28. Chapter 28
Chapter twenty-eight
Leaving Lizzie was harder than Kieron had expected.
Not because he was worried about her, exactly—she was more intelligent than he was and to prepare her, they had run simulations of every scenario they could think of that might happen in his absence.
He wasn’t even going to be gone for long, so that wasn’t it.
No, leaving her behind was hard for two reasons.
The first reason was the soft one—that he simply wanted to be with her right now.
The revelation that she cared for him enough to want to make him a forever part of her life, to give them a permanent and legal connection, was devastating.
In a good way. It made Kieron feel like he’d been stabbed in the chest with a blade made from hopefulness, an edge that both cut and cured.
It was bittersweet, to think that family could be something that made you feel good.
He couldn’t remember much about how he felt for his mother, or his grandfather, but Kieron knew that any warmth he’d had for them, or them for him, had been gone before he could speak.
He had been a soldier-in-training and a disappointing one at that.
Every touch had been a pinch, a slap, a smack—stand straighter, go faster, why are you so slow, why are you so stupid?
They had taught him not to rely on family for any sort of positive feeling.
Zak had taught him that warmth could come from friends.
Profound emotional connections could be made between people who had nothing in common other than the will to reach out, and what a revelation that had been.
It wasn’t family, toxic, toxic family, and that was a good thing.
Kieron didn’t need a family, when he had someone like Zak in his life.
And then he lost him, and then …
Well, then he had kept going. Made new connections, despite being sure he’d never be able to. Found a lover and a daughter and a sweet little ship who’d broken down his walls in Catie. And then, somehow, he’d looped back around to family, and now here he was, about to break up another family.
No. You’re making them whole. Xilinn’s spouses had thrown her to the wolves. If they didn’t want her, then fuck them. Kieron would take her.
If he could get out of this damn port.
That was the other reason it was hard to leave Lizzie—the presence of Traktan military personnel at the port had grown exponentially over the past twelve hours.
They were working nonstop on the ships they were going to use to send away their political prisoners, undoubtedly trying to make them space-worthy for long enough to deflect blame if anything went wrong up there.
Now that they’d severed ties with the Alliance, undoubtedly the government wanted to keep their best resources for the people they valued, but these ships …
they were heaps. They looked like they’d been salvaged from scrap piles and recycling centers.
Their lights were flickering, hulls covered in shoddy patches while technicians worked feverishly to get them sealed up.
They wouldn’t last long. Or if they did, they wouldn’t be given enough fuel to get the people on them very far.
It took more than an hour, but Kieron eventually made it out of the port and to the skimmer he’d left tucked away behind a nearby shipping container.
He let Lizzie take care of guiding it to the forest behind Pol’s house as he reached out to Pol.
The boy’s implant wasn’t reacting very quickly—it felt sluggish, so slow that nothing but emotive bursts could come through instead of actual words.
The emotions behind the bursts seemed an odd mix of frustrated and happy.
I’m coming, Kieron sent to him, giving up on understanding the blend of emotions. Meet me in the back as soon as you can.
He got another burst of frustration. Ooookay.
Getting to Pol’s house was easy—the flight lanes were practically abandoned, everyone huddled in their homes so that no one had to witness the atrocity that was about to happen.
Parents, children, siblings—they were about to be thrown out, cast into space so that a group of fundamentalists could keep dissent under control.
This place was about to be irreparably broken.
Or perhaps it already was.
Kieron hated it here. He had never liked it, but now he felt like his early animosity was completely justified. He was ready to leave and never come back. He just had to get Pol.
Once the skimmer was tucked away, invisible to cameras and as camouflaged as possible against the road’s backdrop, Kieron climbed down the vines into the space behind Pol’s backyard. He pressed himself up against the wall and listened for the sound of movement or a small child’s voice.
He got two children’s voices instead.
“—with me, Szusza!”
Oh. She’s here. Xilinn and Zak’s daughter was here. Kieron might actually be able to take her with them. A thrill of hope filled his chest, and he almost looked around the wall.
“You can’t go!” a quiet but harsh voice snapped. “I won’t let you!”
The hope fell away, quelled by the fury in that little girl’s voice.
