Arizona waited until Vermont was asleep.

  Not just in the drifting, drowsy sense where a child could still be coaxed awake by the wrong floorboard, the wrong dream, the wrong worry pressing at the edge of sleep.

  Properly asleep.

  The sort of sleep children fell into after two straight days of fear and too much hope and one overwhelming reunion that had finally exhausted the body past the point where it could keep asking if its mother was really still there.

  Vermont had fought it, at first.

  Of course she had.

  She wanted to stay with Arizona. Wanted to keep touching her hand or sleeve or shoulder as if doing so would keep the sea from changing its mind and taking her away again. Wanted to ask too many questions and then, halfway through them, sag under the weight of her own exhaustion anyway.

  Arizona had let her ask a few.

  Had answered softly.

  Yes, I’m here.

  Yes, I came back.

  No, I’m not going anywhere tonight.

  Yes, you can sleep beside me until you drift off.

  The little prefab room had felt impossibly full in those moments—small bed, soft lamp, folded blankets, the faint clean smell of fresh bandaging and battle-scrubbed skin, and Vermont tucked close in that half-curled way children and the newly safe both slept.

  Arizona had sat beside her bed for longer than strictly necessary.

  One hand resting lightly over Vermont’s hair.

  The other on the wheel rim of her chair as if, at any second, she might still have to move for some new emergency.

  There was comfort in the room.

  Not enough to quiet the ache entirely.

  Enough to let her breathe around it.

  By the time Vermont’s breathing deepened fully and her small fingers relaxed their loose clutch on Arizona’s sleeve, the rain outside had settled into something softer than before—less drizzle, more a steady whisper over rooftops and pathways. The atoll, battered by return operations and still buzzing with late-night medical and repair work, had gone into the sort of subdued activity bases developed after battle: never truly asleep, but quieter. Voices lower. Boots less hurried. Doors shut more gently.

  Arizona leaned down as far as her body and chair allowed and pressed a kiss to Vermont’s forehead.

  “Sleep, little one,” she whispered.

  Then she sat back, adjusted the blanket one last time, and wheeled herself away from the bed.

  Her hands were tired.

  That was the first thing she noticed once the room was quiet enough to hear the smaller truths in her own body again. Not her back, not the wound memory still trembling faintly in her chest and belly where the bomb had penetrated deck and fear at once. Her hands.

  The long battle in shipform always did that to her when she returned to her wheelchair.

  Out there, at sea, her paralysis did not define movement the same way. Her shipform was whole in the sense war allowed. She could still command it, feel through it, suffer through it, fight through it.

  But once she returned to herself here—truly herself, the woman in the chair with her hair still faintly smelling of salt and smoke and antiseptic—her body returned to its old divisions.

  Waist down, silence.

  Waist up, burden.

  It had been that way since Resolute Shoals twenty years ago.

  She had long since stopped making dramatic peace with it. Peace suggested neatness. She had something more practical than peace now: habit, grace, and the refusal to let injury turn her into a lesser version of herself.

  Still, tonight, her shoulders ached.

  Her palms ached.

  And there was a private, ugly flutter in her chest she had not fully named because it had nothing to do with the bomb hit, not really.

  It had to do with the room she was about to visit.

  Pennsylvania.

  Her brother.

  Alive.

  No, not alive in the simple sense.

  Here.

  That was more accurate and, perhaps, harder.

  She had imagined finding his wreck once, long ago. Imagined perhaps a pendant. A fragment. Proof. Something that would allow grief to settle into certainty.

  Instead she had been given a ghost with battleship guns.

  Abyssalized. Conscious. Coherent enough to choose and refuse. Damaged almost beyond reason. Held now in secure medical confinement not because Horizon was cruel, but because everyone with a functioning survival instinct understood that an Abyss-touched original battleship who had spent years—decades?—alone in the dark could not simply be parked in a spare prefab and trusted not to vanish or explode.

  Arizona did not resent the guards.

  She resented the need for them.

  The corridor outside her room was quiet. One of the overnight orderlies stationed in the residential section saw her emerge and moved at once as if to offer help. Arizona gave a small shake of her head.

