying to have laser defense, getting a streamlined chemical processing sequence that will launch rockets, and just,” she made more blue sparks. She smiled wide at him.

“In what sense?” asked Perry. “I mean, they couldn’t get to space.”

“They had small brains, remember?” asked Mette. She gave him a coy smile.

Mette seemed to have no trouble finding time to spend with Perry. Sometimes she would come to the penthouse, and other times she would invite him to her place near the head of the ship, which was much smaller and more economical. They were almost always alone for these ‘meetings’, most of which were for him to help clarify something about magic or try to work out some particular bit of imported understanding to the best of his ability. Marchand was uniquely unqualified for handling any discussion about magic, so that made sense, but Perry could almost feel the flirtatiousness.

Contrary to what Brigitta had suggested would happen, he hadn’t been propositioned by anyone, whether it was for a fling or procreation, but Mette definitely had her designs on him, which was dangerous in its own way, and alluring because it was unspoken.

Maybe, if he stayed on the Natrix, he would give in, though he was firm about not wanting to leave children behind, no matter how well cared for they would be and how many assurances he had that any difficulties arising from the werewolf stuff would be handled. No such arguments had been made to him yet, because no proposals had been made. Maybe they thought the play was just to put him in intimate company with attractive women and hope that nature took its course.

He was a bit worried that they were right.

The single strongest argument for moving across the wastes with Heimalis City Eight was the one that eventually won out: Perry wanted to be there in order to ensure that everything stayed as peaceful and stable as possible.

Mostly, he had thought that the other thresholder would show up before City Eight was ready to move and the whole thing would be moot. Maya had said that three months was the upper limit of how long the wait could be. The last two worlds, he’d been on the back foot, but aside from being able to accumulate more power here in terms of both training, meditation, education, and allies, he wasn’t sure that he liked it.

When he’d been on Earth Two with Richter, he hadn’t known that the disaster was coming. Now, it seemed inevitable, and the more he cared about this planet and its people, the more it felt like the hammer of doom hanging over his head.

The three month mark came and went.

It could have meant a lot of things. Maybe this was just an outlier, having no more significance than random chance. Or maybe the spell had screwed up in some way. There were all kinds of ways that it could have failed that Perry would have never known about. The spell could have been done with him, marking him as no longer a thresholder, and this could even be a common ending to get, one that he would never have learned from Cosme, Maya, Xiyan, or anyone else. There was a hugely powerful selection bias against failures, the same as never hearing the stories of those who died in childhood.

Because Perry had some time to think, he thought about the other, more exotic possibilities.

It was possible that the other thresholder had died on entry, in the same way that Perry had almost died on entry. Perry was pretty sure he’d get a portal for that, but if the other person had arrived before him and died before Perry showed up, he wasn’t sure what would happen then.

The other main possibility was that the other thresholder had shown up, and for whatever reason, wasn’t interested in fighting, or simply didn’t know that Perry was there. Perry was assuming that they would show up on the same planet, or possibly on the space station, but there was no guarantee of that. They could have shown up in the next solar system over, or on the homeworld of the Natrix. Perry thought that kind of failure of the spell unlikely, but it was possible.

The most likely thing, to Perry’s thinking, was that the enemy thresholder had shown up and was turtling, drawing power from the planet somehow or training in a dark cave somewhere.

After the fight with the elder mech, when Perry had returned a hero, he’d had a single request: build a radio dish that can detect the enemy thresholder. Richter had left all kinds of notes and plans, all the things she’d used, and while there was some unrecoverable corruption to those files as a result of the various hits Marchand had taken, it had been enough for Brigitta and Marchand to get to work.

The radio dish had produced absolutely nothing of note.

