The In-Between looked different this time. Not the honey-gold warmth of the Embassy they'd built, not the swirling geometric void they'd encountered during the Incursion negotiations — this was something deeper. Older. Like standing inside a soap bubble the size of a cathedral, its membrane shimmering with colors that didn't have names in any human language.
Maeve held Priya's left hand. Ji-woo held her right. Their resonance hummed steady and strong, amplified through the Embassy's communication array and anchored by the full Constellation back in the underground facility in Virginia. On the other side of the membrane, the thing that Maeve's precognition couldn't see — the blind spot, the convergence point, the presence Ji-woo had mapped at the edges of the In-Between's deeper architecture — was waiting.
This is the convergence point. All timelines pass through this moment. I can't see forward because "forward" doesn't mean what I think it means in this space. It's like standing at the edge of a cliff and realizing the ground was never solid to begin with. Whatever we're about to meet has been here longer than "here" has existed. The blind spot isn't dark anymore. It's opening.
I can feel it. Not thoughts exactly — more like... attention. Something enormous is paying attention to us the way we'd notice an ant carrying a breadcrumb. Curious, not hostile. But the scale of it...
The deeper geometry I mapped — the structures that were here before us — they're resonating. Like the whole In-Between is vibrating at a frequency I've never felt. Whatever built those structures is the same thing we're about to meet. Stay close.
General Winters' voice came through the telepathic relay from the facility above, routed through the thirty anchoring minds of the outer Constellation, tense but steady.
Girls, the anchor team is reading massive energy signatures. Off every chart we have. Whatever you're approaching, it's not like the Adjacent Realm beings. This is something else entirely.
We know, General. It's okay. It's not hostile. It's... (pause) I think "ancient" doesn't begin to cover it.
What are you?
The shimmer intensified. And then the In-Between spoke — not in words, not in thoughts, but in a way that landed somewhere between the two, like understanding arriving fully formed before language could catch up.
You are the ones who bridged. Interesting. I have watched the bridge form between two points on the surface, two locations that should not communicate, and I was... curious.
The soap-bubble cathedral pulsed, and for a moment the girls felt something like amusement — vast, gentle, and utterly alien.
Your species would call me a keeper of time. A manager of the wave. I have many names across many surfaces, but the closest translation in your field of meaning would be... a lord of time. A time-lord, if you prefer.
Did a cosmic entity just give us permission to call it a time-lord? Maeve is going to make a Doctor Who joke. I can feel it coming. Please, Maeve, not now. Not to the face of infinity.
A time-lord. Okay. Can you explain what you mean by "the wave"? And "surfaces"?
The In-Between shifted. Suddenly they weren't standing anymore — they were floating, or perhaps the distinction didn't matter. Around them, a visualization began to form. Not projected, not holographic. More like the Resident was letting them see through its perception for a moment.
Eons ago — in your reckoning of sequence, though sequence is itself a surface phenomenon — a temporal bubble formed. A singularity of time. It began to expand, and it has not stopped. It travels at the speed of time, which is the same as what you call the speed of light. They are not merely equivalent. They are the same thing.
The visualization showed it: a point of light erupting outward, the bubble growing, its surface racing into the void.
As the bubble expands, space is manifest on the surface of the temporal wave. What you experience as the physical universe — your galaxies, your stars, your small blue world — exists on that surface. The leading edge of the wave. The one moment of now.
Oh my God. I can see it. The universe isn't a three-dimensional space that exists in time. It's a surface — a membrane on an expanding bubble of time. Everything we've ever known, every star, every person, every thought — all of it exists on this razor-thin edge of now, riding the wave outward. There is no past out there. There is no future out there. There is only this.
There is no past. There is no future.
Correct. There is only the expanding surface of now. But you do not experience it that way, and this is the beautiful part. On the surface of the temporal wave there exists what you might call a universal field of consciousness. It permeates the wave front. It is woven into the fabric of now.
