There was light first.
Not the Warp's colors and not Nocturne's volcanic amber. Just light, pale and flat, coming from no direction she could identify, spread across the whole space equally.
Then sound.
A voice. Low and direct, speaking in the liturgical register she recognized from the briefing room. The ancient phrasing arrived with meaning intact underneath the unfamiliar shape of the words.
"Art thou well?"
Lilith opened her eyes.
A face looked down at her.
She scrambled back immediately, hands and feet finding the floor and pushing hard, putting distance between herself and the face before her brain had caught up with what her body was doing. Her back hit something solid and she stopped and pressed against it and looked.
A girl.
Not a woman and not a Space Marine in the full sense. A girl, slight and short, close to Lilith's apparent size but nothing else about her matched that first impression. She wore armor. Not the green of Salamanders and not any color scheme Lilith had encountered in the orphanage library or in the months since. It was blue. Deep and dark, worn and marked by long use, the surface of it carrying the particular texture of something that had been in service far longer than it had been new. The design was different from anything Lilith knew — fitted for a smaller frame than standard Space Marine plate and carrying modifications that were personal rather than chapter-issued that she remembered in her past life. Old. Very old.
On the shoulder pauldron sat a logo.
An Aquila that somehow looked really worn out yet it's still recognizable.
Lilith stared at it.
Recognition arrived without explanation. The pull of it was immediate and sourceless, sitting in her chest before any reasoning attached itself. And then memory surfaced.
The flood of images from the Warp. The Astartes killing each other in armor she hadn't recognized, the vast grief sitting underneath all of it. In those images some of the armor had carried that mark. She hadn't known what it meant then. She still didn't know what it meant now. But she'd seen it and it had been real and it was on this girl's shoulder.
She looked at the girl's face.
And went still.
It was familiar.
Not familiar from a meeting or a corridor or a conversation she could point to. It was immediate and sourceless and landed in her chest and pressed before any reasoning attached itself to it. She knew this face. She didn't know how.
The girl's expression was direct and responsible. Not warm, not cold. She looked at Lilith the way someone looked when they were standing in front of a consequence they'd had a hand in and intended to address it correctly. She said, in the old phrasing, plain and without decoration:
"Do not be afraid."
Lilith's back was still against the solid surface. Her heart was going faster than she'd like. "What happened?" she said.
The girl held her gaze. "Something took thee. I tried to stop it and couldn't, so I followed." A pause. "Art thou harmed?"
"I don't think so." Lilith looked at her hands. Intact. She looked at her legs. Fine. She looked around the space for the first time.
It was not Nocturne.
The floor under her was pale stone, smooth and worn flat by long use. The ceiling was high and the walls were far apart and the light came from everywhere and nowhere at once. Not a dream — she knew what the forest and the temple felt like from the inside and this wasn't it. This was solid and present and real in the way Nocturne had been real and Armageddon before it.
"Where are we?" Lilith said.
The girl said something in the old phrasing. The meaning arrived as: between.
Between what, Lilith wanted to ask. But before she could form the question, something else pushed through from behind everything she'd been holding back since she opened her eyes.
Eve.
The thought arrived and everything else moved aside for it.
She was separated from Eve.
This is not just a separation like across different rooms or different corridors. Separated by something she didn't understand, in a place she didn't recognize, with no way to measure the distance or know if distance applied here at all. She reached for the connection and found it — the thread that ran between them — but it was thinner than it had ever been, stretched taut across something vast and dark with no visible other side but it was there.
Eve is alone, she thought. Eve is back in Prometheus and she doesn't know where I am and she can't reach me and she doesn't know if I'm—
She thought about what Eve did when something threatened that thread. She thought what the Blank field had done when Eve was separated and frightened and fighting. She thought about Eve moving between Lilith and every threat before anyone else had processed the situation, every time, without fail.
Eve was not alone this time but she didn't know where Lilith was and Lilith couldn't tell her.
She thought about Eve sitting on the edge of the bed, back straight, eyes on the door, hands folded in her lap. Waiting in the dark with the red glow of her eyes steady and patient like the good girl she is.
She thought about Eve's face when she heard it waiting for her.
She thought about Eve on the floor of the quarters with her forehead on her knees and her shoulders shaking and Lysander's hand on her knee.
Her own chest compressed around all of it.
She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth and stared at the pale stone floor and breathed and the breathing didn't help the way it was supposed to help.
Her vision blurred.
She didn't understand why for a full second.
Then she understood.
She was crying.
She hadn't decided to and she hadn't felt it building. The tears were just there, running down her face, and her hands were shaking and she was sitting on a pale stone floor in a place called between and a girl in blue armor with a Aquila symbol on her shoulder watched her from three feet away, and she was five years old and she was frightened and she couldn't stop any of it.
She didn't try to stop it.
She pressed her back against the solid surface behind her and pulled her knees to her chest and let the tears run and didn't wipe them, and the only thing in her head was Eve's name, over and over, and she sent it down the thin stretched thread between them as hard as she could.
Eve, she thought. I'm here. I'm here. I'm coming back.
The girl in blue armor watched her and said nothing and did not look away. Her expression stayed direct and responsible and patient.
I swear. I will come back.