Page 19 of Star Bright
For an instant, Vash wanted to call his son back to explain. But that would mean admitting that he didn’t remember why his daughter might be mad. His memories needed to come back,now.
Stiffening against the need to keep his fledgling close, he kept an eye on Darcy and Atsu as they crossed the living room while he examined the other pod. The console showed that the revival process was complete, and yet the decompression hadn’t started.
“Kong, can you tell, why has this pod not opened yet?”
“Every revival is different, because every being is different,” the droid prevaricated. When Vash stiffened, it rolled a cautious half wheel back. “For whatever reason, the unit’s internal scans must be indicating that this one’s systems are not yet stable.”
Fear jabbed through him. “But the bioelechemical readings are all within drakling norms.” He clenched his fist over the steady light proclaiming as much.
“There is more to a being than such physical processes,” Kong said. “Not that the experience is known to mechanical constructs such as service droids.”
Vash stiffened. Was Kong saying that his daughter didn’t want to join her family? That she would rather stay in the pod? He couldn’t leave her alone and asleep. Not just because her brother would never stop crowing about it, or his own desperate need to hold her again. Whatever was keeping her stuck in the pod couldn’t be fixed with the lid closed between.
When he initiated the release override, Kong did not try to stop him.
The soft hiss of the equalizing pressures and atmospheres sounded menacing. It took everything in Vash’s body not to rip the lid back at once and haul his daughter out into the world. This world. At the other end of the big lobby, he saw Darcy glance back at them. Atsu was kneeling on one of the stools at the bar, gesticulating with a bottle of hot sauce. Although Vash could not hear what he was saying at this distance, it probably had something to do with the formations of different kinds of volcanic rock which had been his latest obsession at the time they departed.
Vash shook his head. Why did he remember his son’s enthusiasms but not the source of his daughter’s anger?
The lid parted with a last gasp, and Vash pulled it the rest of the way open without waiting for the pneumatic hinges.
Within, the protective gases drifted away, and he stared down at his beautiful daughter. She’d been beautiful as she hatched out of the egg, and the sols since as she matured toward adolescence had only made her more striking.
For a moment, before the last swirl of gas cleared, he glimpsed the features of his mate, but softer and sweeter, and again his heart clenched, squeezed by some cosmic fist.
Then she opened her eyes, brighter green than the highest leaves of an ancient sheenwood.
He reached over the edge of the pod toward her, and she flinched. His chest felt crushed. “Yadira.”
Avoiding his hand, she sat up, pushing her long, dark auburn hair away from her face. The locks were a terrible tangle, as if even frozen in stasis, his restive child had tossed and turned.
“Yaya!” Atsu’s energetic cry and even more energetic body slam nearly knocked Vash over. He caught his son with one arm lest the child tumble into his sister. “I brought you this porridge. It is not so very hot, but it is all this closed world has. Darcy says it may snow soon, and then we will have something called hot cocoa and hot cider. Maybe those will be hotter. Maybe even too hot for you.”
Yadira swiveled her head to stare at her brother. “Go away, Oos. You’re annoying, and I’m not hungry.”
“Then I’ll eat it all.” Atsu slipped out of Vash’s slack grip and ran back to Darcy who was approaching with an apologetic grimace. “Told you she’s always mad.”
Vash squelched his own scowl. Young draklings squabbled and scrapped—such was inevitable with the spirited, sometimes unwittingly strong beasts still developing within them—but discourtesy was not tolerated. Because some day the real clawswouldcome out.
“Atsu,” he said with strained composure. “Do not antagonize your sister. Yadira, do not insult your brother.”
“It’s not an insult, just the truth. Heisannoying.”
“And sheismad,” Atsu shot back. But he mumbled the words around the bottle of hot sauce he was sucking on, so Vash could pretend not to hear it.
He might not have all his memories back yet, but he was getting a pretty clear idea of why he’d frozen his fledglings.
Not for a hundred sols though.
His glimmer of humor immediately soured. “Yadira, you need to eat something. And then we all need to talk.”
But his daughter was glaring at Darcy, acid venom in her narrowed green eyes. “Is that her? Is that the Earther female you chose to replace my mother?”
“Replace?” The constriction around Vash’s chest wasn’t just painful, it was so tight he feared his heart would collapse, becoming nothingness, just a black hole. “I don’t…”
“Is it you?” Atsu grabbed Darcy’s hand again, this time with no hesitation. “You might smell strange, but Addah says we need a mother. Then we will all be happy again.” He slanted a look at his sister, not sly but wistful.
Yadira boosted herself up, slender hands clenched like someday-claws around the rim of the pod. Her narrow back arched up, as if she might force wings to burst from her with the power of her fury. “We. Already. Have. A. Mother,” she snarled.
