"So what did it feel like?" asked Lee Carter. She and Captain Matthew Cross were sitting at the small table in the front room of the Banshees' underground domicile the day after Cross' brush with death at the hands of the Breen and his genuinely miraculous recovery.
Matthew Cross struggled to articulate his thoughts, but no words fit well enough to even begin to describe his experience. Finally, he was forced to throw up his hands in defeat. "It's impossible to describe, Commander," he said. Carter looked terribly disappointed, so Cross made one last effort. "At first I was falling -- that was probably the shock from the concussion and fever from the infection. But then suddenly I was surrounded by a golden light and I wasn't afraid anymore. It was--" he searched for the right word, couldn't find it and settled on "--warm, all over, like being wrapped in a blanket. The next thing I knew I was looking up at all your worried faces. I was touched," he finished wryly.
"Fascinating," responded Carter.
"There was one other thing, now that I think about it," continued Cross. His brow creased in thought as he fought to recall more details of the experience. "There was a face..."
"Hey! I can't help it if you dream about me in your delirium," said Carter, still a little uncomfortable about Cross' earlier confession that he had seen her face in his dreamscape.
"Not, not you," said Cross. "There was someone else there too."
"Should I be jealous?" said Carter, a mischievous smile curling the corner of her lips.
"No," replied Cross thoughtfully, completely missing Carter's meaning. "I think it was Enki."
Carter blinked in surprise. "That kid we caught peeping in the windows? Why?"
Cross struggled to remember, but was clearly frustrated by his inability to conjure up more than vague tidbits. "This is going to sound crazy, but I think he might be the one who healed me."
"The kid?" exclaimed Carter incredulously, but then reconsidered her first opinion. "Well, I suppose anything's possible in this crazy place," she said. "We fall through a Black Gate and wind up on the other side of the known universe, there's a 50 billion year old black dwarf star in a universe that's only 12 billion years old, we find an ancient underground city on a rogue planetoid inhabited by beings from all across the universe and run by an old woman, there are huge half man half scorpion monsters, and somewhere here there supposedly is a magical gateway that will take us all back home and all we have to do is click our heels together three times and say 'There's no place like home'. A kid with healing powers is probably the least weird thing in this entire story!"
She lapsed into silence and her eyes glazed over in a faraway look.
Cross noticed and said, "What is it?"
Carter's reply wasn't immediate, but finally, she turned to Cross and folded her hands on the tabletop, then sighed and said, "I just wish Enki was around when the Aqrabu attacked. Jo might still be with us.
Matthew Cross smiled in sympathy and reached across the table and patted Carter's hands reassuringly.
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