Chương 347: 149.We Are Still Alive 2

Blinding white light and the roar of the crowd came in together, like the entire Federation had wrung its attention into a single flood and dropped it straight onto me. I almost squinted by reflex, but I held my chin up instead. Outside: the landing zone of the Central Memorial Plaza.

Beyond that: rows of armed security, officials whose faces had gone magnificently pale, a wall of media lenses pointed close enough to probably capture my ancestors, and further back, the crowd — people who had come to attend a memorial service and were now watching what looked like a coffin climbing out of the ground on its own. The emcee stood at the podium, script still in hand, wearing the expression of someone whose life had just been rewritten by a stranger starting on page three.

And further back, on the large venue screens, the Yukikaze's list of missing personnel was still displayed. With my name on it. I stepped down from the hatch. Wind pressed my uniform against my legs. Uncountable lenses turned toward me. For a moment, I found the whole scene absurdly funny — the Federation had spent all this effort and budget putting on a memorial for us, and the first of the dead to arrive still had to walk off her own shuttle. This world sometimes makes no sense. It just makes pageantry.

So I stopped just outside the hatch, planted my feet, lifted my head, and looked out at the sky that had been mourning us for a full year — and at the crowd that had finally gotten us back. Then I said the first line.

"Sorry to have kept everyone waiting." The whole venue went silent for a beat, like the air had been pulled out. So I kept going.

"Yukikaze, Hoshino Shimo —" I looked at the list of the missing that nobody had gotten around to taking down yet, and couldn't quite stop the corner of my mouth from pulling up.

"— here to personally cancel my own memorial." That second, the whole venue detonated. Not a metaphor. It actually detonated. Crying, shouting, sharp intakes of breath, shutter clicks, the chime of comms, the barked orders of security trying to reform their lines, the emcee finally losing professional composure — and somewhere in the crowd, a reporter simply yelling out loud. All of it went off at once. In the front rows, someone collapsed crying. Someone else covered their mouth and kept shaking their head.

A military officer stepped forward half a pace and then stopped, as if his brain hadn't yet decided whether to file this moment under miracle, incident, or career catastrophe. And high above, the Yukikaze just sat there, steady and still. Like a testimony no one could take back. I stood where I was, and felt my heart pounding hard — but not as heavy as before. Because I knew: the hardest step had already been taken. The deceased had arrived in person.

Now it was the entire Federation's turn to figure out how to face the living. After here to personally cancel my own memorial landed, what followed wasn't chaos anymore. It was reckoning. The kind that had been building for a full year, and had now found the exact center of every responsible party's forehead to land on.

The memorial venue — assembled with who knows how many budget line items and official approval chains, arranged with meticulous solemnity — turned, in the second after I finished that sentence, from national mourning ceremony into large-scale human emotional levee failure. People cried. People shouted. People stood frozen, as if their minds were still stuck in the logic pit of how did a dead person walk off that shuttle. The media section was the most dramatic.

A moment ago, those lenses had been pointed at white flowers, at the podium, at close-ups of grief. Now every one of them was pointing at my face, the way something points when it's been hungry for a whole year and the food has finally arrived. Honestly, in that moment, I had a very specific thought. The Federation's news industry really is built on other people's disasters. And they eat very aggressively. I'd barely finished that thought when the security perimeter outside the venue began to break.

"Hold the line! Identity confirmation first!"

"Stand back! Please stand back!"

"Medical team, advance! Media, stop pushing!" — Very professional calls. Well delivered. But useless. Because the first person to come through was never going to be the military, or the media, or the officials who loved using procedure as a shield. The first person to come through was always going to be family. That doesn't run on procedure. It doesn't look at ranks or committee chairs or incident commanders.

It only looks at one thing: is the person I've been waiting a year for standing right in front of me right now. So the first thing to break through the security line wasn't tactics. It was parents. The first one to come through was a woman. She wasn't running fast — she was almost stumbling, one side of her black jacket sliding off her shoulder as she moved, her heels hitting the ground in a rhythm that sounded like something about to give out. She didn't look like someone who could breach a security line.

But the problem was that when the guards saw her face, they actually hesitated for half a beat. Because her face didn't say please let me through. It said if you stop me today, I will walk over you. Behind her, a tall man with broad shoulders, his tie knocked sideways — clearly hadn't had a second to fix it while running. He came up shouting at the guards between breaths:"Get out of the way! If my daughter is alive, what the hell are you people blocking for?!" That energy. That delivery.

The particular talent for calling Federal security you people in the middle of a major public event while still clearly winning the exchange. I didn't need an introduction. Jess McCallow's parents. Which, honestly, tracked. One look at Jess's usual grin — the kind that looked like it was trying to drag the whole world down with her — and I'd always known her home environment had to have some character. I just hadn't known it would be this vivid.

