Shad POV

I stared at the wall of my silent quarters. Pictures of Sage lit up the display in front of me—a couple of our salvaged pictures from back home of Sage and me when we first came to live with Grandpa and Abuela. Me, a scowling dark-haired boy of 12. Sage, a chubby toddler with pigtails. A bunch of shots of Sage after we'd reached the reality engine. The perky preteen in action: Sage fighting zombies, Sage fighting orcs, Sage fighting enormous acid-spitting dinosaurs.

Then the most recent pictures—the Sage I hadn't seen in a year and a half. The confident young woman off studying topics neither of us could ever have imagined a few years ago, ready to take on the galaxy, with long dark hair and a deep tan to her skin reflecting our mixed heritage. I'd been looking forward to hearing about her time at an alien university, hearing how it had changed her, and for Mila to get to know her Aunt Sage. Now it wouldn't happen.

We'd survived aliens kidnapping us from our home and forcing us into a death match against hallucinated enemies. We'd taken on the galaxy together and won over and over again. This time, there had been absolutely nothing I could do. I had stood there helpless, listening to my sister plead for help.

What was the point of all this? I buried my head in my hands. Everything I had been doing for the last ten years had been to keep Sage safe. I would have laid down and died a dozen times over before now if I hadn't known I was fighting for her. And now she was gone.

I heard the door to my quarters hiss open. I didn't look up. There were only so many people it could be, and I didn't really want to see any of them. Then, with a shriek, a little dark-haired girl came racing over to me. She threw her arms around my legs.

"Daddy, you home!"

I picked up Mila and hugged her close. "What wrong?" she asked. "Daddy, too tight."

I loosened my grip a little and looked at her. Mila was her own person. She wasn't Sage. She didn't look that much like Sage had as a little girl. But the first time I remembered needing to protect Sage, she'd been a little smaller than Mila. Our mother had been in a drug-addled stupor, and her current boyfriend was angry because we were all out of beer. He'd come bursting into the room where Sage and I were sleeping for no reason I could think of now. it wasn't like a ten-year-old would have beer in his room. He shouted so loud it woke me and Sage both up. Sage had started crying in her crib. The boyfriend came barreling at her, and I'd leapt up from my bed and punched him right in the eye. A ten-year-old punching a grown man is a joke, but he'd stumbled out of the room, swearing at my mother about her damn kids, and stormed out of the house, never to be seen again.

There had been too many incidents like that before we went to live with Grandpa, and some of them I refused to think about even now. My daughter would never know that sort of turmoil. I would be there for her, and so would Juana, no matter what. I swore it to myself.

I looked up as Juana sat down on the couch across from me. "You heard?"

"I did," she said. Her eyes were red. "I'm so sorry.”

“There was nothing I could do. I just had to sit there and listen while she called for help, and I couldn't do a damn thing."

Juana didn't speak. We sat there until Mila got tired of hugs and jumped down to run around the small cabin we three shared.

"So, what are you going to do now?" Juana asked.

I rubbed at my stinging eyes with the back of my hand. "Well, I've got a briefing in two hours."

"No, you don't," Juana said. "You're not taking your grandfather's calls right now. He said to tell you it's been canceled.”

“Oh.” I felt suddenly deflated, and I wished I had something to distract me.

"What you are going to do," my wife told me, "is let it all out. Then we're going down to Mama's, and we're going to..." Her voice started to break. "We're going to spend tonight with everyone who cares about Sage, remembering her and talking about her. And tomorrow, when we have to go back to work and do our tasks, she'll be there with us."

The sight of Juana's tears broke something in me. I put my face in my hands and wept, and she wrapped her arms around me and patted my back. We held each other for a while.

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Then I got up, went to the bathroom, washed my face, and we went down from the crew deck to the passenger hold, where all of Misfits Guild had been interrupted in their preparations for this new exploit by the news of what had happened to Sage.

There wasn't room in Mama Grace’s restaurant for all of them. She had a big cafeteria now, able to seat 500 at a time, and an army of cooks working with her. It was still standing room only out the door. They saw Juana and me coming and parted to let us through.

I found Grandpa sitting at a table near the front, a drink sitting untouched in front of him, looking lost, and it hit me all over again. We sat down. Mila squealed and hugged him. "Grandpa!"

He picked her up, dangled her on his knee. "And how are you, little princess?"

"Everybody sad," Mila observed. "So, Mila sad."

Grandpa patted her. "It's all right. You don't have to be sad. You're making everything better just by being here," he assured her.