Two hundred cycles passed, and the Natrix packed everything up for the move. It was a flurry of activity, some of it neatly ordered like the folding up of the farming frames, and other bits much more rushed and slap-dash. In theory, everyone lived inside the Natrix and only used the outside for necessary hunting, gathering, mining, and farming, but theory and practice were, in this case, rather far from each other. There was often a ‘tent city’ outside the Natrix, a phrase Perry couldn’t hear without thinking about homeless camps. Here, it meant a place where people could get out of their rooms and enjoy wide open spaces while still well within range of the defensive perimeter and the monstrous power of the guns.

Perry pitched in to help, and for the first time, Marchand was unleashed on the population, synthesizing the information from hundreds of cameras and microphones and giving direct instruction to thousands of people as they got everything in order.

“It’s the smoothest it’s ever been,” said Brigitta. “Granted, that’s because we didn’t change the old system, we just had him tracking checklists and calling out orders like the managers would have done before. In the future, he could just do it bespoke, run everything through a neural net and train up a system that makes sure every single person is doing the right thing at the right time.”

“You’re all in on this?” Perry asked. “Because he works a lot better for me than he does for other people.”

“I know that,” said Brigitta. “The version that was running the pack-up was firewalled from the one you walk around in. But he’s good, yes, good enough for all my purposes.”

Perry hadn’t had much of a chance to actually wear the armor. His destroyed mech had been recycled and a new one had been created for him, with the same lanky legs but even more emphasis on the large sword, which was now converging closer to just being a shield. The long gun was still there, but it was lower caliber and with more specialized bullets that in theory would allow it to accurately penetrate from a distance while shedding weight.

He used it to walk alongside the Natrix as it marched to its new resting place, and he ran a few missions with the gatherers and miners that went out on forays to grab necessary resources from far away from where the Natrix was making its home. A portion of the Natrix was given over to shelves full of specialized equipment for these expeditions, and Perry started to become familiar with which ones they were going to take, though he was completely lost when it came to their operation. The small group he usually traveled with was twenty people on average, split between ten mechs, and his job was to be on defense, or sometimes ‘proactive’ defense, which largely entailed going to groups of bugs that had been spotted nearby and killing them before they could get anywhere close.

The resources, whatever they were, got transferred onto a promena, usually stacked quite high and strapped in place when it was plant material, but rather smaller when they were grabbing metal from a deposit. They had sounders that would find things underground, and a long drill that would probe deep into the earth for extraction, though this only worked with certain kinds of materials, namely sulfur. There were two people per mech so they could go in shifts, with one person sitting in the jump seat and only having minimal input.

They poked fun at Perry from time to time, given that he couldn’t operate the machines and used March for pretty much everything. This was meant in the spirit of good fun, but it still stung sometimes, as though he wasn’t really a part of their group. He was always praised for the things he could do, like going out to snipe bugs from a great distance, but that wasn’t entirely him, it was mostly March. It made sense: this was almost the ideal environment for Marchand, one of simplistic warfare and high technology. The sense of alienation didn’t leave though, not even when doing other things that were more universal like sitting down to a big meal or watching a show.

He missed Maya. He hadn’t really thought that he’d miss her when she was gone, but he did. She was from Earth and a thresholder, and he had more in common with her than with anyone he’d met since leaving the second Earth.

He didn’t think that when the other thresholder showed up they would be a friend, per se, but maybe they could talk, connect, share their experiences, and then fight each other over whatever deep and intractable differences they had with each other. Most likely they would want to blow up the Natrix for some dumb reason, and he couldn’t allow that. He also couldn’t allow them to live as a god-king among these people. And possibly, they would simply want to kill him, and that would be enough, but he hoped they would talk first.

Another two hundred days passed. The dish hadn’t picked up anything. The Natrix moved again, this time with the packing up done through a system of Marchand and Brigitta’s own devising. It worked less well than hoped, and there was some argument over why it hadn’t had the hoped-for gains. They would try again, iron out some of the kinks, and hope that it improved the next time, but there were two hundred cycles between moves, and it wasn’t a process that could be rapidly iterated upon.

