One

When did my life really begin? Saki Kayenlora wondered while drifting in zero-G under the dome holding her world’s final, silent debris. The first two times, or when I was born again after the fall?

Her hazy, broken reflection wriggled across the dome module's base, a two-kilometer-wide disc of slate black. Its surface was glass-smooth, but the way light danced off it at crystalline angles left Saki wondering if the deck, perhaps even the whole module, had been grown rather than built. Coasting across the deck at arm's length, she could even see her eyepatches' stark white glimmer where her right eye used to be.

I’ve got three Mothers. I don’t know any of them. That’s weird, isn’t it?

Saki felt sandwiched between the module's flat base and a parallel safety net whose strands cut dense, bright, neon-green lines between tidedowns ringing the bases of the round cisterns stacked under the dome. They loomed around and above her, dozens of them, the size of city blocks with transparent top halves. Within, reconstructions of buildings were set upon strata of dirt from Saki's former hermit-world of Laclathan. Some of the other refugees called it soil, but soil is dirt tended by living things. The Itayohkon didn't leave a single molecule of organic matter untouched, and the cargo module held what little remained with room to spare.

Between deck and net there was enough room for Saki to reach both sides, if she used her toes. She passed through a gap between two curved cistern walls and noticed the unnerving purity of the gently-forced air, completely devoid of smell. Lights from the windows above her twinkled like stars through the net.

Three births, two-and-a-half worlds, a pair of apocalypses. If things keep up like this, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to forget one or two?

Her past already felt like the strands of the safety net, stretching through endless space yet constrained to one inevitable plane, going everywhere and nowhere. Every day since age five when the government took possession of her, she'd trained to feel her Mark 90 Superheavy Exoarmor as her own body. Her weapons were meant to be trained at her current hosts, the TTMA Imperial Army. Instead, the Mark 90’s shields held up just long enough for her to have a front row seat to the living nightmare that was the end of her world.

How old am I, really? Can’t be more than twenty-one. Or do they not count the years I spent as a piece of software? I’d only be fifteen. I feel a hell of a lot older than that.

Saki hooked two fingers around a bright green strand of net, pulled herself to a faster speed and angled her course towards one nearby cistern's edge. As it towered over her, Saki peered between strands and saw a plain, tall-windowed apartment lying silent and dark, waiting to be planted at her people's new home.

None of them knew exactly what would happen in the company of TTMA, the biggest, grandest four-letter acronym of them all, the masters of the Universe. Or Known Universes, as they’d corrected her. From what she’d seen, Telene-Tetyon Maiakean Arcaelit had to be such a mouthful because its people were just that grandiose! Of all their many unfamiliar nouns, one in particular had given Saki pause: enveneration.

In a thousand years she couldn’t imagine describing exactly what had happened to her twice now, the experience of being remade, of fading from conscious reality towards a sensation of pure existence and back again. The Arcaelits had a single word for it. Hubristic or not, the refugees regarded their hosts with an equal mix of fear and hope. The Itayohkon converted all life on Laclathan into a liquid biocomputer in hours, but even they bent to the demands of TTMA at the first sight of their Silver Ships.

Even after the apocalypse, I get pushed into the next intrigue…

“Saki?” came a sharp whisper from the cistern to her left. Her mouth twisted into a grimace as she sighted a tarp stretched at an angle between the cistern's tiedowns and the deck, serving as an improvised tent.

That guy never could tell his rendezvous point from his ass. Saki recognized Tamke Veriian’s voice. Grasping the net with both hands, she grunted and flailed as her body pitched forward under her own inertia. A couple more clawing grabs and she'd changed course towards her last friend, the only other living person who knew what the Mark 90 really was.

Tamke smiled while Saki pulled herself under the side of the tarp he thought he'd remembered them picking for their hiding spot. Saki's inky hair flipped and followed her head in microgravity like a showy fish's fins as she emerged. Her left ponytail snaked behind, cinched by her neck with a green bandana as it always had been, while the other ponytail's jagged ruins flowed loosely around her. More than anyone, Saki had trouble with enveneration. Something, she wouldn't say, happened to her right eye which now lay hidden. Her left eye was as steely-gray as ever, though tired.

“Hey, warbuddy-Tamke,” Saki said. Tamke liked that nickname a lot more than the ones she used to call him.

“Hey! Did you bring it?” he asked.

“Yup.” Saki said, producing a single, white cigarette from her satchel. Or at least, when she'd described a cigarette to a Legionary onboard, the rolled cylinder was what he gave her.

“You don’t think it will, you know, do something extra to us, do you?”

“It’s not supposed to. If it did, would they let soldiers have it?”

“Not back then on Laclathan, no. But who knows what people get up to here, they don’t even have a government!”

“I’m sure that’s just a myth. Or one more of the lies we were told.”

