Cosmosis

Twist the Knife

(English)

"Dude, I'm fine."

Dustin was very fidgety in the medical gurney. True to his word, Ken had stayed with Dustin for as long as I still had fires to put out. But the grim tension was beginning to thin with every minute the station climbed back into a higher orbit.

Chewing through the last of the critical matters had taken a few hours, but I eventually caught up with Dustin. Now we were sitting just outside one of the cargo-airlocks awaiting the Siegfried's docking.

I opened my mouth to say 'you are not fine' or something to that effect. He wasn't.

The prognosis was still rattling around inside my brain, and I didn't know how to handle hearing the words, much less repeating them.

"I'm a surgeon," Nerin had insisted. "I can't help him!"

"I'm <talking> with Dyn as we speak," I'd said. "There's got to be more we can do."

Nerin had been scrubbing up to try operating on one of Nora's camp counselors: Sammantha. She'd taken several rounds center mass in the first couple minutes. Patching the wounds had let her keep going, but the name 'patching' was fitting. It was a temporary solution at best, and she'd pushed herself too far in the fighting that followed.

"Radiation sickness can't be resolved through surgery," Nerin had huffed before ducking into the station's rarely-used surgery.

Nerin had been in surgery for almost an hour now, and at least one more patient had been wheeled into the makeshift operating room.

At least one of those patients had expired since then, but I was still concerned with Dustin.

Dragging my brain back to the present, a stifling warmth drifted closer. Nai didn't need to announce herself.

Dustin gave a start though.

"Y'know for a heavyweight, you sure know how to slink and sneak," he muttered.

"If you're trying to put on a brave face, shut up," Nai told him coldly.

He frowned at her Starspeak. He must have been surprised she'd followed our English.

They hadn't interacted much, but I'd written Dustin enough over the years that he knew how closely Nai and I's friendship ran.

Nai could tell how anxious I was over his health, and she was trying to provoke him into being a little more cognizant.

My hand twitched, waving her off. The motion was so tiny, absolutely anyone would have dismissed it. But Nai knew what churned between my ears, and her eyes flickered almost imperceptibly toward my gesture. Knowing.

She nodded, mumbling an apology.

"Sorry. I'll brief Serral."

I wanted to pick her brain about Macoru and Mavriste's smart-plasma. They'd used it to clean up a radiation site, and she'd grasped its secret while we'd battled them, incorporating it into Vorpal Fire.

A crude grasp was all I had of the trick behind it, but that was enough for me to think my way through why it wouldn't help Dustin.

The plasma didn't permanently change the state of any matter beyond itself. It could temporarily alter certain behaviors of material it came into contact with. It could be used to filter radioactive dust from other particles so they could be more easily disposed of safely. Maybe it could even leech the radioactivity out of materials somehow.

But the smart-plasma couldn't magically piece together DNA that radiation had already shredded. It couldn't repair the inner workings of cells that had been blasted. It couldn't mend organs that suddenly found themselves crumbling.

It was beyond frustrating. Radiation poisoning we could solve, but that wasn't the thing that would kill him first.

He was damaged. Hurt. Injured.

On such a tiny scale, it boggled the mind just to consider.

Nora caught up to us a few minutes later, clothes stained with blood. She must have been helping out in surgery. Dustin had said she knew a lot of bio-Adeptry. But her face was gaunt and pained.

It hadn't gone well.

····

Nobody said anything while we waited.

We just sat by the airlock waiting as the countdown on the Siegfried's final approach.

The outer airlock hissed. My grip on the gurney tightened. Disembarking people clambered in on the other side. Nora wordlessly positioned herself at the gurney's other end.

Ready.

"Dude, really, I'm fine," Dustin huffed.

Nora and I both glared at him.

The airlock swooped open, and Flotilla personnel flooded out. At the front of the pack were Aarti and Yurgo—two of Dyn's best medical assistants—holding blood packs.

"Surgery is two decks down from here," I said, pointing them toward the nearest access ladder. "First left, down two, then inward. Big blue sign. You can't miss it."

The two of took off without even a moment's hesitation. The information had not been new. Psionics might have been absolute hell on maintaining any semblance of work-life-balance and dysconnectivity, but it kept us in the loop like nothing else.

The second the airlock cleared, I hauled on the stretcher. Dustin did his best to hide it, but he gave a groan at the sharp movement.

Nora and I hauled him directly to the Siegfried's medical theater.

Dyn was waiting, and in seconds we lifted him into one of the medical berths, clamped his arm in a blood-analyzer, and began shoving chemical treatments into his blood.

