Chapter Text
“I told you,” Philippa rasps as they approach the hill, her mouth curling into a triumphant grin despite her split lip. “I told you I could find it.”
“You also said--” Jett pauses for breath between words, gripping Philippa’s shoulder more tightly against the weight of the injured woman in their arms. “You said you wouldn’t say I told you so. ”
“I didn’t.”
“You did. You--” She stops speaking as Ensign Mahto coughs again from her chairlike perch between them. “Hey, kid, how you doing there?”
Mahto says nothing, her eyelids fluttering.
“You’re doing great, Ensign,” Philippa says. With her black eye and ripped sleeve, she looks worse than Jett feels and almost as bad as Mahto sounds, but when she speaks to the younger woman her voice is firm. “You’re doing great, and we’re almost there.”
Mud squelches under Jett’s feet as they pick their way up the side of the hill. Philippa uses her chin to point at the camouflaged transport beacon. “There.”
“Right where you--where you figured,” Jett manages. “You see that, kid?”
Mahto smiles faintly.
“For the record,” Philippa says, somehow finding the breath to continue their theater, “I never said I--wouldn’t say--told you so. Said I wouldn’t-- gloat--”
“And whaddayou--call what you’re doing now--” Jett leans her hip against the beacon.
“Well, we made it, so I am celebrating our success--” Philippa’s rejoinder whirls away in a shimmer of gold as the transporter beam swirls around them.
Jett’s arms feel impossibly light as the waiting medics lift Mahto away, but seconds later they are full again as Philippa stumbles and Jett grabs her. Somehow she is still speaking, relaying Mahto’s condition to Culber even as she sags against Jett, and she falls silent only after he follows Mahto’s stretcher out the door.
“We did make it, Phil,” Jett manages, gripping her tightly as a second wave of medics converges on them. “We did it. We did.”