Two life signs. They remained, weak, flickering like candles sputtering at the bottom of their containers, their wicks soaking up every last bit of wax they could to keep burning. These were the people they’d come to rescue. They’d survived and they were going to continue to survive if Brenn had anything to do with it.

She concentrated on every step forward. A steady breath in, a steady breath out. The humus covered ground was spongy and gave way beneath her feet. Each sip of the thick air tasted green and alive. Sweat prickled on her hairline and cooled her arms as they swung beside her. These were her sensations, the things her eyes, ears, nose, and millions of nerve endings picked up. The headache belonged to her as did the painful throbbing in her back and feet. The sharp stab just above her kidneys accompanying every step and the way pain radiated from her ribcage through her lower back when she took too deep a breath, those belonged to her as well.

The rest she’d built a wall around and she struggled to maintain it. The fever; the nausea; the pain above her pubic bone like a terrible unending pressure that had grown more intense with every other symptom the closer they got to the life signs; these did not belong to her and she could push them to the back of her mind. Awareness without feeling. Once she’d accepted the impossible, that Rora was here, it’d grown easier to compartmentalize. If the mind were a muscle, then her muscle memory had taken over. This was the proof, right? If it weren’t Rora, she wouldn’t have been able to build the barriers.

Right?

When their bond had been new she’d been half mad, hadn’t she, unable to suss out which of them was hungry, or tired, or aching from a hard day’s work? It’d been a mess of emotional and physical confusion. It made sense, what was happening now.

It had to make sense, because Rora had to be here.

Or was she just wishing—running her finger along the unbroken line of a wishing stone with her eyes pressed closed and heart set as she cast it into the sea. Please let me look into Rora’s eyes again. Please let me hear her laughter fill up a room.

It was just as likely the stim had kicked in and the skills Rora had taught her to separate their minds had allowed her to untangle the place where her pain and her need to finish this mission intersected. The brain could play tricks. Hadn’t Rora taught her that, too? People could convince themselves of many things simply for the want of believing.

Dusk continued to deepen, and shadows filled the blocks of overgrown fairy mounds surrounding them. It was just like the fair folk of Ma’s tales to take back the gleaming metallic dwellings of mortals—cover them in moss and vine, scent them in perfume, and create pockets of mystery to entice careless beings into the otherworld.

‘Mind the wood when you’re out there, a stór.’ she used to say when Brenn had ventured outside the Human District, which hadn't been often as a child. If she’d been going out to sea with Da, it was the merrow she had to be wary of. As if the Aesir weren’t enough to fear. Out here, she should have been far from the superstitions of home, but like hope, they were hard to shake.

This forest had eyes. They were on her now, judging her impossible hopes. Rora would say no hope was impossible, merely improbable. If she were feeling particularly impish, she’d add,

‘There are more things in heaven and Earth, dear Brennan, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’

Brenn never saw the appeal of Shakespeare, but for once hoped the aul English lad had been right.

The Interface indicated the life signs were almost beside them in a mound with no visible entrance. By unspoken agreement, she and Tara both fell silent in case the eyes in the trees weren’t the results of a mind fed a steady diet of justified paranoia and a touch of magical thinking. Tara held up a hand to halt her. On one side, the foliage created an impenetrable wall of branches and vines one would have to hack through, making it impossible to sneak up on them. The building they needed to find their way into was single story and long, perhaps it’d once been a community center or a market when the settlement was new.

Blood pumped in Brenn’s ears. If danger lurked, it’d be around the corner. Her answers would be around that corner, too. Inside this building. Had she hoped in vain? Was she her mother’s daughter, after all?

Tara un-holstered her weapon, and Brenn followed suit, though the Interface still showed no one else and no anomalies. Her muscles remembered this dance as easily as they remembered the steps and kicks of common reels. A wave of nausea clenched her stomach. Hers, not Rora’s. Shooting someone, even with a tranq, should come with a bit of nausea. It was best not to grow to enjoy the wounding and the killing. She was far from a saint, but she wasn’t a monster. The Aesir would never turn her into a monster.

Tara nodded and with slow, silent steps they rounded the corner. She took shallow, measured breaths. Her nerves hummed in anticipation of the invisible. She’d become smoke. Insubstantial and drifting. A spirit separated from her body, free to observe as they turned the corner to face an enemy who probably didn’t exist.

Crash. She fell back into her body as she caught something on the ground out of the corner of her eyes. Her breath hitched with a gasp and her hands shook as she swung her weapon around.

“Jesus Christ!” She jumped at Tara’s hand on her shoulder.

“He’s already dead. You don’t need to shoot him more,” Tara choked out.

Brenn swallowed down the burning bile. It was a miracle there was anything left in her stomach at all, but the stench. God almighty.

Propped partway against the overgrown wall was a man—most of one, at least. He had the look of one of the locals about him, but his dark skin had turned waxy where it hadn’t been eaten away by the little critters that crawled all over him. She crossed herself on instinct and whispered a blessing for the dead.

“Promise me you won’t ever leave me to get eaten by the creeping, crawling things?” Tara asked as they moved away towards fresher air to take stock of their situation. Brenn only made a kind of grunt in response in case opening her mouth invited another round of dry heaving.

“Look at the trail there.” Tara motioned to a streak of disturbed soil with bloody mud that led up to a door. Unlike most of the buildings they’d passed, the vegetation here had been removed and the dying light reflected on the dingy metal.. It wasn’t clean after decades of neglect, but on top of the grime were obvious streaks of dried blood and two handprints the right size for a small woman.

