One raindrop out of thousands raced to the bottom of the large window overlooking the garden beyond the conference room. In that moment, Nash imagined herself as a child again; selecting a favored contestant upon the pane and tracing its path with her eyes as it slid down the glass. A youthful disappointment came over her whenever her chosen bead of water merged with others or come to a halt. On a grand scale, the scene unfolding on the other side of the frame was both systematic and random. But then again, why shouldn’t each one have a steadfast, singular destiny?

  For a moment she took her attention from the weather and brought the courtyard itself into focus. It was rich and overgrown with decadent flower bushes and dark trees, much like the center of the Hex in which she lived. She recalled playing in this very same landscape as a child after school when her uncle would bring her to work. Each distinct occurrence formed the threads of a pleasant, faded tapestry of imaginary games, scraped knees, and crowns made of leaves. Kory had always been there, sometimes Mia too, even the pale shadow of Sohrab lurked vaguely on the edges of her memory. Nash lowered her head into her hands and waited for the inevitable, sparing a moment to mourn for the drenched place twenty feet away to which she could never return.

  She rose to her feet on instinct at the hiss of the door sliding open. Her uncle entered the room, followed closely by Kory’s mother, their faces expressionless. Nash stood before them, donning the well-worn mask of resolve which hid a pit of despair greater than any collapsing mine. For a brief instant, she envied the ones who didn’t make it out of Tenphi; writhing in ecstasy one moment in the lightness of ignorance, only to be crushed beneath the very real weight of stone and concrete the next.

  Her superiors, (accusers? family?) sat at the table across from her. Nash followed suit and waited for one of them to speak, knowing a torrent worse than what raged outside would sound forth if she ventured first.

  Rahenzo, sensing his niece had marinated long enough in her discomfort, laid down a slim dossier, opened it to any page, then pretended to examine it. “So how do you think it went?” He said.

  “Why do I only ever meet with you two? There must be others in the Gild cosigning this… endeavor. At least that’s what I gather based on the scale of things.” Her heart raced as the words spilled out of her. There’d been too much time to think during the intervening voyages between destinations.

  “A question with another question, that’s… an approach,” her uncle commented.

  “Then no, I don’t think it went ‘well,’ but that much should be obvious shouldn’t it?” She blurted, not liking his flat tone or the way Perezele stared through her, leering down the bridge of her hawkish nose as if she were smelling something sour.

  Enzo forced his face into a shape that almost felt piteous. “It’s not ‘obvious’ to us,” he said.

  “You’re not serious,” her jaw dropped. “The numbers alone – how high is the official count from Deju now? Six hundred and fifty dead or missing? I’d triple that number, but it would be a conservative estimate…”

  “A low sum compared to what will happen if it all stops.” He punched the blunt end of his index finger into the table and looked her square in the eye. “And I do mean all. All of it, everything, the whole galaxy cannot afford to come to a screeching halt. We ensure that it doesn’t.”

  “I get that, but –”

  “Do you?” He rose from his seat, and kept a hand on the table as he drilled into her. This wasn’t the dressing down she expected. All the while Perezele sat there in silence, leaning forward, chin perched on her hands, with that same piercing glare.

  “I don’t think you get what we’re facing here.” He paced toward the window. “Didn’t our people sacrifice everything, living and dying aboard those old non-warp ships? Sometimes they got into those damnable pods and never woke up! Did you think of that? Did you think of their drowned corpses floating forever, rotting in that vast space between the stars, while their families lived on and died with no hope of ever seeing them again!?” He turned from the rain to face her. “The only thing, and I do mean the only thing that keeps all of this going, this… life you take for granted is Vercoden, our first and only deliverance from darkness!” He paused for a time, letting the weight of his words sink in.

  “I’m sorry…” Nash whispered in shame.

