Alejandra covered her face. “Dammit. I forgot.”

  “I didn’t.” Micah nudged her. “Don’t worry, there are no Fleeters here to see.”

  She raised her head. “I don’t care if anyone in Fleet knows. I just don’t want to cause trouble for you.”

  “You won’t. Are you sure about Fleet? What about Admiral Greve?”

  “Admiral Greve can take his opinions and shove them in the dark place he keeps his brains,” she snapped. Her spark of anger, quick to rise, was equally quick to sink beneath embarrassment as she glanced at Lanaril. “Sorry. I shouldn’t say things like that around you.”

  “Have I become a different person since the party at Hol-Opah?”

  “We weren’t in a temple then. And you weren’t wearing that.” She indicated Lanaril’s tunic.

  “I can take it off, if you prefer.”

  “No,” she said with a thoughtful frown. “No, I’d rather you keep it on. It reminds me that you’re different.” She gazed up at the morning light streaming through the dome. “This is different. I need that.”

  “Very well. Then if you’re ready, I have a shannel dispenser in my study and two cups waiting for us. Join me?”

  She nodded, her nervousness returning.

  There was little Lanaril could do about it here, so she nudged them through their good-byes and held back a smile as Micah promised his timely return. If the infamous Admiral Greve caused any issues and survived Alejandra’s ire, he might not survive Micah’s.

  Alejandra walked silently beside her as Lanaril led the way out of the temple and through the inner corridors to her study. She declined an invitation to sit, preferring to stand at the windows until the shannel had been served and Lanaril was taking her own seat.

  “It’s been a long time since I spoke with a minister,” she said, sitting straight-backed in the opposite armchair. “I lost my faith at the age of twenty-one and haven’t seen a shred of it since. Until recently.”

  “Can you tell me what led to your loss of faith?”

  She nodded, one side of her mouth twitching upward. “Some habits really do die hard. You sit there wearing a tunic that says you speak for a deity and I’m already thinking it will be easier to tell this story to you than it was with Micah.”

  Lanaril held up a hand. “Please, let me say this first. I cannot speak for Fahla. I can speak for my belief in her, for her teachings, for what I believe she wishes for us. But I’m not a translator. I’m an interpreter.”

  Alejandra tilted her head, examining her with keen intelligence. “You’re the Lead Templar.”

  “Yes.”

  “Of Blacksun. The capital city of Alsea.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which makes you the equivalent of the High Prelate on my planet. He spoke for the Seeders. His word was their word, and he passed it to his ministers. To doubt any of them was to doubt the Seeders themselves.”

  This was shaky ground. She had never trod a path like this before.

  “I’m not familiar with the religion you grew up with. I can only speak for my own. This tunic merely says that I have accepted the responsibility that comes with wearing it.” She hesitated, looking for a bridge. “When you put on your uniform, does it mean you know everything there is to know about healing?”

  “No, of course . . . not,” Alejandra finished, her eyes narrowing. “I see where this is going. It’s not the same thing.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “I got where I am by studying until my eyes fell out of my head and then learning on the job. Making mistakes, losing people. Learning how to save them. Plain hard work.”

  “So did I.”

  She planted an elbow on the armrest and dropped her forehead into her hand. “Then how am I supposed to talk to you? If you’re nothing more than a woman in a fancy tunic who makes the same mistakes I do?”

  “You’re looking for infallibility?”

  “I’m looking for someone who knows!”

  “Did that work for you before?”

  She stiffened, her surprise chased by a wave of realization. “No.”

  Lanaril leaned forward. “I’ve only met you a few times, but you don’t strike me as the kind of person who lets people tell her what to do or how to think. Is that truly what you want from me?”

  Alejandra stared at her, the conflict showing on her expressive face. “I don’t know what I want,” she said at last. “Maybe I just wanted you to say something I could believe. Something that would make it right. But I’m not twenty-one anymore.”

