Page 49 of Family Found

“Of course. In a heartbeat, as the human saying goes.”

“Oh my gosh. You’d stop working for me?”

“Yes.”

It was tempting. Would he stay home then? At the house in Canada with the ominous bunker in the yard?

But that wouldn’t be fair, and I knew that. “It matters what you want. I can’t decide for you. Everyone else matters too. Lissir helped translate back on Aër, from Kanker…”

“Kankarraz. We all speak the language, though Lissir speaks it like his first language.”

“Right. What if he wants to go be a translator?”

Inkiri sighed. “Isn’t it obvious already? The sentenmen will not split up. Some do, when the time is right and circumstances call for it—you’re right about that. But ours? Vergis has only just acknowledged he’s part of it, and we know how special you are, to this world and to Aër. We’re sentenmen, we protect one another and those we all care about. We’ll stay together.”

The tears came. The clicking and cooing followed.

“Happy tears?” my mate, my perfect mate, asked.

I couldn’t speak. My throat closed up, and I didn’t know how to label all those emotions. The land, carefully, suggested a kind of warmth, summer warmth, the thing that made the flowers open their petals as if it were the last summer day they would ever see. It wasn’t anything I had a name for, but it worked.

I got the feeling the land wanted to hug me. Humans had hurt it, and it had been hurting. I had missed that hurt so totally, the land’s longing for someone like me. But slowly, the land was recognizing that with me and my chosen mate, there came more people, people who readily honored me as its connection to those who lived on it.

Today is a future I thought would never be, the land said quietly in my mind. I never thought this would be possible.

I nodded even as I was comforted. It was the same for me, in a way. Faces flashed in my mind’s eye: my parents, my friends. My parents and aunt were fine, and maybe I would go see them again. They were my past though.

I didn’t miss my family, not really. Knowing that they were safe was enough for me. It wasn’t that I hated them, my parents who’d made sure I’d always had an au pair to care for me and tuck me in at night, but they had never been my real family. My guys and creepy Vergis, Kinnek in his skimpy shorts and Charles with his uninhibited way of getting naked in the bath, those people were my real family. It had just taken me a little while to find them all.

I’m not ever letting them go, and you are helping me, I told the land with all the authority of a magical twink who knew dispensomancy.

The land sort of smiled at me, serenely, which was a weird thing to have happen in your mind.

Chapter 16

After he’d held me for a long while, Inkiri and I got up. We found old packets of instant ramen in the dorm room, and there was a shared kitchen, so I ended up introducing Inkiri to what being a student had been like.

He’d looked more than a little skeptical about the noodles and the flavoring pack, and his frown had only deepened when he’d sniffed it. He’d decided I could have all of it.

In the dorm room next to the one we’d claimed, there was even a whole stack of Japanese snacks, so we experimented with those while we sat on the bed, our feet tangled together. Inkiri seemed to like them better. The thing was, I couldn’t even always say what the snacks were supposed to be, so it was a new experience we got to share.

It was the best. It helped me get over the dry and stale instant coffee I’d found in the kitchen and made for myself to have with the ramen. The sad mug of brown slop had gone down the drain, with me unable to finish even half of it.

By the time Inkiri and I made our way back, the college looked like the kind of place that housed ghosts. As we walked past the overgrown lawns, Inkiri held on to my wrist.

“Wow, it really is dark out here. I guess if they still have emergency services in the city, they rerouted the power.”

He nodded. “You truly cannot see?”

I looked around. The brightest thing was the sky and the stars dotting the blackness, but there was a faint, faint glow that came from elsewhere in the city.

“Just shapes. It’s not completely black, but I’d lose my way for sure without you.”

He clicked. “Then I’ll not let you go. You won’t get lost, not now, not when we go to the Stone to close the veils.”

“I know. Let me try a thing.”

I poked the land. It roused like a cat might from a nap. It let me know where I was, in this big city with its heart river. It was a pulled-apart kind of experience, and I just couldn’t get over the dizziness.