The moment her mother reached the front, the second shuttle was finishing its landing. It hadn't even fully stopped when the hatch flew open. Jess stood in the doorway, one hand on the frame, the other raised in a casual wave toward the crowd below.

"Hey — Mom, Dad, afternoon. Nice setup you've got here." I heard someone in the front rows draw a sharp breath. I almost laughed out of sheer aggravation. At a moment like this, and her opening line still sounded like running into people she knew at a shopping center. If this woman ever died from having too much mouth, I would not be surprised.

"Jess!" The sound her mother made when she called that name — the whole venue's air seemed to shiver. The next second, she was already moving, arms going around Jess, holding on tight, the way you hold on when you're afraid that if you loosen your grip, a year's worth of disappearing will happen again. Jess had been trying to maintain that oh come on, it's fine, I'm back, isn't this a bit much expression.

Her mother got there first — raised her hand and brought it down on the back of Jess's head, not hard, but not gently.

"You finally remembered to come back!"

"Ow — Mom, there's a lot of cameras here, can you at least let me keep a shred of survivor dignity—""You dare talk about dignity!" Her father arrived next, standing beside them — tall, red around the eyes, still forcing his face into the shape of a father who was supposed to be composed right now. He lasted about one second.

"You're this thin — what happened? Did the Federal military not feed you?"

"They did, but the food wasn't good," Jess said, instantly.

"And you had to stay alive to get to it." That line. Her father's face — which had been holding together by sheer will — simply came apart. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. He pulled Jess in, her mother still attached, arms going around both of them, big enough that he nearly folded them into his chest. I stood a little way off, watching the three of them tangled together, and found myself wanting to look somewhere else. Not because I didn't want to see it.

Because it was a little too real. Whatever I'd been holding down with sarcasm and busywork — that stone lodged in my chest — shifted, all at once, without warning. But I didn't get the chance to deal with my own feelings. On the other side of the security perimeter, another line broke. Not crashed through this time. Parted. A man in full dress uniform strode forward, the rank insignia on his shoulders heavy enough to look like an entire star system was pressing down on them.

Several officers and security personnel trailed behind him — though trailed is generous. They were mostly just trying to keep up. Every step he took was straight and precise. His face held almost no expression, which was somehow more alarming than losing composure would have been. Because you could tell: this wasn't calm. This was a man taking everything that had no business showing in public and forcing it back behind his bones through sheer military discipline. Admiral Bayer Vander. Ash's father.

He didn't look at me first. He looked up, at the Yukikaze still hovering above. The glance was brief enough to almost miss, and heavy enough that it felt like everything had passed through it at once. Only then did his eyes come down to me.

"Cadet." His voice was low and steady.

"Where is Ash Vander?" My posture straightened on pure instinct. Men like this are frightening. Not because they're loud, and not because they throw rank around — because they don't need to raise their voice at all, and you still want to correct your stance until it could serve as an illustration in a training manual.

"Reporting, Admiral," I answered.

"He's aboard the Yukikaze, holding the acting captain's chair." Admiral Vander's brow shifted, barely. I added one more line.

"Alive. Conscious. Steadier than most of the adults on the ground right now." The officers standing nearby all made rather spectacular faces — the kind you make when you desperately want to correct someone's last sentence for being wildly out of line, but can't actually find anything wrong with it. The Admiral looked at me for two seconds.

I suspected he was trying to work out whether I was just a first-year with no filter, or one of the standard-issue malfunctions the Yukikaze apparently produced — the kind that gets broken in on the border and comes out talking with barbs attached. In the end, he only nodded once. Very slightly. But I saw it — his shoulders, for just one instant, genuinely dropped. One instant. Then he was an Admiral again.

"Seal the Yukikaze's docking approach. No unauthorized personnel." He turned and issued orders with a pace as precise as a cutting blade.

"Medical, logistics, intelligence — all three teams, move up. Any media that crosses the line again, confiscate their equipment."

"Sir!" Right. Half a second as a father. Then straight back to being the Federal military. The third person to break through the crowd, technically, shouldn't be described with the word break. Because he wasn't the type to arrive disheveled. He was the type other people automatically stepped aside for. Calando Rosen. Chair of the Defense Committee, Galactic Federation Supreme Council.

That name carries the same kind of weight in the Federation as some families' ancestral tombs — not something you touch lightly, and it comes with its own built-in ecosystem of security, secretaries, aides, and political atmosphere. He walked over in a black formal suit without a crease out of place, unhurried, still wearing the composed expression he used on broadcast when discussing defense budgets. But only on his face. Because his hands were clenched. Tight enough that his knuckles had gone white.