The visualization shifted again. The expanding bubble now shimmered with something like light — but it wasn't light. It was awareness. Consciousness. Woven through the surface like threads in cloth.
Within this field, the future exists as probability. Not as a place you travel to, but as a pattern of what is likely to manifest next on the surface. And the past exists as memory — not as a place that still exists behind you, but as information retained within the field of consciousness. Your experience of reality — of time passing, of causation, of narrative — manifests entirely within this conscious field. You are the universe experiencing itself on the surface of an expanding moment.
(voice barely a whisper) The balloon. We're on the surface of an inflating balloon.
Yes. As the temporal bubble expands, your universe of space-time expands with it. Your astronomers have observed this. They call it the expansion of the universe and attribute it to a force they named dark energy. It is simply the wave, still moving, still growing. The surface stretches and new space is born.
Silence. Or what passed for silence in the In-Between.
Okay. So... what are you? Where are you in all of this? Inside the bubble?
I exist within the bubble itself. In the space between the origin point and the surface. What you call the In-Between. I manage the integrity of the wave. Ensure the surface remains coherent as it expands. There are others like me. We are old. We were here before your surface formed complexity. Before your field of consciousness became self-aware.
It's a maintenance worker. The most powerful entity we've ever encountered, something that manages the literal fabric of reality, and it's basically a cosmic maintenance worker. The structures Ji-woo mapped at the edges of the In-Between — the ones that were here before us — they're its infrastructure. Its tools. We built our little Embassy in the corner of something's workshop. That's... oddly comforting. And terrifying.
And the communication you noticed between two universes — the bridge, the Embassy we built — that's what brought you to us?
Two separate locations on the temporal wave front began exchanging information. This is... unusual. The surface is vast and the distance between points is enormous. Communication across the surface is expected — that is what consciousness does. But communication between two distinct folds of the surface, two separate universe-formations? That caught my attention. I came to observe. To understand.
And? What did you find?
Another pulse of amusement.
I found three small beings holding hands in a mobile home, talking to their neighbors through a hole in the wall of reality. It was... charming. You are not a threat. Your bridge is not a danger to the wave. If anything, it is a sign that the field of consciousness on your surface is maturing. Reaching out. Beginning to understand what it is.
(laughing softly) We're charming. The cosmic time-lord thinks we're charming.
Do you have any advice? For us? For what we're doing with the Embassy, the interdimensional relations?
Continue. The surface benefits from connection. Isolation leads to stagnation, and stagnation leads to... inconsistencies in the wave. Your bridge is healthy. Your curiosity is healthy. I will not interfere. I simply wanted to know what was happening, and now I know.
The visualization faded. The soap-bubble cathedral began to dim.
One more thing, for the one who hears thoughts.
Priya startled.
The silence you seek is not the absence of noise. It is the presence of peace. You will find it. Not where you expect.
And then the In-Between was empty, and they were standing in the Embassy's main chamber, still holding hands, tears streaming down all three of their faces.
We just met God. Or the building superintendent of reality. I'm honestly not sure which, and I'm not sure it matters. The blind spot is gone. The convergence point has passed. And we're still here. Maeve's precognition should be clearing up now — she should be able to see forward again. And whatever she sees, whatever comes next, we know one thing: the In-Between isn't hostile territory. It's someone's workshop. And the someone doesn't mind that we built a little Embassy in the corner. I need to sit down immediately.
With the blind spot resolved and the time-lord confirmed as benign, the Embassy operation shifted from crisis mode to permanence. General Winters — Sarah, though the girls still struggled to call her that consistently — had been managing the facility from the underground complex while commuting home to her daughters on the military base. But permanence required presence. The Embassy needed full-time management, and there was no one better suited than the three women who'd negotiated humanity's first peace treaty, built the Embassy itself, and now had a working relationship with a cosmic entity that maintained the fabric of reality.
