The day is done, and by the time we make it back to the URE, I release them. Morning is not too far away. Despite being so late, I can't go home. My nerves dance in erratic patterns. I pass the pod. There's no reason to be there if I'm not going to sleep.

When I wander past the chapel, Dean's words surface. If I poked my head in, would I find Simon as an even more sallow-skinned, haggard wreck than he was before?

Warm light from the ever-burning candles of the chapel accost me as I enter. On the bench closest to the door, Simon sits with the weight of the world on his chest. Leaning his head against the wall, he stares into the metal rafters.

The Lady of the Impenetrable Heap casts a shadow across the pews. The shade rests in his lap, illuminating the darkness under his eyes that seems to be whispering about sleepless nights. His thick fingers entwine over his thighs.

Blue eyes open with sluggishness. He tilts his head, his gaze wandering to me. He doesn't smile. He rolls back to center, shutting me out.

"What are you doing here?" he asks quietly, his eyes still closed.

"Honestly? No idea."

"There's plenty of room if you want to join me." His arm sweeps around the empty space.

"Dean's worried about you."

"You're still talking to Dean?" His eyes open to peer at me with a blip of hope.

"Yeah, I mean, we're still friends and all." I fall into the space next to him on the bench.

"I was afraid you'd completely abandon him once he was contracted. I'm glad you're still talking."

"He asked me to wait for him."

"What does that mean?"

I shift uncomfortably. "No idea."

Simon sighs a long, slow exhale before shaking his head before proclaiming, "That kid was born a few hundred years too late."

"What does that mean?"

"Have you ever noticed how different he is?"

"Besides the fact that he breathes air from a different stratosphere?"

"No, Nika. Not his body, his mind. He thinks differently than a lot of people down here. He feels his way through situations. The kid is practically the manifestation of a metaphysical poem."

"Talk human to me, Simon." Before Days-Simon has no business here.

"It means he doesn't give a shit about any contract. He follows the law because he's a good person. He's loyal to a fault and has a rigid sense of duty, but he wants what his heart wants—"

"I'm not here to talk about that. I'm here for answers, not more questions."

He reclines to his original position, re-erecting his barriers. After a few minutes of silence, his question is so quiet, I barely hear it emerge. "What do you want to know?"

So much. There's no best place to begin. "Why haven't you come home?"

"I'm staying with Tahn."

My face twists in disgust. "What kind of relationship grows out of something like that?"

"You have no room to judge," he scolds. "I've made my share of good and terrible choices, but everything I've done, I've done it because I've tried to make the best out of all the shit thrown at me my entire. Fucking. Life." His head bangs lightly against the wall to punctuate the words.

"Sorry things have been so horrible for you," I say bitterly, a little insulted that I must have been one of the referenced situations. "But you being a whore has never really been the best for me either."

He chuckles. "How do you think I got the Sink in the first place?"

He squints at me with blue eyes dulled by the state of his oily skin and rough shave. I want to let him sulk, but Dean's words ground me. Something is wrong. We're going to be separated soon. I want my dad to come home.

He exhales, slumping into the wall. "So, if you have all the answers, why are you here again?"

I slide in a little closer. "We're leaving soon. In about two months, actually. And today I found out we aren't even going to be on the same ship." I drop my hands into my lap. I want to be blunt so I don't regret anything later. "I don't want to waste time on wondering what you're doing. I want to know you're taking the creds we have, and you're preparing for the five-year haul without me. I want to know that whatever happens next, I don't have to imagine you in all the worst possible situations. Because, you know . . . I worry about you." I finish at a whisper to the ground.

His four-fingered hand rests on my shoulder. When I perk up to accuse him of being a shitty human being again, I catch his eyes shining at the edges, enhanced by the flickers of a hundred yellow flames.

He lingers over me, searching for something over my face, in my hair, around my eyes. When he's satisfied, he returns to his position leaning against the wall.

"You sound so much like your father sometimes."

I'm dumbstruck. "What?"

"Your father." His hand drops into his lap. "I never told you this, but I knew him. Fairly well, actually."

I wait in silence while Simon blinks a tear loose.

"My relationship with Roberto was the only good thing I had going in my life. He found me when I was at my lowest. I had just run away from a fucked-up, abusive relationship on the West Coast and was trying to find my way around Virginia again. The house I grew up in is not too far away from here, you know. When I first headed west, I thought I'd found a fabulous little life for myself in LA with a B-List celebrity chef on my arm. Turns out exchanging sex for work is basically a stepping-stone for bigger problems.

"Anyway, I was back in Richmond, trying to pull my life together when I met your father at a local café. I was a lowly baker's assistant, and he was head of the most popular book club in the zipcode. He saw me going in and out of the kitchen on Saturdays, dropping trays off at the front counter. One day, he just slipped it in there."

I don't understand. My boots dispense no answers.

