I shook my head. “I’m good.”
He winked at me. Jackson had immediately taken up talking to Wes and Judge. They were really impressed with how Artemis was running despite the damage or maybe because of it. Canyon and Rohan were talking to Nolan and Sterling.
Things looked the same as before I had left, which was so strange, considering all that had happened. I turned to view the rest of the room and was immediately pulled into a hug by Paloma. I hadn’t seen her yet.
“I was so afraid I’d never see you again.” She sniffed. “You look beautiful.”
“Thank you.” I hugged her back. She had improved since last I’d been around her. The dark circles under eyes, so familiar for new mothers, were gone. Ben had grown so much, and he must be sleeping better. The color was back in her cheeks, and she’d cut her hair so that it fell just over her shoulders. “You look fantastic.”
She sighed. “Last time you saw me we were still in colic hell. He outgrew that and now he’s just the most scrumptious baby you’ve ever seen. You’re coming to dinner tomorrow. Unless the world is ending, I don’t want to hear no.”
“Okay, deal.” It really was so nice to see her.
“Waverly.” Diana was next to embrace me. She hadn’t changed at all, but then Helene had already been a year old when I’d left. She’d been back to sleeping for some time. “Welcome home. No more time travel for you. It’s fine for me to say that. We’re in a secure room. I can’t wait to hear all your stories.”
I sighed. “Some of them are not great.”
“I figured. I…”
“Waverly.” Melissa Alexander, older than the last time I’d seen her and radiating an energy that made her seem practically a different person than the one I’d seen on Orion, pulled me into the tightest hug yet. “I don’t know how I never remembered I saw you on Orion until after you were gone. I’m sorry, darling. It was like a dream and then it became clearer. I can’t explain it. You’re okay. Thank goodness.”
I let out a breath I had been holding from the second she embraced me. “I’ll be honest, Melissa, you seem like a totally different human being than you were there.”
“I pretty much am. That was not the best time for me. I was a… well, let’s just say I was rough on the universe. Not that it makes an excuse for how I treated you or all the people there I was unkind to but… I was in a very, very bad place right then. It’s amazing my husbands didn’t just up and go.”
I could never imagine that any more than I could my own doing so. They were strong men, all of them, and once they loved us, they always loved us. There was something humbling about that I’d never understood before.
We had an obligation to love them and take care of their hearts, of the gifts of forever they made to us.
“If it means anything,” Melissa’s gaze traveled the room, and I knew without looking that she searched for her husbands, “that was an important time for me. Your words, they bothered me. Actually spurred me forward to make decisions and changes, a lot of which would result in what happened to me next. So thank you, Waverly. You saved us all.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, but I was very glad to have this Melissa with me, and not the one I’d left behind. “I didn’t save them. They’re not a distant memory to me. I was just there. I… I feel like it just happened, because for me, it just did.”
Melissa’s face fell. “That time? It’s always just happened. It has never stopped banging around in my head, in my heart, in my soul. Almost every decision I’ve made since then has been about honoring a time where so many died. Somehow I didn’t. I’m probably less deserving than the women who devoted their life to helping other women on that planet—yet I continue on.”
She shrugged, but I understood immediately it wasn’t a nonchalant gesture. There was pain hidden in that, and we might be separated by years and experiences, but this woman and I had something in common that I never would with her daughter or my sister-in-law. We shared memories of a place that didn’t exist anymore, not as it was.
I put out my hand, and she took it. In my peripheral vision I could see Paloma and Diana share a look. It was okay. They didn’t have to understand.
After a minute, I stepped back. “All right, look, I hate talking in public but there are some things you all have to know, and I need to get them out. This is some hard stuff, and it might be that you’ll think you would have made different decisions in the same circumstance. That’s fine. We’re all entitled to know our hearts and what we would and wouldn’t do. Please know that what we opted to undertake and how we did it was made in the best possible way.”
Diana’s Uncle C.J. spoke from the corner. “We trust you, Waverly. The five of you have proven yourselves time and again to be incredible. There’s no need to justify yourself.”
