I realized with no small amount of horror that I knew her face. I had seen it a hundred times, sketched into the pages of my mother’s notebooks. I knew who she was supposed to be to me—the one my mother had told me would come. My counterweight. The female I would love and scourge the worlds for. And she was beautiful. Breathtakingly so. The way she stubbornly clung onto life, refusing to die even as her body failed her, was remarkable.