"And on that cheek," he says, lost in a moment that I have no recollection of . . .

and o'er that brow,

So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,

The smiles that win, the tints that glow,

But tell of days in goodness spent,

A mind at peace with all below,

A heart whose love is innocent . . .

"He gave that to me. Wrote down those words and slipped them in my pocket as I walked by, my hands full of empty baking sheets. He re-introduced me to poetry that day. The stanzas of Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats—they saved me. They brought us together."

All these words from the Before Days are foreign to me. There's no way to process them, but he continues anyway.

"Roberto and the poets showed me I was more than my parents' expectations. He told me I was capable of achieving all of my aspirations—like going to culinary school and everything." Simon trails off, speaking directly to his hands before laughing one loaded note. "Our whole story is the worst fucking cliché, but it's ours."

I can't face him. I pick at the fraying edge of my jacket and process the information as it swings at my head. The boyfriend. The one my father has talked about so frequently, he became the hazy memory of a distant relative—the example Simon bases all of his life's lessons on. He's my biological father.

"The only problem with our fairy tale," he continues, "is that Roberto was married to Camila, your mother. She was a Coast Guard pilot and never came back for long. It was perfect. I basically moved in for two weeks at a time while she toured the country. I'm not proud of it and neither was he, but the whole thing gave us little snapshots of a life we wanted. I got to spend time with you. I actually knew you well before we came down here. I loved you because you were his."

My heart ceases its beating.

"You had a different name, actually. Roberto fought so hard to name you Janika, but neither of their Mexican families couldn't pronounce it, so they named you something else. When she was gone, though, you were Janika. And we were a normal, happy family in that little house." He takes a rag out from his coat pocket and wrings it in his hands.

I still have nothing to say. No words are right.

"When the Invaders hit, I came to get Roberto, to tell him I knew a place we could all run to. My parents were invited to the URE because of their work as superstar surgeons. I knew about their access. I figured they'd died at a conference in Brazil when the Invaders hit the Southern hemisphere first, so I took it for us. I could save us. We could be a real family."

He clutches my hands to his chest.

"That's all I ever wanted."

I'm afraid to ask. "Then what happened?"

"I got there too late. The base where you and Roberto lived, everything was destroyed. I found him. Camila's body was a few feet away. Honey, you were still in his arms. His hand—" he chokes on his words, "his hand covered your face and shielded your eyes. He loved you so much."

My own tears threaten to fall.

"I wanted to die right there. With him. If you hadn't been in his arms, I would have crawled in and stayed. Right there and never left. I would have liked to lie there and let the world take us together.

"No one loved me like he did. Nothing has even come close. Nothing. I'm a broken man who realized too late that the greatest thing that will ever happen to him is gone. I'd rather stay here and die within a fifty-mile radius of his remains than shoot myself into space to chase a worthless existence on another planet."

Tears cascade over his cheeks. He stares at the ceiling again. Overwhelming guilt sweeps over me. I'm the reason he's miserable.

"You're not allowed to stay here to die." The thought of launching in seventy days and watching him disappear stabs at my heart. Simon curls inward, huddling into the wall. I reach out, grabbing his arm to bring him face-to-face. "Do you understand me? You can't leave me."

He shrugs his body from my grasp as he sobs.

"No, Dad. You can't turn away from me now, or you might as well have just left me there."

"I almost did." His fingers dig into his tear-stained face. "I didn't want to go on. Camila was armed. I grabbed her gun, and she moved. I don't even know if she was really dead, but I didn't care. I put the barrel in my mouth. I tasted the metal. Her blood was still warm on it. I tried to pull the trigger. I kept my eyes on Roberto's face. I was going to do it for us. Then I saw you, peeking out from behind his hands. You saw me and reached out to me."

He pauses to let one choking gasp ring through the empty room.

"You struggled to push his arm off. And I stood there, the gun still in my mouth, as you pulled yourself up and tripped over his remains and grabbed my leg. You looked at me, and I looked at you over the gun. I couldn't do it because you have the shape of his eyes—the curve of his nose. His blood was in your hair, dripping down your arms." His voice shakes as his body heaves through the lament.

"I wanted to tell you, but I couldn't. Roberto was mine. Not yours. Mine. And if I told you, I'd have to share him. God, it's so stupid."

My arms envelop him before he crumbles on the floor of the Impenetrable Heap. He finally curls into me. He heaves racking sobs as his fists clench my jacket. I've never had to hold Simon before because he's always been the strongest pillar of our family. Everything I have, everything I am, I learned from my nestled spot in his arms. But after all of my own experiences with excruciating loss, I understand. All those stories of "the boyfriend," every single time Simon was a shitty human being, was actually another notch of perpetual mourning. Each cold morning alone, each misplaced acerbic remark, each time he chose them over me was spillage from an irreparably broken heart.

"I'm sorry, Dad."

I remind myself to hold it together while I let him fall apart.

We sit there for unbroken stretches of time. No one disturbs us as we drift to a fitful sleep on those hard metal benches before the shifting shadow of the Lady of the Impenetrable Heap.