The sun had just dipped behind a group of trees when I arrived at the lake. I quickly took off my socks and shoes then rolled up my pant legs to just above my knees. Next thing I knew, I was shin-deep in the water, the gentle waves lapping around me with a soft soothing sound.

The simple act of standing in the water calms my anxiety and the weight of the day slowly bleeds off my shoulders. I cross my arms over my chest and close my eyes, listening to the gentle sounds of the water and the slight evening breeze. The only thing that would make this better is if the rocks under my feet became the soft Aorian sand that would cradle my toes as if they were fragile and in need of care.

It would be better if this was Aoria.

I release a breath I hadn't known I was holding until my mind whispered the silent truth to me. Despite everything that happened, despite the pain that was attached to the God-awful planet, it was still my home; it was still the place that held the souls of my family.

The thought of my family sends a pleasant warmth through my body, protecting it from the slight chill of the wind. Soon, I'm surrounded by the sands of home again.

"Nine, ten. Ready or not, here I come!" Shawn's voice rang out from the other side of the house and I continued to scrabble for a spot to hide, not having found one in time.

I stop running when I see that the tide has gone out and exposed much of the shallow sea life. I quickly scan the area that had previously been covered with water. At first, all I see is a bunch of kelp and seaweed, but as I'm about to give up, having heard Shawn getting closer, I spot a grouping of sea-sponge just big enough to hide behind.

I hurried behind it and covered my mouth as I giggled. It was rare to find sea-sponges so close to the surface, but it seemed that the sea was out to help me today.

"Rina! Where are you?" Shawn calls out to me in a sing-song voice, his footsteps getting closer by the second.

Suddenly, Shawn jumps behind me and yells. "Boo!"

My startled scream soon dissolves into a fit of giggles as his fingers move about my belly, tickling me. "Stop!" I continue to laugh and lean into the sea-sponge to get away from him. "Sawn!"

He joins me in laughing and steps away. "Okay, okay. Come on, Mama says that dinner is almost ready." I look up at him from where I sit on the ground against the sea-sponge, having gotten my pants wet. "Look at you, all wet and hiding behind a sea-sponge. I guess I'll just have to call you Wet Rina. Oh! I know, I'll call you Spongy, now."

He held out his hand and helped me up. "Let's go get you changed, Spongy, Mama won't be happy if you get a cold." Together, we walked back into the house, hand-in-hand.

The memory faded away with the sound of feet on the rocks behind me. "Figured I'd find you out here." I frown and look over my shoulder, having expected Astrid or even Elena.

"What are you doing out here?" I look at Raiden where he stands just outside the reach of the water.

"Well, as I said, I figured I'd find you out here. So, in thinking of the context of the phrase, I guess you could say that I was looking for you." He shrugs his shoulders and I glance over his posture. He's fairly relaxed, feet shoulder-width apart, hands in his jean pockets with his thumbs hanging over the edges. When his shoulders relax again, he tilts his head to the side, seeming to think of something.

I slowly turn to face him, careful to not lose my balance on the rocks. "What do you want, Raiden?"

He holds a hand to his chest above his heart in mock surprise. "I'm hurt, Serina. What makes you think that I'd only come to find you if I needed something?"

My brows raise in response, not bothering to explain when we both know that he isn't one to look for people without a reason. "Okay, I guess you right, to an extent."

I tilt my head to the side, curious. "Explain."

"Astrid was busy in a study session with Telenoch, all but drooling as he talked about the history of the planet." He rolls his eyes and I can't help the small grin that finds its way to my lips. That sounds like Astrid. "So, she shot me a message and asked if I would come to find you. She knew that your shift ended a little over an hour ago and hadn't heard from you."

"An hour?" He nods and I purse my lips.

How had it already been an hour? I grabbed an officer as soon as my shift ended and told them to drive me out here. It was a quick drive, maybe ten minutes tops. Once we got here, I told him to stay with the rover and walked out here.

"So, in all, I guess you could say that I need you to reach out to her, despite her current distraction, she sounded worried."

Neither of us says anything, both at a loss in the current situation. With only the sounds of the water and wind around us, I move out of the water and take a seat on the rocks. It takes a moment to find a comfortable position over the many shapes, but soon, I've settled on the ground.

"What were you thinking of out there?" Raiden's voice is much quieter now that we're next to each other. I contemplate what to tell him as he moves to sit next to me. After a while, I decide on the truth.

"My family." I grin and look out at the water. "I was thinking of a time my brother and I were playing hide-and-seek. I was six and hid behind a sea-sponge that was just barely larger than I was."

"It must have been pretty hard to leave your family. Aorians are a family-oriented people, aren't they?"

I drop my gaze to the ring on my finger, staring at the looping "B" before I start to spin it. I gently shake my head and look back to the water. "My parents died when I was twelve and Shawn left the planet when he turned twenty-one. I was on my own for the last four years, so I didn't really have anyone to leave behind."

I can see his posture turn ridged out of the corner of my eye. "Oh, I wouldn't have—"

"You didn't know." I stop spinning the ring and move it back so it sits upright. "In reality, I didn't have to tell you, but we'll all be close together for the rest of our lives, so why hide it?"

He's silent for a minute and just looks out at the water as I do. "What happened?" His voice is rough, almost like he didn't want to ask but was still compelled to know.

"Skimmer accident. My dad had an Arteriovenous Malformation, AVM, in his brain that ruptured one night. He and my mom were on their way back home from town when it happened. He lost control of the Skimmer and they crashed." I bite my lip and continue. "No one knew—no one even suspected—that he had one. Apparently, it's usually caught at birth and fixed, but his parents had a home-birth and it was never found. After that, Shawn and I were immediately checked because they can sometimes be genetic, but we were clear.

