Rose yelled to him but couldn’t even hear herself over the thunder. Before she knew it, she was halfway there, the splinter wounds hacking at her arm and leg. Nothing else mattered except reaching her captain in time. No one else had seen the threat. It was up to her, and her alone, to act. A thin smoke cloud obscured the assassins, but only for a moment. They were hunkered down in the webbed netting, their sights zeroed on the big prize.

Twin flashes branded the smoke.

The first shot tore through her chest like a hot, savage beast. It knocked the wind from her body and spun her around. The second buried itself in her lower back and she collapsed onto her captain. In his one eye, blazed the passion of brotherhood. With his one arm, he tried to hold her upright, but a spasm of pain flailed up her spine and then vanished. After that…she felt nothing.

He spoke comforting words to her that she couldn’t hear. He looked away and issued orders she couldn’t comprehend. Orders that Rose wanted to repeat at the top of her lungs, as per her role as an officer in the Navy. The ship lurched with the weight of another violent attack. She staggered out of his grasp and spilled over the side and plunged toward the sea, holding her chest. During the fall she thought of home, a place she should know but didn’t. The feeling of home seeped out potently, though. It translated across time, across oceans, and across the mortal barrier, she now knew. It was different for every person, but it existed deep inside of everyone, a universal identity nothing could take away. The battle raged all around her, but it grew distant, an echo of things that mattered in a muted tunnel with no walls—miles and leagues away.

The Battle of the Nile faded to a blurred mural and froze in time, like one of those dramatic paintings her mom had shown her when she was young.

That falling sensation suddenly snapped her back to her own reality and she was once again on the rooftop where she had her rendezvous with Bellamy. To her horror, Rose realized she’d fallen asleep up there. Bellamy had left her? Then, with a start, she accidentally toppled over the edge…

She screamed.

“Rose?”

Hearing her mom’s voice confused her and relieved her all at the same time. She sat straight up in bed, covered in a thick sheen of sweat and immediately felt for the bullet wounds in her back and chest, then for the splinter wounds in her shoulder and thigh.

Nothing.

“Rose? Is everything okay?”

Her heart jack-hammered against her chest bone and reverberated back through her lungs. She glanced around her old room, mentally clutching at the fixtures and the colors and the ambiance…anything familiar that she could use to anchor herself to this reality.