Andrea Höst - Gratuitous Epilogue [Touchstone - Extras]

The effect on Fourteenth was a combination of a severe aether overdose combined with the overenhancement which occurs when they touch me while I’m expanded. The Levitation and Telekinesis talents, who were flying as fast as possible, lost control and they tumbled to near-space’s ground. Blinded by white, bruised and with a couple of broken bones, they used the interface to track each other and find the gate, dragging each other toward it.

They didn’t make it, though, all of them collapsing. Zan, since her squad had been ordered not to go back into near-space, and with no sign of the storm subsiding, had thought to send drones, which easily homed in on Fourteenth and brought them back.

Broken bones were nothing compared to what the storm had done to their talents. Hyper-enhanced, producing brain lesions when any of them tried using anything energy-intensive. Four months later they’ve only just begun to reach normal levels again. Anyone with Sights – the talents which don’t just turn off and on – has had a particularly bad time of it. Given that Fourteenth is a Sights speciality squad, that means all of them, but the two Place Sight talents (Lara and Jax) have spent most of the past few months sedated because they just couldn’t handle it.

Zan, even though she made the only possible decisions and thought to send the drones, obviously feels somehow responsible, just as she had when I melted down in the Pillar. On top of that, with all the spaces realigning after the storm, the five active squads were distributed across Tare for the first couple of weeks, until Third (without their primary pathfinder) had managed to map out new routes. Even with the reduced numbers of Ionoth, it’s still been months of strain.

From the last couple of emails, it sounds as if Taarel has helped Zan through. With Maze and Grif cut off, Taarel stepped up into the senior captain role, and, despite the blow of Eeli’s loss, held everyone together.

The tone of Zan’s emails had improved by the last, written only a few weeks ago when Fourteenth’s talents settled back into more normal parameters, and I wrote her back as soon as I finished reading it, touching on my near-cooking, and then moving on to more cheerful subjects. As soon as the route was open again, and most of Tare’s Setari were back on Tare, Twelfth and the other squads who had been holding Tare together were given extended leave, which they definitely needed. Hopefully they’ll be posted to Muina soon.

Ys' birthday went well, I think. The microscope we’d decided on as a present was thoroughly approved of, fortunately, and I could tell she was relieved that her birthday lunch was a pure family affair. But it was only when we took her off in the afternoon to Pandora that I felt like I’d really succeeded in making her happy. Ys is much smarter than I am. She’s smarter than Rye, than Kaoren, than any of her teachers or the people she meets regularly. I can practically see her brain overheating sometimes, trying to make up for lost time, and I’ve been worried that – friends with Lira or not – she’ll feel lonely or isolated because she doesn’t have anyone who can think like her.

Isten Notra thought my idea for a birthday present was very funny, and was happy to be Ys' surprise for the day. When Ys realised she was going to be given a whole afternoon with Isten Notra, just to talk, she lit up amazingly, and she was in a daze when Kaoren brought her back that evening. A head full of answers . And Isten Notra has invited her back for an afternoon once a month, which is far more than I asked for, but Isten Notra says she enjoyed herself a lot, and that she thinks it important for Ys' development. Once she’d emerged from her daze, Ys went very quiet around me for a while, and I kept catching her watching me in an analytical sort of way. She’s stopped that now, but this past month has been a series of positive steps in our relationship. She doesn’t resist me nearly as much.

Having a flood of new episodes of The Hidden War also produced some odd family moments. Especially since the first new episode was my actual log of being stuck in Kalasa. It made for a really disorienting viewer experience, since underwater swimming isn’t exactly a great visual, and the only thing you can do to make hours and hours of swimming more interesting is to cut most of it out. They were very clever with the segues though – they simply made the clock display quite large to show the amount of time passing during the scenes they were cutting through. It was interesting how my vision hazed out the time I barely made it through the extra-long tunnel.

The new season had started broadcasting on Tare over two months ago, and there were a lot of interviews with the producers and the actors about how difficult it had been to go through with the production when they didn’t know if anyone at the settlement was still alive. And tons of reviews talking about how immensely traumatic it was to watch my log.

The traumatic part posed a bit of a parenting problem for us. Fortunately we had a day’s warning, since they only transmitted news, not entertainment programs, with the first contact. The kids read about it straight away, and Fein (who has become fast friends with Rye) was asking questions about it and that probably wouldn’t have mattered except that Sen got wind and wanted to watch it. That put us in a bit of a bind, since she’d been having so many nightmares lately that we’d been trying to keep her away from any negative stimulus. She couldn’t watch it without us giving her permission – and she didn’t actually argue with us when we first said that it would be too scary for her – but she was very subdued and hurt by our refusal and then had perhaps her worst set of nightmares yet. Kaoren said that this was a Sight Sight reaction: the need to know , particularly about things and people who are important to you, can be overwhelming.

Sometimes it amazes me that Kaoren’s so sane.

We decided the best thing to do was to make The Hidden War strictly full-family viewing, and only in the mornings or early afternoons so that Sen isn’t likely to sleep immediately after. Lots of explanations and support and then a carefully managed story time. We kept the kids out of school that day (and skipped our training) and watched the log-file episode. Sen actually took it pretty well – she kept patting my arm and trying to console me – and then switched to doing that to Kaoren, which told me pretty clearly how much he hates watching this log.

Ys, Rye and Lira held up well at the start, mainly impressed and disbelieving of how long I swam about, and asking pertinent questions about whether the burn hurt and why I’d changed direction. But when I broke down crying after reaching the desert, they all went grimly subdued. Me crying isn’t something Ys and Rye are used to, and Lira didn’t take it a great deal better. Ys is one of the few people who recognised that after I’d set the arrow alight, I almost lost my way walking back, and that seemed to horrify her more than anything else.

The scenes with actors playing out the drama of the search were a relief, and the kids were as usual very critical of the fact that none of the characters resemble the people they know. Though Teral Saith’s Lastier has become subtly more like Kaoren since they met, and the moment when Lastier lets his guard down when they find me more-or-less alive was a really powerful one, which I think impressed them all. Lira immediately asked Kaoren whether that was really how he’d been while I was lost.

He shook his head. "I was angry, the entire time," he said. "None of us read those platforms correctly – they serve so many purposes, but it was mass blindness not to see this one. And to run those tests without a single Setari to observe was one of the poorest decisions made during the entire settlement." He smiled, a faint, wry expression. "And I composed many lectures for Cassandra, for letting herself be stood on that platform, and then for being where I couldn’t find her, and I think I was angrier with her than anyone else. But I thought the arrow was a very good idea, so I forgave her." Then he pulled me over to his lap and squeezed me really tightly and Sen patted us both.