Gomez’s world turned red in an instant. An impact like a sledgehammer against her chest knocked her against the bottom of the overturned truck with such force that she bounced off it. Her legs wobbled beneath her.

A battering-ram of force slammed into her back. She watched a spray of her own blood jet out of her torso and stipple Stevens’s horrified face with wet freckles. The mechanical din of battle washed away in a low roar, like the sound she’d heard as a girl while floating underwater off the coast of Vieques. The ground tilted up toward her.

Color washed away, leaving the world painted in shades of watery gray as she stood over herself, counting the bullet holes in her own back. Her body was facedown in the dirt, next to a pool of blood from Stevens’s wounded shoulder. A shell casing tumbled into the blood, touching off a tiny ripple. This isn’t real, she told herself. A hallucination. A delusion.

“Not bad as delusions go,” her love said.

Gomez spun around and looked at Kieran Duffy, who stood, arms folded, wearing that damned knowing grin, his sandy hair tousled rakishly. Unlike the rest of the bleach-rinsed world, he was painted in colors brighter than life itself.

“But you’re dead,” she said.

“Then I guess we’re even.” He nodded toward her body. “So. You call this a plan?”

“It was so crazy, I thought it just might work.”

He shrugged. “I’ve seen worse.”

“So,” she said, taking a cautious step toward him. “What happens to me now?”

He lifted his arms in an exaggerated gesture of ignorance. “I’m an engineer, not a fortune-teller.”

Gomez turned back toward her inanimate body. The world around her was growing fainter by the moment, dissolving into smoky white phantoms.

“Regrets?” Duffy said.

“No,” she said.

“But sorry it’s over?”

“Yeah…. I guess I am.”

“Shame you didn’t see this coming,” he said.

“I did,” she said. “I expected it.”

“Then why’d you lead the mission? Didn’t have to be you.”

“Yes, it did,” she said. “This entire planet was at risk, and I was in command. It was—” She stopped, the words like a hang-fire in her throat. She turned back toward Duffy, who once again stood with his arms folded in front of him, his face masked by that enigmatic smile.

She tried not to say it, but couldn’t hold the words inside. “It was my duty,” she said. He nodded sympathetically.

“Yeah,” he said, “I know what you mean.”

The world around Gomez passed away into white oblivion. All that remained for her now was Kieran Duffy. She hadn’t been aware of movement, but he was so much closer now, close enough that she could almost reach out and touch him…almost.

The ocean of pain she’d swallowed to fill the empty spaces inside her threatened to surge up and drown her. “I’ve missed you so much,” she said, her voice trembling with sorrow.

“That’s good,” he said gently. “I should be missed.”

“It’s been so hard,” she said. “So lonely. Nothing’s the same, it’s like I don’t remember anymore.”

“Remember what?” he said with a voice colored in love.

“How to live,” she said. She didn’t remember being touched, but his hands gently cupped her face. She became aware of a chilling cold all around her, and the only warmth she felt was from his hands. He smiled, but she didn’t know what that meant.

“Don’t be silly, Sonnie,” he whispered. “Of course you remember. You just haven’t wanted to. Not enough, anyway.”

She closed her eyes and placed her hands over his and felt their warmth against her palms.

“Open your eyes, Sonnie,” he said, his voice quiet, his breath warm as sunlight and soft as silk on her cheek.

She opened her eyes and looked into his. She saw her reflection in the dark pupils of his eyes, which looked blacker and deeper than space, like the abyss of time itself.

“Know what today is?” he said.

She trembled in his hands. “Today is nothing,” she said.

“No,” he scolded. “I taught you better than that…. Today is everything.…Open your eyes.”

A flash blinded her as a flood of torment raged through her body, like liquid fire filled with needles. She felt suffocated, as if she were drowning. She reached out to Kieran, but he was far away and fading, painted in the unnatural shades of an X-ray image, coming apart like smoke in a gale.

“Open your eyes!” the voice boomed, filling her with soul-shaking irrational terror.

She was back in the gravel yard, pitching forward toward the ground. A third bullet ripped through her torso. Her body felt like lead. She sank like an anchor into Teneb’s gravity.

Another blinding flash, another surge of excruciating pain.

Today is nothing.

She was back in the shuttlebay of the da Vinci, watching Stevens pilot Work Bug Two back into the ship with Duffy’s lifeless body clutched in its cargo claw.

Searing light burned her eyes like she was staring into the sun. A crushing weight pressed in on her from every direction.

She was floating in the water, warm and safe at home.