Brenn’s gaze moved to the man again. Sometimes dead men did tell tales.

“They didn’t leave her completely defenseless, then.” How chivalrous of them. There’d been three bullet wounds in the man's chest. “He must have gotten inside and threatened her. The Resistance has guns, but we don’t kill unless it’s in self defense.”

Of course, it wasn’t difficult to imagine a weak and sickened woman with a newborn baby and dubious connection to reality feeling threatened, whether the man had meant her harm or not. Yeah, that wasn’t fuel for late night marathons of guilt and disgust, was it?

“Well, I’m going to take a wild guess and say she’s still armed.” Tara’s words were clipped oddly from trying not to breathe through her nose, like she’d caught a cold. It must have been terrible to have superior olfactory senses right now.

“And if it’s Rora, she’s skilled enough to aim and kill in low light. We practice on moving targets in the dark.” Brenn nodded toward the corpse, her stomach squeezing. “His shots are clean, all things considered.”

Tara glanced at the door, gaze lingering on the bloody handprints, the skin around her mouth creasing as her lips puckered up. A grim expression, one might say. “I should go in first.

This was insane.

“She knows my face and my voice.” A feeble argument.

“She might not right now.” The obvious answer. “She could be delirious and completely out of touch. I will go in first with you right behind me. Speak your language. Reach out to her telepathically, but if it’s Rora and she sees us as a threat— I don’t want to have to explain to her when she comes to her senses that her wife was alive up until the moment she shot her.”

What a fecking nightmare. Rage like electricity burst from her heart and crackled around her. What if she had to shoot Rora with a tranq? It could kill a woman in her condition.

She gritted her teeth and forced her voice to remain level. “I don’t like it.”

“Yeah, there’s not much to like about any of this.

Brenn calmed her heart and steeled herself. “Let’s not dawdle anymore.”

“I agree, but should announce ourselves first, as best we can. I don’t think the doors are soundproof.”

Sure. Great. Like old friends coming over for a spot of tea, she’d just go over and knock on the door. Nothing out of the ordinary. Still, her feet carried her over there and she swallowed to moisten her dry throat as she raised her fist. The metal rang as she gave it three solid raps, hard enough to be heard, but not so hard as to frighten the woman inside.

No response. It wasn’t like she’d expected one.

“My name is Brennan Darcy, I’m with the Intergalactic Organization of Humanitarian Relief,” she announced in the Creole first, voice loud and clear. “We’ve been sent to help you and your baby, we mean you no harm.”

Only the calls of critters, their tone changing as the sun set, filled the silence. Time to try something different.

“I don’t know if it’s you in there, Rora mo chroí, or if you’re Orla Kelly. Either way, you’re far from Éire. You and the baby deserve to live full, free lives.” She said in Irish, and repeated in Hibernian English. She then switched to the Creole again. “We’re going to come in soon. We don’t want to hurt you.”

With her mind, she touched the sick and frazzled place she’d attempted to block off, opening the gates enough to get through, but not be overwhelmed. Hopefully. There seemed to be some level of alertness, accompanied by heart hammering and limb shaking fear. A real change, or just her imagination tricking her?

“Mo chroí, I’ve found you. I’m coming in with my friend and we’re going to protect you and your baby. We’re going to get you off this rock.” She placed the words directly into her wife’s mind.

Mo chroí. It meant ‘my heart’ in the Creole and she thought she’d never utter those words to another soul. How could she when Rora had taken half of her heart when she’d died. A half she’d thought she’d never find again.

Yet, here it was. Hope now laced Rora’s fear, along with a sort of peace and acceptance.

But this, too, could be imagination.

“I’ve reached out every way possible. I can’t guarantee she heard.”

The thought of opening the door suddenly seemed too much. All of this, too much. The gravity of the sheer number of instantaneous changes that would happen to her life once they opened that door pressed down and her mind tried to float away, down the branching tributaries of ever expanding possibilities. What if Rora had moved on? What if she didn’t want Brenn anymore? She had a baby now—what did that mean for them if they stayed together?

“It will have to do.” Tara said as she holstered her weapon.

Stay in the now. The future is only a guess.

She reduced the dose of the tranq to one that wouldn’t knock a healthy woman out, but make them drunk and uncoordinated. Hopefully they wouldn’t have to find out if even that was too much.

“Okay,” Brenn said when she was prepared. At least, as prepared as anyone could be for an unimaginable situation like this one.

Tara bypassed the control panel, which wasn’t so much a door control anymore as it was the housing in which one fit once-upon-a-time. The smugglers hadn’t even given her a place with a lock.

Of course not. Why would they?

It took some force for Tara to get it moving. Once open just enough, Tara stepped into the door frame. “Hello? Orla Kelly? My name is Tara, I’m with the Relief Org and we’re here to help.”

Brenn’s eyes watered at the mixed aromas of dirt, blood, excrement, and sickness. They weren’t unfamiliar scents, having worked in the hospitals and accompanied Rora on her late night midwifery calls. She sucked in her breath and held it, not from the stench, but because her lungs refused to work. Her body refused to move. The darkness seemed absolute. The silence inside buzzed.

Shrodinger’s Rora.

Was she alive or dead?

It seemed either way, what remained of Brenn’s heart would break.

“Stay back,” a weak and hoarse voice demanded in the familiar brogue of home just as Brenn’s lungs began to burn. Her breath escaped in a whoosh and her heart crumbled to pieces inside her chest.