“But Mama—”
“She’s going to a new home! She decided to leave us, Pol, that was her choice. Mama Laina says that—”
“Mama Laina is a liar!” Pol shouted, giving up on all pretext of subtlety.
“Shut up! You don’t know anything!” the girl retorted.
“They’ve told us all about this in school, about how these people are trying to shut down the schools and the stores and the government, and how they don’t want us to be able to live like normal people now that we’ve left the Alliance, and the Alliance was no good anyway.
We’re going to be better now! We’re going to be fine, but Mama wasn’t happy with that.
She wasn’t happy with us. So I’m not going anywhere, and neither are you. ”
There was silence for a long moment, and then—“I’m going.”
“You’re not.”
“Am too.”
“No, you’re not. I’m going to—ow!” There was a shriek. “You bit me! Mama! Mama Laina, Pol bit me! He’s running away! Mamaaaa!”
A second later, Pol appeared around the corner of the wall, tears and an expression of fear on his face. Some of the fear dissipated when he saw Kieron. “You came,” he whimpered and threw himself into Kieron’s arms.
There was no time to stay there and hold him.
Laina was coming, Szusza complaining at her side.
As fast as he could, Kieron lifted Pol up and tucked him against the camouflage of his suit, then pulled both of them back into the thick, verdant vines behind them.
A second later, Szusza and Laina came around the corner.
“He went where?” Laina asked in an irritated tone.
“He said a friend was coming to rescue him.”
Oh, Pol. The little boy tucked his head even harder into Kieron’s chest.
“Ridiculous stories. He’s probably just run into the edge of the forest to make us worried.”
“We should get him, then,” Szusza said uncertainly. “Right? It’s dangerous in there.”
“He’ll head home once he realizes we’re not playing his game,” Laina said dismissively. “Come back inside.”
“But … he might … what if he gets hurt?”
“Then he’ll learn that he shouldn’t go running off every time he doesn’t get his way, won’t he? Inside, Szusza, now.”
Kieron watched Laina turn around and stride back into the yard. Szusza stayed a moment longer, staring up at the distant treetops, a pained look on her face.
Now. You could reach out to her now, ask her to come … she might say yes.
“Szusza! Now!”
The girl, the girl with Zak’s round face and dark, curling hair, turned around and followed her other parent back inside.
The moment was lost.
***
Flying back in the disguised skimmer was tense, made worse by the roaming patrols that got thicker and thicker the closer they got to the port.
Nobody, and nobody, wanted people watching this vicious deportation.
Kieron finally had to hand the controls over to Lizzie because there were just too many ways for him to screw up—especially with a six-year-old boy hanging onto his arm as he cried hopelessly into Kieron’s shoulder.
Telling Pol to sit down and buckle up had met with a tantrum of epic proportions, so Kieron had settled on asking him to be quiet and hang on while Kieron took care of getting them where they needed to be.
He’d even had the gall to be irritated by it at first—if he’d thrown a tantrum like this when he was a child, he would have been made to sleep outside overnight with no blanket, after he was whipped so hard he couldn’t sit down.
Why was Pol so upset? Wasn’t he happy he was going to see his mother again?
It wasn’t until Kieron finally took the time to really look at Pol that he finally understood.
This boy, this sweet, happy little boy who ought to be at home with all of his parents right now, with his siblings too, ensconced in the comfortable world he’d always known, had been ripped straight out of that comfort zone.
Kieron could only guess when Pol had stopped feeling happy, but he’d clearly stopped trusting Laina by the time Kieron first visited with Zak’s remains.
He’d lost faith in his own home, in the family unit that was supposed to be on his side, to support him in an uncertain world.
Instead of getting that support, his mother had been stolen away from him, his other parents were already moving on, his sister had thrown the lies she’d been told about their mother right into his face, and now he knew that Mama Laina didn’t care enough about him to go after him into the forest. She was willing to risk him being eaten alive.
And to top it all off, the one person who was on his side, who had promised to get him back to his mama, was a stone-faced son of a bitch like Kieron.
Shit, he would cry too.
“Hey,” he said, awkwardly setting his hands on Pol’s shoulders. “It’s going to be all right.”
