Line Captain Tissadelle Shepherd (Human)

She had not expected the word to come out wrong. She had rehearsed nothing — there had been nothing to rehearse, only a hillside, a mother, and four days of noticing things she had no authority to write down — but somewhere between the guard detail's correct, chilly farewell and Galen's two ordinary words, the sentence had assembled itself before she'd finished choosing it.

It is good to home. Tír na nÓg was the only planet she had ever been born on. It was not, she understood the instant the words left her, the planet the sentence had been about.

She corrected it aloud, cleanly, the way she corrected any inaccurate report before it left her desk. Galen didn't ask why the first version had needed correcting, which she was grateful for in a way she didn't examine too closely. The Highland Guard's stiff, precise goodbye behind her had been exactly what the charter required and not one degree warmer — her mother's world extending her the correctness owed a visiting officer, nothing owed a daughter, because officially there was no daughter standing at this gate, only a Line Captain whose personal leave had ended on schedule.

She had not realised, until the guard turned and the tension went out of her shoulders on its own, how much of the last four days she had spent holding a posture for people who loved her and didn't quite know what to do with what she'd become. Galen didn't require the posture. Galen required a manifest, a seal, and nothing else, and that was, this morning, the most restful transaction she'd had since she stepped off the shuttle four days ago.

She thought of the Hollow once more before she boarded — the pale bark, the half-beat-late leaves, her mother's face asking her not to write it down — and filed the whole of it, deliberately, under leave rather than under record. Then she climbed the ramp into the aetoshuttle, and did not look back at the uplands the way she once, years ago, had been unable to stop herself from doing.