“Shit, I guess this is real.”

  That simple phrase tore me from a dreamless sleep. I cracked my eyes open and slowly, achingly sat up amidst the pile of random shit I had stacked around the ‘office’ space of my rooms. “What was that, Jenna?”

  The lights were still off. She was hunched over a stack of books not far from the doorway into the bedroom, using her phone as a flashlight. She glanced over in my direction, clearly tracking movement. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

  I stretched with a yawn, silently guessing I’d slept maybe a handful of hours. My internal clock told me the sun was up, if barely. I concentrated on the gems dangling from the light fixture in the middle of the room and they flickered to life, dim at first.

  “I needed to be awake now anyway. So, you said something?”

  She tapped at her phone, shutting off the light with a pensive frown. “This. Yesterday was real.”

  “Oh. That.” I tried for a reassuring smile as I stood. After folding up the woobie I’d wrapped myself in, I moved in her direction. “Yeah, sorry. Wish I had better news, but at least our hosts are decent people as far as I can tell.”

  Her frown deepened even further as she thumbed open the cover on the book in front of her. “Our hosts. I— I still can’t wrap my head around the fact we’re staying with elves. Like, real fucking fantasy elves. Not half-assed Keebler ‘here have some fucking cookies’ pacifist elves, either.”

  While I could certainly appreciate the thought, the fact she chose to emphasize real struck me like she had a deeper, unspoken thought in mind. “And?”

  She held up the book, a thick hardcover whose featureless cover was almost nothing but blue text and a weird, pale not quite pea green yet not tan either color. Richard H. Battin. An Introduction to the Mathematics and Methods of Astrodynamics, Revised Edition. After a few seconds, she dropped that and held up the one that had been under it. Fundamentals of Astrodynamics and Applications, Fourth Edition. David A. Vallado.

  My thoughts went in several directions while she stood there, staring at the back of the book accusingly, the first of which was a simple question: why did Jenna have that many books on complicated space math when she was a chemical engineer? Second, and I knew this sounded dumb, but what did that have to do with elves? That said, I’d had maybe five hours of sleep and zero caffeine after busting my hump cross-country for days, so I wasn’t expecting anything brilliant to tumble out of my brain at the moment.

  Before I’d managed to coalesce any of that into coherent spoken words, she shook her head, dropped the other book, and glanced about. “Have you seen my laptop?”

  Finally, something I could address. I motioned and set off into the bedroom. It took me a little bit to unbury and open the case with the drone in it, but I handed over the laptop I’d slid in to keep safe. “Anything I wanted to keep extra safe is in here.”

  Eyes on the device in my hands, Jenna blinked a few times before the apology showed up in her eyes. “Oh. I saw all my stuff out there last night and figured it’d be out there, too. Thanks, Sam.”

  Something small and plastic slid out as she opened the laptop. I reflexively went for it and managed to snatch it out of the air before it hit the floor.

  “Hah, cat-like reflexes,” I chuckled as I held it out to her. My eyes fell to the object in my hand as she snatched it. My humor evaporated instantly. “Jenna.”

  “Yes?”

  “Why do you have a CAC with a DARPA logo?”

  Suddenly her eyes were anywhere I wasn’t. “Uhm, no reason?”

  I breathed in slowly. Deliberately changing a small detail when you ask someone to verify something was one of several ways to smoke out a lie. “I thought you were going to Stanford to finish your PhD.”

  “I am.”

  I suppressed a sigh. “And?”

  “And what? I’m finishing my PhD. At Stanford like you said.”

  I winced, sucking air between my teeth. “So, before we left home, you told me you were going to MIT. Now you’re agreeing to Stanford. And you have a DARPA high security lanyard and badge tucked in your laptop.”

  Instead of continuing to shy away, her apparent shyness vanished. She met my gaze forcefully. “And you just spent six months at a summer camp for an Army unit that they didn’t let people even name in public when we were kids. If anyone in our family would understand, I thought it would be you.”

  Taken aback by her sudden shift, the complete departure from the Jenna I thought I knew, all I managed to say was, “But you’re still working on your PhD?”

  She nodded.

  The pair of books she’d been holding came to mind. “In chemical engineering. Totally not space stuff?”

  Jenna blinked. “Sam, Chemical engineering was my undergrad, my foot in the door. Did you stay a regular grunt your whole career?”

  “So, you went from chemicals to space stuff?”

  “Not directly. My masters degree is in a mechanical engineering discipline.”

  It took me a second to wrap my head around just how different those two fields were. “But you are getting a PhD in space stuff? Or, maybe just overly complicated math?”

  She snorted. “Technically, my PhD is in electrical engineering. I suppose you could call it overly complicated math, though.”

  My sleep deprived brain jack-knifed adding the third engineering field to the pile. “Jenna, none of those have anything in common. You know, Dad would probably say you could’ve saved time by starting with a physics major.”

  Her expression darkened. “He did. So did Mom.”

  Ouch. Obvious touchy subject in retrospect. Aiming for a more delicate tone, I responded simply, “Oh.”

