Page 46 of Cloverleaf Station

“Xilinn, please, it’s all right. I’ll get him back to you faster,” Kieron promised. He’d borrow the Lizzie if he had to—Elenus would probably let him, and he could get to Trakta and back before the mining season started again. “I can be there in less than two months. I can—”

“No, no.” Xilinn held up a hand. “Wait. Just wait.”

A clear order, a simple objective. Kieron waited and watched Xilinn pull herself together by sheer force of will. When she finally looked at Kieron again, she was smiling so wide it had to hurt her face. “Kieron, you don’t know how important this is.”

“You’ll be able to inter him in the family crypt now,” he said, a little confused. “I know how important that is.”

“No, Kieron, you … there’s been an election here. The Fundamentalists have retaken control of Parliament.” A sob slipped out between her lips before she could stifle it. “They … they’ve rolled back almost all of the reforms of the past century. It’s not just Zakari whose soul would have been consigned to the void without his body’s return, it’s … his children, Kieron. Pol and Szusza.”

“I don’t understand,” Kieron confessed. “What does his absence have to do with the kids?”

“The old rules state that you can only have full citizenship if both your parents are Traktan. Kieron, if you never found Zakari’s body, and he was stricken from the family register, then the kids would lose their citizenship. They would become lower-class citizens in their own homes, they wouldn’t be eligible for state-sponsored assistance, they wouldn’t be able to attend our universities … they wouldn’t be welcome here until they were dead, to go back in the crypt with everyone else they weren’t allowed to spend their lives with.”

Her eyes filled with tears again. “Laina and I”—Laina was one of Zakari’s other former spouses— “would have had to take them to another Alliance planet for them to regain the standard of living they’ve grown up in, and Laina has the two other children with Kriev, so I was planning to leave with them both. I was just about to buy tickets …”

“Holy shit.” Kieron had lived on Trakta for years, but given that he was a refugee, he’d expected to be treated worse than the people who were born there. He was an interloper, someone they had taken in with reluctance. But to refuse to care for the children born of their planet, children whose only crime was having a parent with an atypical sense of wanderlust … that was despicable. “I’m so sorry. I wish you had told me; you know I would have worked harder to find him.”

Xilinn laughed weakly. “How could you possibly have worked any harder than you already have, Kieron? I was afraid you’d kill yourself if you tried to pick up the pace any more, and that’s the last thing I want. Besides.” She wiped her eyes again, her breathing more controlled now, her expression closer to its normal serenity. “You did it. You found him. I can’t believe you found him, it’s incredible. You’re incredible.”

“I didn’t do it alone.”

“Then the people who helped you are angels,” she said. “No matter why they did it—and I’m sure it was for your sake—they have my gratitude as well. And don’t rush over here,” she added. “The verification of the DNA you sent me, along with the updated incident report, should be enough to get me a stay of action for the children until you can get Zakari home. Just …” She pressed a hand to her heart. “Make sure you send him with someone you trust, all right? I don’t think I can take it if we have to go through this again.”

“I promise,” Kieron murmured. “Xilinn, I …”

“Can you call again once the children are home from school?”

“I … maybe tomorrow.” There was no way Kieron could take seeing Zak’s kids today, knowing they had come so close to losing their happy lives.

“All right.” She smiled knowingly. “Perhaps tomorrow. Thank you so much for this, Kieron. Truly. You’ve saved us.”

“It’s the least I could do.”

“No,” she said. “The least you could have done was nothing at all, and I wouldn’t have blamed you for it. Zak made his own decisions, and the consequences of those weren’t yours to bear. But you did bear them, for us. And your determination has changed the entire arc of his children’s future.” She was crying again now but kept smiling. “We love you, and we miss you. So much. Come and see us when you can.”

“I will,” Kieron promised. “I … love you too.” He ended the call before Xilinn could say anything else, then buried his face in his hands and just breathed, and breathed, and breathed.

So much disaster had been averted by the narrowest of margins … Kieron used to think he was one of the unluckiest people in the galaxy: his childhood living as a soldier, hatred and disgust from his mother, being pushed out of a death cult because he wasn’t good enough for death, living as a second-class citizen for years, breaking free only to lose Zakari …

But now he knew he had been wrong. He was the luckiest man alive. He’d rescued Catalina, who was joy incarnate, survived near-mortal levels of radiation poisoning, turned a potential enemy into a lover with Elenus, and found—with a great deal of help—Zakari again. Enough of him to save his family’s future, no thanks to the unexpected regression of a supposedly advanced society.

If he knew how to pray, he would have. Instead, all he did was breathe, slow and deep, until he felt more in control of himself. Then he got up from his chair and went to see Elenus.

It was time to confront the final obstacle to the best future he could imagine.

Chapter twenty

Kieron waited longer to do it than he thought he would. Longer than he should have, probably. He meant to do it right when he was finished talking to Xilinn, but then he got to the hangar, and Elenus was rolling through a series of holograms so rapid-fire that Kieron couldn’t even make most of them out. And with each one he got either a high-pitched “Yeeees!” or a low, rumbly “Noooo!”

There were a lot more “nooooo”s than the other way around, and Elenus finally pushed the holograms away and said, “Honestly, if you’re going to be so picky, why don’t you just design your new skin yourself?”

“Because I want youuu to dooo iiiit!”

“Well, I want to do it, too, but you’re not giving me much to work with, Catie!”

Kieron stifled a smirk as he heard Elenus refer to Catalina as “Catie.” He’d been adamantly against nicknaming her, claiming childhood trauma. “Do you have any idea what kids do with a name like mine? They don’t shorten it to ‘El,’ that’s for damn sure.” But he’d finally broken. Or maybe he didn’t even realize he was doing it. Either way, it made Kieron happy to hear. It was one small way he’d continue to have a presence in their lives even once they’d gone their separate ways.

“What’s wrong with this one?” Elenus asked, pulling up another hologram. This was a maze of swirling lights, sometimes blossoming into flower-like shapes, other times sinking into deep pools of solid color.