Everything was the same, but everything had changed.
Droids had the capability to be more than he had thought, and clones were not as simple as he had comfortably believed. The world had turned upside down, but somehow things were still dropping out of the sky onto his head.
He still couldn’t get his mind around Zan’s death. Just couldn’t get a grip on it. Intellectually he knew that his friend was gone, gone to that place from which none return. But emotionally Jos still expected the door to open any minute, expected to see Zan enter, lugging his quetarra case, griping about the rain, or laughing at some bit of business in the OT, before unpacking the instrument and wandering off into some classical fugue.
That was never going to happen again.
People died almost every day in the OT, some of them under his hands as he frantically tried to save them, but this—this was not the same.
Zan had been his friend.
“Jos?”
He looked up.
Tolk stood in the doorway. She was in her surgical whites, and his heart leapt to see her—then fell and shattered. His tradition, the centuries-old customs of his clan, denied her to him—his family and history and social constructs all told him that he and Tolk could never be together. And he had believed, up until this moment, all this to be true, had accepted that it was anathema to even think of defying canon.
But Zan was dead. And that simple, searing fact now brought home to Jos, in a way that nothing ever had before, the truth of the old saying that he had heard bandied about all of his life, had even said himself on occasion, but had never really understood:
Life is too short.
Too short to waste on things that aren’t important. Too short to waste on anything that doesn’t, in some way, enrich you or your loved ones. Too short by far to let mindless rules and traditions tell you what you could do, where you could live—
And whom you could love.
Here stood Tolk, before him. Jos looked at her, felt tears start to gather. He stood and opened his arms. “Tolk—” he began.
That was all he needed to say. She ran to him. They hugged, then kissed, tenderness flowering into passion as they discovered the ages-old tonic for the horrors of war. The truth that was always known but always hidden: that the past was frozen, the future unformed, and that, for everyone, eternity was in each heartbeat.
In war—as in peace—it was the only way to truly live.
The moment was short. The drone of incoming medlifters broke it. For a moment, Jos stared at her.
“Time to go to work,” she said softly.
He nodded. “Yeah.”
They started from the cube toward the OT.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
MICHAEL REAVES is a renowned screenwriter who has written, story-edited, and/or produced hundreds of teleplays for various television series, including Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Twilight Zone, Sliders, and Monsters. He was also a story editor and editor on Batman: The Animated Series, for which he won an Emmy Award for writing in 1993. He has worked for Spielberg’s DreamWorks, among other studios, and is the author of several fantasy novels and supernatural thrillers. He is also the author of Hell on Earth and, along with John Pelan, edited the Shadows Over Baker Street anthology. Michael Reaves lives in Los Angeles.
STEVE PERRY was born and raised in the Deep South and has lived in Louisana, California, Washington, and Oregon. He is currently the science fiction, fantasy, and horror book reviewer for The Oregonian. Perry has sold dozens of stories to magazines and anthologies, as well as a considerable number of novels, animated teleplays, nonfiction articles, reviews, and essays. He wrote for Batman: The Animated Series during its first Emmy Award-winning season, authored the New York Times bestseller Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire, and also did the bestselling novelization for the summer blockbuster movie Men in Black.
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