I'd assumed someone at his level, even with a daughter climbing back alive off a missing-persons list, would ask for intel first, then the sequence of events, then political risk — three full rounds of high-level thinking before he had time to remember he was also a father. I was wrong. Aida's shuttle had barely touched down when Calando took a step forward. Just one step. But that one step said enough. When the hatch opened, Aida walked out under her own power.

Her uniform was immaculate to an almost aggressive degree, her hair pulled back cleanly, her face still carrying a trace of I have work to do later, please don't waste my time standing here. She really is remarkably skilled at pressing her own wreckage down so deep it looks like it never existed. I honestly suspect that if she ever took a bullet, she'd finish typing the report before she let herself fall over. She came down and stopped in front of Calando.

Father and daughter stood there, both perfectly straight — straight enough that it looked less like a reunion and more like two senior departments preparing to exchange documents.

"Father," Aida said first.

"Aida," Calando answered.... And then, nothing. No embrace. No tears. No hands reaching for a face. None of the things you'd see in an ordinary family drama. The silence was almost absurd, like the whole venue was waiting to see whether the Rosens were about to turn this reunion into a Defense Committee briefing. I almost felt secondhand embarrassment on their behalf.

Until I saw Calando raise his hand, as if to touch her shoulder, then stop — and finally just, very restrainedly, press flat a small fold of fabric on her collar that had slipped out of place. Just that. Aida went rigid for half a second. Very briefly. Brief enough that no one but someone with my particular bad habit of watching microexpressions when there's nothing better to do would have caught it.

"You did well," Calando said. Aida's lashes moved, just slightly.

"I know," she said.... That answer deserved a smack. But for some reason, I suddenly wanted to laugh. Because that I know wasn't arrogance. It was more like — if she didn't lead with something that sounded exactly like Aida Rosen right then, she was going to crack the shell she'd held together for a full year, right there in front of the entire Capital Ring system. So she braced herself the only way she knew how. Calando watched her for a moment, and — remarkably — didn't correct her.

He even let out a very quiet breath.

"Good," he said.

"As long as you're back." At that, Aida finally looked away. Watching that tiny, nearly invisible motion, I had exactly one thought. The Rosen family's version of affection is high-difficulty. Other families hug. This one delivers as long as you're back like it just cleared top-secret review. Dammit. That was actually kind of impressive. After that, the whole scene tipped into a collective cascade of emotional wreckage. On Harvey's side, I watched a woman push through the crowd, crying the entire way.

When she finally reached him, her first move wasn't to hug him — it was to grab his face and turn it left and right, twice.

"Are all your parts accounted for?" Harvey's expression was flat.

"Mom, I'm not an appliance."

"You be quiet. You fell off a chair when you were little and acted like nothing happened, and the next day your collarbone was cracked. I don't trust you."

"That was when I was eight."

"You don't look much smarter than eight right now."... So that's where Harvey's toxic mouth came from. Clearly a family inheritance. I suddenly had a very clear understanding of certain formative influences. On Roy's side, it got even more dramatic. A little boy — probably a younger brother — ran up sobbing and punched him straight in the stomach.

"You lied! You said you'd be back soon!" Roy took the hit with a grunt and somehow still smiled.

"I'm back, aren't I?"

"A year isn't soon!"

"For the military, that counts as fast."

"I hate the military!"

"Funny, sometimes I also— oof!" He didn't get to finish. An older relative caught up from behind and smacked him hard across the back, nearly driving the rest of the sentence back down his throat. Standing in the middle of all of it — crying, shouting, laughing, camera shutters, the whole thing boiling together — I felt something deeply unreal settle over me. A year ago, the Yukikaze was a missing-persons entry in a file. A few minutes ago, she was a miracle warship hanging over a memorial.

Now, she was a lot of people's children, a lot of people's family, the still alive that a lot of people could finally reach out and touch. All three of those were the same thing. But it didn't stop being news and turn back into people until the families broke through the line. Then I saw her. Aki Kushima. President of the United Interstellar Military Academy's Student Council. Maki Kushima's older sister. She didn't charge in the way the other families had. She walked fast, but controlled.

Still in the Academy's formal uniform — too white, too proper — the badge on her chest catching the light coldly, her shoulders squared as if she'd come straight from some school-level ceremony. But her face was very pale. The kind of pale that said she'd spent this entire year pressing everything she should have shown down beneath her composure, pressed it so long that it could no longer hold. She saw me first.

Or rather, she saw the landing zone in front of me first, and in the next beat, her eyes moved, searching for someone else. Maki hadn't come down yet. But I knew who she was looking for. And I knew this line was mine to deliver. So I drew a breath, straightened up, raised my hand, and saluted. The motion wasn't perfect. My shoulder still ached, my arm hadn't fully recovered, and my uniform carried the small scrapes of everything it had taken to fight our way home.

