Морган Райс - Return

Kevin’s eyes flashed open, and he saw the room around him, white walled and gentle seeming. There were blue-skinned aliens around him, in pristine uniforms that seemed familiar. It took him only another moment to realize that this was yet another hospital. He was spending far too much time in these places. General s’Lara was there, looking on with obvious concern. So was Ro, and it was even stranger seeing the expression on the face of an alien species that normally had no emotions.

Then there was Chloe. She stood over him, and Kevin could see that she had been crying, although now her tears seemed to be ones of joy rather than pain. She reached out for him.

“Kevin, I thought you were dead!” she said. “I thought…”

“ I thought I was dead,” Kevin said, trying to make a joke of it even though it was anything but that. He could still feel the pain that had been clamped around his heart, so crushing and dangerous and deadly. He’d truly thought that he was going to die. He’d thought about all the things he’d done, and all the things he was going to lose.

As Kevin looked over at Chloe, though, he felt a burst of shame, because it hadn’t been her he’d thought of in that moment when he’d been so certain that he was about to lose everything—it had been Luna. It had been times with Luna that had come into his mind when he’d been thinking about moments from the past that mattered. It had been Luna’s memory he’d grasped hold of and kept close to him in the moments when he was dying. It had been Luna, not Chloe, whom he’d been so afraid of losing. Just looking at Chloe now felt like a betrayal, even though it was something that he couldn’t help.

“Kevin, what is it?” Chloe asked. Of course she’d seen it.

“It’s nothing,” Kevin said, dismissing the thought. Instead, he stood up and walked around the room, trying to assess how he felt, ready for his body to be weak and ready to collapse from the effort involved even in trying to move. He was actually a little surprised that the medical staff there let him, but maybe they wanted to test how he was too.

Instead of collapsing he felt… healthy. Kevin wasn’t sure he’d ever felt that healthy, at any point in his life. He could breathe easily, and there was no pain in his head, no tightness in his chest. It was only because all the things that had been wrong with him were gone that he was able to realize just how bad the sickness had been.

It felt as though there had never been a day of his life before this when he had been truly well, because this wellness felt almost alien compared to everything that had gone before.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Chloe asked him, and Kevin nodded. He wasn’t sure how he could describe it.

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt this good,” he said. He looked around at General s’Lara and the medical staff, who all seemed to be looking over at him as if trying to check that things were working as they should. “What did you do?”

“We cured you,” the general replied. “We scanned your body, searching for defective patterns, and then used our healing technology to overwrite those patterns with something new. Your brain has been stabilized, so that your illness cannot progress.”

“And my ability to translate signals?” Kevin asked, and then realized the answer to that question before any of the others could say anything. The Ilari weren’t speaking his language, but their own. He could still understand them, could still sense the signals of the AIs communicating with one another, and could still translate them when they got too loud.

…appears to be fully recovered…

…may be necessary…

“The procedure should have affected nothing but your illness,” General s’Lara said, with a glance across to one of the medical staff, who nodded. Kevin could see her relief at that confirmation.

Kevin should have felt joy at that. He did feel joy, but there was more to it than that. He felt as though this should have been harder somehow. After all the work that scientists had done on Earth trying to stabilize and heal him, it felt impossible that these aliens could just make him well with so little effort.

“You… healed me,” he said. “ Why ? Why did you heal me? You know what I did. You know I’m responsible for the destruction of the world you hid on.”

“And we tried you for that,” General s’Lara said. “We agreed to let you stay. Do you think we would hold back our healing from you when we had the ability to help you? That is not who we are. It is not right .”

The sheer goodness and benevolence of that overwhelmed Kevin in that moment. How could these aliens be so benevolent? It seemed impossible that anyone could be so generous to someone who had done so much to hurt them. After all that he’d done…

“It wasn’t your fault, Kevin,” Chloe said.

Kevin wished he could believe that. All he could do was feel amazing levels of gratitude that the others felt that way.

“Thank you,” he said to the general. “I… I don’t know what to say.”

They’d given him back his life. They’d healed him, when no one else could do it, and they’d done it when he was sure they had every reason not to do it.

“You don’t need to say anything,” General s’Lara said. “We help those who truly need it. We seek peace where it can be found. We forgive .”

That seemed impossible to believe. Kevin wasn’t sure he would be able to manage to forgive the Hive. If he had a chance to destroy it, then he would. And yet… he looked across to Ro. Kevin didn’t hate him. He even trusted him, and yet the former Purest had been one of those trying to destroy his planet.

“I have so much to learn,” Kevin said.

He looked across to Chloe, and again, he had the feeling of guilt that he’d been thinking of Luna and not her when he’d been dying. Chloe had been the one who had been there with him on the Hive’s world ship. She’d helped him to escape. He knew what she felt about him, and he even felt some of it too… but it was Luna whose face was there when he shut his eyes, Luna he thought about in every spare moment, even though there was every chance that she was lost in the mass of the transformed.

“You’ve been given a fresh start, Kevin,” General s’Lara said, gently, as if she understood the sheer enormity of everything that was happening for Kevin. “The question is what you choose to do with it.”

Kevin couldn’t stand there in the room right then. It was too much. It wasn’t just that he didn’t know what to say, or what to think. He wanted to breathe the open air in that moment. He wanted to remind himself that he was actually alive . That he could actually potentially have a future.

There were doors from the medical bay leading out onto a kind of balcony that appeared to have been grown from the tree itself. It curved around like some great fungus growing out of the trunk, more than big enough to hold him and a dozen others. Kevin stepped out onto it, the trees surrounding him, the beauty of the world spread out below. Here and there, small ships darted between the trees as agilely as birds, or up to the larger vessels in orbit. Birds bigger than Kevin nested in some of the branches, singing songs that filled the space with music, while creepers hung down almost to the ground, and furred creatures half Kevin’s size clambered up and down them.

The air was sweet out there, and it wasn’t just the musk of forest flowers and the leafy canopy, although that helped. It was the fact that he could take a full breath without pain, and stand there without the dizziness that came from his leukodystrophy threatening to overwhelm him. It was so strange standing there like that, and the longer Kevin did it, the more certain he was that his whole life had been affected by this disease. He’d thought that it had only come into his life in the last few months, but one breath of the air here told him that it had always been a part of him, lurking and waiting, only seeming to come to life at the point where it got too bad to deal with.