But lately, my thoughts weigh heavily on me, and now I have nothing to distract me from them. My hands stay busy as I run through the morning routine, but my mind wanders, barely aware of the gray walls around me or the dim lights overhead or my breath fogging in the air. My cold fingers punch in the passcodes to enter each doorway without pausing to think about it. Everything is the same as every other morning, and it all fades into background noise. But this time I pause, running my fingers over the brand on the inside of my right wrist, those eight numbers and squiggly lines they marked on me when I entered the service. Now, my mandatory years are over. But no matter where I go, the war will always be a part of me. What if this is where I belong?

Perhaps this was Altair’s intent all along: to give me time to think. He knows I have a choice to make. Merely a few weeks ago, I thought it was already made. After we lost Uwe to a bomb on our last mission, with the image of the explosion waiting every time I closed my eyes, I sent a message to my family without a moment’s hesitation. All these years, I never thought anything could convince me to stay here and keep fighting in this awful war. I believed it was the desire to leave that kept me moving. It was memories of my family that gave me the resolve to do terrible things, anything necessary to survive. My only goal after enlisting was to live long enough to return to them, and protect my siblings like I always swore I would.

When it was just the two of us on Gaia, Scorpia was always the one to take care of me, to lie and steal and do all the things I couldn’t do. I was never any good at it, so instead Momma paid for some fake papers to get me into a Gaian school, calling it an investment in the family’s future.

Once we went to Nibiru, where Scorpia couldn’t shake her bad habits and found an even worse one in a bottle, I took that mantle upon myself. I looked after the little ones, tried to keep Scorpia from drowning in her vices, did my best to soothe Momma’s anger by being the perfect son she wanted me to be. Scorpia and I would huddle by Nibiru’s ocean, or later in the ship’s cargo bay, and whisper about our dreams for the future. We would talk about all of us having a say in the family business rather than being threatened into following orders. No more risky jobs, no more Primus technology, no more weapons. “When I’m in charge, we can be whoever we want to be,” I would always say.