  “And I’m not a Seeder minister,” Lanaril said. “You said you needed me to be different.”

  “Oh, you are. You made that clear in the first two sentences.”

  “Then let me be that for you. Loss of faith is a spiritual wound. You’re a healer in need of healing. This is the kind of healing I know about.”

  Alejandra propped her head against her fingers, a slumped pose far removed from her straight back of mere ticks ago. “Healing,” she mused. “That’s what I told Micah I was starting to do.”

  Lanaril waited. The next step could not be hers.

  “I lost my child. A beautiful boy named Josue. He died of a fever.”

  For the next thirty ticks, Alejandra outlined a heartbreaking story, her short, clipped sentences gradually gaining strength and detail. By the time she finished, she had one of Lanaril’s kerchiefs clutched in one hand and a refilled shannel cup in the other, but her posture was relaxed and she was speaking freely.

  “The thing I’ve never been able to understand is why. Why take a tiny, innocent child? Why try to take me with him when I’d already offered my life for his? What did I do to deserve the pain of outliving my child? I lived my whole life in observance of the Seeders’ laws. I went to services, paid the assessments, prayed every day, never questioned their benevolence. I never even asked them for anything. My friends would pray for things like good weather for some special occasion, and I’d think, ‘Save your prayers for something that matters.’ But when I made the most desperate prayer of my life, Josue and I mattered as much as rain on a picnic.” She fixed Lanaril with a glare. “If you say something ridiculous like ‘we can’t fathom the wisdom of the Seeders’ or ‘we have to trust in their plan,’ I’m done here.”

  Lanaril sipped her shannel, giving herself time to consider a response. Why was an impossible question with no good answer. But Alejandra’s pain had more than one source.

  “You didn’t ask whether you deserved that pain,” she said at last. “You asked what you did to deserve it. Does your religion teach that you’re responsible?”

  “Not in so many words, but the message is there. We’re taught that the Seeders are omnipotent and perfectly just. They can’t be wrong. It’s circular reasoning—whatever they do is right by definition, so if it hurts us, we must have done something to deserve it. If we don’t deserve it, then it wasn’t right, which isn’t possible.” Her emotions hardened. “But that isn’t what my minister said. He said the Seeders wouldn’t give me a burden I couldn’t bear. As if losing the only child I will ever have was some sort of test to prove my worthiness. I failed that one in record time.”

  Lanaril was glad her guest could not sense the effort it took to keep her voice level. “Do you believe this teaching?”

  She rocked her hand from side to side. “Yes and no. Intellectually, I know it’s dokshin. But faith isn’t intellectual, is it? Not the part that goes into your heart. I did go to fewer services after Josue was born. Life was so much busier. I probably did pray less. I loved my son more than I loved my gods. So they took him.”

  It was spiritual malpractice. Lanaril spent a savage moment wishing these ministers were in her jurisdiction so she could personally strip them of their tunics. Alejandra’s dismay at her unwillingness to speak for Fahla now made perfect sense. She was searching for a new authority to counter the old one.

  “When we began,” she said, “I told you I was an interpreter of Fahla, not a translator. That may have been too simplistic. There are times when I’m certain enough of her teachings to feel confident speaking in her voice. This is such a time.”

  The sudden tension in Alejandra’s posture accompanied a fragile blossom of hope.

  “You ask what you did to deserve this. The answer is nothing. You did nothing to deserve such a tragedy. Even if you never did any of the things you were taught would show your faith—even if you never had faith to begin with—none of that would mean you deserved to have your child taken from you. Josue was innocent. So were you.”

  Alejandra inhaled sharply, her eyes brimming. She tried to speak, then clenched her jaw and shook her head. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  Lanaril’s heart ached for this woman who had carried such an unnecessary burden for so long. Had no one helped her in all these cycles?

  “If you were a Seeder minister,” Alejandra said thickly, “you’d give me absolution. You’d tell me I need to have more faith, not that I didn’t need any at all.”

