“I don’t care about the past,” Jorgen said, meeting my eyes. “I don’t care if there’s a risk. I want you to fly with us—because I’m damn sure that we’re safer with you at our side than not.”

He smiled. And seeing Rig smile felt good. It reminded me of our days as kids, when an outcast and a kid who was bullied had made friends against the odds.

“What does it mean to be friends, then?” “It means,” I said, “that if something like that does have to happen, I’ll do whatever I can to return to you once the crisis is over. And you’d do the same for me, right, bud?”

“Regardless,” M-Bot said, “I hope I’m not a Krell. That would be super embarrassing.”

A little too stiff, a little too interested in running things by the book, but he cared about the pilots in his flight, and he went out of his way to make sure we were all okay even when it made him personally uncomfortable to do so.

“We’re coming for you,” Jorgen said. “FM, evasive maneuvers until we get there. We’re not going to leave you behind.”

If others say you’re strange, it’s because they remember this, and maybe fear us. This is your heritage. The heritage of warriors who traveled the sky, and will return to the sky. Listen.

“M- Bot,” I said. “What—” “I,” he said as the cockpit clicked closed, “made you look.”

A hero does not choose her trials, Spensa. She steps into the darkness, then she faces what comes next.

But I could barely feel it, consumed as I was by the full force of Jorgen’s pain, his anger, even his resentment of me for tearing him away from there. I choked on it, feeling every ounce of it down to my bones.

Welcome to the Den of Everlasting Light Which Laps Gently upon the Shores of Time. We will send you a heading to meet us on the Burrow from Which Spring Dreams Both Sweet and Sorrowful!

Is Cobb a coward? He ejected, you know. He got shot down and ejected. Would you call him a coward, to his face?

We were a well-oiled survival machine, but we lacked something these people had. It wasn’t happiness exactly. We had that, even if it was tempered by pain and fear. Prosperity maybe. Peace.

I know how it feels. Like there’s been a hole carved right out of you. A chunk of flesh that’s just not going to grow back. You can function, you can fly, but you’re going to leave a blood trail for a while.

I wasn’t about to keep cleaning protocols when I barely had room for myself, my mushroom databases, my backup mushroom databases, and my backups to the backups.

I felt alone. M-Bot was great, but he didn’t understand me like Kimmalyn or FM did. Or Jorgen. Scud, I missed him. I missed being able to complain to him, and listen to his overly rational—yet somehow calming—arguments back.

“Not. A. Coward,” she said. “Brave to the—” A flash of light.

Pain and fear. But in the center of all that was courage.

You are not a monster, the impression lingered. You are one of us. You are wonderful. You are natural. You are loved.

Jorgen spent his day learning how to make bread.