That second move, the third since Perry had been on the planet, brought them to within easy walking distance of Heimalis City Seven. Brigitta had visited them a few times, usually with Perry as her escort, but now she was living there, engaged in both technical meetings and some of the actual work involved in setting giant robot arms up for welding, machining parts, forging pieces, and things that would have taken Earth humans years.

Perry split his time between Heimalis City Seven and the Natrix. They were close enough to each other that their defensive perimeters overlapped, though the hope was that Heimalis City Seven would be abandoned by the time the worst of the bugs were encroaching with the rising sun.

They were leaving a lot behind. Most of the infrastructure had been built with this deadline in mind, and wouldn’t have been fit to take with them even if they could have. The farms had been over-producing for a decade, creating giant tanks of nutrient slurry that was stored in the natural refrigerator outside the city walls, flash-frozen and packaged air-tight along with some radiation treatment to preserve flavor and nutrition. It was going to be a long, hard slog through the absolute cold of the dark side of the planet, but they had done it before, and had gotten good at it. People would be packed aboard tightly, with almost no personal space and little in the way of privacy, and it seemed like it would be miserable. Worse, most of them wouldn’t have all that much to do, since there was no farming and any work that needed to be done would be accomplished by a small core group of highly trained experts.

The Heimalis project was completed ahead of schedule through Brigitta’s heroic efforts, though they had already done a large amount of the work and preparation to move the fusion cores inside the machine and have everything hooked up. It was, to Perry’s surprise, a machine with treads. That wasn’t Brigitta’s influence, and she had argued against it, but treads could be kept closer to the main body of the machine, keeping them warm, and besides, too much work had been done to throw it all away.

The primary argument against treads was that they couldn’t handle uneven terrain as well, being more suited to roads, of which there were none. However, for much of the trip, they would be traveling over frozen ocean, and when they weren’t, they would be following frozen rivers which would, ideally, provide little in the way of challenge.

“You’re going to need to decide,” said Brigitta two weeks before Heimalis City Eight was set to depart. They were at the eastern edge of the twilight zone, which was warm enough that it was uncomfortable. Almost everything had been taken from inside City Seven, which would have been a ghost town except that people wanted to stay there for as long as possible before packing into City Eight.

It had been almost two years.

Perry had long since found the Natrix claustrophobic, and he took any opportunity he could to leave, whether that was for scouting missions, resource extraction or gathering, or even another satellite launch. There were three dozen now orbiting the planet, allowing constant communication between all the colonies. It was a new era of peace and prosperity, particularly because the colonies all had their own specialties and anything that was good for trade was good for them all. The imagery also allowed for mapping of the bugs and their heaviest concentrations, which made pathing easier. It wasn’t just a new era of communication, it was a new era of understanding.

March had been cloned onto the Natrix, and while he was demonstrably worse at problem-solving according to any of the benchmarks or metrics they had, the clone was still considered a godsend for how easily he could synthesize and retrieve information. They had named it Esper, after the planet Esperide, apparently a name of some honor.

March himself had been completely unchanged by their merging, aside from the microfusion reactor being back online as though it had never been broken. Perry had wondered whether they had a deeper connection, but it didn’t appear that they did. For his part, Marchand seemed content to pretend that it had never happened, even when presented with video evidence from the drone or the elder mech. Perry didn’t press it too hard, and Marchand seemed content to treat it as though it was a flight of fancy with doctored footage rather than ground truth. Perry had tested the transformation twice more, mostly just to train, and both times Marchand reported a gap in function and recording. Turning back always felt dangerous, as though Perry’s skin was going to be ripped apart or his flesh pierced through with metal, and doing it multiple times didn’t help with that feeling, but it was going to be one of his keys to victory going forward, he thought.