…And that was all we could really do.

I knew enough medicine to know that Iodine helped with radiation sickness. Sometimes. But I was still unclear on exactly what kind of radiation sickness we were looking at.

Nora would be out of the loop even more than me.

"…What exactly happened?" I asked.

Dustin had his head pressed back against a pillow so deep, I thought he might not have heard me.

"Dustin—"

"I saw the bots in the reactor core," he said. "I <yelled> at the nearest nerd, and it was pretty obvious someone needed to get in there."

"So you dove into a nuclear reactor?"

"Well the Vorak is the one who knew how to work the machinery," he said. "And they weren't Adept. So…yeah. That was my job."

"You told me to block the sensor in the middle of it all," I said.

Dustin nodded.

"The bots were a second or two from exposing the…it's the 'bottle' that the nuclear reaction happens inside. And if the sensor picked up on the radiation, the whole thing would have crashed from safety features."

I nodded slowly. I got that much.

"Why are you sick, and I'm not then? I was inside the control room."

"On the safe side of the glass," Dustin said. "The sensor is outside the glass, but it only needs to pick up on a few extra rads for safety mechanisms to kick in automatically. The hike inside the reactor bath was…a lot higher than outside."

I knew the kind of glass he was talking about. It was made with exotic materials that were transparent in the visible range, but opaque past ultraviolet.

"…And you knew that going in," I gathered.

"Hey, hey," he dropped his voice, deadly serious, demanding that I meet his eyes. "I knew what I was risking. I knew. If I didn't a whole lot more people than me were going to die."

I had to bite off my response.

He meant that he was dead either way. But I knew better.

Having just lived through the day's events, I'd learned something sickening about myself: I wouldn't have kept my people on board while the station crashed. If we hadn't been able to avert the orbital decay, in the last fifteen minutes before the point of no return, I would have pulled my people back to the Jack along with as many children on board the station as I could, and we would have had Nai destructively decouple the Jack from its moorings if that's what it came to.

If I'd known Dustin was that prepared to lay his life down, I would have dragged him back.

…That was going to take some reflection in days to come.

"The reactor," Nora said, "it's basically just a bigger version of our ship-board ones, right? They're fusion, not fission. Is there really that much radiation? I thought fusion didn't kick off so many rads."

"Our ship reactors use exotic thermoelectric cages," I said, explaining what I knew of the topic. "The massive heat of the fusion reaction is converted directly into electricity. Fusion byproducts are neutrons and gamma radiation. Reactor shielding blocks both with super-dense materials and built-in blackout curtains, and for our ship-board reactors that's enough.

"But the station reactor is bigger," I continued. "It has a liquid bath to regulate temperature, and in addition to the thermoelectric cage inside the main bottle, it also superheats water to turn a turbine. It's an older model."

"But it's still fusion, right? The same byproducts? Neutrons and gamma?"

"Gamma is the trouble here. Normally the blackout curtains keep it contained within the bottle," I said.

"And the reactor core shielding blocks any radiation shorter wavelength than UV," Dustin added.

I glared at him.

"Like I said," he muttered. "I knew what I was getting into."

"Dustin would have been fine still, even inside the reactor bath," I said. "But the bots pried the bottle open for a second. The reactor core still blocked the worst of it for everyone outside…"

"…but inside is a different story," Dustin said. "The lab tech said it would be. I went in, they loosened the cap on the bottle, I scrapped them, pulled the lever back down, and got out."

"And we have reactors like that in our ships?" Nora asked, concerns growing.

"No. For starters, you can't crawl inside ours while they're hot. And ours run at an order of magnitude less intensely," I said. "Ships don't take as much juice. And this one was a little bit of a perfect storm, wasn't it?"

"The reactor tech was talking me through each step," Dustin said. "We had to disable six or seven safety measures on the spot just to keep the reactor firing."

"…Because if the reactor stopped firing, then we all fall out of the sky," I said, voice numb. Disbelieving.

"Stakes were sky high," Dustin said, pointing my way. "So, yeah, I jumped into a nuclear reactor."

"And in the process got hit with more radiation than ten vacations to Chernobyl's ground zero," I said.

"Well, I feel fine," Dustin said, elbowing himself up in the gurney.

"You're going to be dead in twelve hours," I breathed. "Probably less."

"I'm Adept," Dustin said. "No wiggle room there?"

"Maybe if you survived past that point and your biggest problem became a horrifically compromised immune system," I said. "But you have more immediate problems, namely: organ failure."