  “I’m alright.”

  That was only partly true.

  The orderly, trained enough by now to recognize when “I’m alright” meant I need dignity more than assistance in this exact second, stepped back and only said, “If you need anything, ma’am.”

  Arizona nodded once.

  Then wheeled herself into the night.

  The atoll’s paths gleamed wet under the lamps.

  Repair lights still burned in the distance, pale and surgical around the bays and bathhouses where the worst of the fleet damage was already being triaged. Somewhere farther off, a generator throbbed with the low, familiar pulse of held-together infrastructure. Somewhere else, one of the watch whistles sounded and was answered, not urgently, just enough to keep the web of the base intact through the dark.

  Arizona moved through all of it steadily.

  No one stopped her.

  Some saluted or straightened or softened when they saw her coming, because everyone on Horizon had heard enough by now to know where she was likely going and why.

  A Marine at one corner post lowered his eyes respectfully and did not try to speak to her.

  One of the med staff near the secure ward entrance opened the door before she reached it.

  “Ma’am,” he said softly.

  “How is he?”

  The medic hesitated, and in that pause she could tell the answer was not a simple one.

  “Coherent,” he said finally. “Agitated earlier. Less now. He…” The man searched for words he clearly did not feel properly trained to use. “He responds to your voice. Even through the door.”

  Arizona’s hands tightened once on the chair rims.

  Of course he did.

  The secure ward was not a hospital room in any ordinary sense. It was one of the reinforced observation and treatment spaces Horizon had once used for damaged or dangerous recoveries when they expected a patient to wake up ready to bite the world.

  Pennsylvania qualified.

  The room’s walls were solid enough, the fittings bolted down, the corners engineered to avoid becoming weapons if someone with battleship strength and a death wish decided he wanted to test how many people it took to stop him.

  There were two guards outside.

  Both Marines. Both armed, though not in the obvious aggressive way. Weapons slung ready, posture alert but not hostile.

  They knew who was inside.

  They also knew who was arriving.

  One of them, younger, straightened sharply at Arizona’s approach. The other, older and better at reading the human beings in front of him instead of just the protocols behind them, simply stepped aside and opened the inner access.

  “He’s calmer, ma’am,” he said. “But if he—”

  Arizona looked up at him.

  “He won’t hurt me.”

  The Marine did not argue.

  Not because he entirely believed it.

  Because something in her voice made argument feel disrespectful in the worst possible way.

  He nodded.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Then he let her in.

  The room smelled faintly of antiseptic, burned metal, sea-salt, and something darker beneath it all—something like stormwater trapped inside iron.

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  Pennsylvania was there.

  Not on some proper hospital bed. That would have been absurd for a man in his state. His shipform was elsewhere, already under repair and stabilization, because no vessel that badly damaged could be left untended if anyone wanted it to survive the next week. What remained here was him in his humanoid state—or as close as he could come to it now.

  He sat in a reinforced chair that looked too small for the weight of what he was, one arm braced on his knee, head lowered slightly as if listening to a room full of things no one else could hear.

  The Abyss still clung to him.

  That was obvious the moment Arizona saw him up close in proper light.

  He looked like Pennsylvania.

  That was the hardest mercy.

  The lines of him were still there. The heavier build compared to her. The hard, unmistakable family architecture in his face. The bones of the man he had been. The broadness of shoulder and chest that had always made him look like he had been built one layer thicker than most of the men around him.

  But all of it was marked now.

  Veins or lines of corruption dark beneath skin in places they should not be. Scarring too old and too strange to fully belong to ordinary battle damage. The sense of pressure around him that said there was another voice living in the walls of his head and had been for a very long time. His hair fell rougher now, darker with damp and old ash. His eyes—

  His eyes were the hardest part.

  Because they were still his.

  Still aware.

  Still human enough to find her.

  He heard the chair before he fully looked up. Or maybe he heard her breathing. Or maybe, as the medic had said, her presence reached something in him more directly now.

  Arizona wheeled in just past the threshold, the door closing quietly behind her.