The town nearest the facility was called Millbrook, Virginia — population 4,200, one traffic light, three churches, a diner that closed at 8 PM, and absolutely nothing about it that would suggest it sat twelve miles from the most important diplomatic facility in human history.
The Millbrook Research Institute cover is holding. The locals think we study geology. We need you three on-site permanently. The commute from State College isn't sustainable — not when the Adjacent Realm delegation requests an audience at 3 AM because their concept of scheduling is "whenever the dimensional frequencies align."
So we're relocating to Virginia. Leaving the mobile home park.
The Navy will arrange housing near the facility. Temporary quarters are available —
No. No temporary quarters. No government housing. If we're moving here permanently, we're doing it right.
The girls continued their college education online. Penn State's remote program was flexible enough, and their academic advisors had been told only that they'd been "recruited for a federal research fellowship." Which, technically, wasn't a lie.
(on a video call, textbook open) Professor Daniels, I understand the assignment is due Friday, but I'm currently managing interspecies diplomatic relations and the fundamental nature of consciousness. Can I get an extension on the calculus problem set?
(whispering from off-camera) Don't actually say that.
(muting) I wasn't going to actually say that. I was practicing saying that for the day we go public and I can use it as an excuse for everything.
It was Lily who started it. Lily Winters, fifteen, who had been texting Ji-woo daily since their mall trip and had decided — with the fierce certainty that only a fifteen-year-old can muster — that having the Constellation girls as big sisters was the single best thing that had ever happened to her.
Mom. They're going to put them in some sad government housing. Fluorescent lights and beige walls. Beige, Mom. Priya called it "government depression chic." They saved the world. Multiple times. They can't live in beige.
They'll be fine. It's temporary housing. It's functional.
(not looking up from her book, still wearing the COSMIC GIRL jacket) Priya promised she'd help me with my science fair project. She can't do that from a government dormitory with armed guards at the door.
There's a five-bedroom farmhouse on Maple Ridge Road. I already looked it up. Big kitchen, wraparound porch, enough bathrooms that we won't kill each other. We should all live together.
I want the room with the window seat.
My daughters want to live with three genetically engineered psychics. My fifteen-year-old found a rental listing. My thirteen-year-old has already claimed a bedroom. And the worst part is — they're right. The girls need a home, not a barracks. And my daughters need what Priya and Maeve and Ji-woo give them — the big sisters they never had, the sense that the world is bigger and stranger and more beautiful than a military base suggests. David will say it's a security risk. And I'll remind him that these three can detect threats before they materialize, see the future, and locate anything on Earth. My girls are safer with them than in any fortified compound.
The farmhouse on Maple Ridge Road had five bedrooms, three bathrooms, a kitchen large enough for an army, and a wraparound porch with a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Sarah took the master bedroom downstairs. Lily and Sophie claimed the two rooms on the second floor's west wing — Sophie getting her window seat. The girls took the two remaining bedrooms on the east wing.
Within a week, the sleeping arrangement had consolidated. Priya's room became the nest — the larger of the two, where a king bed and a twin formed an L-shaped pile of blankets and pillows. Ji-woo's room became "Ji-woo's room that Ji-woo never sleeps in."
We each have our own room. With doors. And privacy. Like adults.
Yep.
Absolutely.
They were all in Priya's bed. It was 11:30 PM. Priya was in the middle, which was where she always ended up because her telepathy quieted when she was between her sisters. Ji-woo had one leg thrown over Priya's. Maeve's hand was in Ji-woo's hair.
We have five bedrooms and we sleep in one. Sarah thinks it's sweet. Lily thinks it's weird. Sophie asked if she could sleep with us once. We said yes. She lasted twenty minutes before announcing that we "breathe too loud" and retreating to her window seat. Some things never change.
Are you guys in one room again? You have rooms! Plural! With actual beds!
Goodnight, Lily!
This house has five bedrooms and two of them are basically storage! I'm telling Mom!