  “You don’t require absolution. But I do think you need more faith.” She lifted a hand, forestalling the angry response. “Not because your lack is an insult to your gods or mine. Because it’s hurting you not to have it.”

  Alejandra coughed out a bitter laugh. “Did you need your empathy to see that?”

  “Just my eyes.”

  She nodded, swallowing hard as she wrestled herself under control.

  “It’s all right. Take your time.”

  Half a tick passed before Alejandra spoke again.

  “I miss it,” she admitted. “What I went through with Micah last night—it was so beautiful, so spiritual, but it hurt.”

  “The beautiful pain,” Lanaril said. “That’s what one of our oldest writers called it. The beautiful pain of remembrance and longing. A pain that only exists when we have loved, when we know what we’re missing.”

  “Yes, that’s it. That’s it exactly. It made me remember what I loved about believing. The rituals, the community, the sense of being part of something larger. I’ve lost that, and I don’t know how to get it back. I can never believe in the Seeders again. I’m too far away from them.” Her gaze grew steely. “You called them my gods. They’re not.”

  Lanaril’s attention had been caught by one phrase in particular. “Did you join Fleet to be part of something larger?”

  “No. I joined it because I wanted to be the person who led a team out of a shuttle and stopped a plague in its tracks. I wanted to be the one who saved people instead of watching them die while offering nothing but helpless prayer.” There was pure poison in her voice.

  “That makes perfect sense. I was merely wondering if there might have been a secondary purpose. Perhaps one you weren’t aware of at the time.”

  Alejandra drained her cup and set it aside. “I suppose it’s possible. I never thought of it that way, but it did give me a new community. A bigger purpose.” Her quiet huff of amusement was not reflected in her emotions. “If I was trying to substitute Fleet for the Seeders, I put my faith in the wrong place. Fleet took the exact skill set I developed to help people and tried to weaponize it. They lied to me. They told me I was creating an antidote for a virus when that virus was their own bioweapon. I nearly walked away after that.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I accepted a deep space mission to give myself time to think about it. When that ended, Ekatya personally recruited me. I wanted to serve under the captain who stood up for what was right and saved a planet. We got off to a rocky start—” She stopped, glancing down with a smile and a deep surge of affection. “A very rocky start. But at least in her, my faith hasn’t been misplaced.”

  Two uses of such a charged word could not be a coincidence.

  “It seems to me,” Lanaril began, feeling her way through, “that when you lost your faith in the Seeders, you didn’t lose it altogether. You kept it in your heart while trying to find the right vessel for it. Fleet was that vessel until it betrayed your trust. Then Ekatya became that vessel. Two cycles later, you’re talking to a templar for the first time since you were twenty-one. This is a significant step. It tells me that a great deal of healing has gone on in those two cycles. What you shared with Micah last night appears to have been a trigger, but I think the ground was prepared before that.”

  Alejandra’s eyes were on her, but her thoughts were clearly elsewhere. “Lhyn,” she said. “It started when Lhyn was tortured.”

  “What changed for you then?”

  “Ekatya told me the most ridiculous story I’d ever heard and asked me to perform a medically risky procedure on her, all based on what sounded like a fantasy. I almost refused. I almost left Lhyn there to die.”

  “But you didn’t. Why?”

  “Because the strongest woman I knew was falling apart in front of me, begging me to believe her, and I . . . had to. I had to believe her. The alternative was too awful. I told her then that she was asking me to take a leap of faith.”

  “And you did.” Lanaril had not heard this side of the story. Lhyn was a dear and close friend; she knew everything about her experience and a great deal about Ekatya’s. But she hadn’t known their lives hung on the thread of a healer’s lost faith.

  “I did, and it worked. It worked. That qualified as a genuine medical miracle. I remember telling Lhyn that, on Tlahana Station. That she and Ekatya had made me believe in miracles again. Damn,” she murmured. “I didn’t think about that until now. And that was only the first miracle.”

