Chronicles2

   What happened next? Come on, old woman. Spit it up. What the frell happened next?
   "Don't you remember?" Tai'lah asks, and Nar'eth nods and shuts her eyes. After a long moment, she opens them again and blinks at the cold, thin sunlight reflecting off the hard-packed summer snow, a swarm of colorless jewels to dance before her failing eyes. Outside the transparent walls of the dome, the short Nebari day is fading swiftly towards twilight, a silver moment caught and held between the light and dark, and That's me, she thinks.
   Day to night.
   Night to day.
"I remember," she whispers, speaking so softly that her sister, sitting at her bedside, has to lean closer to hear. "Have you told them what I said?"
   "I told them," Tai'lah replies, brushing the sweat-slicked hair from Nar'eth eyes, "but I don't think they believed me."
   What happened next? After the Velbidar, after the sewer...
   "Meelak wants you to know, he wishes you could understand," Tai'lah says. "He wishes you would at least try to understand—"
   "—pirates and mercenaries make lousy frelling heroes," Nar'eth interrupts, opening her eyes partway and glaring up at her sister. "If they want to waste energy and daylight on statues and speeches, they should stick to Nerri and Nar'iel."
   "Oh, so you think thieves and traitors make better heroes than pirates and mercenaries? I don't recall there being many saints in the Resistance. We were all castoffs."
   "Tai'lah, you could at least let me die in peace," Nar'eth mutters and turns her head so she has a better view of the little plaza laid out below the dome, and the domes of other habipods, and the sawtooth rows of slate rooftops stretching away towards the high walls of the settlement. Farther out, beyond the edges of New Sanctuary, the steep foothills of the Argariid Mountains rise up the devour the setting sun. In the lee of the mountains, it was already night. By now, the kragats would be out, prowling silently along through the deeper shadows of the ice-forest canopy.
   "You're not dying," Tai'lah says, as if she actually believes it's true, and presses her palm to Nar'eth's sweaty forehead.
   "The frell I'm not."
   "You need rest, that's all. The surgeon—"
   "—is full of dren."
   Tai'lah takes her hand away and sighs loudly. "Sometimes I'm almost sorry you ever found me," she says.
   "Only sometimes?"
   After the Velbidar, I was sleeping. I was dreaming.
   "Did I tell you there will be fireworks?" Tai'lah asks and turns to check the readouts on the squat orange and black med-droid parked next to her sister's bed.
   "You'd think we'd all have had enough of fireworks," Nar'eth whispers, still gazing towards the distant mountains, the jagged peaks like the teeth of hungry kragats. A monster of stone and ice to swallow the sun, just like in one of the old nursery stories.
   You are an old woman, she thinks. You are an old woman and your little sister is an old woman, too. It's a wonder you remember your own name. It's a wonder you even remember how to breathe after so much time.
   "There are already four leviathans in orbit," Tai'lah says. "Meelak tells me there will be at least two more by dawn. There's an entire warstar of Luxan diplomats, and an ambassador from Delvia."
   "I want to sleep, Tai'lah."
   "No, you want to be alone and sulk."
   Nar'eth squeezes her eyes shut again, but the sun leaves a distracting, bright swirl of yellow-orange afterimages to stain the darkness. After I escaped, after the Peacekeepers, and then the prowler — I thought that I would die alone in the prowler — but I didn't die, and then, and then —
   Too much time back there, old woman. Too much time for anyone.
   Too much death and disappointment and—
   Hundreds of cycles since the Velbidar, and all the people she's killed or left wishing they were dead, the wars and then The War and finally the plague that her own people had unleashed upon the galaxy, and so another war, and the Resistance, finally. And with her eyes shut, Nar'eth can see Sanctuary in flames, silently imploding, silhouetted against space and the blue-green expanse of Nebari Prime.
   Time like an avalanche barreling down the slopes to bury her alive, to trap her and suffocate her and freeze her hard and meaningless as the granite and marble statues that Meelak keeps insisting upon erecting. The glittering avalanche of snowflake moments, each insignificant or profound, each one perfectly irredeemable.
   On this day.
   And on this day.
   And on this day here...