“No.”
“Okay, no,” Kieron agreed with a sigh. “It’s not going to be all right—not the way it was before.
I wish it could be, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.
But I promise that I’m not going to let you down.
I’m not going to leave you behind, and I’m not going to let anyone take you away from me.
We’re going to make it to my ship, and we’re going to make it to your mama’s ship, and we’re all going to leave together. ”
Pol sniffled and wiped his snotty nose on one already-damp sleeve. After a moment’s consideration, Kieron stripped off his camouflage coat and draped it around Pol’s shoulders. There. Now he could get his snot on that.
Serves me right for not thinking to bring a shawl.
Kieron felt them begin to move again, Lizzie creeping the skimmer forward whenever she computed that it was safe enough.
He checked the control panel to make sure there were no warning lights or issues popping up—but of course, there weren’t.
Lizzie knew what she was doing, and she knew she could come to him if it got hard.
Pol needed to know that too.
Kieron sat on the floor and put his back to the nearest wall.
This skimmer was a small one, not really equipped for more than two passengers, especially not if they weren’t sitting up front.
It had accessibility options that made it possible for people in mobility chairs to remote drive it from the back, but he didn’t need that either.
He needed to make Pol comfortable. He patted the floor next to him, and Pol slumped down and against his side, leaning heavily against Kieron.
“I miss Szusza,” he wailed before Kieron could even say anything. “And Lorna and Ophred! And I miss Mama Laina and Papa Kriev and my pet tree-crab, Binkie! I miss my room and my toys! I miss my tab and my shows!”
Now wasn’t the time to remind Pol that he’d brought the tab along in his little backpack. Kieron stayed quiet and let the boy talk.
“I want it to be like it used to,” Pol cried.
“I want my family, I want all of them together, I want to be happy with them. I miss them. I miss them!” He turned his face and wept a fresh set of tears into Kieron’s side.
Kieron, his own throat tight, put his arm around the little boy’s shoulders and held him close as he let his fears and his hopeless dreams out.
“I know,” he said after a moment. “I know you miss them. I wish you could have stayed with them, stayed all together. I know that being with me isn’t the same.
Things change, and it’s all right to hate those changes for a while.
” Shit, what else could he say? “But things will get better too. I promise. Your mama loves you so much. Once you’re together again, you’ll feel better. ”
“I want them all!”
“I wish I could make that happen for you,” Kieron said helplessly. “I—”
“Kee?”
He turned his focus to Lizzie. “What is it?”
“You are two berths away from me. I’m afraid this is as close as I’ll be able to get you in the skimmer, though. You’ll need to make the rest of it on foot.”
On foot … “How many people and cameras are between us and you?” The camo skins he’d made up should protect them from being easily spotted by people, but cameras were more challenging.
“Only one person but numerous cameras. I won’t be able to shield you until you’re on board.”
Shit. He should have planned for this. “How quickly can we leave once we get there?” he asked.
“If I begin initialization procedures now, we can leave two point four minutes after sealing the hatch door.”
Two point four minutes? They could survive whatever these people threw at them for that long. It was possible they wouldn’t even notice, given how focused they all were on the launch. Speaking of … “When is the other ship heading up?”
“Unclear. Technicians appear to be finished with their work, but there are still people being transferred on board.”
Too bad. If they could have used the big ship’s launch as a distraction … but no. It was better to get off planet before someone wised up to what Kieron was doing. “All right, we’ll head to you on foot. Start initialization procedures immediately and make sure you stay in my head, okay?”
“Yes, Kee.” Lizzie sounded very earnest. “I won’t let you down.”
“I know you won’t, baby.”
Pol looked up at Kieron, apparently over his tears for the moment. “You have a baby?” he asked.
“Um.” Well, it wasn’t exactly a lie. “I do, yeah. I’ll introduce you once we’re on board my ship, okay?”
“Babies can’t fly ships,” Pol told him, very seriously.
Kieron grinned. “This one can,” he said as he grabbed for the other, smaller camouflage suit he’d made just in case. “Take off that jacket, and I’ll help you into this, okay?”
It was time to get out of there.