We sat there in silence for a while. "I failed her," he said quietly.

I shook my head. "There was nothing we could do."

"I failed her just like I failed my little girl. I swore after that I'd take care of you two no matter what. Thought I'd made it, too. This was supposed to be a nice, safe trip. She wasn't even going to go inside." I’d never heard such a tone of despair in Grandpa’s voice, not even when we were at our lowest. Because we’d never actually been at our lowest. Not until now.

There was nothing I could say, because he was saying everything that I already felt. Juana got up, maybe to give us some privacy, and went over to where her mother was standing over a buffet of hot food. Mama Grace's eyes were red too. She loved Sage like one of her own daughters. Everyone did. At least Mama had food to serve. As long as she was feeding people, she'd be okay.

"What are we going to do?" I asked quietly, hoping no one else but Grandpa could hear me.

He looked at me. "What do you mean?”

“Are you going to give up? Lie down?”

“What's the point?" he challenged. "I was doing all this for her.”

“And she was doing it for us and for everyone else too," I snapped, my voice rising. I didn't care anymore if anyone else heard. I waved an arm around. "Look at this. Sage helped build all of this. Everyone in Misfits Guild knows and loves Sage." My voice broke. I couldn't bear to speak of her as though she were really gone. "You think she'd let us just give up now?"

He shook his head. “You’re right. But you should have your wife and Mila go home. We can arrange for it. We can’t risk them too.”

"Juana needs to be here," I said. "She's head of the guild. She's handling everything the crafters are doing. Hell, I could be spared more easily than her. And who are we going to send Mila with?”

“Maybe Grace would go.”

"Let's look into just how dangerous this really is," I said. "If it was a fluke or something that's going to happen again. Then I'll make a decision." I didn't want to be separated from my little girl. Not after what had just happened to Sage. But if I was convinced there really was danger, then I'd have her on the next ship back to Kronos.

A thought struck me. I sat up straighter. "Kronos! Maybe—“

"What about him?"

"Well, he... Sage has been inside Reality Engines. There must be a backup." I was getting excited. "She'd lose a few months, to be sure, but..."

Grandpa shook his head. "That was the first thing I thought of," he said quietly. "I already spoke to Coyote. It doesn't work like that. Soul coins are a unique identifier letting you integrate into a Reality Engine, but it's encoded into your personal matrix. Once you leave the engine, your token is removed. We can't just generate a backup copy of Sage. If she died while inside a Reality Engine, then yes, maybe. If we could negotiate for her soul coin back. But the area they went down in is so fragmented…"

I deflated. "Oh."

Grandpa picked up his drink and took a sip. "Such a damn waste," he said. "Her and Colin, they were the future of what we've been building here."

Colin. I had known Colin was coming in with Sage, but hearing her voice and seeing her death had made me completely forget. Sage's death still wasn't real to me. I felt numb all over when I thought about it.

Colin, though, hit me like a bat to my stomach. I sat back, overwhelmed. Colin had become a friend and more in the last couple of years. He was my annoying little brother who did everything I did, but twice as obnoxiously. He was my right arm. We’d worked more missions together than I could count, and I’d grown to rely on his off-the-wall strategies and cocky attitude.

Grandpa noticed my expression. "What's wrong?"

"I just realized Colin's gone, too." The lump in my throat was back. I couldn't speak. I shook my head. It just felt like everything I'd been building for the last ten years had come down around my ears in one flaming moment.

Mila wiggled free of Grandpa's arms. She raced off to find her grandmother, who always had a treat for her. I watched her go. "She's not going to grow up like this," I said. "Not like Sage did, fighting for everything we've got. We're going to take on this engine and get that toehold that Earth wants, and then they can go fuck themselves. I'm done. As soon as I know I've got something to leave for Mila, that she's safer than when we started, I'm out."

Grandpa nodded. "I've got enough pay saved for a good ten years' worth of ethereum," he said. "I might cash it out, go home, back to the strip. I'll have to buy another trailer since mine's gone." His eyes narrowed. "Shit! I haven't paid property taxes on the place in ten years. Damn government's probably took it."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. It was so absurd. It cut through my grief and self-pity. I got up and went to get a plate, suddenly aware I hadn't eaten since this morning. The food tasted like ash in my mouth, but I took one bite and then another. Sage wouldn't want me sitting around, feeling sorry for myself while there was work to be done.

There was plenty of time to mourn. But it wasn't going to stop me from doing my duty.