Page 50 of Alliance
He licked his teeth and brushed his hand over his forehead.
“My homeworld has lights in the sky every night,” he said, folding his wrapper with more care than necessary. “Some yiwren think they’re familiars, spirits, dead souls…” He sniffed, remembering tales told around towering bonfires during harvest season and illuminations he’d hoard with his cousins, full ofmysterious encounters and ghost stories. “I’d love to see them again someday.”
“Maybe we’ll both be able to go back to our homeworlds someday,” Roz said quietly with a wisp of a smile. Her bionic eyes glowed, viewing vids from her LMem. Fásach considered reminding her that she’d never been to her homeworld at all, but he left it alone. Because she had, in her own way.
He rubbed his growing pedicles and brushed some of the velvet off their bumps, leaning his elbows on his knees. “Byd Farrwell is lost,” he said with a rueful smile. “I won’t get to go home in this life.”
Roz’s smile faltered. She hugged her knees, the fabric of her coveralls rustling. “I don’t think I will either. Renata’s the best we got, right?”
Fás chirped in a melancholic attempt at comfort. “Seems so.”
“Do you remember Byd Farrwell?”
“I was a teen when my mamau and I left. Bad luck of the refugee roulette. We were on one of the last cruisers out.” He looked up at Roz, expecting her to give the same distant platitudes as most people. Before the spectacle of theParamourraid and the potential of a human Awakening, the yiwreni evacuation had taken up a lot of airspace, so most of the union knew the details. They’d seen heart-wrenching interviews and docuseries, visited museums of Byddie flora on field trips, studied the rot in their xenobiology courses…
They thought they got the gist of what it was like to lose everything.
But Roz didn’t speak. She gave him space, tilting her head to the side, watching him with big chocolatey eyes filled with empathy and patience.
She was alive.Soalive. How could anyone label her as anything else?
And she had lost everything before she’d even had it.
Fásach breathed in her scent, ears tilting open on either side of his head. He rarely let himself do so, not wanting his girls to know how tired he was. “It was beautiful when I was little. The rot hadn’t reached our territory yet, so the forests were still so green they looked blue. And the ground was covered in clover and mossy stones. I used to draw fake glyphs all over them with my cousins to try to trick the elders into thinking they were ancient paintings.” He laughed. “They never believed us though.”
Roz leaned her head on her knee. “Sounds like paradise.”
“The summers were humid as hell, the winters were harsh, and the spring thunderstorms could turn ugly. But yeah… it was paradise.” The reminiscent warmth in his expression hardened, his brow creased. “When we left, it was a big shock. Before being hauled off to the corners of the union, yiwreni pups didn’t start school until they turned twelve because we have such a hard time sitting still.”
“Born to run,” Roz commented. His eyes snapped to hers, thinking about their chase, and he had to swallow down an interested hum.
“Something like that… My first day of classes on Huajile was a nightmare. I didn’t have a linguitor yet and had only been in school for a year before that. I could barely read Mamie, let alone keep up.”
“It must have been so hard for your mother.”
Fás huffed on a shudder of surprise. He bent his head and rubbed his pedicles harder to keep Roz from seeing the strain of his jaw as he fought back unexpected tears.
“Yeah,” he croaked, chewing the tears back, straining his throat as a lump of profound sadness lodged itself there. “Leaving Byddie gave her bad symphonic vertigo. She couldbarely walk a straight line. I, uh–” He cleared his throat. “Sorry, I didn’t expect us to talk about this.”
“I was a refugee too,” she said with a weak shrug. “Just not the kind that got any help.”
Fásach breathed slowly, expanding his nostrils, lifting his eyes to hers. She looked away, tapping one of the little conch shells on offering to the dead shilpakaar with her finger.
“You mean on Earth?”
Roz nodded. “Rosy’s manman died of cholera when she was little, and her papi walked her across the border into a different country a few months later. They did it again when she was a teenager, and her papi went to work in anoerngegrove while she studied. I think his body hurt a lot more than he ever told her. When I see her memories, his hands are blistered and he limps.” Then she smiled again, swaying a little. “You remind me of him.”
“Yeah?”
Roz bit her bottom lip in a teasing way. “Yeah. Rich brown skin, big ears, and thick, rough hands.”
Fás grinned.
“Sounds like he worked hard for her.”
“Mm…” Roz’s eyes went far away. “She was really angry, Fás. I think the world hurt her papi so badly that she wanted to burn some of it down so people would listen. A lot of her memories make my chest feel like it’s on fire.”
Roz’s harmony blossomed stronger than ever. The things she felt from Rosy were the same things he’d felt for his mamau, their grief and toils. The world had been so hard and cold to them after leaving Byd Farrwell, that you’d never have guessed they lived in a volcanic wasteland.