Tell her we said goodnight too.
The contract negotiations were, according to General Winters, "the most infuriating and impressive display of strategic thinking I've encountered in thirty years of military service." Which was saying something, given that she'd once watched them outmaneuver a four-star general in the White House Situation Room.
The girls refused to join the military. They refused to become government employees. They refused any arrangement that would give any entity — governmental, military, or corporate — authority over their time, their abilities, or their choices.
We'll work as independent contractors. We set our own hours, choose our own assignments, and maintain the right to refuse any task that violates our ethical standards.
Ms. Sharma, the compensation package we're offering for full employment is —
Not relevant. We're not employees. We're contractors. Bill us hourly.
Priya negotiating a contract is the most terrifying thing I've ever witnessed, and I've seen interdimensional beings dissolve the fabric of spacetime and met a cosmic entity that maintains reality itself. She can hear every thought the lawyers are having. She knows their bottom line before they do. This is almost unfair. Almost.
Their hourly rate, once finalized, was classified. But the retainer alone — for maintaining the Embassy, being on-call for dimensional consultations, conducting periodic sweeps for unauthorized interdimensional activity, and serving as humanity's only point of contact with a time-lord — was substantial enough that Ji-woo, who managed their finances, calculated they'd each be millionaires within two years.
Priya. We're going to be rich.
Define rich.
Rich enough that I just added a line item for "financial advisor" because I don't trust myself with this much money and I grew up doing my family's taxes at thirteen.
Rich enough that we can pay off our student loans?
Pay off our student loans, buy this house outright if we wanted, and still have enough left over to fund a small country.
Cool. Can I still use my student discount at the campus bookstore?
Priya noticed it on a Tuesday in August, which felt appropriate because Tuesdays were when everything important happened in her life.
Sophie Winters, thirteen, all knees and elbows and enormous brown eyes behind glasses too big for her face, was sitting at the kitchen table struggling with her summer reading assignment — To Kill a Mockingbird — and making the same frustrated face that Priya recognized from her own mirror at that age. The COSMIC GIRL jacket hung over her chair. She wore it everywhere now, even in the Virginia heat.
What's wrong, Soph?
Atticus Finch is supposed to be the hero but he doesn't actually change anything. Tom Robinson still dies. The town is still racist. What's the point of being good if it doesn't fix anything?
Oh. Oh, this girl. She's thirteen and she's already asking the question that took me nineteen years to articulate. The question I asked about my own abilities — what's the point of hearing everyone's thoughts if I can't change what they think? What's the point of being good in a world that rewards the opposite? She asked me seventeen questions on index cards the first night we met. She let me share a memory of the In-Between and cried because it was beautiful. And now she's asking the hardest question of all, and she doesn't even know it.
Can I tell you something? The point isn't fixing. The point is standing. Atticus stands in front of that courtroom knowing he's going to lose, and he does it anyway, because the standing is the thing. The standing says: this is wrong, and I won't pretend it isn't.
Sophie looked at her with those enormous eyes and said nothing for a long moment.
Is that what you do? With the Embassy and everything? Stand?
Yeah, Soph. That's what we do.
Sophie nodded slowly, then returned to her book with renewed concentration. Priya stayed at the table, pretending to check her email, actually watching Sophie's face shift through comprehension and wonder and — there — the small, private smile of a kid who'd just understood something important.
The feeling that moved through Priya was unexpected and devastating. Not the warm glow of mentorship. Something deeper. Something biological and ancient and completely uninvited.
I want this, she thought. Not this exactly, but — this. A child. My child. Someone I could sit with at a kitchen table and help understand the world. Someone who'd look at me with those enormous eyes and trust me to have answers even when I don't.
It hit her like a wave — at dinner, watching Lily and Sophie argue over whose turn it was to do dishes. Folding laundry while Sophie read aloud from her book report. Braiding Lily's hair on the porch while the sun set over the mountains, the same Lily who'd once tried to play it cool and now reached for Ji-woo's phone before reaching for her own.
