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detach itself from the outer system. He had planned for even
that failure, but it wasn’t all bad. The force of the ship leaving should be
enough to kill anyone left standing in his room. If his next encounter with
Burke ended like the first, Isaac was ready.
     
     
    * * *
     
     
    “Cass, I made a mistake. I’m not
ready for this.”
    “You are. This panic is temporary.”
    “I took on too much, too fast.”
    Burke stood in the room at the back
end of the ship. He leaned himself against the corner, as far away from the
door as he possibly could. Lumen still lay in the middle of the room. He tried
not to look at her as he spoke. There was no one else in the room.
    “Rylan knows who I am,” he said.
“Geoff made a mistake and I can’t even be angry with him. Natalie came here
thinking that I was already fixed and look at me. I can’t do this.”
    “Rylan hasn’t done anything yet,”
Cass said softly. “I don’t think he’ll betray us, but if he does we can handle
it. We can get another ID change. We have enough credits saved up to overhaul
the ship and fit it with new credentials. It’d be expensive but we could
manage.”
    “I don’t like uncertainty,” Burke
said, his eyes closed. “I’m trying.”
    “Natalie knows who you are. You
trust her. She cares about you Burke,” Cass said. “So do I.”
    “And Kristen? She’s in danger. I
can’t afford to be worried about myself.”
    “You can, actually. It will be four
days before we reach Frey. That’s four days that you can’t do anything to help
her. Relax as best as you can. Talk to Rylan. It will be okay.”
    “I lied to her,” Burke said lowly.
    “To Natalie?”
    “To Kristen. When she was taken, I
lied to her. I told her I killed everyone that was involved with her abduction.
Everyone. Now she’s in danger again.”
    “A lie isn’t always a bad thing,”
Cass said frankly. “Deception isn’t always malicious. We’ll stop them. They
won’t take her again.”
    Burke stood still for another
moment. He felt only a little better. He nodded once and forced himself to walk
across the room. He closed the door behind him without a second look back at
Lumen. He walked passed the engine and climbed the stairs to the upper deck. He
could see Rylan in the distance, through the open doors to the helm, still sat
at the pilot’s console. He suddenly wanted to ask Cass if she was monitoring
all outgoing messages but stopped himself, knowing that she likely already
started the moment Geoff said his real name. The thought uplifted him a little
more, knowing that he could be certain that Cass, at the very least, would
always support him.
    He didn’t want to face the pilot
right away. He turned at the door to his room and saw Natalie was waiting for
him. She was looking through the files on the wall display. She jumped in place
as the doors opened, startled by his sudden appearance. She laughed at herself
and looked at him.
    “You caught me spying,” she said,
smiling.
    “I said you could look,” he said,
his voice level. He walked across the room and sat down on the bed.
    “How are you doing?” she stepped
toward him. She stood over him instead of sitting next to him on the bed. She held
her hands out to him and, when he didn’t take them, she crossed them over her
stomach.
    “I don’t know.”
    “I want to tell you something. Will
you listen?”
    He nodded. It was a tiny movement.
    “I won’t lie and say I understand
what you’re going through. I can’t. I know that in a way, you’re only now
dealing with what Adam did to you. After what the two of you did on Earth, I
can’t imagine how that must feel.
    “Among the soldiers who survived
the war on Earth, more have killed themselves than those who haven’t. The
effect of fighting for your home planet, and then losing it, is something that
will be studied for centuries. You went through that with Adam, together, and
even managed to stick with each other and work after that. You stuck