Saki turned the blank roll over a couple times with her fingers, shrugged her shoulders, said, "fuck it. You want first drag?" and lit it. Tamke assented with a nod, taking the lit cigarette. It left a faint trail of smoke between them, a dusty filament that neither floated nor sank in microgravity. He gave a small, cautious puff.

“Don’t you wonder why?” Saki asked, half to empty space and half to Tamke.

“I don’t blame you, if that’s what you’re asking.” Tamke replied while handing Saki the cigarette.

“I know this is sudden. It’s the irony of ironies, right? Me, crawling to the damn Imperial Army for a job.”

“For my part, I’ll be glad to stay outside any war robots from now on. So, why then?”

Saki paused with the cigarette near her lips and answered, “To prove who I am, to myself. For me.” She cycled a small cloud of smoke with her breath that hung there in front of her face. With a second breath and a sharp exhale, she blew the cloud away and glanced at Tamke. His face was calm, his brown eyes free of judgment. He looked curious more than anything. After all that had happened to them, it was hard to be surprised anymore.

Passing their smoke back to Tamke, Saki added, “I need to know what was real. Piloting that thing was my whole life, and every day more of it turns out to be lies. Who am I? What in the world can I actually do?”

Tamke winced as Saki’s voice broke. Tears peeled away from her disconnected right eye, feeling like tiny worms burrowing out of her. Ever since she’d been recovered from Simspace this had been happening: no matter how tightly she controlled her mood, her right eye would betray her.

You won’t see for me, but you’ll talk for me.

Saki composed herself while Tamke took his drag. She whipped her head left and right to come back to her senses, sending a tendril of hair crashing softly into her nose that fanned out into strands like a frayed curtain.

“Saki?” Tamke asked. She turned back, expecting to see him offering the cigarette, only to find him holding a pair of handcrafted eyepatches. He'd always been good at crafts, Saki recalled, wincing at how brutally she used to tease him over it.

She took the gift. Both patches were tightly-woven and dark-colored, with thick bands. Each of their bands sported a handmade charm in the shape of number 82. They both knew exactly what that stood for: brother and sister Attus and Ava Tiazen, A-T-two. Their other comrades, their only real friends. The ones who didn’t make it.

Breaking the long silence, Tamke started, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“Thank you,” interrupted Saki, “and stop apologizing so easily!" Saki’s voice raised and lilted with faux admonition, taking on some of the brash energy she used to bring to bear at the slightest thing.

“I know they hate me.” She added.

“They…the others don’t hate you. They see you as a traitor, which is bullshit.”

“Same thing.” Her mouth curled into a wry smile she hid by turning her head. “So,” she continued, “Everyone thinks that? Every single one?” Tamke grunted in protest as he caught her meaning while handing the cigarette back to his friend. “Your own wife disapproves of your secret smoke break buddy, eh? Now that’s what I call drama!”

She raised the cigarette for another puff. Or your alleged wife, anyways. Does it count when you get together inside an overblown videogame? I’m sorry I pushed you away as hard as I did. I’m glad we tried each other out, but we’re just not that compatible. And yet, did you have to go and get hitched? Idiot. People change, even me.

Tamke didn’t laugh.

“I’m sorry, Tamke. That was too sharp. Believe it or not, I get nervous.” That one made him smile. In fact, this may have been the first time he’d ever heard Saki utter the word 'sorry' outside the context of 'you'll be sorry later'!

“It’s okay. Saki, I know whatever you do will make 'em proud someday.” He wasn’t sure he believed that, but it made him feel better to let it out into the universe as he took the cigarette again.

Saki shrugged. “Whether they come around or not, I did everything I could, gave everything.”

And on the final day, I sat back. I know, I KNOW! Saki, it still stings when you say it, and I think you know that. I’d give anything to go back and fight with you that day.

“It’s getting real short, Saki. You want last drag? I finished the last one.” The last one, six years and a whole planet ago.

Saki shrugged again, then held out her hand. She closed her eye as she slowly released the cigarette's last smoke, giving it an extra push through pursed lips. It dissipated into the tarp, carried by the slow air movement of the module's artificial environment. The sound of their breaths quickened and sharpened.

“It’s time, they’re expecting me.”

“Goodbye, Saki.”

She turned to Tamke and paused for a moment before furling her brow and saying, “Eeeh?! What’s with this funeral mood all of a sudden! I’ll barely be two hours from your settlement! Now give me my damn hug.” Nodding, Tamke leaned in and the two of them squeezed each other deeply. He was onto something, Saki thought. It felt like a farewell of some sort.

Saki and Tamke released each other, peeked underneath the tarp to make sure they hadn’t been seen, and went separate ways beneath the net. As soon as she was out of sight, Saki quickly changed her eyepatch. Though neither Ava nor Attus had lived, Saki could at least bring their memories into this new world. Tamke’s eyepatch didn’t fit with the same precision as TTMA’s, and she could tell one of the charms would eventually dig into the side of her face, but she loved it.