That was huge, considering C.J. had once manipulated everyone into thinking Jackson might be a traitor in order to flush out the real one. It wasn’t lost on me that he was making such a fuss now. We’d never really made up with him, time pushed that aside.
“Thanks for that. So the biggest thing here is that there are fifteen Super Soldier ships in the black hole all in stasis waiting for Evander to wake them up. I don’t know how long they’ve been there but…”
Canyon interrupted me. “A year.”
Well, of course he knew that. I should have realized he would. “Okay, sorry. A year. And they are filled to the brink with hundreds of Super Soldiers ready to destroy on behalf of Evander. We weren’t sure what would happen if we attacked one ship. I mean, we were in Artemis alone. So I took a different tactic, and I left them all a message, telling them life didn’t have to be Evander.”
“It was better than that,” Jackson filled in. “It was really heartfelt. Very touching”
He was sweet. “And we left them there like that.”
Sterling gaped at me. “You must have had to go on the ship to do that.”
“Yes.” Ari nodded. “We boarded the ships, and we uploaded the message on the main two.”
There was silence at this statement before Damian whistled through his teeth. “That’s brave. I don’t know that I would have boarded that ship.”
“It was intimidating for sure. Well, for me. I don’t think the others were scared. That’s neither here nor there.” I waved my hand. “I realize we could have done something like upload a virus or something to end them so we didn’t have to face them, but that felt wrong.”
Judge shook his head. “Are you thinking that anyone here would want you to blow up a bunch of sleeping people who haven’t done anything yet?”
Quinn raised his hand. “I probably would have blown them up. But P wouldn’t have liked it. So, yeah. I get it. Or at least I’m pretending to. How is that?”
Keith rolled his eyes. “Go on, sister. Don’t worry about that. Maybe you’ll get through to some of them.”
Sterling crossed his arms over his chest. “I was on one of those ships once. That’ll go one of two ways. You’ll either make a difference or they’re too far gone to hear you.”
Diana placed a hand on his shoulder, pressing her forehead against his arm. He didn’t hesitate before he drew her to him. “I’m okay, sweet baby. Long time ago.”
I sighed. “That was the easy news.”
I met Jackson’s gaze, and he nodded. We needed to do this. It couldn’t just be us who would know what might be coming. What if someone died and they could have been saved?
“We all know I killed my father.”
Diana spoke up. “That couldn’t have been easy, my friend. Thank you for doing that. The universe is a little bit safer, even if we still have a million and one problems with an even scarier enemy on the horizon.”
“As I’ve told a couple of you, he had shot me, and he was going to hurt my husbands, so I’m afraid I didn’t overthink it.” I steeled myself. “What happened after is what is important here. I was in a shuttle with him. And I had a bullet right here,” I put my hand on my rib cage, and it was actually St
erling who caught my attention. He lifted his eyebrows. Yes, he’d heard the baby’s heartbeat now. We’d have to announce that, too. No secrets with the Super Soldiers around.
Cash winced. “Ouch.”
“Yes.” I could hardly think about it. I was going to have to ask Ari for some help with this but that would come later, too. “And my med machine was broken. Artemis was dead in space. I reached the guys but there was really nothing to it but goodbye.”
Silence met my statement. There wasn’t a person in the room not married and in love. They would all understand what that felt like. In fact, most of them had temporarily lost each other. Damian ducked his head to stare at the floor, but it was the only movement I saw.
“What did you do?” Dane finally asked. “Hold on for hours and hours?”
“I didn’t do anything actually. There was a pop, and suddenly Ari, Canyon, and Jackson were there. Only the Ari, Canyon, and Jackson were not the ones you see now but rather older versions of them. You see, I died on that shuttle.” There were questions I’d never asked. Had I stayed on the communicator the whole time with the guys? How long had it taken? Maybe it was better not to dwell. I steeled my shoulders. “They came back through time to save me, thus altering the past, not something that has ever be done before.”