But that was still the most serious salute I'd ever given in my life. Because it wasn't for an instructor. It wasn't for the cameras. It was for a sister who had waited a year.

"Student Council President Kushima," I said. Aki's footsteps stopped. The venue was still loud all around us, but I swear that small pocket of air went quiet. I looked at her and said, one word at a time:"I kept my promise." Then I stepped half a pace aside. From the passage behind the second-wave landing zone, Maki Kushima was walking out from the other side.

Her stride was as steady as ever, her expression carrying that same calm that had no business appearing at any emotionally significant reunion — as if she hadn't just walked off a warship missing for a year, but had simply arrived a few minutes late to class. Only she could make coming back alive look like excuse me, coming through, I still have follow-up procedures to handle. I finished the sentence.

"Everyone came back safe." Aki froze. Not the dramatic kind. No staggering two steps back, no hand flying to her mouth, no name shouted out immediately. She simply stopped, visibly, completely — like the steel cable she'd been holding taut for an entire year finally snapped the instant my words landed. The next second, she was crying. Not the kind where tears slide down prettily. The kind where every defense on a person's face comes down at once. I had only ever seen Aki Kushima two ways at the Academy.

First: on stage, composed, beautiful, her words running like the back of a blade drawn across silk, letting the whole Academy understand exactly what a Student Council President was. Second: from a distance, when she caught sight of Maki — her expression softening, just a little. Only a little. I had never seen her like this. She raised a hand to wipe her face, and it only made things worse. The tears wouldn't stop.

The woman who could hold the entire Student Council and a room full of Upper House monsters in line was standing in the dead center of a memorial venue, crying the way you cry when you've finally been given permission to stop being President and just be a sister. When Maki reached her, she visibly froze too. Honestly, in that moment, I wanted to whistle. Not out of spite. It's just that in my life — admittedly not that long a life — I'd rarely seen Maki Kushima wear that specific oh, this is a problem expression.

She fears nothing. She measures the world with something close to a ruler. She can pick up the Empire's Third Princess and sort the risks before anything else. And the thing that actually stopped her cold wasn't an enemy ship, wasn't gunfire, wasn't politics. It was her sister, crying. Reasonable. Also very funny. But I had the decency to hold it in.

Aki lurched half a step forward, almost losing control, her hand reaching out — as if she wanted to touch Maki, and was also afraid touching her would make her shatter.

"Maki..." Her voice shook, the second half of the name nearly dissolved in tears. Maki stood in front of her, silent for two seconds, then raised her hand and took hold of Aki's wrist. Not a dramatic embrace. You could call it very Kushima — restrained, brief, more motion than words. But the moment Maki touched her, Aki's tears fell harder.

"I'm back, sis," Maki said, quietly.... That wasn't fair. That line was genuinely not fair. I turned my face away immediately, because I was afraid that if I kept watching, I'd do something on a live Federation broadcast that was deeply inconsistent with my personal brand. Like my nose stinging. Like my heart doing something irregular. Like a sudden, overwhelming urge to smash every camera in range so none of them could capture this too clearly.

Jess had materialized from somewhere on the other side at some point, eyes still red, mouth as wicked as ever. She dropped her voice.

"Wow, Shimo. That setup of yours was vicious."

"Shut up."

"I kind of want to cry right now. I also kind of want to heckle."

"Try it and I'll kick you back into the shuttle."

"This is what I appreciate about you. The more touching the moment, the more you act like a bastard who can't read the room."

"Thanks. That's not a compliment."

"I know." I shot her a look. She grinned even worse. And just as the Kushima sisters finally, truly embraced — yes, they got there in the end; Maki let out an almost imperceptible sigh first, then reached out and caught Aki, who was crying too hard to stand straight — Ash's voice came through my earpiece.

"Ground team. Report status." Still steady. Steady enough to sound like the emotional tsunami happening below had nothing to do with him personally. I looked up at the Yukikaze, still hanging overhead, and felt something close to laughter. Right. We'd only just broken through the families. Still ahead: the military, the media, the Supreme Council, the Academy, and one Imperial Third Princess currently being quietly relocated somewhere else entirely. Which meant— The real trouble was only just beginning.

I pressed my comm, trying to make my voice sound like it still belonged to someone capable of functioning.

"Reporting, Acting Captain," I said, looking out at the crowd of people hugging, crying, and completely wrecking the memorial's careful staging.

"The families got here first." The line went quiet for half a beat. Then Ash answered, mildly:"I can see that." Right. Even he was saying things that didn't need saying.