"…What's going to hit first?"

I checked the literature that Dyn had passed me.

"Nausea to start," I said. "Your stomach and intestines are the first things to lose function. Then everything else. It's…it's going to hurt. More than anything imaginable."

Nora gave a gasp. A matching swing went through her emotions. She had no words.

Dustin was shaken too. He tried to play it off, but I could see it.

"I can deaden the pain with psionics," he said. "And my Adeptry should cover at least some of the damage automatically, right? Spontaneous augs?"

It was true that as his body deteriorated, his Adeptry would try to compensate for the damage, replacing lost cells with temporary stand-ins, trying to pave the way for rebuilding and healing.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

But I shook my head.

"If the exposure were localized, maybe," I said. "But you got hit across your whole body. And you only have so much Adeptry to throw around."

To emphasize how deadly this was, I reached over and pinched the skin on his arm.

It tore and flaked away in a small patch, quickly replaced by his body's subconscious Adept attempt to survive.

He paled, and I felt another titanic drop in Nora's emotions.

I didn't have precise numbers, just because our attempts to bridge alien physics and Earth's had to be filtered through the contents of a high school science book…but Dyn's math said Dustin's exposure was somewhere around 1000 rads.

Well, well north of the minimum guaranteed lethal dose.

Dustin looked sickly already, but I could see the Adeptry at work, even without any conscious effort.

Without Adeptry, he'd look like a sunburned zombie. He probably would have been dead already.

"…I don't want to die," he admitted. "I want to keep helping you guys."

His voice wavered, trying to keep us from seeing how scared he suddenly was.

I had to bite my tongue, or I was going to start sobbing out loud.

Nora clamped down on her emotions and squeezed Dustin's hand tightly in hers.

There was a lot of that to go around.

The time he had left was measured in hours if not minutes. There was only time to say goodbye, and when I turned to Nora to say so…I hesitated.

I had the impulse to not do her any favors.

But this wasn't the time for my grudge.

<Call your people,> I told her quietly.

Dustin didn't miss the knowing look I exchanged with her.

"Nora, give me a minute to talk to Caleb," he croaked, trying not to cry. She was still half-stunned herself and slow to respond, so Dustin added, "…alone."

This time it was her and Dustin's turn to share a heavy glance, but she eventually nodded and ducked out.

Dyn took the opportunity to come over, and add an IV to Dustin's arm. It could only have been in anticipation of pain that was imminent to set in. I could see Dustin was grateful for even the few seconds he could forestall the conversation we were about to have.

I couldn't blame him.

"So, penpal…" he said slowly, "I'm really going to die."

His voiced wavered, but he forced enough life into the words to make his tone clear. A statement, not a question.

I tried to nod.

"…You remember the first time we met in person?" Dustin asked. "You'd just found Jordan, and we took a bunch of munchkins you found with her."

"Yeah, I remember," I said.

"You wanna know how they're doing?"

I did. I felt bad I didn't remember all their names, but one of them did stick out: Elaine. She'd been the only other Adept we found on Cammo Caddo, and she'd been stuck in a Casti basement for months along with Jordan.

"Of course," I said.

"Logan and Jessie are good," Dustin said. "They've both done a lot of growing up. Logan's been doing a ton in our kitchens. Alan and Andre both activated as Adepts."

I didn't ask about Elaine just because I knew already. Since inventing the superlocator, Jordan had passed pearls along to a few of Nora's crew, Elaine first among them. After Dustin, she probably did the most communication work between the Flotilla and Nora's Missions.

Ah.

Dustin was going to be dead shortly, and suddenly I understood what he was concerned about while it happened.

"Are they handling the Adeptry okay?" I asked. Logan and Jessie had fallen under the umbrella 'doing good', but not Alan and Andre.

"They'd made friends with a few local Casti," Dustin explained. "One of those friend's family got mixed up in some anti-Adept activism. Soured some friendships a few weeks ago."

"Sorry to hear that," I said. "What about the flipside of that coin? You guys run through more Vorak space than I do: Adept supremacists giving you any trouble?"

"A couple of the homeworld groups sent Nora letters," Dustin smiled. "They heard the 60% figure and must have started drooling. She sent them back a legendary 'fuck you' letter. It was great."

I chuckled.

"…You're not going to trick me into liking her more," I warned.

He grunted. He knew what he'd been trying.

"…More?" he pointed out.

I rolled my eyes, but he continued.

