Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 157
easily to his lips. Then he thought about it. Could he explain
this to a mortal? He would never have thought he had an
obligation to try.
Armiger lowered his eyes from the moon, and studied
Megan in the pale light. She was a creature he didn’t
understand. His plans had rarely included women. But she
stood next to him now, easy in the cricket-song and darkness,
and played none of the dominance games males played. She
took her own obligation to him, the wounded soldier, for
granted.
"My link to my higher self," he began, then stopped. "It
was more than love. We shared an identity. When... she died,
I should have died too. Because there was only one of us. Or
at least that’s what I believed."
Megan nodded. "We all think that of our life’s love. But
one carries on."
At first Armiger thought she had simply not understood
him. Then he thought of another possibility: Megan knew his
experiences were not like hers, but she was making an effort to
translate them into terms she could understand.
It surprised him to think that she might be spending her
time with him doing such an odd kind of work. For it would be
work, finding commonality with a stranger’s experience.
Armiger himself did so only as a way of anticipating the next
move of an opponent.
If she’d kept her conclusions to herself, he might have
believed she was doing that too. But she shared them.
"Was she killed in the war?" Megan asked.
He started to say no, since this local brushfire he had
been involved in had nothing to do with the interstellar conflict
that had resulted in his greater self’s demise. But he could play
the same game as her: what would make sense to her, on an