I'm twenty years old and I want a baby. This is insane. This is hormonally driven, psychologically predictable, and completely insane. Maeve is going to say I'm displacing my grief over John Brennan onto a maternal fantasy. Ji-woo is going to say I should get a cat first and cite a study about alloparenting in primates. And they'll both be partially right and completely wrong.
You've been thinking loudly today. Something about kids?
I'm going to pretend you didn't just read my emotional state like a weather report.
She didn't need precognition. You were staring at Sophie like she was a baby animal at a zoo. It was obvious.
I wasn't — okay, fine. Maybe I was. I don't know what's happening to me. Sarah's girls are doing something to my brain. Living with them, being here every day — it's like proximity to teenagers is rewiring my maternal circuits.
That's literally what it is. It's called alloparenting and it's well-documented in primates.
Please don't compare me to a primate right now.
We're all primates, Priya.
You'd be an amazing mom. Someday. When the time is right.
I know. I just... didn't expect to feel it this soon. Or this strongly.
She lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. The Navy file sat in her mental peripheral vision the way it had for months — the dossier on the young man from the 37 they'd matched her with. Genetic compatibility, psychological profile, ability complementarity. She'd refused to open it on principle. The whole breeding program was an obscenity, a reduction of love and choice to genetics and optimization.
But the file was there. And she hadn't deleted it.
September. The leaves on Maple Ridge Road were turning gold and copper, and the wraparound porch had become the house's living room — five women of various ages draped over furniture in the cooling evenings, arguing about everything from foreign policy to which streaming service had the best original content.
Priya had read the file. She'd read it in July, alone in her room (her actual room, the one she never slept in), and had sat with it for a long time.
His name was Daniel Park. Twenty years old. Born in Portland, Oregon. Raised by adoptive parents — a high school teacher and a nurse. He was one of the 37, ability class: empathic projection and emotional regulation. The Navy's assessment described him as "temperamentally compatible with Subject 14 (Sharma) — complementary ability set likely to produce stable pair-bond and psychically gifted offspring."
"Temperamentally compatible." "Stable pair-bond." "Psychically gifted offspring." They wrote about us like we were livestock. Breeding stock. Select the best mare, pair her with the right stallion, hope for a champion foal. It's disgusting. It's dehumanizing. And... and his psychological profile shows someone who volunteers at animal shelters and cried during his evaluation when they asked about his adoptive mother. He's studying to be a pediatric nurse. He likes bad horror movies and good coffee and he wrote in his personal essay that the thing he wants most is "a home that feels like home." God damn the Navy for being right about this.
She didn't call in July. Or August. In September, Lily found her sitting on the porch at 6 AM, phone in hand, staring at it like it might bite.
Either call whoever you're going to call or put the phone down and come help me make pancakes. This indecisive staring thing is killing me.
It's complicated.
It's a phone call. You literally negotiate with interdimensional beings and had a conversation with a time-lord. Pick up the phone.
She's fifteen and she's right and I hate that she's right. I've been telling myself I won't call because the Navy chose him and I refuse to let the Navy choose my partner. But that's not why I'm not calling. I'm not calling because the last time I was brave enough to tell someone I was interested, I ended up on a curb in Mexico crying into Maeve's shoulder. And I'm terrified of that feeling. I'm terrified of wanting someone and being told I'm too young, too much, too something.
She called.
The conversation lasted four minutes and twenty-seven seconds. Afterward, Priya walked into the kitchen where Maeve and Ji-woo were eating cereal, sat down, and said:
I called Daniel Park. We're getting coffee on Saturday. He sounds nice. He laughed at my joke about the Navy playing matchmaker. He said, and I quote, "Yeah, it's weird as hell, but I figured I'd rather meet you and find out you're terrible than always wonder." I think I like him.
