It was probably in her nature. When scooped up by the object at Bangalore back in August 2019, Maren had been a clerical assistant with the European Space Agency supporting her boss during the Brahma mission. ESA had no representatives in the Brahma crew but was providing tracking and communication data.

She had endured the flight to Keanu and the years of adjustment, loss, and recovery without ever interacting with Sanjay Bhat in a significant way. Maren had just been a thin blond woman who spoke little and busied herself with food preparation and distribution . . . two things Sanjay Bhat avoided.

It was only when she began installing fascinating objects on various HB structures, from representational or abstract pieces to a misguided bust of Zack Stewart, that Sanjay began to notice her. (In fact, their first real conversation had been an argument over what Sanjay thought was the silliness of creating likenesses of deceased humans.)

Now Maren was on him, at him, kissing, holding. She was so distraught that she was hardly able to form words. But he did hear: “They just told me yesterday!”

“What?” he said, his voice sounding better, though still not great.

“That you were . . . were . . .” And then, unable to say were dead, she started sobbing.

“Look,” Sanjay said, “they were wrong!” He had to admit that he enjoyed the rush of emotion—he was blinking tears himself—as well as the comfort of Maren’s strong arms around him.

And her fragrance. Early in their relationship, he had realized that he loved the way Maren smelled.

Now she fastened herself to him with a ferocity he would have loved to reciprocate in a more private setting. She made it difficult for him to walk, not that the pressing crowd of HBs would have allowed much speed. “Let’s get you to the Temple,” Harley Drake was saying.

Harley’s command voice worked its magic. Maren’s death grip relaxed and the other HBs moved aside. Sasha and Jordana and Maren formed around him on three sides. All were taller, Sanjay realized, and the variety of coloring—ginger Sasha, blond Maren, and dark Jordana—sent a jolt of smug, unjustified pride through him. My three graces, he thought.

Sanjay had taken perhaps a dozen steps and was beginning to feel as good as he had ever felt when the vision in his left eye changed, not so much distorted as overlaid with another image.

What the hell—?

He felt a growing pressure at the back of his skull, and now his right eye was affected, too. The overlay resolved itself into the image of what looked like a giant egg. But that was swiftly replaced by . . . unknown faces, figures, landscapes.

Inside his head he registered . . . static, voices in languages he didn’t know, even music.

Then one word: Ring. It repeated, Ring, ring, ring.

He blinked but kept walking and smiling, telling himself, This is normal, this is temporary, this is not the beginning of my Revenant sell-by moment, right up to the moment where he fainted and fell on his face.

“Are you awake?” Maren’s voice in his ears, low, almost a whisper; her face in his field of view, brows furrowed.

They were in the Temple now, second floor, Sanjay’s work home for most of his adult life. Sanjay had been given a pair of trousers and a loose shirt. He was flat on his back on a couch; Maren was sitting on the floor next to him, his hand in hers.

He managed a quiet “Mmmm,” but squeezed her hand and pulled her even closer.

His vision cleared. The tableau was utterly familiar and at the same time totally disorienting. Physically and mentally, he had prepared for weeks to leave Keanu—possibly for good. He had had terrific, painful arguments with Maren. “Why do you have to go?”

“I know more about the vehicle than anyone.”

“And why did you have to be the expert?”

“I don’t know. It’s in my nature.”

Maren’s worst fears had become fact. There was always a risk with any space mission. Adventure could have exploded on launch. It could have suffered engine underperformance and drifted into a useless orbit, fatal to its crew.

Its thermal protection system could have failed. Even a small navigation failure would have caused them to miss Earth entirely, dooming them.

Then there was the possibility—certainty, it turned out—that they might be fired upon.

The method and likelihood of a return to Keanu remained uncertain.

When Sanjay considered the nature of the Adventure vehicle and mission . . . well, the odds might have actually been weighted in favor of failure and death.

And so far, he had experienced a little of both.

Yet . . . he had made it back. He was in his lover’s arms again.

So why did he feel so guilty?

He realized that Sasha, Harley, Zhao, Jaidev, and several others were nearby, either staring at him with obvious concern or pretending not to. “How long was I out?” he said, loudly enough for everyone to hear.

“Fifteen minutes,” Harley said. “We had to carry you.” A typical Harley comment, which Sanjay appreciated.

“Sorry about that.”

Maren was looking at his face. “How do you feel?”

A good question. He felt fine, except for the lingering pressure in his skull. The voices and other sounds were still present. Images kept flickering through his vision . . . they were less intrusive, but still present. It was as if his brain had learned to manage the flow of extraneous data during the fifteen-minute blackout.

And flow of data was what he had to be experiencing. Sanjay knew that one suspected reason for the Revenants’ existence had been to communicate, to serve as a bridge between humans and alien intelligences who had not only a different language but unusual biologies and, for that matter, wildly unfamiliar frames of reference. He had heard, for example, that the Architect seemed to possess a sense of time that was far slower than that of humans . . . the same way that an insect’s sense of time passing would be far faster.

Sanjay had become a bridge. Fine. His goal was to be a good bridge . . . and to still be standing more than a week hence.

“A little rattled,” he told Maren and the others. “Hungry.”

So they fed him typical Keanu food, which, given that he was ravenous, was the best thing he had ever tasted. (Another list of regrets for dying when he did . . . no chance to eat a proper Earth meal.) As he ate, he made sure to exchange reassuring looks with Maren while trying to answer questions from Jaidev, Harley, Sasha, and Zhao.

There were the expected ones. His last memory. His first sight and sounds upon revival. “Do you remember anything from in between?” Zhao said.

That question was surprising only because it came from pragmatic Zhao, the last human Sanjay would ever have expected to take interest in life after death.

Sanjay would have been the second least likely, and no matter how he replayed his moments of death and new life, he found no interregnum, no region between, no halfway-between-heaven-and-hell moment. “No. As far as I can tell, there was no gap.” He snapped his fingers. “It was that fast.”

Maren seemed upset by the whole notion, not that Sanjay could blame her. “How did this happen?” she was saying.

“Don’t question it,” Harley said. “Gift horses and all that—”

Unsurprisingly, this caused Maren to collapse in sobs.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Harley,” Sasha said.

“I’m a little curious, too,” Sanjay said. “I mean, we knew that Keanu had the ability to . . . find an individual human soul and—”

“Please don’t call it a soul!” Maren said.

“Fine, a human identity, a personality . . .” As he uttered these terms, he noticed changes in the signals inside his head, as if he were taking part in a kind of guessing game.