Andi’s body was rigid, every muscle tense. “We don’t know for sure if... We should turn around, go back...” But she knew her own words were foolish even as she uttered them. That Lon’s soul no longer existed in this galaxy.

“Andi.” Dex’s shoulders rose and fell as he took a deep breath. “You know as well as I do that turning around would bring us nothing but grief. He’s gone. He died a hero. A worthy death, for a Sentinel.”

The transport was finally growing warm inside, the old heating system kicking into gear, but Andi’s hands still shook as she gripped them together. She knew it wasn’t from the cold.

Dex reached over, carefully, and wrapped one hand over hers. She tensed beneath his touch, so lost in her pain. But he felt it, too. The others had been Guardians, his brothers and sisters from Tenebris, and they had died alongside Lon.

Andi hadn’t been the one to bring about their deaths, and yet her swords seemed to sing her name, begging for more tallies. How had they already lost another of their crew, so soon? In the short time he’d spent on the Marauder, Lon had become a part of them, saving Andi’s life with his own blood after they’d fled Arcardius. And now... He’d traded his life for theirs. Again, he’d saved her.

But for what purpose?

Now she had no crew. And no ship.

The realization of that finally hit her, too. The Marauder was gone. Frozen and forgotten in the Soleran wastes, the cruelest reminder that without her girls, without her ship...

She was nothing.

She thought of Lon’s final words. “What did he mean?” Andi asked. “When he said...” Again, his face flashed in her mind, like the countless others that had died because of her. “When he said to tell her what she truly was?”

Dex’s jaw tensed. He swallowed and looked away. “I...I don’t know.”

He knew something. Or perhaps that was just Andi’s own guilt tugging at her, trying to project onto Dex. She cracked her knuckles, a habit she’d always resorted to in times of stress.

It was calming, the act of doing something, however small.

“Lira always spoke so hopefully about the dead,” Andi said, remembering her friend’s words about those who’d fallen in the attacks on Adhira, after they’d crash-landed there in the Marauder. It seemed so long ago now, though it had been little more than a month since the Xen Pterran forces had invaded that peaceful planet.

How many others had fallen in the weeks since?

“She said that they live on, in the world around us,” Andi continued. “In the wind. The trees. The stars.”

Dex nodded, his eyes locked on the landscape ahead. “Then Lon is with us still, even now.”