  After a little bit of additional thought, I added, “Sorry, I’m still not quite wrapping my head around everything. How does this relate to all the space stuff?” She stood there looking at me expectantly for several seconds. “Look, I get it. Top secret shit. Here’s the thing— no, in the immediate sense, who am I going to tell? There’s literally no one here any of that would make sense to. Second, even if we pretend I don’t already have a TS/SCI clearance and don’t already do that kinda shit for a living, you’re my little sister, do you really think I’d screw you over or be dumb enough to repeat any of it? That’s assuming I even understand what you’d tell me. Shit, we’re stuck here together and I’m trying to be more than the ‘I see you three or four days out of the year’ sort of brother I’ve been since— since—”

  “My eighth-grade year.”

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  I winced. “Yeah, that. We used to be close. What happened?”

  “Too much happened. Too much time, too much stupidity, too many people. Life. Life happened, Sam.”

  After a heartbeat spent simply staring, I asked, “How did it start?”

  Her features softened as she clearly dug up old hurts. “Bullying, mostly. High school was just different. A few teachers tried to stop what little they saw, but I didn’t have any real friends to look out for me. Or anyone who ever really understood me for that matter. Mom and Dad thought I went goth because it was a phase. I went goth because I decided if they wouldn’t like me then they would fear me.”

  I blinked a few times. “That sounds like you got in a lot of fights.”

  “I did, and no, I didn’t get caught. Not that that was easy, at first anyway.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? How did it get easier?”

  “Lippy bitches who never learned to back off are pretty likely to run to a teacher if they get their asses beat, so I learned not to leave visible marks, but do you really think their boyfriends went to a teacher or the resource officer when they lost the fight their girlfriends signed them up for?”

  I massaged the bridge of my nose a bit before asking, “How many? Boyfriends, that is.”

  “It doesn’t really matter. After the captain of the football team had his accident, they mostly stopped coming.” My jaw dropped. “What? It’s not like I beat him black and blue like some guy would have. He tried to start some shit, found out small hands fit under helmet face masks just fine. He also found out it’s kinda hard to stop someone from strangling you when you can’t get at their hands and they’re okay with getting hurt in the process.” She flashed a mirthless smirk. “Of course, he got hurt in an accident. Not really sure what he thought was going to happen. If he won, it’s not like he could brag about beating up a girl, and if he lost, well, no guy would admit to that either.”

  It took me a second to pick apart the explanation. “That might be true, but he had size and strength on you.”

  The smile that surfaced was not a friendly one. “Dad was right. Escalate faster, further than the other person is willing to and they’ll generally give up. He expected one thing, got something altogether different, and didn’t know how to handle it.”

  Hearing Dad’s words repeated in such a calm tone dug at a recent memory, at something the cadre at OTC had stressed repeatedly. I couldn’t help but echo what we’d been told repeatedly. “Violence of action saves more lives than needless stealth or subtlety. Everything else being equal, going farther, faster than the enemy is capable of is the key to victory.”

  Jenna nodded and deflated subtly, suddenly appearing exhausted. “Warn them off first but take them down before they know what’s happening the moment they ignore the warning.”

  Uncomfortable with the new, if somewhat reasonable, revelations, I shifted topics. “And after high school?”

  She answered with a non-committal shrug. “I was always an all-purpose nerd, so I was always going to end up doing something STEM related. Though, that just changed how the bullying is done. Most academics spent high school having the smallest dicks in the room and it shows. ‘I’m sorry, Ms. Byrne, but nobody uses em-dashes in their papers, especially not people at your level in the curriculum. I think you used AI to write this paper. I’m going to have to report this.’ Fucking coward.”

  I realized I was subconsciously clenching my fist when her tone shifted to something far more conversational and she said, “If you want to know what I’m working on, you know how drone warfare blew up real big? How it felt like we could be a stiff sneeze from World War Three without ever knowing it? Well, lots of things happen up in orbit every day. It’d be a shame if some of those things happened to some people’s satellites and nobody could explain how.”

  I connected a few dots. “So, what? Some kinda stealth drone mothership version of that X-37 spaceplane?”

  She flashed a faux innocent grin as she shrugged. “Sounds like something out of sci-fi or Cyberpunk if you ask me. There’s no way DARPA would waste money on something outlandish like that. Not nearly enough buzzwords in there to be a believable government project, anyway.”

  “Kinda makes me wish DARPA did ‘bring family to work’ days.”

  For the first time since her rescue, Jenna broke into an honest grin. “Can you imagine? I mean, what a clusterfuck it’d be. Hi, this is my brother. He’s a delta operator. Mom here was a cryptologist for the NSA before she retired. Oh, and my father’s a physicist who worked out of Groom Lake for a while and has his name on the wall at both Boeing’s Phantom Works and Lockheed’s Skunkworks. I think half my coworkers would be trying to ask you guys questions, not the other way around. Speaking of asking questions, what’s up with the other guy in from yesterday?”