By every benchmark Perry had, he was stronger, faster, and tougher. He had expected to slow down as he plateaued, but second sphere wasn’t a smooth plateau, it was a series of plateaus, and the breakthroughs were always a breath of fresh air. He had slowed down, but there were periods of rushing speed in the mire of that slowdown. He was better at drawing in energy and his vessels had expanded, his meridians thickened. He’d learned to go without food, water, or air, and could stay in space, regulating his own heat, pretty much indefinitely.

He had finished the lunar channeling training that he’d had in the great arc, and could channel the weak moonlight into blasts if he ever needed to, though he hadn’t yet been able to teleport to the lunar surface like Luo Yanhua had. His energy matrix was still out of place, the injury he’d given himself having left permanent scars, but it was a series of minor annoyances, not anything that crippled him, except that it might make it much, much more difficult to reach third sphere. There were books to read from, and he did that with some diligence, which helped his academic tether.

He had also progressed through magic training with Mette, who had quickly surpassed him. He could now form the blue sparks into a blue ball, which could then be thrown. It landed no harder than a punch, and was strictly inferior to a bullet, especially because six of them in a row would leave him feeling strained in spite of a healthy and well-rested body. Mette could do two in the space of a single second, and twenty before she started to falter. She could also make a trickle of matter, either a few drops of water or fine sand, though she was hoping that she’d be able to do more exotic materials in another year, either gold or the material they needed for the fusion cores.

Perry was feeling more restless than ever. The work of generations aboard the Natrix had been massively sped up by his arrival, but that had only reduced it to ‘within his lifetime’, and then only because his lifetime promised to be quite long. He had little to contribute anymore, and he could feel the academic tether slowing down as there was less and less that he could easily learn, and almost nothing novel he could teach others. There wasn’t much use for his skills, not even against the bugs. He had taken on the elder mech, the single most dangerous foe on the entire planet, and he’d won. Once he’d done that, he’d gotten stronger, more durable, more versatile, needing less to live, and there was nothing to do with it.

He had not yet accepted that the enemy thresholder wasn’t going to show up. He refused to accept it. But he was going stir-crazy, and the time aboard the Natrix was starting to blur together. He hadn’t yet acted on his need for excitement, not unless he counted solo missions deep into the bug nests, but he could feel the tug of it. Mette had spent two years wearing him down in one way or another, and he worried that he would do something that might hurt Brigitta simply out of the need for something new and exciting. Being cooped up in an apartment in Teaguewater hadn’t been nearly this bad.

Brigitta was thrilled to have him along. They had spent a significant amount of their lives together, and she loved him, even if it was a love with dark clouds.

They didn’t talk about ‘the baby thing’ very much, but it was a conversation that often ended in tears. He tried to comfort her as best he could, but she didn’t want to be comforted, she wanted to excise the feelings and get on with her life. That made her not want to do the emotional work, and Perry wasn’t even really sure what emotional work would look like for her. Really, he was only vaguely aware that ‘emotional work’ was something people were supposed to do when they had these strong emotions that were making them miserable. He was vastly under-equipped for ‘the baby thing’ every single time it came up, no matter how many times it came up.

Leticia got pregnant, and then Mette. This wasn’t unusual, had happened before and would happen again, but they were the two other leaders, and Brigitta’s very closest friends. The way Brigitta dealt with it all was to pour herself into her work, but there had been a heated argument between Perry and Brigitta over the parentage of Mette’s child, a conversation which came shortly after the baby was born.

“Did you sleep with her?” asked Brigitta. There were tears in her eyes, which to Perry seemed to have come from nowhere. They had paid a visit to the new mother in her hospital room. The maternity ward aboard the Natrix was always busy, and Brigitta seemed deeply uncomfortable there. “It is yours?”

“No,” said Perry. “And no.”

“Are you lying to me?” asked Brigitta. “Do you think I’m not strong enough to take it?”

“That’s really not it,” said Perry. “I said that I don’t want to leave a child behind.”