"Caroline mentioned something like that," he said thoughtfully. "She said 'Caleb still likes and respects Nora'…I wasn't sure I believed her back then. But it's been a while, and now…"

"You know what else I said, right?"

He nodded. "You said, 'sometimes people you like and respect hurt you. Sometimes they even have actually good reasons'."

"…And that makes it hurt more, not less," I finished. "What's your point?"

"My point is I'm going to be dead," he hissed. "So you and Nora aren't going to have me to go-between anymore. I know she hurt you. I get it. I do. But you gotta ask yourself how long are you going to let things fester? Suck it up, be the bigger person, have it out with her, and bury the fucking hatchet!"

His voice crept louder until he finally ran out of breath and fell back in the gurney, and silence hung heavy.

"…I don't think I can go back to her, hat in hands," I admitted.

"That's fucking petty—" he said, practically spitting the word.

"She walked away from me, I didn't—" I started, but he wasn't finished.

"—and justifiable," he admitted.

I sulked back in my seat, not proud of my outburst.

"I get that's she's in the wrong when it comes to you two," Dustin said. "I've told her so to her face. But she can't make things right as long as she thinks she's doing you a favor giving you space."

"She is doing me a favor steering clear," I said. "I don't want her trying to waste energy trying reform my image of her: she's helping abductees. Good. I don't care if she's doing it out of some kind of penance or whatever. I only care that she's not making it my problem."

"It is your problem," Dustin said. "This, me—" he gestured to himself and the IVs he had allof his body, "—is making it your problem.

"…There's a reason I said 'suck it up'," he said, and his voice broke a little. "You've both got some major baggage, but I like you both. I respect you both. And I'm going to die with you still nursing some bloody beef. Even if it wasn't about helping us all as Terrans, even if you two weren't leaders of our slice of humanity, I'd still want you two to make up—fuck—at least a little…I don't like it when one of my friends hates one of my other friends.

"I know it's on Nora. I know, in a perfect world, she needs to be the one who makes right between you two. But she can't. Not right now. Because we all demanded that she do the job that no one wants. What she did to you, man…it eats at her. And she would have made it right a long time ago if not for all the rest of our baggage bumping that down the priority list."

Oh man.

That stung to hear. Almost as much as having to watch Dustin die. I wasn't prepared for a conversation this heavy, but there literally wouldn't be another moment for it.

Trouble was…I believed him. Dustin was right about me still liking Nora. The emotions were twisted and convoluted, but that was true amongst them.

I was furious with her, still, to this day. I hated what she'd done to me. To Nai. To Nerin even. She'd lived right next to us for weeks, and torn away from us like it was nothing, risking Nai's life and mine and the process.

Except it wasn't like it was nothing. I did believe that choice ate her up, just like some of my choices gnawed on me from inside too. I did still like her. She was brave, intelligent, savvy. I respected her, because as deeply as her betrayal stung and hurt, intellectually, I knew it had been the responsible thing to do.

She'd gotten lucky for circumstances to have turned out this way, but her betraying me had saved lives. Given all of us a chance to do more than just float by in alien cosmos.

How was I supposed to handle that kind of knowledge? My getting hurt so deeply had helped people. I couldn't argue with the result. I couldn't hate the consequences, the outcome.

I did still like Nora. I did still respect her.

And I did hate her. I hated what she'd done to me.

Dustin talked like it would be easy for her to apologize, to atone. If not for the rest of life getting in the way? Like it was that easy?

"She would have tried," I finally said to Dustin.

"Yeah, she would have," Dustin said. "So I'm asking—no, demanding that you try too."

I glared at the guy. Anger welling up in me at what he was asking me to even consider.

But he still had those tubes in his arms, and the image of him fighting two robots underwater, inside a nuclear reactor, with no air supply…the image was still fresh in my mind.

That baggage that he talked about that kept getting in Nora's way, the rest of life taking priority? That wasn't nothing to sneeze at. He was dying because his first instinct had been to save every life he could. To help as much as he could. Not because it came naturally to him—though I thought it probably did—but because we'd been abducted by aliens.

He'd thrown himself in to danger because he felt like he had to. Part of him regretted it. Because who actually wanted to die? Especially like this. This wasn't a blaze of glory. Our last memory of Dustin would be him sedated so he didn't have to be conscious for the horrific, agonizing torture of total organ failure. Part of him regretted saving everyone's lives, and it felt shameful to even acknowledge just how large that part was.

So he was going to die, hating some of himself.

I swore under my breath. I knew how that felt. More than a little.

That was what finally broke some of my anger. Some.

"Fine. Yeah," I said weakly. "I'll try."