  Then she spoke the simplest thing in the world.

  “Penn.”

  The effect was immediate.

  His whole body, which had held itself in that coiled, inward, almost feral stillness of someone fighting a thousand impulses by never relaxing enough to let them near the surface, eased.

  Not much.

  Enough.

  He lifted his head.

  And in his face there came something that looked almost unbearably like recognition without armor.

  “Ari,” he said.

  His voice was rough.

  Not in the casual way of exhaustion or smoke or injury.

  Rough with disuse. With old screaming. With too many years of talking only when it mattered or when the Abyss wanted him to hear his own answer back twisted.

  Arizona had braced herself for many things.

  For seeing him hurt her.

  For seeing him changed.

  For not being recognized.

  She had not properly braced for hearing him call her by the old name in his old voice.

  It struck her so hard she almost forgot to move.

  Then she wheeled closer.

  Not all the way within reach immediately. Not because she feared him. Because she knew enough of trauma—her own and everyone else’s—to understand that even love could startle when it arrived too quickly.

  He watched her come.

  His gaze dropped once, involuntarily, to the chair.

  Not in judgment.

  In shock.

  Then back to her face.

  It was almost painful, the nakedness of that reaction.

  He had not known.

  Of course he had not known.

  Everything inside him that had been prepared for reunion—if any part of him had ever allowed such a fantasy to survive—had been built on an image of her from before.

  From the sea. From war. From memory.

  Not this.

  Not Arizona moving by the strength of her arms alone, the lower half of her body motionless beneath the blanket draped over her lap.

  His jaw tightened.

  “What… happened to you?”

  He did not ask it cruelly.

  Not even clumsily.

  Just with the horrified, immediate grief of a brother discovering that while he had been gone from the world, the world had not been gentle to his sister either.

  Arizona held his gaze.

  She had never been one for false softness when the truth was owed.

  “Resolute Shoals,” she said. “Twenty years ago.”

  She could have dressed it up. Could have said an attack, or a strike, or the fighting there, or any of the vague military phrases people used when they wanted trauma to sound like weather and not betrayal.

  Instead she told him plainly.

  “I took damage. It cost me the use of my legs.”

  Pennsylvania stared at her.

  His hands—large, scarred, still carrying that awful undercurrent of potential violence even at rest—tightened slowly on his own knees.

  There was anger in him.

  But not at her.

  Not at the chair.

  At time. At absence. At the fact that this had happened and he had not been there.

  “I should’ve been there,” he said.

  The sentence came out too fast. Too automatic.

  Arizona knew that reflex.

  She had worn it herself after enough losses. The absurd, impossible conviction that the dead or absent or simply differently positioned could have prevented things history had already set in motion long before they knew where to stand.

  “No,” she said softly.

  His eyes flashed.

  “Yes.”

  “Penn.”

  He looked away from her then, but only because looking at her was making the thing under his skin move.

  She could see it.

  The Abyss in him was not some puppet master riding his bones while the true Pennsylvania slept helplessly beneath. That would, in a way, have been easier. Cleaner. A villain and a victim.

  This was worse.

  He was him.

  Fully conscious. Fully aware.

  And the Abyss was the dark thing perched behind his thoughts, always whispering, always offering, always pushing—violence, isolation, suspicion, the ease of becoming less human because less human hurt less.

  Arizona could almost see the effort it took him not to yield to those currents now that she was here.

  Not because he wanted to hurt her.

  Because feeling her presence meant feeling what he had lost and what he had become in the same room, and the Abyss would rather anything than that.

  So she said his name again.

  Gently.

  “Penn.”

  He dragged his gaze back.

  She did not let him look away this time.

  “I am alive,” she said. “That is what matters tonight.”

  His mouth worked once, then flattened.

  “That should not be enough.”

  “No,” she agreed. “But it is still true.”

  They sat with that for a moment.

  Rain tapped softly on the outer wall.

  The room’s light buzzed low overhead.

  He looked older than death had any right to make him. Not in years exactly, because time had treated them both strangely, but in accumulation. In the heavy set of the face. In the way being alone too long made even strength start to look like damage.

