“If you’ll help them, I’ll stay.” He stood and faced her. “I’ll stay and spend my life making up for all I put you through. But please, Jayita. Before anyone dies.”
She looked at the box that sat on the table, unopened, filled with mementos of a life that belonged to someone she no longer knew.
“I should go.”
“Jayita, please—”
She paused at the door. “And you don’t have to make up for anything. Not to me.”
Jayita swiped the sensor panel and held her breath as the window cleared, not knowing what she would find on the other side.
The bandages were still in place, she could see that much from here. The woman—E’kaia, she remembered—sat on the sleeping platform, her knees pulled up to her chest, staring straight ahead, lost in her own thoughts: memories, perhaps, of freedom, or of her ch
