The darkness bent, deepened, and colored. Angles blossomed. True-sound returned, but now the presence loomed behind him—no matter which way Arthur turned.

  This time he did not fall into memory. He stood at the center of a small, polished cube, its white walls enclosing him while torrents of color streamed along the outside.

  His body was there, anchored at the center.

  “We’re sorry, Arthur.” A voice, clear and eerily familiar, came to his ears.

  The colors streaming by slowed and formed as though honing in on the voice. He blinked and he was in an office chair staring at the speaker.

  “We’re just concerned. Nobody tries this hard to be a trashman.”

  Though the office looked plucked from the past, the cube’s faint outlines remained, ghostlike, as if they had always been there.

  Then he heard his own voice—strange and doubled as before.

  “I can do the work,” Arthur said.

  “Oh I’m sure there’s something we could have you do, but someone else could likely do more. That’s the point. It’s just trash, son. Take it from me, you don’t want this job.”

  “I don’t care,” his voice quivered, “I’ll do anything.”

  The cube spun on and when the blur settled again, Arthur stood beside a heavy clergy desk. The woman behind it was weary with age and he could smell her perfume.

  “Please,” he said.

  “It’s not your test scores,” the woman said, rifling through papers. “It’s the liability of bringing you along. The insurance. The medical inventory. The Asparian Empire may be rich, but war is still expensive. We can’t have people—assets—requiring so much attention.”

  “I only tripped, and just the one time, it didn’t have anything to do with—”

  “Sure it didn’t,” she eyed him in that same way everyone else did, like he was small for the sole purpose of being insignificant. “But even if it hadn’t, a gun runner needs impeccable balance. Imagine your test today was on a battlefield. The crates of munitions you spilled would have killed your comrades.”

  Arthur tried to speak, but she cut him off, snapping the folder shut.

  “I’m far too busy to argue the point further. Good day.”

  She flicked her hand, and the colors surged again. The desk dissolved as the cube carried on.

  “There’s just no space,” a voice began, then blew away. Another took its place before it finished, and then another till it was a torrent of every rejection he would never forget.

  “We’ve filled all our positions.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “What would you even do?.”

  “Donna, where’s my real two o’clock?”

  “My hands are tied. Protocol.”

  The voices stacked, quickening, as if their journey was powered by his misery. Faces half-formed in color, mouths opening and closing, a bureaucratic chorus grinding him down.

  Then—his mother’s voice—the momentum snapped and he fell to his knees.

  “Of course you have a purpose,” she said gently, “yours is to be here, with me.”

  Her tone was soft as a butcher’s in the soft harvest dawn.

  Arthur’s chest caved. He remembered whispering I love you when he left Dearth. Her face was pained not by the words but to see him go, to see him try, to get his hopes up.

  Gods, she’s dead. I’m angry. I’m resentful, and she’s dead.

  “I’m saving your life…” Hitori’s words as he stood above Arthur during the exo exam. His own thoughts rebelled against the presence showing him these images.

  You…don’t…know…me…

  The realization was stark as the memories were harrowing. He suddenly remembered a time when his mother looked at him in a different way. A memory of her standing beside his father, beside his warmth that could thaw winters.

  A mighty hum shook the cube, as though veering suddenly off course. Arthur shuddered.

  Waves—real waves—washed upon an empty shore. His mother, tall and beautiful—as she was in the pictures on their wall—stood next to a man in a sharp maroon uniform. The silver-winged Asparian bear roared on his back, a chrome fist thrust upward on the insignia marking him as a meck pilot.

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  He turned, and Arthur looked up—not from his knees, but from two small feet.

  “You coming, Arthur?” his father asked.

  “No,” Arthur remembered that no, petulant as water was wet.

  Amused, his father leaned down.

  “And why not?”

  “Because if we stay, you won’t go. I don’t want you to go.”

  Arthur sat in the sand—the thoughts of his younger self running through him—desiring to bury himself and make it that much harder for his father to leave. His parents shared a tender look, his mother brushing her hand across his father’s back before turning aside to give them privacy.

  “Now, what’s this about? We were excited last night, weren’t we?”

  Arthur had forgotten how his father’s eyes glimmered, green and silver. The memory replayed, and Arthur was grateful—even as his younger self began to beg.

  “I have to.”

  “No, you don’t!”

  His father opened his mouth to reply, then smiled curiously, as though recognizing that he himself didn't have the answers to magically make this easier. It was a detail Arthur hadn’t remembered.

  This was hard for you too, wasn’t it…

  “You’re right, Arthur. Nobody forced me into this.”

