Page 165 of Seer Prophet

Lily looked between us, her clear, green-rimmed eyes sharp. “Who?” she demanded of Revik, her mouth set in a frown. “Who is complex?”

“Your brother,” he told her casually, going back to coloring.

She looked at me, as if to verify his words, and I laughed.

“Don’t look at me,” I said. “Do you really think your father is lying to you?”

“He said bunnies can beblue!”Lily said at once. “I looked it up,just now.I showed him, but he says he doesn’t care. Bunnies are brown… or black… or white. Notblue!”she emphasized, looking disapprovingly at Revik’s very blue rabbit.

He glanced up, smiling at me, and rolling his eyes.

“She is definitely your daughter,” he said.

I clicked back, laughing.

“You think so, huh?” I looked at Lily, smiling at her. “Your father doesn’t like rules, darling,” I told her. “You may not win this one.”

She gave me a surprised look, then stared at Revik’s downturned dark head, as if contemplating this new information, or maybe incorporating it into the information she already had about him. Her hair had gotten longer, I noticed, looking at it from behind. As it grew longer, the curl got pulled out of it by the weight.

Straight and thick and raven-black, it looked even more like Revik’s.

She looked older to me again.

I frowned at the thought, looking at the length of her legs. Balidor said there wasn’t anything they could do about whatever Menlim had done to speed her maturation process.

It bothered me, though. It bothered me a lot.

When I glanced up next, she was watching me look at her, a sharper expression in her clear eyes. Her round face reminded me strangely of Revik’s too, more from what I remembered of him as a kid when looking at Barrier images, but enough to take my breath at times. Her light was all her own, though. It had flavors that felt familiar to me, bare glimpses I couldn’t react to with anything but emotion, but those things weren’t either mine or Revik’s.

They were hers.

She watched me look at her, that serious expression still on her face, even as she continued to lean against Revik’s shoulder and side.

That only reminded me of that first day, too, though.

When Revik and I walked in here that first time, Lily just stared at us.

We’d stopped within a few feet of the door, and stood there silently as the security team rolled it shut behind us.

I guess we’d been letting her get a look at us.

We hadn’t planned that ahead of time, or even talked about it.

Lily didn’t blink at all those first few seconds.

She’d been standing in her crib, staring at us with eyes that looked a lot older to me than her body. I remember wondering, even then, just how old she was at that point, in seer years. She’d looked around three or four in human years, but I had no idea how that would translate, or even what it meant, really, since we knew Shadow’s medical techs had been aging her artificially.

Anyway, I still didn’t really get seer aging.

I still tended to relate everything to human ages.

I also wondered if she was still her chronological age mentally.

Given what Menlim had done to her, would her emotional growth lag far behind her physical growth? It seemed obvious to me that it would, but Balidor had been much more ambivalent about that when I asked him. At that first meeting with me and Revik in the tank, Lily wouldn’t have even been born yet until the following month.

Meaning, if she’d been allowed to gestate and age normally.

“Nine,” Revik told me softly at the time, squeezing my hand. “Balidor tells me she’s been aged to roughly the equivalent of a nine-year-old Sarhacienne. Which he believes should be more or less accurate, at least physically, which includes brain development. They’ve done something to speed up her experiential development, too, probably via enhanced VR, but also by speeding up the activation of her light structures. Either way, the age should be about right, since she’s been exposed to very few humans. Even if she’s Elaerian, and able to change her development cycle, she still would be mimicking Sark development… not human.”

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