I know. I've been tracking his location for two weeks because you kept looking at his file.
Ji-woo!
What? He's in Virginia too. He transferred to UVA last month. You think that's a coincidence? He's been working up the nerve to call you.
I saw this timeline three months ago. Priya, happy, laughing, holding someone's hand. I didn't tell her because she needed to get there on her own. The precognition showed me Daniel's face and I spent weeks being terrified that I was just seeing what I wanted to see. But it's happening. She's going to be okay. She's going to be more than okay.
The first date was coffee at the only café in Millbrook that stayed open past 8 PM. It was awkward and wonderful. He couldn't hear her thoughts — not because of psychic shielding like John Brennan's wall, but because his empathic abilities created a kind of emotional white noise that her telepathy couldn't parse into clear signals. It wasn't silence. It was warmth — like standing near a fireplace, where you feel the heat but can't see individual flames.
He's not quiet. He's warm. There's a difference, and I didn't know there was a difference until right now. With John, the silence was what I wanted — escape from the noise. With Daniel, there is no silence, but there's no noise either. There's just... presence. Calm. Like being in a room with someone who's genuinely happy to be there.
The Navy was right. I hate that they were right. But they were right.
Maeve fell next, which surprised everyone including Maeve.
His name was Callum Torres, twenty-one, ability class: temporal perception and enhanced cognition. He could process information at speeds that made supercomputers jealous, and his temporal perception meant he experienced time at a slightly different rate — everything slightly slowed, giving him an almost supernatural reaction time.
He'd been assigned to the Embassy as a technical analyst. Maeve had been annoyed by him for exactly three weeks before realizing that the annoyance was attraction wearing a disguise.
Okay, I need to say something and I need you both to be mature about it.
This is about Callum.
How did you —
You argue with him about coffee. Nobody argues about coffee that passionately unless they want to kiss the other person. It's psych 101.
Also I can hear your thoughts and they're very loud when he's in the room. Like, distractingly loud.
I hate both of you.
You love both of us.
He's one of the 37. The Navy matched us. I swore I would never —
We all swore we'd never. And yet. (gesturing at Priya, who was texting Daniel with a smile that could power a small city)
They engineered us. They picked our parents, designed our abilities, chose our partners like we were chess pieces on a board. I've hated that every day since I learned the truth. But Callum... Callum isn't a chess piece. He's a person who makes terrible coffee and brilliant observations and who looked at me last Tuesday like I was the most interesting thing in any timeline. Maybe the Navy's matching algorithm got lucky. Maybe compatibility isn't the same as destiny. Maybe I can choose him freely even if they chose him first.
Ji-woo held out the longest. Three months longer than the others. She'd been the most vocal about the breeding program, the most furious about being treated as genetic inventory, the most resistant to any relationship that could be traced back to a Navy database.
His name was Ethan Okafor, twenty, ability class: spatial manipulation and kinesthetic genius. He could feel the structure of physical spaces the way Ji-woo could feel locations — complementary, the Navy noted, like two halves of a navigational system.
They met when he corrected her calculation on an Embassy spatial integrity report. She'd been furious. He'd been apologetic. Then he'd been right, which made her more furious. Then they'd worked together for sixteen hours straight on a dimensional mapping project and somewhere around hour eleven, in the Embassy's main chamber lit by interdimensional light and powered by vending machine coffee smuggled from the facility above, Ji-woo had looked at him and thought: Oh no.
I refuse to be the third domino. I refuse. This is a pattern and I don't like patterns.
You like Ethan.
Irrelevant.
Not even slightly irrelevant.
The Navy picked him for me. The Navy. The same organization that created us in a lab, raised us like experiments, and tried to turn us into weapons. I'm supposed to just... accept their romantic recommendations? Like they're some kind of military Tinder?
Ji-woo. The Navy also picked our scholarships, and you love your degree. They picked our housing assignments, and that's how we met each other. Sometimes the system gets things right for the wrong reasons.
