Now Waverly rested a hand on Seth’s shrunken shoulder. She liked touching him there because she was the only one allowed. He smiled as they walked to the door of the shuttle bay. “Did our Golden Boy make a good speech?” he asked her.
“You didn’t listen?”
He shrugged. “I may have caught some of it.”
“I know you don’t think the Captain deserved to be the first one buried there.”
“He was monster,” Seth said quietly.
This was an old argument between them. The Captain had always maintained his innocence, insisting that Waverly’s father and Seth’s mother, along with their colleague Dr. McAvoy, had acted alone to sterilize the women of the New Horizon. When the Captain learned of their betrayal, he said, he alerted Captain Takemara of the New Horizon, who insisted they be executed for treason against the mission or his ship would attack. Rather than put his crew through the trauma of a public trial, Captain Jones had opted to deal with the criminals quietly. Then Anne Mather took the helm of the New Horizon and began her plans to attack the Empyrean from their hiding place in the nebula, unbeknownst to Captain Jones. Over nine years, he never changed a detail of the story, but Seth didn’t believe a word of it.
Waverly wasn’t so sure. Whenever Waverly broached the subject with her mother, she was so evasive, and became so angry, that Waverly suspected Captain Jones’s story must be true. At the very least, it was clear that her father had been involved in committing a terrible crime that led to a great deal of bloodshed. Over the intervening years, she’d come to accept that she would never know for sure if Captain Jones was a conspirator or not. After a while, it stopped mattering to her. She knew that Seth clung to the idea that his mother had been an innocent scapegoat, and she did her best to avoid the subject altogether. Let Seth have the memory of one good parent. Let her mother believe she’d protected the memory of her dead husband. They’d both been through enough.
So instead of responding to Seth now, she reached for his hand, held it to her lips, and kissed it. He smiled at her as he pulled her along the corridor toward their apartment.
Their apartment was immaculate, just the way Regina Marshall liked to keep it. Waverly’s mother had never fully regained her old spark, but slowly she’d emerged from her fog and was helpful and productive.
As Waverly was drying her hair after a long hot bath, Seth knocked on the bathroom door. “Video call for you from the New Horizon.”
She went into the master bedroom, wrapped up in a fluffy white robe, and engaged the com signal. “This is Waverly.”
“Congratulations,” Kieran said after a pause. His image was grainy, but she could see his smile just fine.
“And to you. I heard a newborn crying. That makes five?”
“Her name is Waverly,” Kieran said and grinned as he watched her try and fail to suppress tears.
It was awhile before she could speak again. “Thank you, Kieran. I’m just glad to know you and Felicity are so happy together.”
“It was all meant to be,” Kieran had said to her with a peaceful certainty.
“Oh Kieran.” Waverly laughed, shaking her head. “We’ll never agree about this.”
“I know. But I can’t help it. It’s how I see things.” He tapped absently on the desk in front of his com console. “You know, if I hadn’t swallowed those explosives, if they hadn’t operated on me to get out that detonator, they’d never have found my defective heart valve. I’d have died of an infarction before the age of thirty. Tell me you don’t see the hand of God there.”
She shook her head. “I just don’t see the patterns you see.”
“Because you refuse to see them,” he teased.
“You see them because you want to.”
He surprised her by laughing. “Maybe you’re right.”
“What? Is that doubt I’m hearing?”
“Without a healthy dose of uncertainty, faith isn’t faith. It’s zealotry.”
They shared a long, quiet smile before she said, “You know what, Kieran?”
“What?”
“I think you’re an excellent pastor.”
“But never captain,” he supplied for her. Indeed, when the doctor and Jared Carver had been publicly shamed, Selma Walton had taken over the vessel and exonerated Kieran of any blame associated with the Pauleys’ bomb plot. Kieran then joined the political faction that insisted the pastor and captain roles be kept separate by law. Seth had been surprised by this, and Waverly knew it redeemed Kieran in his eyes. The two men would never be friends, but she felt they’d at least forgiven each other. Now Kieran smiled at Waverly. “I’ll leave those nasty moral compromises for you pagans.”
“We’re so grateful.”
“I’d better go,” Kieran said.
“Keep in touch,” Waverly said, and he nodded as his signal winked off, knowing that conversations like this would soon become impossible. And no one would know for another thirty years if the two colonies would be able to stay in contact on any kind of permanent basis. Waverly hoped they would.
After a quiet dinner of roasted vegetables and a lovely egg-and-goat-cheese frittata, and an evening reading aloud to her squirming little boys, Waverly crawled into bed next to her husband. Seth folded her into his embrace and she rested her head in the hollow of his shoulder. She fell asleep almost instantly but was startled awake when he said, “That was our first time apart in nine years.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, nuzzling his neck.
“Me neither.” She thought he was going to let her sleep, but then he asked, “Was it amazing?”
She smiled in the dark and pictured the dappled water reflecting the sunrise, remembered the caress of the breeze on her skin, the dome of endless, eternal blue over her head. “You won’t believe how beautiful.”
“Tell me about it,” he said and gave her a gentle shake to keep her awake.
In the intimate whispers of a long-married pair, she described the water, the air, the sky, the clouds. They stayed up, resisting sleep, talking into the wee hours, glad to be together, glad to finally be going home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Once again I want to thank the entire team at St. Martin’s, but especially Jennifer Weis, Mollie Traver, and Matthew Shear, who I know fought the good fight for the Sky Chaser books. My agent and friend, Kathleen Anderson, has continued to be a tireless advocate. In addition, I want to thank my friend Victoria Hanley, for her careful reading, and my brother, Michael Ryan, for his wise edits and his absolutely brilliant idea about the oxygen-producing algae.
Also by Amy Kathleen Ryan
Spark
Glow
Zen and Xander Undone
Vibes
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AMY KATHLEEN RYAN earned an M.A. in English literature at the University of Vermont, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the New School Creative Writing for Children Program in New York City. She is also the author of two widely acclaimed young adult novels, Zen and Xander Undone and Vibes. Visit Amy online at www.amykathleenryan.com.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
FLAME. Copyright © 2013 by Amy Kathleen Ryan. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Ervin Serrano
Cover photographs: woman and background by iStock.com; man and texture by Shutterstock.com
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-312-62136-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-01417-7 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781250014177
First Edition: January 2014
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Flame: A Sky Chasers Novel Page 30