White Crystal Butterflies | Wattys 2021 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Sixteen

My anxiety about the letter's contents eases almost as soon as I'm actually reading. There's a certain calm to knowing I'm holding something from someone I know better than anyone else in the UIS, no matter what she has to say. I can feel clearly in that moment why paper mail bounced back so fast with the rise of interstellar travel. This is the tangible connection to reality that I've been craving.

My heart is still going fast enough to hurt. I try to ignore it.

I hope this letter finds you, and finds you well. Zuri refuses to tell me what she did to get you on her mission, but I'm inclined to believe it wasn't the most ethical advance given that she told her full research team to keep quiet if I were ever to ask. I hope you're okay.

The letter crinkles in my hands before I realize how hard I'm clenching it. I try to loosen my grip before it creases. God, only one paragraph in and I'm already shaking.

She went asking about me.

You don't have to answer this, and I'm fine with that. If you're not ready to talk to me again yet, that's okay. I know you need space when things happen. And I know you. But I want you to know that I still care about you—a lot—and I wish I was there with you. If nothing else because Zuri is a—

Nobody ever said Yahvi had a clean mouth in private.

—for sending you without a co-leader, or at least a second-in-command. Or not insisting if you turned her down. I don't care what your answer is; I consider a seven-month solo deployment inhumane, and you can't tell me otherwise.

And I know you don't do well alone.

I have to set the letter down. I drag my pillow out of my sleeping bag and hug it, burying my face. Nobody out here in the UIS knows that about me. Nobody. I've been branded a lone wolf more times than I can count, and I've kept it that way as the years have passed without presenting anyone stubborn enough to reach out to me. Anyone as stubborn as the other Aventureros trainee our leader matched me with decades ago, because she had mental health training and he thought we'd get along. I'd spent the last six months shut down after the death of my parents, and had nobody else in the world. In the next three, Yahvi and that same leader probably saved my life.

We did get along. So well, that by the end of that trip, we were sent on our way with a letter asking the organization to keep us together, and recommending us straight into its leadership program. The rest is history. The guarantee of each other's company over the next sixteen years masked the fact that both of us spiral when left to our own devices for too long. Yahvi manages better than I do.

I keep my head down on the pillow. I shouldn't be struggling this much, but I am. As gutting as it would be for her to yell at me on paper, it's almost worse to get the opposite. I'm the one who's kept away for the last nine years. Any normal person would hate me by now. But Yahvi's always taken pride in not being a normal person, and the stubbornness with which she's kept sending letters is only one extension of it.

I can't just ignore the rest of this. I eventually pack away the wave of emotions enough to pull the letter towards me again. Thank god, that was the last of the personal part. I don't think I'd be able to keep reading if there was more.

At least I can tell you you're with two of the best people from Dara, so don't worry about Tobias and Lingmei. Zuri's never gotten either of them in her pocket, and I'd poach them if I could.

So this pair has Yahvi's approval? That's good to know.

Happy one-year anniversary on your Tikokura landing—