Page 27 of Star Bright
“No! I don’t want that,” Yadira exclaimed. “No one to hold. No one to fall.” With a choked howl too deep for her throat, she shoved back her chair and ran.
“Yadira.” Vash started to push to his feet.
But Atsu threw himself back in his chair with a wail. “Why is she always so mad? I wasn’t eventryingto make her mad this time.”
Darcy rubbed the little boy’s back. “It was nothing you did,” she consoled. She glanced at Vash. “But maybe you can explain to Atsu that we are not…that I am not an Earther bride. Let me go talk to Yadira.”
Vash stared back at her, troubled. “That’s not your responsibility.”
She gave a crooked grin. “We want every guest to feel welcome and comfortable.” Before he could stick her with explaining to the little boy, she hurried after the teen.
Just as well most of the facility was still locked. She was able to query her datpad about anomalous life signs and tracked the girl to an empty corridor. Yadira was huddled in one of the locked doorways, knees drawn up until she was smaller than Atsu. Darcy found it hard to believe that those narrow shoulders would ever sprout wings.
She wondered if Yadira was wondering too.
With a muffled grunt, she collapsed to the cold tile next to the girl. “No one will—or can—ever replace your mother,” she said quietly. “Your father knows that too, even though it probably seems like he fumbled a bit there, trying to find his way across a route he’d never been on before.”
Yadira mumbled something into her forearms crossed over her knees as a pillow for her head.
Darcy tried to distinguish the words, but even her translator was struggling. “You tried what?”
The girl lifted her head to glare Darcy. “To replace her.” Her fingers tightened around her own arms, hard enough to blanche the skin. “I tried to do all the things she did. But Atsu never listens to me. And Addah is even worse. And nothing from the cookbook tastes the same.”
“Oh, Yadira,” Darcy whispered. “No one expected that from you.”
“And all I wanted to do was go with my friends to the cliffs where we could jump off into the lake and pretend that we were flying. But when I got to the top I just…couldn’t.”
Darcy’s heart clenched. “But you wanted to try the climbing wall anyway today? You are so brave.”
Yadira glared at her. “Only because there was a rope to make sure I didn’t fall.”
Darcy winced. “And then like a nincompoop, I fell.”
The teen looked at her. “Nincompoop?”
“An old-time Earther word for someone who makes silly mistakes.”
“It wasn’t your fault. You’re not a drakling.” She sighed. “At least you didn’t laugh at me for using the rope. All my friends would’ve said I was a nincompoop for that.” She looked down. “They will all be very old now. Probably they wouldn’t want to be my friends anymore even if I hadn’t used a rope.”
Darcy had read that draklings were a vigorous, long-lived race—and that something in their secretions conferred a certain amount of protection from telomere degradation in their intimate partners, which was being studied as a longevity supplement but so far only seemed to work if there was an emotional component as well—but somehow, the thought of the little girl’s friends as centenarian elders coming to the end of their long, vigorous lives was more heartbreaking than thinking they were already gone.
“Oh, Yadira,” she whispered again. “I know it’s not much, but would you like a hug? It’s okay to say—”
The girl threw herself into Darcy’s arms. Darcy closed her eyes as she held the shaking girl.
“I try and try to summon my beast,” Yadira whispered. “But it won’t come. Why won’t it come? What if Addah decides we’re too much trouble? What if he leaves us too?”
Darcy held back the urge to sayoh, Yadiraagain. “Your father isn’t going to leave you. He knows all your favorite foods and he didn’t even scream when you bit him.”
“I bit him?” The girl jerked up straight. “I forgot that. I haven’t done that since I was littler than Atsu. I better say I’m sorry.”
“That would be the right thing to do,” Darcy said sincerely. “But from what I’ve seen, he would take any pain for you, and that’s why if he does make a mistake, you can tell him, and I think he’ll do his best to listen now.”
When Yadira’s grip on her lessened, Darcy stood up and held out her hand to the girl. “I think your brother ate everything in the buffet, but since the kitchen is open, what do you say we go look for something else?”
By the time she got the drakling girl filled with yakisoba noodles and lemon sorbet, Yadira was starting to wilt. “Why am I tired?” she mused around a jaw-cracking yawn.
Darcy thought about her earlier list to Vash: cryo and crash, shock and sadness. Adding adolescent angst on top of that along with her apparent belief that she’d been in charge of mothering her family, no wonder the girl needed a nap.