"The doctors told us that we were lucky, ignoring the fact that they were talking to two kids who just lost both of their parents. 'At least it was quick and painless', they said. They said that we should take comfort in knowing that they didn't suffer. After that, my brother dropped everything and took care of me."

I finally stop, having been unable to keep the word-vomit from spilling after I started. Once the beginning got out, the rest followed together, almost as if it refused to get separated.

"My little sister died last year."

I start, his words shaking me out of my darkened self-pity. My lips part in shock and he picks up a small rock. He rolls it between his fingers then throws into the water, watching the ripples from where it landed.

"She was nineteen. She never really knew what she wanted to do with her life, but she had finally decided that she wanted to be a nurse and started taking intro classes like terminology." A small grin forms on his face before it disappears completely. That would explain him knowing a few words. "She was three weeks from finishing her first quarter of classes when she got sick, Hansirlong's Disease."

I drop my head, having heard of the wave of disease that swept through the Prime system the previous year. It was an awful sickness that had almost no precursor. One night your fine, the next you're literally coughing out your lungs. The disease was often dormant for an extended time before your lungs started to liquify, and at that point, it was already too late. Once it started, it was a few days to a week and a half of coughing up a filmy black substance that turned out to be what was left behind as your lungs disintegrated.

"She was one of the rare cases that lasted two weeks. Some people said that we were lucky to have more time to say goodbye, but all it allowed was for her to suffer longer." I watch as he throws another rock into the water, this time fueled by a wave of subtle anger that hadn't been there before. "The worst part is that I was in cryo for so long because now that I'm thinking about it, I realize that it's been almost two years, yet it feels so new."

Without looking away from the water, I gently set a hand on his that sits on the rocks at his side. "It will always feel new, somedays are better than others and you're able to remember the good times, but most of the time, there's still an ache in your heart."

He doesn't move his hand, so we sit there in the growing darkness as dusk continues to stretch on. "She would've been twenty-one this year. She would've been able to go anywhere she wanted."

"Did she have any ideas...before?"

He chuckles under his breath and shakes his head. "She was crazy, she had all sorts of planets that she wanted to go to. She hated it on Prime 3, said it was too crowded and 'dreary'. She said that she wanted to go somewhere intimate, a small planet that was community-driven and everybody knew everybody. She was thinking of somewhere in whatever system I ended up in so we wouldn't be too far apart."

Finally looking at him, I see that he's been staring at me. I give him a small smile. "We little sisters can be a bit of a shadow. I wanted to transfer to the planet that Shawn is at, but as you can tell, it didn't turn out that way."

"Where is he?"

"A1-C23, a mining colony." The word tastes like dirt on my tongue. No matter how much I try, I will never like the idea of living—even just being—on one. "He was always fascinated with the rocks, although on a planet of sand, they were a rarity already, so their appeal was understandable. He's now lead geologist there, leading the research team to map out cadmium deposits."

"Ah, so you guys are the type-A family."

I scoff, rolling my eyes. "What do you mean 'type-A'? I like to think that I can be fairly laid-back," He gives me a pointed look and I shrug. "When I want to be."

"Whatever, you are not only the head of the infirmary, you're an elder of the planet, and your brother is the lead geologist of an entire planet. I would consider that pretty type-A."

We fall into a lull in the conversation, finding a comfortable silence in the air. We just sit on the rocks, letting the sounds of the water talk for us. After a moment, I realize that my hand is still over his, so I quickly pull it back, wrapping my arms around my knees. I set my palm on top of my other arm, the skin suddenly cold now that it's apart from his.

They believe that Celxians should be the only to inhabit the planet and mean to kill you all. The wind whispers with the sound of Telenoch's voice, bringing an all-too-familiar weight back to my shoulders.

"I can't believe I thought that we would be okay, so long as we impressed Telenoch and survived the next two months. Now we have to keep our people safe from some fringe group of Celxians."

"You're not the only one that thought we had made it. We all did." Raiden says, the stress of the situation bleeding into his words.

"I guess, but we're not ready for an attack. The guard is running themselves ragged trying to keep up with rotations, so the borders are never unmanned. We've had three of them come into the infirmary just today, two were from heat-exhaustion and the other a wound on the back of his leg that needed stitches. Ha, and I still have people learning basic anatomy!"

I drop my head to my knees. "There's only four of us that would be any good if an actual surgery was required, I have two people that still get queasy at the sight of blood, and my training technicians still only know the basics of the machines. I mean, what if—"

"Serina," Raiden sets a hand on my shoulder, cutting my theory short. "You need to calm down; we don't know when an attack will happen if it does. So for now, we just need to keep training everyone and hope for the best."

I give him a small nod, acknowledging what he said, but the stress of the colony seems to congregate on my shoulders, weighing them down. How are we going to train enough to be able to defend ourselves from people that know the planet like the back of their hands?

"Come on," Raiden stands up and brushes himself off. "It's getting dark and we should head back to the colony. Besides, you need to talk to Astrid before she comes to kill me for not doing what she said."

I glance up at him and notice he has a hand out to help me stand. Reluctantly, I take his hand and get up, brushing myself off as well. Quickly dropping his hand, I unroll my pant legs and grab my socks and shoes, suddenly aware of everything that was shared here.

"I guess you're right." My throat closes before I say anything else, so I start for the rovers, not bothering to put my socks and shoes back on.

"You know," I glance back at him, having gotten a few paces ahead. "You're not so bad, Barringer."

I stumble for my footing as a rock slips under me. Once steady, I face forward again. "The same could be said about you, Jackson."