·····

Nora's entire crew showed up soon after.

I nodded to a few people I recognized. Ken gave me a courteous nod. I was surprised to see Caroline among the crew Nora brought to this. She wasn't Adept and a non-combatant role to boot.

Then again, a few of my own non-combatant crew came by to give their condolences too. Nora and company hadn't expected the violence to unfold any more than we had.

Caroline found me sulking to myself in the back of the medical ward after Dustin had complained about how overwhelming the number of people coming in was.

She didn't look any less awkward than I felt.

One of my niche skills was stubbornly sitting in awkward silence without flinching. She wasn't so accomplished as I.

"Caleb," she greeted.

"Caroline."

"Dustin's had a lot to share about you since last time," she said, trying to be conversational. It was a hollow effort though. Hard not to be with someone dying in the room.

"I'm sure he did me justice."

"He said you were a fickle jerk, and a bigger nerd than Urkle."

"Like I said: did me justice."

I almost smiled.

"…He's going to be missed," she said quietly. "Badly missed."

I nodded. There was little else we could say.

"Did you really get a girlfriend out here?"

What kind of question was that?

I eyed her.

"You really want to be asking about something like that right now?"

"No," she snapped.

The word came out of her mouth too harshly, and she knew it.

She was floundering. Because her friend was dying.

"…Yeah," I said. "I'm dating a girl. Why, you jealous?"

It was a lame attempt to make anyone at all feel better, but she recognized it for what it was.

"It's envious, you dolt," she said, trying not to inappropriately laugh. "Haven't you ever watched the Simpsons?"

I rolled my eyes, and my psionics detected at least a small shift in her emotions. Hopefully in the right direction.

"Also…yes," she admitted.

"Sorry?"

"Yes, I'm jealous."

She was staring right at Nora at Dustin's side.

"…It's envious, you dolt," I repeated back to her. "Haven't you ever watched the Simpsons."

She failed to contain a bark of inappropriate laughter that time. But only a few people in the room glanced our way.

Someone muttered something about 'reaction formation'.

For a death ward, there were actually more than few awkward peals of laughter followed by awkward regret. People weren't trying to keep Dustin's spirits up. It was the other way a round.

But I'd seen behind his mask earlier, if barely. His real emotions hadn't changed from terror, anger, fear, and regret. This was all he could do to try putting people at ease.

More of Nora's crew came to chat me up than I expected. Most of them were younger than me, and awkward as hell about…my celebrity. I was slow to realize that. My own crew had long since adjusted to my infamy, but for most of Nora's, I was still just a name and a story.

But I did recognize one person.

"I've got horns like these, but they still call you the d-devil."

A curly-haired girl with only a hint of a stutter leaned back against the wall next to me, neon violet metal spikes sticking out of the very edges of her forehead.

It had been a long time since I'd talked to Michelle, but it was genuinely good to see her.

"Ajengita has more 'cloaked in beautiful and terrible light' symbolism," I said, "or so I'm told."

"Good to see you t-too," she said. "Wish it could have been under better circumstances."

"No kidding."

Most of my professional correspondence with the Mission abductees went through Dustin, but Michelle had was one of the few others in that camp I kept a direct line to.

She looked anxious though, and most of her attention was on Dustin, rapidly deteriorating. Still.

"…Hey, I just found out something a minute ago, and it's pretty d-delicate," she started. "But it's also a little time sensitive, so if I ask you to do something without a full explanation, w-would you?"

"Ask and let's find out," I said simply.

"Warm up your-r A-game," she said, tapping her head knowingly.

I frowned.

She was on a short list of people who knew my superconnector's full potential, because she'd once benefitted from it, getting me to poke around her head, both psychic and physical.

She'd come a long way since then. I always felt arrogant using my own skills as a basis for measuring other people's, but another short very short list Michelle was on was people who felt close to my level. Out of every single person I'd met out in space, human or alien, friend or foe, she was the most skilled in psionics.

The horns jutting from her head were specialized prostheses with a whole slew of psionic tricks…or they had been the last time I'd seen her.

But looking at them now…she was keeping them bristling with energy. She thought they'd need to be ready for whatever she was talking about.

"You finished your superconstruct," I noted.

"Your last round of n-notes put me over the top," she nodded. "You ever combined your superconstruct with another?"

"…Almost," I said, thinking of last year's Kraknor fiasco. "Why?"

"No reason," she admitted. "Doesn't change anything. I just would have l-liked something a field test to refer to first."