  Arizona wheeled a little closer.

  Not enough to crowd him. Enough that the space between them stopped feeling like a guarded room and started feeling like family still trying to remember its shape.

  “You came for me,” she said quietly.

  It was not accusation.

  Just fact.

  Pennsylvania’s eyes darkened.

  “I came because you were in range.”

  That sounded like deflection immediately.

  Arizona let one corner of her mouth tilt.

  “Is that all?”

  His gaze narrowed by a degree that would once have meant he was preparing some older-sibling answer involving sarcasm or command-tone impatience.

  Instead, what came out was rougher and much more honest.

  “No.”

  The room gentled around that admission.

  She nodded once.

  “Thank you.”

  He made a small, irritated sound at that.

  As if gratitude made him uncomfortable now. Or perhaps always had.

  Arizona watched him a little longer before speaking again.

  “You do not have to sit like a prisoner with me.”

  Penn’s expression hardened immediately.

  “I am a prisoner.”

  There it was.

  The first clean edge of the real fight inside him.

  Not the battle.

  The self.

  Arizona folded her hands lightly over the blanket in her lap.

  “No,” she said. “You are wounded.”

  “Ari.”

  “You are wounded.”

  He laughed once, low and ugly.

  “That’s what we’re calling this?”

  “We are calling it what it is.”

  That made something flicker in his eyes again—frustration, grief, maybe the beginning of panic.

  “You don’t know what I am.”

  It was the sort of thing people said when they desperately hoped not to be contradicted.

  Arizona knew that too.

  So she answered carefully.

  “I know enough.”

  His shoulders went tighter.

  The pressure in the room changed with him, that faint Abyssal push under his skin rising as his thoughts darkened.

  Poison.

  Ghost.

  Shouldn’t be here.

  Should’ve stayed out there.

  She did not need him to say those exact words to know them. She could see them moving through him the same way she had once seen battle damage stress travel through a hull under bad water.

  “Penn,” she said, softer now, “look at me.”

  He did.

  “That voice in the back of your head,” she continued, because she refused to dance around the worst part if naming it would help him feel less alone in it, “it is not you.”

  His jaw flexed.

  “It’s in me.”

  “Yes.”

  “It wants—”

  “I know.”

  He stopped.

  Something in that answer reached him.

  Not because it solved anything.

  Because it told him she was not naive.

  Arizona was not treating him like a recovered child or a miracle or some sentimental family return that erased the Abyss because she wanted it to.

  She knew he was dangerous.

  She knew he heard things he hated.

  She knew he was coherent despite corruption, not separate from it.

  And she was still here.

  That mattered enough to make his breathing change.

  A little shallower at first.

  Then steadier.

  He looked down at his own hands, flexed once as if testing whether they were still his tonight, and said the thing he had been circling around since she entered:

  “I don’t want to stay.”

  Arizona did not react outwardly.

  Not because she had not expected it.

  Because she had.

  He spoke before she could answer.

  “I never wanted to be found. Least of all by you.” His mouth twisted around the words as if the truth of them hurt on the way out. “I work better cut off. Away from people. Away from… this.”

  He lifted one hand weakly, indicating her, the room, the whole absurd idea of being back among the living.

  “I’m poison, Ari.”

  The sentence landed heavy and familiar.

  Not because she believed it.

  Because she had heard versions of it from wounded souls before—girls who thought the way they survived made them unfit for gentleness, boys who thought the damage meant they had forfeited belonging, men and women who mistook isolation for mercy because it was easier than risking being loved and hurting someone in return.

  She rolled a little closer still.

  Close enough now that if he had wanted to lunge, to break, to run, he might have tried.

  He did not move.

  “You are my brother,” Arizona said.

  He shut his eyes.

  “That doesn’t fix it.”

  “No.”

  She was quiet for a second.

  Then she added, with the full softness and force of who she was:

  “But it means you do not get to decide for me whether I am better off without you.”

  His eyes opened again, and there was actual shock there this time.