I waited for the explosion but none came. “It was only three of them. Rohan was dead. Apparently everyone is dead. In that future. And some of it came from a battle on its way here. Ari didn’t give me specifics. Just told me to tell Ro to duck when the lights went out. But I can’t help but feel that there has to be more to do to prevent this… destruction than just duck. Plus, I realize that changing time is a big no no, and I’d just like to point out that the guys here with me now didn’t do it. They haven’t made that decision, and I’ve already made Ari promise not to do it.”
Jackson turned to him. “Are you crazy?”
“It’s important to her.” He nodded to me. “And it’s complicated. Big burden to live with on her shoulders. I don’t see it that way but she does. That’s really what matters here.”
“I didn’t agree to it, lady.” Jackson let me know. That was fine. We’d discuss it later. I’d discuss it as many times as we had to but not now.
Nolan stepped forward. “Look, I’ve never understood the whole time travel stuff, but I do get that if I had the chance to go save someone I loved, I’d do it, too. So forget whether people who are not here should have done it or not. They did it. End of story. We deal with the now. Ari didn’t give you any more information than tell Rohan to duck?”
“That and that it was soon.”
Nolan nodded. “Okay, then we prepare for battle. We don’t know who or when or whatever but we go on high alert, and we stay that way for the next year. After that time we think maybe we thwarted it. I mean, they saved her. What little I understand should indicate a shift in a timeline or something? Maybe it doesn’t happen because she’s alive, and she warned us.”
“Maybe it’s even more complicated.” Wes put his hands on his knees. “Frankly, I’m not sure how to calculate how many people Waverly interacts with regularly and how she alters their lives or if Ro really can manage not to die then who he alters. It’s a lot of shifting. That’s fine. If everyone is dead, let’s assume she can’t make it worse.”
I nodded. Now seemed as good a time as any. “Or how much the fact that I’m now pregnant with Rohan’s baby, a child who would obviously not be coming otherwise since both his mother and father would be dead.”
My brother Keith jumped away from the wall. “Now there is a change right there. That’s for sure.” He rubbed at his eyes, and Quinn elbowed him.
“Keith, I think you should congratulate our sister before you get lost in this.”
Keith’s face fell. “Congratulations, Waverly.”
“Thanks.”
Well, this whole thing had gone better than I’d expected. If anyone had really negative feelings about me being alive or what I’d done with the Super Soldiers, they had kept them to themselves, which I appreciated. I stepped away from where I’d been talking as low murmurs filled the crowd. There were plans to be made now to put us on alert and…
Sterling, Canyon, and Rohan all jolted. It was Canyon who spoke. “Someone put on the monitors. Something has happened that some of the population here has heard. I…”
Rohan finished for him. “Earth has fallen. Evander has it.”
My body went cold.
Earth was such a tricky subject for all of us. I’d actually never been there myself. But that was where humanity started, where we almost destroyed ourselves, where we made ourselves so sick we stopped making enough female babies to continue the population the way it had been, where we took to the skies to try again.
Everything was really a colony of Earth when it came down to it. Sandler One owed its existence to trade with the planet. On the other side of the galaxy, stories were told of her grandeur, and I would bet that even in the farthest away realm of the Dark Planets they knew old Earth tales. We were human and therefore the planet belonged to all of us even if we never saw it with our own eyes.
Clay was closest to the monitor, and he turned it on. Sure enough, there were reports coming in that Evander had invaded Earth. Footage of Evander Corporation circling the planet and knocking down Earth’s defenses passed in front of my eyes.
My hand went to my stomach. I was having a baby and this was the world I was having him in. One where Earth had been taken over by a corporation so heinous it had not only created two of my husbands to battle for it but abused them in the process.
Voices were low if words were spoken at all. They weaponized disease and…
It was when the words “Oceania has fallen” came across the screen that I heard Paloma and Melissa cry out. I blinked. Yes, that was right. I’d never been to Earth but those women certainly had. Melissa’s father was chancellor of Earth, and her aunt lived in Oceania. That was Diana’s family. Paloma’s sister was married to three water barons. I didn’t know where she lived.