“I said that I would understand if you did,” said Brigitta. “I said that it would be good for the colony, to have your children here, and I believe that,” her fist was gripping her shirt, wrinkling it. “But you can’t lie to me about it.”

Perry took a breath. He tried to remain calm. “I’m not lying,” he said. “You need to accept that I’m not lying, that I haven’t slept with anyone but you since I got here. I don’t want to have children here.” He didn’t say ‘maybe not ever’, though that was the truth, because he thought she might take it the wrong way in the moment.

“You’re attracted to her,” said Brigitta.

Perry took a breath. “I’m going to let you be with your thoughts and calm down,” he said. “We’ll talk about this later, if you still want to, but your friend — our friend — just went through a difficult birth, and that’s been tough for you. I don’t like being accused of things that I didn’t do.”

They had gone to their own rooms, separated from each other, and then not actually talked about it again, which was something that Brigitta was pretty good at. They had angry sex and then patched things up without actually talking through her issues, which had become his issues. The fact that he still planned to leave, to believe that he could leave, underlined everything.

That had been the lead-up to her question, which was disguised as a statement, that he would need to decide.

“I’ll go with you,” said Perry.

He cared about her. It was nearly the longest relationship he’d ever had. He knew her intimately, from the way she stirred her tea to the way she moved in her sleep when she had bad dreams. She wasn’t the main reason he was going, but she was a reason. He hoped that she would find peace among the Heimalis people, given that infertility was endemic among them.

Two years was a very long time, but it had, on the whole, felt like a holding pattern, one that was good for his growth in power and bad for his ability to hold himself together. He had liked being a thresholder, and that was still what he considered himself, even if to all appearances the portals that had defined his life had abandoned him.

Heimalis City Eight was at least something new, a different world to be in, cramped and unpleasant but notably not the Natrix, which was continuing its perpetual crawl through the twilight.

Where the Natrix was a moving city, the Heimalis City Eight was much more clearly a machine for delivering cargo from one place to another. It just happened to be that the cargo was humans, and the place it was going was on the other side of the world, through incredibly cold temperatures and perpetual night.

While it was called Heimalis City Eight, it had another name among those who were going to be riding it: the Crypt. The name came from the beds that people were to sleep in, which were likened to coffins, though the people of the Natrix didn’t actually bury their dead, and had learned about the practice only from watching one of Perry’s movies. Every hallway felt a touch too narrow to Perry, every room a bit too cramped, the ceilings low, the seating leaving him touching shoulders with other people. All of the facilities seemed as though they had constant queues, whether that was the mess hall, the bathrooms, the entertainment pods, or the ‘green room’ where plants grew in racks and people could get a simulation of sunlight.

There were three fusion reactors, all doing their best to circulate heat, and an elder mech that had been reconstructed after the calamitous battle with Perry. City Eight had its own mech bay, but it was used only in the case of mechanical problems, since this was a transport ship, not a proper city, with no need to collect anything but water from the surrounding regions. They were budgeted for two months of travel time, laden with all the nutrient paste they would need for that, and there was a promise that Heimalis City One would have already laid the groundwork for Heimalis City Nine once they got there, and construction would begin in earnest, out in the open air, making a place where they could bunker down for a sixty-year winter.

Perry was curious how it would go once they reached the moving Heimalis City One. They were the brains behind the operations of City Seven, and Natalka was their golden child, who was returning having been thrashed and humiliated. Perry half expected them to kill him — or to try to kill him.

The cycles felt long, and Perry put his efforts into training the second sphere, which could be done while motionless in his bed. He had a slightly larger sleeping space than most, not because he was getting special treatment, but because it was a bed he shared with Brigitta. He practiced magic too, though there wasn’t really a good place to do that, and mostly he was poring over messages from Mette and reading through the books that Marchand had scanned for the umpteenth time trying to find something worthwhile there.