“Open your eyes!”

The light flared then subsided as she pulled a ragged, painful breath into her fluid-choked lungs. She exhaled with a string of hacking coughs that filled her torso with hideous jolts of pain.

She was lying on a surgical bed in the da Vinci sickbay. She looked up into the faces of Lense, Wetzel, and Falcão.

Lense clasped Gomez’s bloody right hand in both of her own and smiled. “Welcome back, Commander.” She turned to Wetzel. “Keep her stable while I scrub in for surgery.” Wetzel nodded and Lense stepped away.

As Wetzel adjusted the surgical bed’s numerous devices and functions, she looked at Gomez. “Relax, Commander,” she said. “You’re home. We’ve got you.”

Gomez watched Wetzel and Falcão work. Lense returned, clad in a surgical gown. I’m gonna make it, Gomez promised herself. Lense stepped up to the surgical bed. “You were clinically dead for almost two minutes,” she said. “Scans don’t show any sign of neural damage, but I don’t always trust scans. So, before I put you under for surgery, answer one question: What’s today?”

Gomez smiled weakly at Lense. “Today is everything.”

Lense considered that, then smiled. “Good answer.” She nodded to Wetzel. Gomez felt the delta-wave generator fill her mind with soothing impulses to embrace a dreamless sleep. She put up no resistance and let herself drift away, confident she would awake whole.

Abramowitz stepped out of the turbolift and reveled in the simple act of walking. The EMH had done a textbook-perfect job of mending her shattered bones. But as glad as she was to be back on her feet, she was even more relieved to be looking like her old self again.

Putting her back together hadn’t been easy, however. The EMH had described her internal injuries as “shocking,” and Lense had wholeheartedly agreed with his diagnosis. Consequently, Abramowitz had been forced to stay in postsurgical recovery for almost a day after Stevens and Hawkins had been discharged to bed rest in their quarters.

It could be worse, she reminded herself. Gomez is still there. Abramowitz had learned from the EMH that the first officer had been beamed up dead and with such grievous wounds that only Lense’s stubborn refusal to quit could be credited with her revival. After surviving a seven-hour surgery, Gomez was expected to remain in sickbay for at least a few more days.

Abramowitz strolled down the corridor toward the mess hall, looking forward to a nice bowl of raisin oatmeal. And a Denver omelette. And some pancakes. A day and a half of fasting on Teneb, and I come home to a day of injected liquid nutrients à la sickbay, she groused silently. Bring on the apple pie.

She turned the corner and paused at the peals of laughter ringing out from the mess hall. Stevens’s hearty guffaws came through loud and clear, rising joyfully above the chorus of chortles. He reined in his laughter as he continued.

“So this lunatic, he tells him that they’re ‘on the same side,’ that he’s a secret agent!” More chuckling and snorting filled the room. Abramowitz peeked around the corner. Stevens and Hawkins sat across from each other at the far end of the middle table, holding court before an amused audience that included Corsi, Haznedl, Poynter, Conlon, Konya, Vinx, and half of engineering. The table in front of Hawkins and Stevens was covered with plates of food and a variety of odd beverages.

“He’s leaving out the best part,” Hawkins interjected. “Here I am, trying to keep my game face on, and this knucklehead’s laughing—over an open transceiver channel!”

“It wasn’t just me!” Stevens protested with a laugh.

“I know, it was all of you!” Hawkins said, his face bright with amusement. “I’m fighting not to crack a smile in front of this guy, but I’ve got the twit triplets giggling in my brain!”

A small, frightened voice inside Abramowitz’s head suggested she clandestinely slip away to her quarters and come back to eat later. She told the voice to shut up, and stepped around the corner into the mess hall. “Room for one more?”

Stevens, who was about to launch into the next part of the story, switched gears. “Hey! Look who’s up and around!” The group broke into applause and whistles and overlapping exclamations of “Good to see you!” and “Welcome back!”

She moved to take a seat at the close end of the table, near the door. “No you don’t,” Hawkins said cheerfully, crooking a come-hither finger. “Up here, with us, in the seats of honor.”

Haznedl and Poynter stepped apart to let Abramowitz pass by. She stepped around Hawkins, who ushered her to sit at the head of the table, between himself and Stevens. “What’re we eating?” she said as she sat down.

“It’s habañero happy hour!” Stevens exclaimed.

“Burritos, fajitas, hasperat—if it’ll light your tongue on fire, it’s on the menu,” Hawkins said.