"What did you make?" I asked. "Why do we need to use it now?"

"Like I said, your notes p-proved helpful," she said, pushing a little psionic power through her superconstruct, and a familiar sight flickered into view for a split second before vanishing.

It had been another image of Michelle, right in front of me, but for that barest fraction of a second, it had felt psionically alert, aware, alive.

"…especially your updates on Simulacra," Michelle said. "I made…a s-supersimulator."

'That name is taken' were the first words I reached for, but I bit my tongue.

"Simulacra of yourself?" I asked.

"Combined with a s-secondary function for massive time-dilation," she confirmed. "It's a one-trick pony, but it lets me go into my own head for days and really think something through. From all angles. Bouncing ideas of simulated versions of my own consciousness, all in the blink of an eye."

"And you want to use it with my connector?"

"I already used it today before I walked in here," she said. "I got the bad news about Dustin, and I was compiling his after-action reports because he…y-you know…and I saw his name on something, it got my attention, and I w-went in the tank to try to figure out what I should do about it. This is more or less the script I came up with."

"You're dancing around something," I recognized. "Why?"

"Because this is a delicate t-topic stacked on top of a tragedy," she said. "I'm trying to ease you into it, because it's going to hurt to hear: I didn't find Dustin's whole name. J-just his last name."

I froze. Dread welled up in more stronger than any killer robot could bring on.

Dustin and I had traded a lot of letters over the years. What amounted to email. We chatted about casual stuff, and we did some business between the Flotilla and the Missions…but there were some details that had never come up because we only exchanged messages.

We just didn't interact in person that much…and I didn't know any other 'Dustin's.

So, for the first time in our years of relationship, I realized I never learned his last name.

My brain made the rest of the leap in a flash.

Michelle had been doing an after-action report, and she'd consulted my people for information. And our files. Which would have included a Flotilla crew manifest.

Someone in my crew had Dustin's last name. He had a family member somewhere out here.

My brain made the second leap quicker.

He had a family member here.

That's why Michelle said this was time sensitive. My superconnector and her time-dilating simulator might be a sibling's last chance to speak with Dustin.

And Michelle had already found them on board the Siegfried.

"What is Dustin's last name?" I asked her.

Michelle grimaced.

"…I heard Caroline mention your girlfriend earlier," she said, meeting my eyes.

"Madeline," I nodded, dread oozing further up inside my chest.

"Madeline Squire, right?" she asked.

My jaw clenched, and I nodded.

Oh…she'd said it was going to hurt. But I thought hearing any name from my Flotilla would hurt.

She meant it would hurt me personally.

"H-hey guys?" Michelle called out to the crowded medical ward, "I need a moment with Dustin, please. I don't mean to i-impose, but I wouldn't ask if it wasn't crucial. Please, clear out?"

Nora gave Michelle and I a confused look, but she complied along with the dozens of other Mission crew.

"W-what's…going on?" Dustin sounded awful. Even in the last hour, his skin had gone straight through pale and was showing hints of yellowing. It was peeling up and down his limbs too. One of his eyes was stained from where blood had leaked into the white.

Even his voice was weak and shaky.

"There's someone you need to see," Michelle explained. She kept her voice as somber as she could while leaving absolutely no room for doubt. "I-immediately."

Michelle then ducked out of the room as the rest of the crowd filtered out. She'd timed it all out. Madeline would be right outside, and she'd need easing into this too.

"Dude, what's going on?"

I couldn't meet Dustin's gaze.

How was I supposed to even begin broaching this?

"I…might be dating your sister."

It was all I could choke out, and it stunned Dustin speechless.

Michelle must not have been able to keep Madeline in the hall, because I heard her voice behind me.

"…Duster?"

My girlfriend's voice was stiff and heavy. Like she couldn't believe what was before her eyes.

My heart sank.

"Mads?" Dustin croaked. He sounded delirious. He might not have even been able to see anymore.

But he could still hear her voice.

"What are you doing here?" Madeline said, tears quickly breaking out. She grabbed his hand like she were drowning.

<Caleb,> Michelle caught my attention.

Sooner was better than later.

Maddie was breaking down just at the sight of her brother, and every second counted here.

I laid on hand on Maddie's shoulder and held out my fist toward Michelle. She bumped it, and I let the connection run from her, through me, and into them.

It was her time-dilation, and my connectivity. But I kept both of us out of it. Dustin and Maddie would have a few hours to talk. Maybe days if Coalescence captured the right streaks of Michelle's simulator.

But whatever time they had left…it wasn't for us to intrude.