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The first thing she thought, after the dust had settled and the reality of the new world washed over her, was that she hadn’t ever wanted this.
Alone, a few hours walk from Rim Elm, Noa had sat down in the grass under a tree, put the baby aside, and cried with the shame of it. She had never wanted this. She had wanted Terra, and she had wanted friends, and she had wanted to see the outside world and find her parents and save her parents and save her brother but—
Halfway to Jeremi, Noa asked the baby what he thought they should do.
“I don’t think we have a home,” she admitted, listening to him babble softly where he was strapped to her back in the pouch that Maya had given her before she’d left Rim Elm. “I mean, maybe we could go back to Rim Elm? Or Biron? But I don’t think Vahn will stay there, and I don’t want to live in Biron! Everyone is so boring in Biron.” Even Gala, most of the time. (Some of the time.) “And we can’t go home.” Not to either of her homes; it would be almost impossible to get to Snowdrift Cave and she didn’t even really want to live there alone anyway, not now, not without Terra, and Conkram was gone.
“Jeremi’s nice,” she said, while Cort mumbled meaningless noises. “I liked it, so we can go there. Until either of us have a better idea.” Her brother smacked her on the shoulder with one little fist, and for a moment, even though she knew she shouldn’t, she almost hated him.
She was a child. She was still a child! She didn’t know anything about babies, or how to raise them, or even really what they ate or needed or how they grew older except that they did, and that Terra had managed to raise her, even though Terra had been a wolf back then. If Terra could raise her, Noa assumed that she could raise Cort, because it couldn’t be that hard. He was just a baby, and she was just a child, and—
Vahn arrived in Jeremi two months after Terra had left, and when he knocked on the door to the little house Noa had been living in, she didn’t cry or run to him. She just stood there, tired and overwhelmed and her ears ringing because Cort kept crying, and wanted more than anything in the world to curl up against Vahn’s side and nap like they had rested on the road, where she would tuck herself between Vahn and Gala and close her eyes and listen to them breathing and talking while Terra sat, warm and familiar, on her wrist.
It had been all so hard, and sometimes so awful, and people she loved had died and people she hated had died, and she’d been so frightened that Vahn or Gala might get hurt, but they had been together.
And now she sat with the goat’s milk in the bottle and the baby in her arms and Noa wondered if she was ever going to have any idea what she was doing, but Vahn was there. Vahn was there.
Vahn was there, and he came over and pulled her into a hug so tight that it made her chest ache a little, pushed more tears out of her, and she grabbed onto the back of his shirt to anchor herself. “I’ve done this before,” he told her, and she thought about Nene back in Rim Elm and, with what she hoped was a grateful noise, let him take the baby.
Vahn stared down at Cort, who had hiccoughed himself into crying again, and sighed. “You’re a lot of trouble,” he told Cort.
“He’s trying,” Noa said, wiping her eyes on the backs of her hands the way she always had before, a motion that, before, had let Terra press up against her cheeks. The space on her wrist was so empty, raw, like a wound. One time, in a fight somewhere outside of Sol, she’d gotten a horrible big cut across her shoulder, and they hadn’t been able to heal it right away. It had hurt, but not like other things had hurt. It hurt like she had lost something, the way it had felt when Terra’s wolf had fallen and been unable to get back up. It had hurt like she would never stop hurting, ever again.
Her empty wrist hurt like that now, even when she wasn’t touching it. It woke her during the night, that emptiness. She’d tried wrapping bandages around her wrist or wearing a bracelet, but it wasn’t only the weight that was missing—it was the presence, the second mind that she had always, always known.
For her entire life, Terra had always been there. And now she wasn’t.
It gaped inside Noa, deeper even than the pit that Octam had fallen into. There was no bottom to that feeling of missing. She knew Terra would call it grief, but Terra was gone, and Noa was here, so she would call it whatever she wanted, and what she wanted to call it was bad.
“You’re trying too,” Vahn finally said, and Noa sniffed, leaning into his shoulder and watching as he easily took the bottle of warm goat milk in hand and, in only a few minutes, had Cort eating and quiet.
“Thank you,” Noa finally said, dozing off against Vahn’s shoulder. “Thank you for coming back.”
Vahn held her tight, and she knew he understood.
It took Gala four more months to show up, and by the time he did, Noa had started to think that maybe he’d forgotten about them. Not—not really. Not really forgotten about them. But a little bit.
He stood on the doorstep, travel bag tossed over his shoulder, one hand on the doorframe. He’d grown—he had to duck to get under the door. He stared down at Vahn, who had Cort tucked over his shoulder, and then deeper in at Noa where she was trying to make something to eat and mostly failing.
For a time, none of them spoke, except for the baby, who gurgled comfortably in Vahn’s arms, staring up through the door towards Gala.
Gala swallowed. Nodded. “I’m home,” he said, and for the first time since Terra had left her, Noa felt—
Noa felt like it was gonna be okay.