Page 270 of Hunters and Prey

Coming Home

“PLEASE!” THE VOICE pleaded. “Come outside with me… please!”

Black looked up from the glass-like urele wand he held in his lap, frowning.

He still hadn’t figured out how to work the danged thing.

The Council wanted to him to learn to use it so they could better map the structures in his light… specifically the “Dragon” structures… but he hadn’t been able to do much with it yet.

Part of the problem was the wand itself, he suspected.

It wasn’t really made to highlight the structures on the lower half of the light column, as far as he could tell. Anyway, it was a seriously old-school tool, as in thousands of years old, even on Old Earth. He’d never used an urele in his life, although he’d heard of them––vaguely––as training tools for young seers back in the time before First Contact.

Kids in the slave camps talked about them when he’d still lived on Old Earth.

They sure as fuck didn’t train slaves with these things, though.

“Uncle Kirev!” the voice repeated, louder. “Come outside with me!”

Glancing up, he met the clear and green-ringed eyes. Seeing the urgent, eager look on that young face, he gave her a deliberate scowl.

“What for?” he said, gruff.

She blinked, staring at him blankly.

From her expression, a reason hadn’t really occurred to her.

She recovered quickly, though.

“Because I want you to,” she said.

He grunted, glancing over at the couch, where Revik and his wife were stretched out. Allie had Narik curled up at the side of her chest in a sling. He was sleeping now, after she’d fed him an hour or so earlier, and she was propped up on pillows with a pad in her lap, sketching something with a stick of what looked like charcoal.

Her pale green eyes were concentrated, her light oblivious to him and her daughter.

Black wondered what she was working on. He suspected it was more sketches for a new mural they’d asked of her for the town square. It was going to be a big one, and she’d been sketching out pieces of it for weeks now.

Revik was reading off a small tablet, massaging his wife’s feet in his lap absently with one hand.

A sharp finger poked Black in the chest.

“Let’s go do something,” she said, her voice insistent. “I’m bored.”

Sighing in overdone irritation, he faced her, gripping the urele in one hand.

“What would we be doing?” he said. “That’s too vague, ‘come outside with me.’ How can I make a decision if I have no idea what that means?”

She frowned. “It means come outside with me. It’s pretty clear.”

“Not really. How do I know it won’t be more boring than what I’m doing now?”

From the couch, Revik snorted, giving them both a bare glance.

Lily, his daughter, who looked maybe nine-years-old in human years, but was probably closer to fifteen, barely gave her father a glance. Black had been told that her physical growth rate had been accelerated artificially when she’d been super young.

It had slowed back to normal now, thanks in part to energetic work done by the Council, but she was still both too young and too old for her physical age.

Allie told her she’d only actually been alive for about six years.

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