She expected a fight when she confessed her plan. Instead her young mother closed her eyes, and opened them, and asked, “Can you bring him back?” They sat together at their outpost’s small kitchen table, and drank tea, and curled their wings close about themselves, though the late summer night was warm. “I have to try,” she said, “before the end. It won’t be long now.” Her mother rocked on her stool. Earlier that day, wandering among the primitives they’d come to this world to watch—scavenger lizards still struggling to master fire, a few thousand years behind schedule—they’d seen battleships gather in the sky, and heard the rumble of the Angelus Guns returning to the Crystal City. Rainbow machines in their blood sang a war song to call the hosts of heaven home. “You could stay,” her young mother said. “Let him live with the choice he’s made. Our fighting days are done. We are scientists now. Scholars.” “I could stay,” she said, meaning, but I will not.