“And for those of us still not cleared for active duty,” Stevens said as he placed a large frosty beverage in front of her, “real-tequila margaritas, courtesy of a transporter chief who shall not be named.” Poynter feigned innocence as she looked at the ceiling and whistled.

Abramowitz picked up her drink and took a sip. It was sweet and tart and cold and fiery all at the same time. She wasn’t sure whether she liked the ring of large-grain salt around the edge of the glass, though it took the edge off the drink’s more sour notes. Stevens lifted his glass in a toast, and the rest of the room followed his lead and lifted their glasses.

“To Carol,” he said, “who stopped the rest of us from eating bowls full of poison—”

“Technically,” Abramowitz said, “alcohol is also a poison.”

“Quiet, I’m toasting you. Stopped us from eating bowls of poison so she could drop a satellite on our heads instead.”

Amid the laughter, Corsi grabbed Stevens’s sleeve and tugged on his earlobe. He made an exaggerated yowl as she pulled him toward her. “You were going to eat a bowl of poison?”

“It was an accident,” he said, grinning as he squirmed loose and played to the crowd. “We were in this POW camp….”

Abramowitz tuned out the rest of Stevens’s rehash of the mission. She pretended to pay attention, in between washing down the insanely searing-hot hasperat and burritos with mouthfuls of her lip-puckering margarita. A few times every minute, she caught herself stealing sidelong glances at Hawkins.

His close-cropped hair flattered the crown of his perfectly rounded dark head, and the corners of his mouth curled winsomely behind his neatly groomed goatee.

A woman would have to be blind not to see what a handsome man he is, she thought. The echo of that notion lingered until another, more cautious voice intervened. What am I doing?

She couldn’t stop looking at him. A few times he happened to glance back, laughing at some detail of Stevens’s story, and she pretended to laugh along. She desperately wanted to reach out and put her hand over his. To touch his arm. To…

Stop it, you’re irrational, she chastised herself. You’re feeling drawn to him because he pulled you out of the water. You were injured, you were delusional, in shock. Just some silly imprinting psychology, just a Florence Nightingale effect, just…it’s just…

She swallowed another generous gulp of her margarita. The alcohol infused her body with a warm glow that, unlike the effect of synthehol, was entirely impossible to ignore.

Just stop rationalizing, she commanded herself. No more thinking. Feel. What do I feel?

Turning her head, she looked unabashedly straight at him. She let go of her thoughts and forced her eternally chattering mind into a moment of silence.

She felt intrigued. She remembered talking with him during one of the premission briefings, and feeling respected. She saw the keen mind behind his eyes, the candor of his smile, the relaxed confidence that radiated from him…and she felt deeply, powerfully, undeniably attracted.

He noticed her unbroken stare. For a moment he looked taken aback, then he smiled at her. “What?” he said in a sub rosa tone. “Something in my teeth?”

She shook her head and answered in a voice for his ears only. “That vehicle-training holo-program you made?”

“What about it?”

“Would you show it to me?”

“Sure,” he said. “When would—”

“How ’bout now?” she said, cutting him off. He peered inquisitively into her unblinking gaze.

The first tremor of a sly grin tugged at the corners of her lips. She knew that Hawkins was good at “reading” people, and she wasn’t exactly concealing her intentions in this rare unguarded moment.

He didn’t answer right away, and Abramowitz’s mind became a panicked whirlwind of all the awkward, innocently devastating things that she feared were about to issue from his mouth.

Then he spoke. “Love to.”

He stood up and waited for her to join him. She blinked, realized it was really happening, and stood up.

“Where are you guys going?” Stevens said. “I’m just getting to the—”

“I’m gonna teach Carol how to drive,” Hawkins said. “Don’t forget to tell them about the…uh…”

“Flying monkeys?” Stevens said, clearly baiting him.

“Right,” Hawkins said with a snap of his fingers. “The flying monkeys.”

Abramowitz followed Hawkins out of the mess hall to the turbolift. “It’s a great program,” he said, his mind clearly not on the small talk he was spinning. “Very versatile. Plenty of environments to choose from. I think you’ll really enjoy it.”

“I’m sure I will,” she said as the turbolift door opened. They stepped inside and stood unusually close together in the middle of the car.

Abramowitz felt like someone else—or maybe she finally felt like herself—as she lowered her head and flashed him a grin from beneath her slightly drooping black bangs.

The doors had barely begun to swish closed as she reached up, with three decades of suppressed passion suddenly unleashed, and pulled him into a hungry kiss.

He didn’t pull away.

She didn’t think about letting go.