  “And to answer your, frankly irrelevant, question…” Enzo continued, not ready to lighten up just yet. “You’ve got to understand there needs to be a level of discretion with what we’re doing. Of course, the higher ups know about these operations. They wouldn’t be happening at all without the approval of others beyond myself. But be real for a minute,” he turned to face her. “Why would an unvetted planetary geographer be zipping around with the protégé of our Earthling rivals, three members of a long-imprisoned, dangerous race – no offense…” he glanced apologetically to his counterpart, receiving from Perezele the stony silence to which he was accustomed. “…and an undocumented mind-reader who, as far as we know, works with petty criminals?”

  “I – how did you…” Nash stuttered, shocked as to how her uncle could have learned that last part.

  “It doesn’t sound good when I put it like that does it? And it shouldn’t sound good. By all accounts it should disturb us a great deal, and yet…” his eyes turned upward, the disdain in his voice replaced by the terror of delight. “…Somehow your little team is lightning in a bottle, producing one unmitigated success after another!”

  Nash pressed her back into the chair as far as it would go, wishing the plush fabric would carry her to some unseen world the way the bushes outside used to. Words of reason and the fancy arguments they might form abandoned her. Only the names of the three places they’d visited such violence upon remained. “…but C.A., Rallus-Beta, Deju… all of them were –”

  “Executed perfectly, above and beyond, every single time. And I know what you might be thinking,” Enzo half leaned, half sat on the table in front of her and folded his hands in his lap. “But don’t you worry about how we’re going to spin this. It was an electrical fire at a mismanaged outpost, an unfortunate geological anomaly, and what was that middle one?”

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  “…Rallus-Beta.”

  “Right, Repho, nothing to fuss about there…” he clapped his hands to his thighs and rose to pace the room again, ruminating at length about similarly related points of discussion. It all blurred together into a blend of imperceptible static, an auditory soup running thick down the sides of Nash’s head and over her numb ears. She wanted to drown in it. “…but more to my point, thanks to the acquisitions your scouting made possible, for the first time in over thirty years, our total yields aren’t falling half as fast as they were. We might even be able to level off and break even soon! You heard that, didn’t you? You’re helping to solve a problem that’s older than you, and for that you should be proud, not scared!” His eyes gleamed, illumined briefly by a bolt of lightning outside the window. The downpour increased.

  “And that’s…it?” Nash ventured timidly, daring to shift in her seat just a little. She wondered how she would ever rise from it after burying herself so deep.

  “That’s it,” her uncle beamed. “It’s all it ever was, and it’s everything.”

  #

  The storm raged on as Nash stepped over the threshold of her apartment, dripping wet without a shred of regard for the tile floor that would now surely become slick. Not even the fine, tufted rugs, placed with care along the border between the kitchen and living room, were safe from the flood. It had taken her a long time to come home. She hadn’t bothered with the train, a car, or even an umbrella.

  “Didn’t find him tonight either?” Nash asked Kory, who sat curled up on the couch, chin on her knees, and looking worriedly, out the sliding glass door that led to the balcony.

  “No,” she mumbled. Since landing a few days ago, Kory had taken to wandering the streets all day, treading back and forth through the old neighborhood where she remembered Billy’s fighting gym had been. Hours upon hours of searching, drifting, and hoping proved fruitless. It was impossible to find, as invisible to her as he was.

  Nash pitied her friend, who clung to the ghost of a more pleasant period of time, brief as it was. Though she wasn’t sure Kory saw it that way. “I don’t know why you’re in such a hurry to get yourself injured again.”

  “If I could just…if I could only – what happened to you?” Kory’s attention refocused at last. It wasn’t like Nash to drip water all over the floor. Usually, she was the one scolding others for that.

  “Never mind about me,” Nash shrugged off her coat and let it fall with a heavy, wet thud. “We have a better place we can train, and we can go there first thing tomorrow morning if that’s what you’d like. And besides… even if you could find Billy, he’d think you were as crazy as he did the last time you spoke to him…we need to peel Zol off of that driving range, or he might forget how to do anything else.”

