Page 160 of Sky Song
“Gemma’s arriving today.”
Cricket sat up. “I didn’t know.”
Lyle rose to his feet, shifting so his back was turned to her.
“Lyle.”
“Hmm.”
His evasiveness brought back memories of Meeus, of their first encounters, of his non-answers to the most basic of questions. Those, too, had been because of Simon.
“What’s going on? Why did no one tell me Gemma’s coming?”
“Simon didn’t want you to know.”
“Simon is here?”
“Has been for a few weeks.”
“Is he avoiding me? Us?”
Lyle’s face didn’t change but Cricket detected a slight shift in his energy. “He does avoid me, you know that.”
She knew, of course. Simon and Lyle had a weird relationship. Rather, each would love nothing more than not to have a relationship, but they were forever bound together through their human wives and through what was done to Cricket using Simon’s genes.
When Cricket and Lyle had first arrived at Enzomora, with Lyle hooked up to machines and unconscious, his medical outcome uncertain, Cricket had stayed with Gemma and Simon, once more dependent on the goodwill of these strangers. It had been a horrible two months that she’d mostly spent at a Rix medical facility, surrounded by aliens whose language she didn’t understand, with Lyle who, deep in a medical coma, had been all but gone. An irritated Rix doctor had informed her at some point when she once more made a nuisance of herself with her questions, that Lyle gambled with his life when he agreed to put in the implant. But the moment he took it out so suddenly, he forfeited it for good.
It had been a dark time when nothing was certain. Only mama’s presence by her side had held Cricket together.
Yet once more that almost supernatural resiliency Lyle had been blessed with came to his rescue. Even by the Rix hardy standards, his survival was a miracle.
They had originally settled on Enzomora, but in the world where everyone was judged by the tattoos on their throat, Lyle’s ink consistently gave away his infamous past. Some were in awe of him. Others wanted to kill him.
To be fair, Lyle had no desire to conform. He cared little about Enzomora, and he really hated Simon’s constant monitoring of him.
One day, he came home and simply said, “We’re leaving.”
Cricket remembered her confusion well. Where would they go? Why would they leave behind Gemma and Simon, and the life that they had just begun to build? What about mama?
But of course, Lyle had thought about all of that, including leaving Simon behind, which was exactly the point.
And eventually, they had left - the two of them, their infant daughter Mireya, and Ruby - and settled on a not too distant planet called Exter. An emerging world that belonged to a conglomerate of nations, it had a small starship base run by everyone and no one in particular. That’s where Lyle came in. He started transforming it into a robust outfit. He trained pilots. He began to fly.
Simon had learned about their departure after the fact. He may have been furious, or he may have been relieved - Cricket didn’t know. But in the typical Simon fashion he quickly grasped that Exter’s expanding infrastructure could include medical services. And that unlike on Enzomora, Simon didn’t have to explain to the Rix Council why he was involved in the genetic research he was supposed to crack down on. Ethically dubious and borderline illegal, but at least he wasn’t killing anyone to achieve his goals.
Ren and Paloma often visited but refused to move to Exter. “Too structural,” they had deemed Cricket’s new home. She didn’t deny it. She worked hard alongside Lyle to give it a structure.
When she visited, Paloma spent a lot of time with Mireya, surprising Cricket with her newfound tolerance for little children. Paloma took walks with her, read to her, and could spend hours fooling around on the floor with her, but was alwayscuriously absent when the situation required any aspect of baby maintenance.
Cricket smiled thinking about Paloma, but then her thoughts went back to Gemma’s arrival.
“Simon has again involved you in his schemes,” she said to Lyle accusingly. “Tell him to stuff it.”
“All he did was ask for a small favor.”
“Which was?”
“To keep quiet about Gemma’s coming.”
