She led him from the prison and out into the night streets of the Holster. The city glowed softly in lines of orange Caledonia hadn’t noticed through her pain last night. Rows of sun pips were placed both in the ground and along the building walls above eye level, ensuring that you could always find your way—or be found.

They walked together in silence, and Caledonia noticed that Donnally seemed at ease here. He wasn’t hyperalert or scouring his surroundings for possible escape. He walked with the effortless confidence of someone who knew where he was. Of someone who felt at home.

The realization made Caledonia clench her teeth so hard they ached.

“You should keep me locked up.”

“I know,” she admitted.

His profile was so painfully familiar. Her breath caught on the way one shoulder rose slightly higher than the other, the involuntary twitch of his lips. She’d seen him make this exact gesture a thousand times or more and she’d forgotten it until this moment. How many other parts of her brother had she forgotten?

There were so many things she wanted to say to him, and now that she had the chance, she didn’t know how. She’d never been good at sharing her heart. Not even with Pisces. And she was afraid that if she shared everything in this moment, Donnally would demand to be returned to his prison cell.

“You look like her, you know?” he said, pulling her out of her own thoughts.

“Who?”

One side of his mouth squeezed in an incredulous smile. “Mom.”

“Oh.” An image of Rhona Styx flashed through her mind. Rhona at the helm, her gap-toothed smile broad and confident; Rhona sitting cross-legged in her bed as she oiled her favorite rifle; Rhona, feet dangling over the starboard bow, as she taught Caledonia to tie fishing knots. Red hair that roiled in the wind, a laugh as grizzly as the sea itself, resolve as steely as the hull of their ship.

“Oh,” she repeated, feeling breathless. “The hair.”

“Something more in the eyes. You always have this look, like you can see right through me.” Donnally’s smile wavered and vanished. “At least, that’s what I remember of her eyes; they were discerning.”

“Yes,” Caledonia agreed, a near-giddy feeling bubbling in her chest. “They were.”

This, more than anything, was enough to give Caledonia hope. If Donnally could remember their mother, then perhaps he could remember the boy he’d been before. Perhaps he could still imagine being something other than a Bullet.

He fell silent once more, retreating so far into himself that Caledonia thought maybe she’d imagined that brief feeling of connection. She and Donnally walked down the main thoroughfare, his stride a hair longer than hers and his steps twice as heavy, but they were still, somehow, completely in sync.

When they stopped before the barracks, he paused, a lopsided smile on his pale face.