Chapter 19 #2
“Exactly. Where we’re going, Clanfather Zyxel has enemies who would recognize him in his Ezzaska form.
People who’d cause serious problems for him—for all of us—if they knew he was there.
In this form, they won’t know. They’ll see a demi-human who happens to look vaguely like Clanfather Kaede.
” I let that settle. “Which is exactly what other demi-humans look like. Human mixed with something other due to their breeding.”
“Like going undercover,” Neazzos said, with the authority of someone who had absorbed a great many adventure serials and filed them as practical reference material.
My cubs have been highly interested in becoming spy assassins like their Clanfather Kaede and the Fab Five. It was only natural for him to conclude that Zyxel was in a secret mission.
“Exactly like that.”
He turned back to the yard with a new quality of attention—not just combat-study now, but something more careful. Reassessing. Filing Zyxel into a new category, one that had layers.
“His eyes are the same,” Meti said.
Still quiet. Still facing the yard. She hadn’t moved, hadn’t joined the back-and-forth. Just sat in my lap with that deep-water stillness, and now produced this: precise, simple, completely true. She’d been watching the whole time and had found the one thing that didn’t change between forms.
“Yes,” I said. “They are.”
She nodded once, satisfied. Like she’d been sorting something and that was the last piece.
“Which is why this is a secret,” I said, looking between all three of them.
Neazzos, Nocrez, Meti still settled in my lap.
“His safety—and ours—depends on no one knowing who he really is while he’s in that form.
What I’ve just told you cannot leave this family.
Not the household staff. Not anyone. No one outside of us.
” I held the pause. “Do you understand how much that matters?”
Neazzos straightened. Drew himself up with the deliberateness of someone accepting weight. “We won’t say anything. Not to anyone.”
“I would never,” Nocrez said. Quiet, but absolute.
Below, Zyxel looked up again. Found us immediately—that scholar’s precision, knowing exactly where to aim attention. I sent a small pulse through the crimson thread: warmth. Acknowledgment. Something that didn’t need words.
His answering pulse carried relief he probably hadn’t meant to broadcast.
“You’re leaving.”
Meti. Still facing the yard. Quiet, flat, final—not a question and never going to be one.
The tightening of Nocrez’s grip on my arm. Neazzos going absolutely still—tail frozen, ears pitched forward, the particular stillness of a cub bracing for something he doesn’t want to hear but is going to listen to anyway because not knowing is worse.
I closed my eyes for one breath. Two.
They always knew. I’d stopped being surprised by it, theoretically.
And yet every time it still landed somewhere raw, because I wanted to protect them from this and every single time they simply reached past my protection and named the thing themselves.
They’d known about Zirene before I’d found the words.
They’d known about the Festival. They carried some gift for upheaval—some instinct that read the emotional weather of the adults around them and translated it into truth—and no amount of careful redirection had ever gotten ahead of it.
I opened my eyes.
“Yes,” I said. “Come here. Both of you—come sit with me.”
Neazzos came off the railing in two steps and pressed himself against my side opposite Nocrez, the bright vibrating energy of earlier gone, replaced with something younger.
Something that didn’t know quite what to do with itself.
Meti remained in my lap, and I tightened my arm around her and looked at the yard below while I found the words I’d been working out for two days.
“You know about the bad people,” I started.
“The Verya,” Neazzos said. Flat. Certain.
I’d half-expected to have to build to that.
Had prepared a softer approach. But Neazzos had been listening—had probably been listening to far more of our adult conversations than anyone had intended, filing the pieces away in that precise internal catalogue—and he’d already assembled the picture himself.
The adults who went quiet mid-sentence when the cubs came into the room.
The strange males who’d arrived at the villa and been folded into the family before anyone explained why.
The training. The urgency underneath everything.
“Yes. The Verya.” I kept my voice steady—not bright, not forced.
Just honest. “They’re the ones who took Ryzen’s brother, Xenak, along with the others who were left at that asteroid base I’d returned from.