  #

  “’In medias res’ means, ‘in the middle of things.’ It’s a literary technique in which a story starts in the middle, works its way back up to that point from the beginning, and then continues on to the second half. The Odyssey is a common example, for instance…” Greg droned on as he and Zol arrived at the eleventh tee box. Last night’s storm had a left a mess for the grounds crew, but as the sun dawned on a new day, you wouldn’t know it. That guy he’d hired from Augusta ran this place like the navy. “…and though this isn’t quite the same, today we started on the back nine so you can see the full effect of what I’m about to show you, without taking all day of course. I know y’all are heading out to the farm later, and trust me, I won’t be far behind.”

  Zol grunted in the affirmative as he placed his tee into position. He locked onto the bumpy, white, sphere, raised his driver high, and launched the ball with mighty crack into the sky. It sailed on the breeze before landing an impressive three hundred and thirty yards away; right down the middle, no practice swing, airway to fairway. At his feet lay the splintered remains of the tee. It seemed he needed a new one every hole.

  “My God, man,” Greg exclaimed, holding his hat to his chest. “You need a better coach than me… or maybe you don’t. At least let me get you some new clubs, or a sponsor.”

  “You keep trying to throw money at me and I’ll go back to my cave to hit golf balls into the ocean,” Zol threatened flatly.

  “Just the clubs then, all of yours have impact-dents in them,” Greg said as he lined up his own shot and drove the ball a gentlemanly two hundred and sixty yards. He bent over to pick up his tee, placing it in his pocket as he returned to the cart where Zol waited. “You should let me make you an iron with Vercoden in the handle, and we’ll see if you can smack the ball into the next quadrant,” he joked as they drove away.

  After finishing the remaining holes in a crisp two hours, Zol hitting absolute missiles on each, the pair finished putting on the eighteenth green, and turned the cart back toward the clubhouse. The return should have taken no time at all. Wasn’t the end of the last hole always next to the clubhouse? It didn’t seem like it today. At once, darkness fell, compounded by the arrival of a dense, sudden mist. Greg drove through it, eagerly gripping the wheel and grinning madly. The chirping birds, rustling leaves, and every other ambient sound faded away until all that remained was the faint rattling of their clubs. Zol forgot his bearings as unfamiliar vegetation swept past. It took a lot to put the stoic creature on edge, but whatever Greg was cooking up did the trick.

  At once, the vehicle lurched to a halt, nearly tossing the passenger from his seat. Before them sat two glowing, golden orbs about seven inches in diameter. They laid six feet apart from one another, and appeared to the conditioned eye to serve as tee markers for a hole yet unrevealed. “Get your nine iron,” Greg said, slipping from the cart with that same uncanny look on his face. Zol did as he was told and joined his friend. The turf below their feet was curiously pristine, unmarred by anyone else’s botched drive attempt.

  “Isn’t it splendid?” Greg whispered; arm outstretched to the luxuriant par three unveiled by the fog’s sudden departure. Sunbeams cut thick through the lifting cloud and shone through the trees lining either side of the fairway, neat as a pin. At the end sat a delicate pond with a fountain in the center serving as the water hazard. Last was the green, from which rose a satiny, red pennant bearing the number nineteen. “It’s special, you know, and it’s not just for everyone,” he mused. “Only on certain days, when the course is shifting and the winds are changing, and the moon is full –”

  “This planet doesn’t have a moon, it is a moon.” Zol interrupted dryly.

  “– It’s for effect, I’m setting the scene, dude…” Greg brushed him off, before regaining his momentum. “…only then will the nineteenth hole, the stuff of legend, reveal itself to the player whom fortune favors!”

  Zol wasn’t sure he bought into the ‘myth and magic’ of the nineteenth hole, noting the massive net visible on the edge of his left peripheral, but he humored his friend. And besides, transcendent, or not, he still wanted to play it. He raised his iron as a conqueror’s saber, and gave a nod of approval.

  “After you, my friend,” Greg gestured proudly. “You’ll be her first.”