“Yes,” his father said. His mother could not speak for the tears choking her. Acorna was rapidly wiping away her own. Maati sniffled and snuffled. Thariinye, strangely quiet, put his arm around her. Maati’s mother also held her daughter close. Acorna laid a hand on Maati’s knee and one on Aari’s. He lifted her hand and held it against his face for a moment, bending his head to press it between his jaw and his shoulder. His face was damp, but she thought it was perspiration rather than tears. This confrontation was very painful for him, but a good pain, she hoped, a healing pain. Aari’s nerve endings burned with life again.
“To lose a child to untimely death is almost the worst thing there is for a parent. To know a child is being deliberately and terribly injured is even worse. But when I lost you, when I didn’t know where you were or what was happening to you, to know you were there but not to feel you-that was unbearable.
Had it not been for the twins, and then Maati, we -would have left to find you long before we finally departed.”
Miiri reached out to Aari, but he flinched away from her touch. She withdrew her hand and rested it on her knee. Raising her chin, she continued her tale. “When -we could, -we flew back to Vhiliinyar. We maintained radio silence lest the Khieevi trace the signal. But our old home planet had been violently altered, and it seemed it was now fighting back. From our vantage point in low orbit -we could see that the beautiful greens, blues, and purples of our world were gray and black now, with angry red sores and craters all over. The seas had dried up, leaving behind cracked and broken soil, and where once streams had flowed through mountain meadows the barren riverbeds flowed instead with magma from the ravished peaks. Indeed, many of our mountains had hurled themselves into the heavens, erupting violently. One of these eruptions destroyed our spacecraft before we could raise our shields. It came from nowhere. We took heavy damage. Knowing that the ship was likely to break up at any time, -we headed toward the nearest habitable planet. As we approached the atmosphere of this world, we barely had time to slip into the pod and eject before the ship was destroyed. We landed here, much as Maati and Thariinye did, the pod’s sensors guiding us to a safe landing. Here there was food and water, and breathable air. We survived and waited for rescue, so that we could continue our search for our son.” Mini’s voice grew small and stilled, her hands clasping and unclasping on her knees, her eyes dropping from Aari’s.
Acorna, her hand still in Aari’s, with her other hand took one of Miiri’s and joined it with her son’s. They did not clasp hands, but they touched. Miiri raised her eyes again and searched Aari’s.
Kaarlye took up the tale. “There was little we could do but survive, and wait, and hope that you would somehow free yourself from the Khieevi. And here you are.”
He ruffled Maati’s hair. “And here you are, too, our beautiful daughter, starclad and a young lady now.”
Aari’s hand clutched his mother’s now, and Acorna slipped away as the family reunited. Thariinye sat there watching, so quiet it was hard to believe he was Thariinye.
Acorna joined Becker on watch. Mac had shut himself down to conserve his batteries. RK sat cleaning himself, warming his underside on the lights from the console. The piiyi that had played constantly on the corn screen was blessedly shut off for the moment.
Becker looked around as Acorna slid into the chair beside his.
“Family reunion stuff, huh?” he asked.
Acorna nodded, feeling happy but subdued. The emptiness that was in Aari was filling in like a dry spring after a dam had broken, and to a lesser extent, the same thing was occurring with Maati. It made Acorna feel wistful, wishing that perhaps her own parents had escaped somewhere, could rejoin her. But no, she did not feel that would happen. She had not known them, had missed them as a baby only long enough for dear Gil, Calum, and Rafik to learn her Linyaari baby names for mother and father, and then she had been wrapped in the loving care of her three “uncles” who -were actually her fathers, and all of her other new friends, who were her family. Now she had an aunt and a planet and so much more-and she did not begrudge Aari finding his parents and learning of their continued love for him and Maati. And yet-Becker leaned over and patted her shoulder. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, Princess?”