For a moment, her eyes met Jessyn’s. It was a look that she would remember for years. For the rest of her life. The peaceable old woman who had worked, her lover at her side, in Tonner Freis’s labs on Anjiin was gone. The angry, grief-stung woman was absent as well. In that moment—that fraction of a second—Synnia had become something regal. Something more than human, or else what humans can become when they face the universe and refuse to look away. There was no fear and no pleasure and no hope. Maybe serenity, if serenity could sometimes be terrible.