They’ve been hurting a lot of people for a very long time, in a lot of places, and now they’re pushing into our galaxy, hunting for more people to hurt.
They’re the reason your father is at the frontlines, protecting our empire from both the Quaww and the threat that the Verya brings.
They’re the reasons why our family is scattered. ”
“Are they coming here?” Nocrez’s voice was barely above a whisper.
“Our family is going to make sure they don’t,” I said.
“That’s what all of this is—all the training, all the planning, all the people who’ve been coming and going for the last two days.
We’re building the walls.” I felt him ease slightly and pressed on before he could tighten again.
“But to do that, different members of our family need to be in different places. So I need to tell you where everyone is going and why.”
A nod from Nocrez. Neazzos watching me with those sharp bright eyes.
“Your father is at the front—you know that. He’s commanding forces against the Quaww fleet, protecting the Empire’s borders.”
“He said he’d come back,” Nocrez said.
“He will.” I meant it. I had to mean it.
“Clanfathers V’dim and Z’fir are going to stay close to Destima.
They’re positioning in the surrounding area—watching the space around us, running patrols, making sure nothing comes our way while the rest of us are gone.
They’re our first line of warning. Our shield right here, close to home. ”
Something in Nocrez’s face shifted at that—a small softening. V’dim and Z’fir staying near Destima was the best news in this conversation and he knew it.
“Clanfathers Xylo and Odelm are staying here,” I continued. “In the villa. With you.”
“They’re still healing,” Meti said. Quiet. Certain.
I paused. Looked down at her. She hadn’t turned around. “Yes. They are. They need time to recover fully, which is part of why they’re here rather than coming with me.
“And you?” Neazzos pressed. “Where are you going?”
“A meeting.” I held his gaze when he shifted to look at me.
“A very important one, at a place called the CEG Space Station. It’s where powerful people gather—leaders, diplomats, people with fleets and resources and influence.
The Quaww will have representatives there. And we’re going to be there too.”
“To fight them?” Neazzos’s tail had started moving again.
“To talk.” I kept the response simple, because the complexity of it would take hours to unpack.
“To tell other leaders what the Verya are doing. To make alliances—find people who’ll stand with us instead of waiting to see which way the galaxy goes.
And yes, potentially to face the Quaww directly.
But talking first. Always talking first, because a war you can prevent with the right words is worth more than one you win with weapons. ”
He absorbed that. I could see the slight disappointment at the talking-first part, and the grudging acknowledgment of its logic underneath it.
“Clanfather Kaede, Clanfather Zyxel, and Ryzen are going with me,” I said. “They’re my protection at the Chamber. They’ve been training today so they can move as a unit—so that if anything goes wrong, they can cover each other and cover me.”
“And then you come back,” Nocrez said. Still barely above a whisper.
“And then I come back.”
The yard below was quieter now—the drill paused while Kaede said something, Ryzen listening with his daggers resting in their slow orbit, Zyxel studying them both with his scholar’s attention.
The amber thread in my web pulsed with the particular warmth that meant Kaede had found something that satisfied him. A small victory in the larger work.
“It’s because you’re a Beacon, isn’t it, Mama.”
Meti.
Still in my lap. Still watching the yard. Voice carrying the same flat certainty she used for settled facts.
Not a question.
I looked down at her. She turned her head to look back up at me—those dark amethyst eyes patient, deep, already past the question and waiting only for confirmation.
Silver fur catching the amber light. Something in that gaze that had never belonged to a young cub her age, that sat in her face like it had always been there, like the title she’d inherited was already shaping her from the inside.
Lying to Meti hadn’t worked once in three tries. She waited you out with perfect, unruffled patience and then asked again, more precisely, because she’d already known the answer and had only been giving you the courtesy of saying it yourself.
“Yes,” I said. “They want me. That’s what this is about, at its core—they want me, and the people who love me are arranging themselves around that fact to make sure they can’t have me.”
Nocrez made a small, distressed sound against my arm.