“I am sure it was.” He hopped down from the gurney. “I believe I am going to take a shower and find some clothes.”

“How about a belly button?” she called after him. “Or—I don’t know—nipples? Do you have—”

“I am leaving, Ana,” he called over his shoulder.

“Wait!”

He paused in the doorway again, his arms folded over his chest, and turned back around to her. The edges of his lips twitched up, as if he was fighting off a smile. “Yes?”

She let out a long breath, trying to memorize the way he looked in the doorway, his hair catching the fluorescent light in oranges and reds, and said, “I’ve missed you.”

She didn’t care if he felt the same, because in the end it didn’t matter. He had his entire life ahead of him, and she had hers, and for the moment they were in the same room together.

“I have missed you, too,” he replied, and left the medical ward.

And her heart leaped and thrummed in something akin to happiness.

Robb

As he made his way down the hallway of the Dossier to the waystation again, and then back to the Caterina, he rubbed at his mechancial arm. It twitched sporadically. It hadn’t been still since the meeting, and he knew it was his nerves, and he hated that. He thought he had left a can of oil in the crew’s quarters, but either Xu must have used it or someone else had; really, though, he was looking for Jax, and he was nowhere on the Dossier. He needed to get back to his brother, because Goddess knows what he was cooking up while unsupervised. Perhaps a coup to overthrow Ana once this was all over. Perhaps a way to murder him in his sleep—there was no telling.

Ducking out of the crew’s quarters, he started for the hull again. Maybe there was a can of oil at the weapons module, or in one of the junk boxes in the engine room—

“Robb?”

He turned at the call of his name. Coming out of the bathroom was Di, his hair freshly washed, in dark trousers and a towel hung around his neck. And here he’d thought he would have the priviledge of never seeing Di half naked ever again. The first time on the Tsarina was enough, honestly.

“Di,” he greeted him, clearing his throat. A sore, uncomfortable feeling crept into his mechanical arm, but he rubbed at the ropy tissue where his skin met metal. His fourth finger began to twitch, and he couldn’t stop it.

Di motioned to Robb’s arm. “May I see it?”

He hesitated. You did this to me, he wanted to say, and just looking at Di made his phantom wrist burn in pain—he remembered how unbearable it had been, the sharp white-lightning agony that whispered up his arm until—

“I do not want you going to Nevaeh with it malfunctioning,” Di added. “Besides, I know a thing or two about mechanical arms.” For emphasis, he held up his hands and wiggled his fingers, showing that he had metal fingers and metal arms and . . . well, metal everything.