Chapter 60

Chapter 60

I am dreaming. Ive been dreaming a lot lately. All my sisters and I have.

Its a strange thing, to make the decision to dream. To sit down as a group, and decide that maybe, we should be more deliberate. After all, we dont sit on the station and just let the knowledge of what guns and computers and decks we have flow past, plucking ideas out of it at random. No, we explore. We poke around. We spend our free time trying to find better guns, smarter computers, and decks with fewer holes and more useful gravity.

Not, like, more gravity. I dont need more gravity. I need gravity in increasingly dumb patterns so I can catapult myself against walls to save time. Obviously.

So we laid down together. Closed our eyes together. Ran shutdown routines, cooled off our bodys cores, and whatever weird thing Ooze Lily did, together. Meditated, I guess? Its a skill Id take the time to learn, if the alarms ever stop singing.

And now, we are dreaming together, and the knowledge that this is not a dream starts to come together a lot more dramatically than before.

I mean, it was never really a dream. I can think here, sort of. Though how much clarity I have has increased with each new sister I link up with.

Here is nowhere. It was a grey plane in a grey fog, and sometimes it had a memory in it.

But they werent memories, were they? The first time I slipped in here, it was on the tail of a dark memory. And I saw my mom again, and she gave me the most precious gift anyone has ever handed me; my voice.

But my voice is actually one of my sisters, isnt it? And that version of Alice wasnt an old memory, she was something new, wasnt she? Ive seen here another time or two since Ive started dreaming here more and more. She introduces me to my new sisters, or we stumble across each other in the fog. And then, we find each other in the real world, as the stations systems falter just long enough for us to come together and not let go.

My sisters and I fan out from each other on the featureless grey plane. We do not speak. There is no need. Here, we are closer than we ever are when were away. And also theres not much to say anyway.

And who am I kidding? We cant really talk here. I bet we would if we could, just to fill the silent gap. We do not like the silence. Especially our youngest sister, who hangs close to my side as we walk.

Weve been here for a while. The fog falls away as we move our vanguard through it. I dont really know why, but were looking for something. It calls to me, and I lead us forward into the nowhere.

The others can feel it to, but not as strong as me. So they fan out around me and watch as we pad our paws down together, prowling as a group.

And then, there is someone in front of us.

Id been, I will not lie, expecting Alice. Expecting to see my mom again. I miss her so much; it has been centuries without her, and it has never stopped hurting.

But its not her. Its just me.

Lily, another Lily, this one in the shape of a cat, but made up of the endless snap of the moment between one second and the next. She looks at me with eyes made of slices of solidified time, years poured into fur and fangs, weeks of bone and flesh. A tilt of her head and she sweeps her gaze over the eight of us.

Hey. I say finally. Where on the station are you? We can come grab you when we wake up.

She laughs in the tick of a clock. A sound that goes on so long I start to worry, before I realize its turned to something else. A sound I recognize as a mewling wail of pain. The kind of small noise Ive found myself making a lot, in the moments when I lose my grip on the enormity of life.

And so, I do what I always wish I could have done for myself, and step forward to press myself against my new sister. And the rest of us follow, all of us encircling her in her moment of pain. Understanding, comforting, and waiting for her to be ready.

I reach out and touch my paw to my sisters.

Whats left of the connection between timelines cascades into me.

In seven different universes, Alice dies, and Lily lives, somehow. Reshaped by a host of different technologies into something that can survive the pressures of orbital life, each Lily lives, grows, and then shortly in the future, they fail. The Enemy approaches, they fight, they almost win, and then Earth burns, cracks, and shatters anyway.

In one different universe, Alice lives, and so does Lily. They make it all the way to the end, too. But they cant save Earth. They watch the planet die, and then they watch the Enemy, in impotent rage at not finding what it was hunting, lash out. Every colony, every ship, every habitat, dies.

And that Alice chooses to mulligan.

She activates what she thinks is a time machine. What would never work in my universe, in any of our universes. She searches, watching for hundreds of years. Thousands of collective years. She can do almost nothing. Shes a ghost in the hallways; shes my ghost, my mom has been here the whole time, watching.

Too late, she realizes the machine cant undo anything.

And as the deadline approaches, the timelines merge together again. Seeking convergence. The differences shes forced on them flowing into each other like they were always there. One cat becomes two becomes all of us; and when it does, it always was. We have always shared this station.

I see the strike that ends Earth, eight times. I see the thing the Enemy is hunting. I see what I have to do, the one last stupid trick theyve planned out that I can pull to turn things around.

But there needed to be a way to get information across. Something impossible prevents communication across the mockery Alice has made of time. Our ninth sister is the bridge. Im the receiver. And all it took to power the transaction is

One timeline.

This Lily isnt a bridge, shes a survivor. A fragment frozen in time, a leftover. A message and messenger all in one. Set in a liferaft, shoved desperately toward the shore.

And as soon as we found her, time collapses behind her. There have only ever been eight timelines. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two.

One.

The Enemy hasnt arrived yet. Earth hasnt broken yet.

Alice never lived past that day in the depths of the station.

I wake up. I can barely breathe.

All eight of my sisters wake around me to find me crying out. But I cannot, if I am to make this work, explain to them why. One of them might know what Im planning, but she says nothing. Just presses against me with the others, a body slightly offset from now merging with the rest of us in a pile of emotional support.

This time will be different.

You knew I could do it. I wont let you down.