Page 68 of The Blind Hordesman

The males have dived already. I see nothing.

“The sea has calmed,” Rickie Lee says.

I stand and approach the water, double-check the coordinates, see someone initiated transport already. “Are you seeing what I am seeing?” I ask Sotay.

He joins me. “Maybe I shouldn’t have sent them out so soon.”

“You think?”

“Often.”

“I doubt it. Now what? I will need to retrieve them.Ifthey’re alive, and all for what? Sports? I—”

Hundreds of merchant sacks pop to the surface of the water. We wait for the males. They leap from the sea, shouting between gasping breaths. I sit back down and exhale a breath I didn’t even know I’d been holding. “I hate sports.”

The males swim back, and I note there’re more of them. Twenty-one males I recognize as merchants from Regha, Eron being one of them, so there will beka-te, candy from my old homeland, Telea. Nice. Loven and Vemlox reach the shore, grumbling and looking defeated. Kinre joins them, and they dress while the merchants pull the sacks, trying to salvage the drowning and likely destroyed goods.

I stand again, spread my arms. “Where is my gate?”

The males shrug. Loven says, “It was there. Then it wasn’t.”

“Seer?” I prompt when he reaches the shore.

He shakes his head.

A male emerges from the sea. He wears simple cotton pants and a shirt. In his hand is my gate. “Dreikx,” Retay, Kinre’s son, greets me and drops the gate on the sand. Burns show on his palm. Skin and flesh have been melted, roasted, looking like the leg Sotay brought me. “Congratulations,” I say. “You won the Sewa region.”

They cheer, and Kinre lifts up his son and shakes him while Retay looks confused.

“Woohoo!” Kiki says from a distance. She is sitting on the sand, the upper half of her body inside a sack. “This thing is full of candy.”

Sotay groans as he gets up. “Want a beer?”

I shake my head no and pack the gate into the container. When I stand, I find Seer next to me. He places a hand on my shoulder and squeezes. “I’d war alongside you any day.” He walks away and joins his family. Perhaps I could spare time for celebrations, a trivial unnecessary time waster.

I join the Regha Alphas and accept a beer.

Ten beers later, I’m nude, swimming in the freezing waters. I don’t mind the cold. The waters are mine, and my people finally have a home to call their own.

Series Epilogue

Seer

“Push, Kiki, come on. You can do it. Push my baby out.” I rattle a battle cry to encourage my queen, who has elected for natural labor over whatever the Teleans are doing with pregnant Omegas these days.

Something flies at my head.

I stick my hand out and catch a bottle of water. Oh hey, water. I pop open the cap and drink. Another bottle hits my chest. I laugh, snort, and spit water everywhere.

“Get out of my labor room,” the Telean doctor says.

“Fuck off and deliver the baby.”

“Out!”

“Make me.” I turn toward Kiki’s labored breathing. She’s a champ, this Omega, not a peep out of her. I scoot my chair closer, a little wary of things she might throw at my head. I press a hand on her massive belly and feel it contract, tighten up.

“This seems like transition,” I say.

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