  “Lhyn’s brain healing,” Lanaril guessed.

  “She told you about that?”

  “She’s a good friend, and she doesn’t like to carry secrets.”

  This time, the amused huff was genuine. “No, she doesn’t. And a few days after that, I watched her and Ekatya light up the molwyn tree out there. Now that you’ve got me thinking about it, maybe the surprise isn’t that I’m here now. Maybe it’s that it took me this long.”

  Her emotional signature was so far removed from what it had been at the start of their session that Lanaril could hardly believe it was the same woman. The healer was healing herself, asking only for guidance on the path she had already chosen.

  “Micah will be here soon,” Lanaril said. “I want you to think about something when you go. Think about the memorial you’ve created for Josue.”

  “What memorial?”

  “You gave his life a profound meaning. You went out and learned how to help others. You stepped in front of death and said no. I can only imagine how many lives you’ve helped or saved over the course of your career, but I know for a fact that Lhyn would not be here without you. Ekatya is a divine tyree; she would never have been the same after that loss. And Rahel tells me that no one else could have gotten to her when she was injured on your ship.”

  Alejandra was listening with intense concentration, her heart fertile ground for the seed now being planted.

  “Josue’s life was tragically short,” Lanaril said gently. “But his legacy has been extraordinary, because his mother kept her faith.”

  17

  War game

  Ekatya flipped her command chair onto its back, wanting to see the action directly overhead. Both the top and bottom displays were active, offering an immersive view of the space around them and the battle raging through it.

  A combat grid overlaid the displays, showing optimum targeting solutions for the weapons rooms that ringed the Phoenix. Each was crewed by a four-person team handling rail guns for defensive and offensive use, two launch tubes for firing shield breakers and missiles, and a Delfin launch tube for the expensive, high-yield torpedoes that could end a battle.

  At the moment, half of her weapons rooms were hurling projectiles at the two enemy destroyers and Alsea’s space elevator.

  “The Victory is trying to flank us,” she said. “Lieutenant Scarp, get us to the other side of the space elevator.”

  She brought the chair back to level and glanced at the two rings of stations below her. Lieutenant Scarp was fiercely focused on his control panel, piloting the ship through the blizzard of weaponry being flung at them by the destroyers. Beside him was Commander Lokomorra; navigation and main weapons completed the ring. Level with the deck, the third ring held eight more stations.

  The central dais was a brilliant design plan, minimizing physical obstructions to the otherwise perfect display imagery. Sitting at its top, she had the best view of the displays and her crew. All other stations lined the walls of the circular room, their operators largely hidden by the vertical panels that bridged the imagery from the bottom display to the top.

  She ignored the figure standing by the lift. Admiral Greve had no place on her bridge during a war game. His authority was over the battle group as a whole, but that group was not whole at the moment. The three ships assigned to Alsea were fighting each other with dummy missiles and disarmed laser cannons, testing offenses and defenses in a simulated Voloth attack. Greve should have been in a personnel ship outside the battle, observing and analyzing, but had predictably chosen to watch her instead. With nowhere to sit and no battle harness holding him in place, he could only hold on to a grab bar near the lift. She was disappointed that her opening gambit, a fast ship rotation to enable almost instantaneous port and starboard broadsides, had failed to dislodge him and crack his skull.

  At least it had severely disabled the Thea, which had lost maneuvering ability but was still firing when it could.

  “Fighter losses at forty percent,” her weapons officer reported.

  Frowning, Ekatya looked down.

  Beneath their feet, the blue-and-white beauty of Alsea rotated in peaceful ignorance of the battle, swinging the nearly complete elevator through space with it. Up and down its length, the elevator was swarmed by white fighters defending and silver ones attacking.

  They had begun with equal numbers of fighters, but white now outnumbered silver by a two-to-one margin. Two dozen silver fighters floated on the outskirts, their battle over.