Page 69 of A Steeping of Blood
Alive, whole,here. Jin blinked wearily. His parents were standing before him.
His father was holding a needle. His mother was holding a vial full of something green—the same luminescent fluid from the darts the guards had loaded into their weapons.
They had aged, one decade older than the portraits Jin had painted in his memories. There was white in his father’s hair, there were fine lines on his mother’s face, but it was their eyes that had changed themost. They were not bright and full of possibility anymore; they were haunted and dark.
And for a moment, they could only stare, paling as if they were staring at a ghost. In many ways, Jinwasa ghost. He stared back. What more could he do? His tongue refused to move, his brain refused to form words, his heart refused to stop weeping.
And he knew, without a single shred of doubt, that despite the ten years they’d spent apart, despite the endless changeshe’dbeen through, they recognized him.
“Jin?” his mother whispered.
Don’t say my name, he wanted to snarl, but oh, how many years had he hoped to hear his name from his mother’s mouth again? He couldn’t spew any of his anger at them.
Only silence.
It was confirmation enough. She cried out, dropping the vial. It shattered to the floor, glass and liquid spraying every which way. He thought, at first, that she was going to embrace him, but in her other hand, Jin saw a weapon. It looked like the grip of a pistol, as if the barrel had been sawed off. As she held it, a current zapped from one side of a prong to the other, to and fro with unimaginable speed. In his father’s hand, a matching one buzzed.
They looked dangerous.
Ten years apart, and the parents who loved him, birthed him, raised him, were going to hurt him.
Jin felt numb.
His mother almost looked apologetic as she approached, one side of her upper lip lifting higher in that odd way that it used to, making him feel like a little boy again. “Guards? Some aid, if you will.”
Jin couldn’t hold back his scoff. She couldn’t even touch him.
“Do you want us to hold him?” one of the guards asked.
“Yes,” his mother said.
When the guards reached for Jin on either side, both of his parents moved at once. Jin braced himself for whatever pain was to come, knowing it would hurt tenfold not because of the unknown weapons but because they were the wielders. His parents that he had longed for, searched for. They shoved their hands forward, and Jin closed his eyes.
The guards yelped in surprise.
Jin’s eyes flew open. His parents had their weapons tucked against the necks of the guards. They were shuddering, shaking, eyes rolling to the backs of their heads, stunned with the current zapping between the prongs. They fell to the floor in twin thumps. His mother dashed to the doors and locked them tight.
Jin blinked.
He was not expecting that.
“My boy,” his father whispered, setting the stun weapon on a table before he broke into a laugh. It was a sound Jin thought he’d never hear again. A sound he had placed in a glass case and attributed to the hero he’d lost as a child.
It rearranged the pain echoing inside of him; it calmed him. It was his father’s voice, soothing away the years upon years of disquiet.
Jin forced his guard back up.
“You’re… not surprised to see me,” he said carefully.
His mother laughed. “No. We were waiting for you.”
When Jin was a boy, his father and mother would teach him the strangest, most random bits of knowledge that one would argue a child of his age didn’t need to know. How to tie a knot, how to pick a lock in case he was trapped, how to treat a wound himself. He had always been asponge, soaking up what they taught him, but he hadn’t realized his parents had been teaching him because they’d been preparing for the worst.
“Oh, she’s been waiting for years,” his father said, a shine in his eyes.
“For me?” Jin asked.
He took a careful step back. Had the Ram sent word to his parents? No, even if she had figured out that he and Arthie had stolen her ship, she couldn’t have moved any faster than they had, and they’d wasted no time getting here.