  “Then why? Why are you leaving?”

  With a weighted sigh, he looked out across the ocean.

  “Remember that fight you got into last year—with the bully at school—and Mom and I had to talk to the principal?”

  Arthur’s younger self nodded, remembering.

  “We were so worried, but when we finally got there you seemed fine. Angry still, but when we asked you why you did it, you didn’t think long did you? You asked us what else you were supposed to do?”

  He placed a hand on Arthur’s shoulder—reaching through time to console them both.

  “I was so proud. Do you know why?” Arthur shook his head. “Because you did the right thing, even if you didn’t know why. You just did it.

  “I’m going because I want to be like you, Arthur. Because I think I can help, because it’s the right thing to do.”

  So much of Arthur’s identity was wrapped up in this moment, that it wasn’t until now, as it unraveled and reset, that he understood so much more about himself—why he challenged others opinions of him, and the way he always threw himself into things—meanwhile his younger self grumbled, turning aside to hide his tears.

  “You rather fight the bad guys than be here with me and Mom.”

  His father laughed once—deep, and kind—before wrapping an arm around him and dragging him close across the sand. Side by side, Arthur leaned into his father and watched the water churn.

  “You and your mom are the best. Way better than the bad guys.” He pressed his voice low against Arthur’s forehead. “I’m not going because of them though, I’m going because people need help.”

  “I don’t care about them,” Arthur muttered.

  His father squeezed tighter as tears rolled down his son’s cheeks.

  “Them is such a big word, ya know? ‘Them’ is you and mom. ‘Them’ are your friends at school, grandma and grandpa too. Them is the cashier that gave you that sucker earlier today.”

  Arthur quieted, remembering how everything felt in that moment—the sand, the wind, the water, his father holding all of it together.

  “But what if it's really bad, what if something goes wrong?”

  The weight of consideration returned to his face. For a moment, it wasn’t the weathered look of a man in his late thirties but a man who knew the way of the world beyond what he could articulate to his own son.

  “I can’t promise things won’t go wrong, but I can’t stay just because I’m scared either. You’re too young to understand now—but one day you will.” He squeezed Arthur again. “We’ll talk more about it when I’m back, when you’re older.”

  Arthur’s stomach dropped. It was the first lie his father ever told him… but then wasn’t Arthur here, older, having the conversation yet again?

  His father stood, and Arthur drank him in. There were the physical qualities of his father that stood apart from every other person, like the breadth of shoulders, sweep of his hair, his laugh…. His size was something Arthur would never grow into, but the feeling of great strength and purpose, of warmness and safety? Arthur thought that wasn’t beyond him, not yet.

  “Dad,” Arthur said as an intrepid thought surfaced, “what if you die?”

  His mother turned, face taut with a fear Arthur would come to know well yet here his father smoothed it with a smile.

  “Well,” He said, with all the casualness of telling the time, “I’ll have died doing the right thing.”

  All this talk of right and wrong meant very little to a nine year old. His younger self cried out, his fears coming in the form of unintelligible sobs.

  His father scooped him up, whispering hushes into his ear. His mother joined them, and so too loomed the towering presence. With a painful cognizance, Arthur knew the memory was ending. Already he could feel the path behind forming once again.

  Over his father’s shoulder he saw the military shuttle waiting in the parking lot. From here it would take him to base, then off-world, and finally, to his death.

  “Before I go,” his father said, “I want you to remember something. A trick I use from time to time.”

  Arthur’s younger self nodded hesitantly. Then his father spun him in a circle. Once, twice, three times, each rotation shaking loose fear, repelled by love’s centrifugal force.

  He lifted Arthur to his shoulders, the world still spinning.

  “When something feels wrong, when you feel lost—say the words ‘do right, fear nothing’.”

  The words from their originator were like honey and, at the same time, like great cinderblocks—becoming the foundations of his entire being.

  “Now say it with me.”

  “Do right, fear nothing.”

  Their voices combined, echoing across time. The cube rushed on, the image of his father merging with every moment those words had ever been spoken, preparing him for every moment they’d be needed once again.

  The blackness returned with its silence, and the presence—not as disconcerting as it was before—waited patiently for his tears to dry. As alien as it was to be watched so intently—so intimately—there was a kindness too.

  A heat, resonating with his own. Then there was too much.

  Fire. Colors. Neon yellow and red, molten gold. Sun beams lanced through him like sharpened pikes. His heart burst open. He screamed—not in pain, but in light—as the world shattered and came together again.

  Then, a simple sound: the click of a telephone line finding purchase at the center of his skull; it spoke.

  Bond—match.

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