  Her sudden change in topic gave me some mental whiplash. “Other guy?”

  “Not the huge guy, the other one. Looks my age. Tomas? Yeah, Tomas was his name. I think.”

  “First of all, he’s half elf and older than me. Second, you’re going to have to narrow it down a little.”

  “Older than—” Jenna’s brow came down. “Half. Elf. He looks human.”

  I nodded and motioned for her to finish her thought.

  “I— Ah, well, we’re in a different world, right?” I nodded. “So why was Tomas randomly humming songs from back home? If this is really a different world, the odds of him even getting the riff to one of Third Eye Blind’s songs right is basically zero.”

  “Oh, that,” I responded and scratched at my head, trying to find a way to package the explanation. “You know, it’s one thing to try to explain something in an anime to someone else, but when you’re talking about something you’re living, it sounds weird as hell. So, there’s a trait or perk system— and before you ask, no, I don’t know exactly how it works, but when we rescued you, he gained a trait called MTV.”

  “Like the TV channel?” Jenna asked and then squinted. “That makes no sense. They haven’t played music videos since damn near before I was born. Shouldn’t he be spouting off reality show bullshit?”

  I frowned and sighed. Goddamnit, Jenna, I remember when they still played music.

  Before I could say anything else, her face lit up. “Wait, so if you know he gained a trait that means you have access to whatever the equivalent of a character sheet is. So, is it like all the anime? Just say something like ‘status open’ and voila?”

  Hoping to slow her roll, I held up a finger. “No, it’s quite a bit more complicated than that. There’s some kind of underlying RPG system, but nobody uses it. Wait, hold on a second, let me see if I—”

  “Welcome back, Samuel,” a woman’s voice said from behind us, from the doorway to the bedroom.

  Startled, I had my pistol half drawn before it registered I knew the voice. That realization hit about the same time I’d finished my pivot, saw the speaker, and blinked.

  Aoibheann’s eyes twinkled as she smiled. Unlike our previous meeting, she was wearing something green and made from a diaphanous, nearly transparent material that left just enough to the imagination. “You called?”

  It took me a second to mentally switch off my Y-chromosome. I glanced at Jenna as I stuffed my pistol back in my holster to find her wide-eyed with one of my knives in hand. Two reactions to that hit me simultaneously. As a soldier and her older brother, the fact she kept a weapon close at hand and reacted both appropriately and quickly was warmly reassuring. At the same time, as the older brother who clearly missed out on a significant portion of her life, the fact she kept a weapon close at hand and reacted appropriately was a huge jump from the innocent girl I remembered. The implications of why tore at me because remarkably few of them were remotely positive.

  I laid a hand on Jenna’s shoulder. If I didn’t recognize the promise of violence in the side eye she turned on me, I would’ve laughed, but I understood what was flashing through her lizard brain at that very moment. She’d spent the night in that bedroom and the only way in was the door on the other side of the room. “Chill. Aoibheann doesn’t really worry about little things like doors.”

  Jenna’s eyes narrowed as conscious recognition throttled back the autonomic survival instincts. “Little things like doors? Doors aren’t little things, Sam.”

  “They are when you’re a Goddess, Jenna. Aoibheann, this is my sister Genevieve. Jenna, Aoibheann, Goddess of Life and Death, Last Patron of the Syr.”

  Aoibheann made a slight curtsey. “Pleased to finally make your acquaintance, Jenna. Your brother was quite worried, you know.”

  Jenna sheathed the knife and glanced over at me a moment, clearly confused, before addressing Aoibheann. “I’m sorry, he called you a Goddess? Like, capital ‘G’ goddess, religious figure, as opposed to insanely attractive, which you clearly are.”

  Aoibheann’s first response was a coquettish grin. “I think Samuel would tell you to embrace the power of ‘and.’”

  Suddenly reality jumped, like someone had fucked up in the editing room and spliced the wrong film segment in. One instant, Jenna was standing next to me and the Goddess was over by the bedroom door. The next, Jenna was sitting on the edge of the desk with Aoibheann standing only a few feet away.

  The Goddess turned to me. “Sorry if that was a little disorienting, Sam.”

  I blinked. “What was that?”

  “She dislocated time,” Jenna answered.

  Like when I first met her at the temple. I studied Jenna’s face for a long moment. Considering she was no longer wide-eyed with disbelief or confusion, I suspected the dislocation had not been short.

  I started to open my mouth, but the Goddess’s sudden sigh stilled my tongue.

  “Unfortunately, I’m needed elsewhere. It was nice meeting you, Genevieve.”

  With that, reality did another jump-cut and Aoibheann vanished.

  I echoed Aoibheann’s sigh. “Well shit. I was hoping to talk with her.”

  Jenna slipped off the desk and came toward me. “About what?”

  “Well,” I started and mentally fumbled repackaging my concerns in a way that didn’t sound evasive.

  Just before we hit uncomfortable silence territory, Jenna smirked. “Let me guess. ‘Geneva Checklist’ and ‘A Beautiful Mind?’”