Page 92 of Lorran
“I require Lorran’s assistance,” Mylomon said, still standing in the doorway.
“Wait, are you asking me to babysit?” Wyn asked. She cracked open the blue bottle and took a swig. Then sputtered at the salty flavor. Not juice.
“Supervise.”
Right, because supervising a kid wasn’t like babysitting at all.
Wyn looked at Mikah, who had nearly finished his green juice. She needed coffee and a meal that didn’t come in brick form sealed in a foil wrapper. “Sure. How about we go find some breakfast and then visit your mom?”
She grabbed a table at the hotel’s all-hours café. Mikah ordered a large bowl of soup filled with noodles, and she had the same. It was the best meal she’d ever had, but she’d be hard pressed to say if the noodles were that good or her taste buds were that beaten after weeks of meals from foil packets.
“How old are you, kid?” she asked, watching Mikah slurp up his noodles.
“Six.”
“Kind of big for your age, huh?” She’d have guessed nine or ten, judging by his height.
He shrugged. “I dunno. How old are you?”
“Thirty.”
His eyes went wide. “You’re so old. Are you going to die of old age?”
Charming.
She reminded herself that Mikah lost his father recently and his mother was in critical condition and his question was only a little sassy and not mean, so she held her tongue. “Eat your soup,” she said.
After, they stopped at the gift shop in the hospital. She picked up a package of crayons and paper for Mikah and a cheap digital tablet for herself, not that she had been expecting to find quality art supplies in a gift shop. The crayons were a surprise, but when she thought about it, how many children sat in waiting rooms with nothing more to do than color and wait for news? Too many.
She even found coffee, honest-to-goodness coffee from Earth in a cart in the hospital’s atrium.
Fueled and stocked up, they sat in Saavi’s room. Machines beeped and occasionally a medic checked her vitals, but otherwise nothing happened. Some random show played on a viewscreen in the wall, but neither of them paid it any attention. Chattering voices and a canned laugh track—wow, that was a universal thing Wyn did not expect—filled the quiet room.
“Mylomon has a human mate,” Mikah said, sprawled on his stomach on the floor. He drew on the paper with purpose, his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth.
“Does he?”
He nodded. “What is she like?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never met her,” Wyn answered.
“Oh. I thought Terrans knew each other.”
This kid. “There’s something like seven billion people on Earth, so no. We don’t know each other.”
“But Lorran is part of Mylomon’s clan, so you are clan, too.” Mikah set down his crayon and carefully selected a new one.
She tried to get a look at his drawing, but Mikah threw his arm out to shield the paper. “You’re right, but I haven’t met her.”
“Oh. I hope she’s nice.” He pressed a purple crayon to the page with intensity. “I’m going to be clan if Mommy dies. She made Mylomon promise to take care of me.”
Wyn wanted to cry. This kid at his core wasn’t bad or rude, just the people in his life were vanishing with alarming speed and that made him prickly. She’d be prickly too and wondered if he had any friends his own age. How long had his parents lived on that ship, alone, skirting the edges of civilization and the law? That Mikah had any social skills at all was astounding.
“She’ll be okay,” Wyn said.
Mikah looked up from his page. “Mommy says it’s rude to lie.”
Yup, definitely a prickly pear.