   "You should've eaten something," Tai'lah says, and Nar'eth listens to her fussing about with the serving tray and dishes, the sharp clack of pottery against pottery. "Next, they'll accuse me of trying to starve you."
   "Tell them I'll eat when I'm hungry," Nar'eth mumbles. She doesn't bother to open her eyes again; if she keeps them shut, perhaps Tai'lah will decide that she's fallen asleep and leave her alone.
   And it's a little easier to remember with her eyes shut tight, drifting alone in the dark. Without the distraction of 'vevyen's light and the stark, chiaroscuro world outside the dome, the avalanche of moments begins to come apart, the memories separating one from the other.
   And what happened next?
   After the Velbidar and the prowler. After Maer showed her the way and let her run. After the ventilation tubes and the maintenance shaft, after she'd waded through the stinking iron bowels of the command carrier...
   But this is a familiar game, because she's already been an old woman for such a very long time and its been tens of cycles now since her memory was anything like reliable, anything like cooperative. She's learned that it's only a matter of sorting through all the other moments competing for her attention. All the other greater and lesser significances.
   Like the day she learned exactly how and when and at whose hand her mother died, and the job she once did for a woman named Syraeyn, and the pain the first time someone shot at her and didn't miss.
   Like the first time she had sex, and the first time she had sex with a Luxan.
   Or the night that she was forced to scuttle the Vik'tor in an asteroid field, abandoning the ship and a hold filled with stolen Kalish and Scarran artifacts.
   The day the Resistance came to her, the first time she met Nerri, and then the night she met his sister and the former Peacekeeper Aeyrn Sun.
   Almost dying, again and again and again.
   Learning to lie, and fight, and how to break down a pulse rifle.
   Finally finding Tai'lah in a filthy Charrid brothel.
   Past all these things and a thousand others, back to the stolen prowler auto-piloting her to some secret place where Maer had promised that she'd be welcomed and safe.
   What happened next, old woman, is that you had a dream, and now Nar'eth does open her eyes, almost gasping in surprise that anyone might possibly recall a dream after almost two hundred and forty-one cycles.
   In the prowler, you dreamed of an old woman lying on a bed in a city covered with snow.
   "Would you like me to read to you?" Tai'lah asks.
   And the old woman was Nebari, her skin gone dark with the last stains of vedda, and her sister is with her, her sister who was lost for a long, long time.
   "No, I'm fine," Nar'eth says, looking away from the mountains and the setting sun, turning her head slightly so she can see Tai'lah again. Her sister's skin is not so dark as her own, because one of Tai'lah's fathers was Sebacean, and her pale gray eyes are only flecked with black.
   "Are you sure?"
   "Yes, I'm sure," and now she remembers how the story goes, more or less, and more or less is about the best that anyone ever gets. "I want to sleep, that's all. You should rest, too."
   "I never seem to want to sleep anymore," Tai'lah says and picks up the serving tray.
   The old woman is dying, and everyone knows that she's dying, but they pretend that she'll live forever.
   "Tell Meelak that I'll think about it," Nar'eth says, and her sister's gray eyes brighten and she smiles.
   "Oh, Nar'eth, this will make him very—"
   "I said to tell him that I'd think about, Tai'lah. That's all I said."
   But the old woman isn't afraid, because she's lived through worse things than dying, and she's tired, and, even though she's seen terrible things, she's seen great, good things, too.
   "I'll tell him," Tai'lah says, still smiling, before she turns and leaves the room. And Nar'eth tries to imagine finding the strength to sit up, much less the strength to attend Meelak's dedication ceremony.
   The old woman has seen the fall of evil men and the redemption of her people, and she's buried the children of her children.
   The door to her bedchamber glides shut with a sound like snow sliding off slate shingles, and the med-droid beeps and clicks busily to itself in a language she's never learned and that even the translator microbes nested in base of her brain don't understand.
   "Does that mean I'm still alive?" Nar'eth asks the droid, and it whirs and beeps and clicks out an eager, unintelligible reply.
   "Yeah, that's what I was afraid of," she says and turns back towards the glacier-bound Argariids. And the girl in the prowler, dreaming of the old woman, begins to stir, rising slowly towards wakefulness, and in only a moment more the bottom edge the sun will slip within reach of the purple, famished mountains.