She's right and I want to throw a pillow at her. Ethan is kind and funny and brilliant and his spatial sense complements mine in a way that makes our work feel like a conversation instead of a calculation. When we mapped the deeper In-Between structures together — the time-lord's infrastructure — our abilities synced up like music. Like two instruments playing different parts of the same song. I've never experienced anything like it. And that terrifies me because what if the only reason it feels right is because they designed it to feel right? What if this isn't choice, it's programming?
But what if it doesn't matter? What if the origin of compatibility is less important than what you do with it? Priya chose Daniel. Maeve chose Callum. They didn't fall in love because of a file — they fell in love because of who those men turned out to be. The file just pointed them in the right direction.
Damn it.
Fine. I'll ask him to coffee. One coffee. If he's boring, I'm blaming both of you.
He was not boring.
The house on Maple Ridge Road was never quiet. Not once. Not for a single moment.
At any given time, at least three of the following were happening simultaneously: Lily and Sophie arguing about bathroom access, Sophie reading aloud to anyone who'd listen, Priya singing off-key in the kitchen, Maeve having what she called "vision episodes" that were really just her staring into space while her precognition showed her seventeen possible outcomes of that evening's dinner plan, Ji-woo reorganizing something that didn't need reorganizing, and Sarah Winters moving through it all like the calm eye of a domestic hurricane — still a General at the facility by day, a mother of five by night.
When the Navy suggested I oversee the Embassy permanently, I assumed the hardest part would be interdimensional diplomacy. I was wrong. The hardest part is five women sharing three bathrooms.
SOPHIE USED ALL THE HOT WATER AGAIN!
I DID NOT, YOUR SHOWERS ARE JUST TOO LONG!
I used the cold water. It's fine. Builds character. Also I could hear both of their thoughts from the shower and I want you all to know that Lily is lying — she absolutely used the hot water first — and Sophie knows it but is arguing on principle.
PRIYA! You can't just out people's thoughts like that!
I can and I did. Justice has no bathroom schedule.
I should be concerned about the privacy implications of living with a telepath. Instead, I'm grateful because she's resolved more sibling disputes in three months than I managed in fifteen years. Also, she braided Sophie's hair last night and Sophie didn't pull away. Sophie, who hasn't voluntarily let anyone touch her hair since she was eight. Something about Priya makes my girls feel safe. Maybe it's the telepathy — she knows exactly what they need before they can articulate it. Or maybe it's just Priya. Whatever it is, this house has more love in it than anywhere we've been stationed. And we've been stationed everywhere.
There were harder moments too. Nights when Lily slammed her door so hard the hinges rattled, furious about something she couldn't name, and Priya sat outside in the hallway, not reading her thoughts, just present, until Lily opened the door and fell into her arms. Mornings when Sophie, fierce and fragile at thirteen, cried in the kitchen because a kid at school had said something cruel about her too-big glasses, and Ji-woo — Ji-woo, who claimed to be the least emotional person in any room — sat with her and said, "He's irrelevant. You're extraordinary. Those are facts, not opinions."
Evenings when Lily would find her spot on the couch occupied by Maeve, and instead of being territorial, curl up beside her and say, "Tell me what happens next," because Maeve's precognitive glimpses of Lily's future had become their private tradition — not specifics, just feelings. "Something good is coming." "You're going to laugh really hard next Thursday." "There's a conversation ahead that matters. Be brave."
This is what family is. Not the genetic connection the Navy manufactured, not the engineered compatibility or the psychic resonance. It's this: five women in a farmhouse in Virginia, fighting over hot water and braiding each other's hair and holding each other through the bad nights. It's Sophie asleep on the couch with her head in Priya's lap, the way she was that first night at the old house on the military base. It's Lily asking Ji-woo to teach her self-defense and then teaching Ji-woo about Fleetwood Mac in return. It's Sarah looking at all of us across the dinner table with an expression that says: you're mine now, all of you, and I will fight God himself to keep you safe.