  Arizona rarely used force that way.

  Not loud. Not cruel.

  Maternal force. Old battleship force. The kind that did not ask if the room would please adjust and simply expected the truth to be endured.

  Penn looked almost lost for a moment.

  The Abyss in him did not like that. She could feel it in the subtle tightening, the pressure spike, the way one breath caught wrong in his chest.

  “You don’t understand,” he said.

  “Then help me.”

  That stopped him cold.

  Because it was not a challenge.

  It was invitation.

  Help me understand.

  Not explain yourself so I may judge you.

  Not confess so I may decide whether to keep you.

  Help me.

  He had no ready answer for that.

  Arizona leaned back just enough to give him room again.

  “I am not asking you to be easy,” she said. “I am not asking you to be fixed by morning. I am not asking you to like this.”

  His mouth tightened.

  “Then what are you asking?”

  “For you,” she said, “to stay long enough that leaving is a choice made after rest, not fear.”

  The room went very still.

  Penn stared at her as though the concept itself was alien.

  Maybe it was.

  Twenty plus years alone with only the Abyss for company would make any softer offer seem suspicious.

  Arizona could not fix that tonight.

  She knew it.

  But she could sit here.

  She could remain.

  She could be his sister without asking him to turn instantly into someone easier to love.

  That, perhaps, was the only honest place to start.

  After a long silence, Penn looked away again—but not to retreat.

  To think.

  “You shouldn’t be doing this,” he muttered.

  Arizona’s answer came with the faintest thread of dry humor beneath it, old enough that for a heartbeat it sounded like them before the world broke.

  “I have been told that often.”

  That almost got him.

  Not a smile.

  But close enough that she saw the old shape of one trying and failing to form under all the damage.

  His gaze dropped once more to the chair.

  When he spoke again, it was quieter.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Arizona knew immediately which sorry he meant.

  Not for one thing.

  For all of it.

  For being gone.

  For not knowing.

  For her legs.

  For the years.

  For arriving like a ghost with guns instead of a brother at the door.

  She let him have the apology without minimizing it.

  Then she answered with equal honesty.

  “So am I.”

  Not because it was his fault.

  Because grief that large belonged to both of them.

  They sat together for a long time after that.

  Not always talking.

  Sometimes just existing in the same room while the rain whispered outside and the guards pretended not to listen and the atoll beyond continued its exhausted, midnight labor of repair and mourning.

  Eventually Arizona told him about Vermont.

  Not all at once. Not like a formal report. Just enough for the fact of her to exist in the room.

  Penn’s expression, when he realized Arizona had a child now—adopted or not, it made no difference in the emotional truth—was complicated enough to ache. Something softened. Something hurt more. Something old and protective and half-buried tried to lift its head through the corruption and the self-hatred.

  Arizona saw that too.

  She did not press it.

  Not tonight.

  When at last she knew she had to leave—because her own body was beginning to fail her in all the usual quiet ways, because Vermont would wake if she was gone too long, because healing never cared what emotional revelations people were having—she turned the chair slightly toward the door.

  Penn’s whole body changed at that.

  Not dramatically.

  But he felt the leaving.

  Arizona paused.

  Then she asked the only thing that mattered before she went.

  “Will you still be here when I come back?”

  He looked at her.

  The Abyss moved behind his eyes.

  The loneliness did too.

  And something else, now. Something she had brought with her simply by refusing to fear him properly.

  After a long moment, Penn gave the smallest nod.

  “…Yeah.”

  It was not a promise for forever.

  It was enough for tonight.

  Arizona accepted it exactly as offered.

  “Good,” she said softly.

  Then she wheeled to the door.

  Before the guard opened it, she looked back once.

  Penn was still watching her.

  Still there.

  She left with the knowledge seated in her chest like pain and grace at once:

  Her brother was not lost in the simple way she had once believed.

  He was worse than lost.

  He was found, and hurting, and trying very hard to convince himself that disappearance was a kindness.

  Which meant Arizona would have to do what she had always done for the wounded, the difficult, and the beloved.

  Come back tomorrow too.