Page 8 of Storm Echo

A burst of startled laughter. “Really? A family of spies?”

“Intelligence is our business,” he said. “Might as well be our family motto.”

“Do you have one? A family motto?”

He didn’t hesitate in answering. This was no secret he was bound to keep. It just wasn’t well-known. Dig deep enough, far enough back, and you’d find it. “Cor meum familia est.My heart is family.”

She sat back on her heels, her eyes shining. “Oh, how wonderful.” Hands fisting on her thighs, she said, “But isn’t that against the rules with Psy? I don’t know too much about your people but I’ve picked up bits and pieces, and that motto … well, it’s so poignant.”

“Yes, it’s against the rules—or was before the recent change in our leadership,” he said, the fall of the emotionless Silence Protocol yet too new for the knowledge to have settled inside him. “Too much inherent emotion.”

“So how did it survive?”

“Ancestors took it off public-facing buildings and off the crest that goes on outward-bound items, and the rulers of the time thought that meant we got rid of it.” He found a clump of an herb she’d wanted. “Stupid, really. Should’ve been obvious the family was as tight as before.”

Lei’s lips curved as she accepted the herbs he’d picked for her. “I like your family already. My parents were like that with me—just all in, you know?”

He’d caught the past tense, probed with all the gentleness he had inside him—and when it came to Lei, he had unexpected depths of it. “They’re gone?”

She nodded. “A long time ago. We were caught in a hurricane. The winds flipped my father’s car while he was trying to drive us out.”

Ivan would’ve frowned if he hadn’t long ago learned to control external indications of his internal responses.

Weather tracking had advanced to the nth degree since the ravages of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Hurricanes and cyclones were now often accurately predicted a considerable time out from the event, and all cities had structures built to act as shelters for massive numbers of people, since authorities had realized it made more sense to ride out the situation in place than try to evacuate millions of people, many of whom had nowhere to go. The shelters were built to withstand even the most deadly categories of storm—and had done so multiple times.

Even those who chose to remain in their homes had plenty of time to prepare.

Fatalities from being caught out in the elementsduring a stormwere extremely rare. But he didn’t ask why her family had been driving on the road when everyone else was hunkering down. He knew the answer. He’d lived the answer. A minority of people always fell through the cracks, either because society forgot them, or because of unforeseen circumstances—or because they weren’t capable in a way that couldn’t be predicted or ameliorated.

Ivan’s mother wouldn’t have had the capacity to get him to a shelter had the news of a storm broken while she was walking the petals of the crystalline flower. He’d have stayed where he was, a child with no knowledge of the storm winds about to smash the city.

Instead, he focused on the rest of her words. “You had a good childhood?”

“A happy one,” she told him, the sadness of her old and faded. As if she’d come to terms with the loss long ago. “My papa spoke fluent Spanish and English, while my mama was only fluent in English—but she’d retained just enough knowledge of French that the three of us spoke in a mishmash of French, English, and Spanish. And every so often, she’d add in a Maori word she’d learned from her grandma before she passed away.”

A smile breaking through the sadness. “It was like a secret language all our own. My father would say ‘te amo, my belle’ to my mother, and she’d pretend to swoon, then call him by a funny French endearment, like ‘my little quail.’ I have terrible Spanish grammar because I keep trying to mix it up.”

From the light in her gaze, it was clear to Ivan that she didn’t care about her imperfect language skills. “We traveled a lot. I’d been to most corners of this continent by the time I was ten.”

“Your pack didn’t mind?”

A slight fading of her expression, her attention suddenly tightly concentrated on the herbs she held. “My mom and dad were loners. Two loners who fell in love and had a baby. Pack life wasn’t for them.”

But what about their child?

Ivan didn’t ask that question, either. He knewexactlyhow hard the loss of her parents, her only foundations, would’ve been for Lei. “My father was never in my life—I don’t even know his identity,” he said, telling her a fact that would get him blacklisted among the vast majority of Psy families should he go looking for a genetic match for a procreation agreement.

It mattered nothing to him, since he had no intention of passing on his genetic material. “I was raised by my mother as a child. She died when I was eight.”

Her fingers flexing open as if without her conscious control, Lei dropped the herbs in her hand. “Oh.” A softness to her as she turned to look at him, she said, “Then you know.”

“Yes.” He’d never forget that sensation of being moorless, without even the fragile and fractured anchor that had been his lifeline. “What was your favorite place to travel to that you remember?”

A frown, then she clicked her fingers. “The Amazon rain forest. We had to get permission from the local packs to travel there—but wow, I’ll never forget it. A kind of green that’s so rich it’s beyond description, the songs of the birds, the sounds of the other animals. We shifted and ran and ran, so many scents in the air.”

As he listened, she told him more stories of her family’s adventures, of hours and days on the road, of nights spent under the stars, of vistas endless and breathtaking. No mention of anyone else. Not even friends met and made along the way. Only Lei’s parents and Lei.

“They left you with extraordinary memories,” he said after she finished a story about a winter trip where her father had built a snow cave for them to spend the night in.

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