Chapter 48
FORTY-EIGHT
ELAINA
“What’s a hive?” The boy named Daniel spoke slowly to Elaina at the rugged wooden dinner table, his tiny chin propped on his hand as he looked up at her.
The family around the table were seven in all, blended of Cyan’s great-great niece Nila, her husband, their three children, and two other relatives whose ties she didn’t quite catch.
Nila had tried to keep the questions at bay, clearly attempting to give them some peace after their journey. But eventually little Daniel asked if Elaina was technically an alien, and after some help with the translation she said that technically she was, and there was no stopping any of it after that.
Elaina struggled to explain community raising to a family with such deep roots. “It’s kind of like shared care duties. Everyone helps raise you.”
The concept seemed both confusing and disquieting to the boy.
“It wasn’t bad,” she defended. “Just… efficient. And I got to learn from all sorts of people, and?—”
“But where were the bees?” Daniel cut in, light brows folding.
“The bees?” Elaina looked to Cyan for help.
“Flying insects that make a nectar that tastes sort of like the inside of your sandseeds,” he explained, focusing intently on cutting his steak into miniscule pieces. “That’s where the Gaian word for hive comes from.”
Huh. Elaina always just knew the word as a reference to a collective. How curious, the tendrils of linguistic influence Gaia still held on places so far away.
“And anyway, efficient isn’t always good,” Daniel piped up, lifting his chin smugly. Nila rose from the table then, saying something in Gaian that Elaina didn’t quite catch but that was followed by others getting up to start picking up dishes.
Elaina caught Cyan watching her. Here was the gulf between them—her world of practical solutions versus his, of traditions and families that lived in the same houses for generations, repainting old bones and re-reading old diaries.
She rose to help with the plates.