I turned to ask her, but the paleness of her skin and the way Tommy wrapped her against him told me all I needed to know. It wasn’t good news. Melissa strode from the room at a fast gate, her husbands at her side. Nolan shot instructions to C.J. They needed more information than they had. Diana bent over, clutching her knees. I’d never heard her talk about her grandfather. Were they close?
Sterling put a hand on the back of her head, bending over to speak to her.
I looked away. These were private moments.
“Canyon.” I had to know before we went any further. “Did the ships I didn’t let you destroy do this?”
He walked over to a monitor and stared down at it. He didn’t know, but I trusted him to find out and tell me the truth. He stared down at it for a second longer and then shook his head.
“No. Evander did it with the ships already here. I can be sure about it because a, I don’t remember the numbers on the sides of the ones I can see featured there and b, I see the Evander ships we let go coming through the black hole with our long term sensors right now.”
Nausea swept through me. “So that’s that then.”
“Mars Station was just destroyed,” Quinn spoke, his eyes down on his own monitor. “One of the ships that came through just did that.”
I sunk to the ground. I’d always known there was a chance they’d take lives and I’d be left feeling that the role I played allowed them to do it. I just hadn’t realized I wouldn’t know how to live with it.
I lay in the dark in Jackson’s bed, his arm wrapped around me. “They were coming anyway, lady. And even if we had managed to destroy one ship the others would have turned on and come after us. We wouldn’t have done a thing. You gave them a chance.”
I nodded. “We could have uploaded the kill virus or whatever Canyon had in mind.”
“That was hypothetical. Not one of us knows how to do that. Maybe someone at Evander does, but that might have taken C
anyon years to create. And I can guarantee he’s hearing you now and wishing he’d never said that to you.”
I sighed. “I’m not trying to hurt his feelings. This was on me. I wanted to leave them a stupid message and…”
The door swung open. I expected it to be Canyon, but it was Ari. He held up a monitor. “Baby, some of the ships turned on each other. At least three so far have been recorded not joining the others and attacking three other ships. They’re missing. We don’t know where they are. Canyon has headphones on, and he’s listening to chatter; Rohan tapped into their frequencies. We can’t get it all, but they absolutely had an uprising. The main ship, Waverly. The one you went on was one of them. I don’t know what this means, hot stuff, but it worked as best as it could. Some people listened. I’d bet my life on it.”
Tears flowed from my eyes. “Really?”
He dove to the edge of the bed. “Really.”
The Farm continued on in hushed tones. No one spoke while they went about their business, as though all they could manage to do through the grief was get through the day.
Nolan thought he knew how the attack would come for us. Evander would be on their way. They wouldn’t leave colonies of dissension around to affect their bottom line. They’d come to make profit in our galaxy, and they would make it with or without consent.
I found Paloma staring out a window into the spring landscape outside. She held Ben to her, his sleeping head pressed against her shoulder. He had her dark brown hair, and although I hadn’t seen him in too long, I’d bet if he opened his eyes, he’d still have the Sandler blues.
I approached, and she smiled at me, sadness in her gaze. Ben must be a good sleeper, because she spoke in normal tones. “We got the word from my brother-in-law, Amari Chen. While their area of Earth remains unharmed—not surprising considering the resource of the water—Evander wants to talk to them. They’re sending a representative.” She choked on the word. “That doesn’t matter. What matters is that my sister is dead, killed on Oceania. She was shopping. There have been some survivors, people who got to the escape pods. But, they’ve all made it home by now if they lived. Amber is clearly dead.” She rubbed her eyes and sucked in a long breath, her mouth coming down to press into Ben’s neck before she spoke again. It was almost like she wanted to breathe in his scent. “I don’t know if Amari cared. He was so… cold on the screen. I don’t know if my sister had any happiness in her life.”
Light Unfolding: A Reverse Harem Science Fiction Romance (Wings of Artemis Book 8) Page 14