The Crypt’s movement could be felt pretty easily at any given time, and he could tell the difference between when they were going at a good clip across frozen ocean and when they were crawling along some valley. Sometimes, the Crypt stopped, but they didn’t tell the passengers anything about that. Often Brigitta would go to help out with whatever technical problem was going on, and sometimes she would give him a report long after the fact, but other times she would be exhausted and only want to fall asleep with his arms wrapped around her.

He didn’t sleep much anymore, only an hour or so a night, and from testing, he could go almost three days before he needed a cat nap. Often this time was spent with his eyes closed, training with tiny twitches of muscles or just the flow of energy through his body, but sometimes he would watch her as she slept, feeling the small movements of her body, the rhythm of her breathing, the steady beat of her heart. He would press his hand against her chest, and with great concentration, could feel the energy flowing through her. He had gotten good at projecting his aura, and when they were that close, skin to skin, he could wash her hair by brushing it with his hand.

He cared for her, loved her even, but … and then his mind would trail off into hard truths he didn’t often want to think about, thoughts that made him feel like a traitor to her even though he’d been clear going in that he wasn’t going to stick around.

At almost exactly the halfway point of their trip, Perry opened up a message from Mette, transmitted to the Crypt via satellite. He had thought that it would be one of her missives about magic, which usually had a little addendum about life on the Natrix in their absence. This one was simply labeled ‘Big News!’.

The radar dish finally had a signal, a regular pulse along the same wavelength that Richter had tracked. The location was difficult to triangulate, but she had done it along with help from Esper, her Marchand clone. It was only eighty miles away, to the north-east, and from what they knew, there was a good chance that the other thresholder would be coming within a handful of days.

The most difficult thing was breaking the news to Brigitta. He had expected her to cry, but she let out a breath like a weight had suddenly been lifted from her shoulders.

“There’s not a day that I didn’t think about this happening,” she said. “Now that it’s here, it’s a relief.”

“You won’t miss me?” asked Perry.

She gave him a very light, affectionate slap across his face. “Of course I’ll miss you,” she said. “But I’ve been missing you ahead of time, before you were gone, before we knew that you would be gone.”

Perry nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” she asked. There were no tears in her eyes.

“Sorry I couldn’t be more for you,” said Perry.

She shrugged. “The same, I guess. I made the preparations for Marchand ages ago, but I’m not sure it will be enough. Try not to have the fight in the snows, if you can. A rip in the insulation would mean you start bleeding heat, and the reactor won’t help.”

“I was hoping to borrow one of the snow mechs,” said Perry.

Brigitta frowned. “Possible, given we’ve needed them less than expected and packed extras, yours included. You have a history of wrecking the mechs though, and we have to assume you’re not coming back.”

“It was only one mech,” said Perry. “And I won, which is the important part.” He looked at her. “Is this really how we’re leaving things?”

“I’ll cry later, when there’s time to cry,” said Brigitta. “Does that make you feel better?”

“It does,” said Perry. He smiled at her. “If I don’t see you again …”

It hit him that this was a real possibility, maybe the most likely outcome, whether he won the fight or lost, assuming there was a fight. They had spent so long together that she felt embedded onto his psyche, the smell of her hair and movement of her hips when she walked, the look of intense concentration when she was trying to solve a problem, the energy she showed when hammering away at a keyboard. He had seen all sides of her, and knew her better than anyone he’d ever known before.

“If you win your fight, and you decide not to take the portal, you can come back here,” she said. “There will always be a place for you. Always. Whether by my side or not.”

Perry nodded. He didn’t trust himself to say anything. It was too tempting to speak the words she wanted to hear.

Five hours later, he was suited up in Marchand, who was covered in insulating material and looking like a puffball. The mech he was driving was similarly wrapped; the internal systems were configured for temperatures of negative one hundred degrees. Beneath the power armor, he was covered from his neck down to his toes in black nanites, like thermal underwear, silky smooth against his skin.

He set off toward where the signal was coming from, and tried not to look back.