My precognition shows me a lot of futures. In every single one of them, we're still here. Still together. Still family.
The leaves fell. The mountains turned amber and crimson. The Embassy hummed with quiet, important work — the Adjacent Realm art trade was thriving, and Secretary Okonkwo had indeed fallen out of his chair, just as Maeve had predicted. The girls finished their fall semester with grades that ranged from excellent (Maeve) to "technically passing but I was busy saving interdimensional relations" (Ji-woo). Daniel brought Priya flowers on their three-month anniversary and she cried, which she was furious about. Callum and Maeve argued about coffee and then kissed in the Embassy break room, which was caught on the psychic relay and which General Winters pretended not to notice. Ethan built Ji-woo a custom spatial mapping tool and she thanked him by correcting his posture, which in Ji-woo's emotional vocabulary was equivalent to a love letter.
One evening in late October, Priya sat on the wraparound porch, watching the sunset paint the mountains in shades she didn't have names for. Sophie was beside her, reading — always reading — wearing the COSMIC GIRL jacket with the friendship bracelet from that first mall trip still knotted around her wrist. The sound of the house behind them was a symphony of life: Lily's music, Sarah's voice on a phone call she was pretending wasn't classified, Maeve and Ji-woo debating something about quantum field theory that would have baffled most physicists.
Priya?
Yeah, Soph?
Are you going to stay? Like, forever? Or is this temporary?
She's asking because everyone in her life has been temporary except her family. Military kids learn that early — friends leave, houses change, nothing is permanent except the people in the car with you. She asked me this question with her eyes that first night, when she fell asleep on my lap in the old living room with her index cards scattered on the floor. She's been carrying it ever since, this quiet dread that we'll leave the way every other friend has left. She's asking if we're in the car.
We're staying, Sophie. This is home now.
Promise?
Promise.
Sophie nodded once, satisfied, and returned to her book. Priya watched the last light fade behind the mountains and felt, for the first time in her life, the complete absence of restlessness. Not silence — she'd learned the difference now. Not the absence of noise. The presence of peace.
The time-lord was right. The silence I was seeking wasn't silence at all. It was this — a porch, a sunset, a kid reading beside me, my sisters' voices through the walls, a man who makes me laugh and whose emotions feel like standing near a fire. It was never about finding someone I couldn't hear. It was about building a life so full that the noise becomes music.
I'm twenty years old. I'm going to be a millionaire by twenty-two. I manage an interdimensional embassy. I've had a conversation with an entity that maintains the fabric of reality. I have two sisters who changed their flights to sit with me on a curb. I have a family that fights over hot water and holds each other in the dark. I have a boy who looks at me like I'm the most interesting thing in any dimension.
And somewhere in the future — not now, not yet, but somewhere in the field of probability that the time-lord described, on the expanding surface of now — there's a child who will sit on this porch with me and ask questions about the universe, and I'll have answers. Not all of them. But enough.
I'm still becoming. But I'm becoming somewhere that feels like home.
Inside, someone dropped a pan. Lily shrieked. Sophie laughed without looking up from her book. Ji-woo said something sarcastic. Maeve's voice rose above it all with the calm authority of someone who could see the future: "Nobody's hurt, the pan is fine, dinner will be ready in twenty minutes."
Priya smiled, pulled Sophie a little closer, and watched the first stars appear — points of light on the expanding surface of now, ancient and new all at once, a constellation of moments that was still growing.
In a small town somewhere in the Midwest, a young woman with red hair looks out her kitchen window at the fence in her backyard. Next door, someone new is moving in. She doesn't know it yet, but a conversation is about to begin — casual, unplanned, two neighbors meeting over a shared boundary.
That's how these things always start.
The Constellation series is complete. Thank you for reading.
A new story in the Over The Fence universe begins soon.