Part
Two
Elmy,
Did
I resurrect two men? They seemed gone pretty damned far to me. Their faces dry
and drawn as they lay together inside that coffin, inside that tomb. They were
covered with some chalk-like stuff that I supposed was a preservative. They
didn’t wake. They didn’t breathe. I checked for that, though I knew the answer
before I leaned forward. What kind of a people buries two men together anyway?
They lay entwined like lovers. That practice is rarely venerated.
You
don’t care, of course. You may be dead yourself. You may be imprisoned. You may
be taken by the nightwind. But you’ve certainly had questions of your own. Why
did I abandon you? Why did I leave my whole home planet to its fate? And why place
you, particularly, to face off alone against the megalomaniac who runs our city,
to stand against wave after wave of attacks by our beloved Augers?
But
I don’t have those answers. I only have questions your questions can’t
anticipate. They may not apply directly to you. Ship wants me writing these
letters nonetheless. Ship used to have me write a journal, to help me regain my
memory and figure out why I ended up alone in the middle of an asteroid field. Now
that the answers are so close, and memories are coming so fast I cannot keep up
with them, Ship asks me to write to the person I most want to speak to, so that
I can say the things I need to say. Even if you’re not here. Even if you never
read them.
An
odd notion, I know, but I’ve learned to trust Ship, despite his machine
strangeness. That’s why we’re not in the asteroid field anymore, but screaming
together toward the Earth. Ship has said this means significant progress on my
part. I know it marks distance away from my dead husband, whose corpse, even if
it was there tumbling around the rocks, we were never going to find. So I needed
to stop looking for it. I needed to come to you. And then I’m going to need you
to act. So I say I left you in command for the same reason I write you now: because
you can take it.
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