When Em Matte stepped into The Eye, she connected the waking world with the mortal ones. Her death led to Union Day, a day in which all the galaxy was suddenly, and sometimes tragically united. Now everyone must struggle to survive and rebuild in a...
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It's awful to lose your best friend once. It is hell to lose her twice.
As Fitz stood in front of his mirror at The Keep, he looked at the four long scars that cut across his chest. One of them stretched up to his neck. He fought in New York, Chicago, Hong Kong, London, Dubai, Lagos, and then in places on planets he should have never had any business being on. The worst fighting he'd seen, though, was in Seattle. It was there that he earned the scars.
Mara scars.
He'd been fighting, covering one of the irfan from Lionshead, when a set of mara showed up. The first thing that had caught his eye was when one of them split off into two. That would have been strange enough, but during a lull in the fighting, the two that had split almost seemed to embrace each other, whispering words in a language he couldn't understand. One took off, sprinting faster than any natural creature could, up the bridge. The other stood, seemingly in shock, watching its partner's departure. A junet soldier took advantage of the mara's distraction and shot it in the head.
That was when the strangest thing he'd ever seen happened. For a fraction of a second from the moment the bullet hit its forehead to the moment the back of its skull opened up, the mara turned to Em . "Em!" he screamed not realizing that his com system was still on as he ran towards her, but then another mara with a foris eye lunged at him. Its massive claws tore across his chest, throwing him back into something that knocked him unconscious.
That mara killed the junet soldiers and all four people Fitz had been fighting with, including the irfan, in a matter of five minutes. That was the time he'd called Em's name to the time Tine and Drith got there. When they'd arrived, though, all traces of Em were gone.
When Fitz woke back at infirmary in The Keep, Tine was near frantic, asking him if he'd seen Em. The image of her laying there in a pool of black and red blood spilling out on the snow was seared into his memory. "No," Fitz lied. "I just forgot she wasn't with us for a while. It was a pretty bad attack."
Tine nodded, scrubbing his face with his palm before he said, "It was."
There was no way good way to tell him what he'd seen and there was no sense hurting him. Fitz's fingers ran over the mara scars. Could Em have really been turned into a mara? Or did PTSD just rear its ugly head again? He shook his head. It could be either, really.
For three weeks, he'd walked around like a zombie. Nothing registered as real. He forced smiles, even when he was talking to Maeli or playing with the kids. It wasn't like there were psychiatrists' offices open in the middle of a war. Sadie could cure the body, but after having watched what happened to Em after the babies' deaths, he learned the waking world didn't put much stock in mental health.
Pulling on a shirt, he walked out the bathroom, grateful that Maeli had taken the kids to play in the gardens. He loved them, but in his grief, their happiness made his nerves raw. As he walked out their quarters, he thought about what Earth had become and the blessing it was to have a place like The Keep to live. Yes, there were soldiers and guardians going to and fro, but as hard as it would have been for him to imagine when he'd first gotten there, the waking world was fairly peaceful.
