Page 67 of Cloverleaf Station

“I do!” Lizzie said quickly. “I want that. I want you to be my father, Kee.”

“I …” How had they gotten here again? “I didn’t have anything to do with building or programming you, sweetheart,” he said. “Elenus did.”

“You take care of me,” Lizzie said. Her voice was soft, tentative. “You love me. Don’t you?”

“Of course, I do.” That was never in question. “I just don’t want you to make a decision that you’re going to regret.” People—machine or otherwise—didn’t stick by Kieron. He simply didn’t have the personality for it. He wasn’t enough—not affectionate enough, not bold enough, not safe enough, not vocal enough … the ways in which he failed at being a person went on and on. He didn’t expect his … whatever it was with Elenus to last all that long. Maybe a year if he was lucky. Perhaps two if they both traveled frequently so that Elenus didn’t have to be around him all the time.

“You have the worst self-esteem. The worst,” Elenus groaned. “And I’m going to do something about that, but first let’s establish that Lizzie, like Catie, is a new kind of person, who is capable of telling us who she wants as her guardian. I’m on there because I can’t not be, in addition to the fact that I love her very much, but you’re on there because she wants you to be. Is that clear?”

“Yes.” It wasn’t especially believable, but it was clear. He and Elenus could fight it out once he finally got to Gania.

“Good. Part of being her guardian is assisting in maintenance of her assets. Lizzie and Catie combined have a total of—” And here he named a number that might have stopped Kieron’s heart if he’d been genuinely able to envision it, but his mathematical prowess ended at ten zeroes. “—in research and development funding, so that’s more than enough to qualify you for the board. That means part ownership. And believe me when I say that if I told Trakta’s nearest Alliance planet what they wanted to do, they would be more than happy to ride to the rescue.”

“But I don’t need rescuing,” Kieron pointed out, ignoring the less comfortable parts of Elenus’s speech for now.

“You don’t. But the people that the government is about to load up and set adrift on a slow boat to another planet definitely do. The only reason I haven’t complained yet is because I don’t want word to get out to the wrong person, and I’m waiting for a Ganian commander I’m friends with to be in position to help mobilize rescue efforts. We’re going to save Xilinn, and these little shits aren’t going to be able to do a thing to stop us once we’re in space. It’s the stuff planetside that I’m more worried about. How are you going to get to Pol?”

“I’ve got that all worked out,” Kieron replied. That had been far easier than dealing with the bureaucrats, a simple matter of programming the right mods into a skimmer and synthesizing a few invisibility suits. Not invisible to the naked eye, not really, but they were totally invisible to all computers except the one who’d programmed the algorithm that had made them. Kieron had grown up in suits like these, all part of his early training, and making them, with Lizzie’s help, had been incredibly easy. Actually sneaking out of the port and getting Pol? No problem.

“If you’re sure,” Elenus said. “I’m tracking chatter on when the ‘dissidents’ are going to be sent away, and it’s looking like sometime tomorrow night. Can you coordinate pickup of Pol by then?”

“I can.” Kieron was still reluctant to go without Szusza, but Elenus had a point when he said that they needed to keep things as simple as possible right now. If he had to, he could make a stealth skin for Lizzie and come back for her. Or … maybe he’d come in something expendable instead, in case they were fired on.

“Then get ready to add kidnapping to your illustrious list of achievements, darling.”

Chapter twenty-eight

Leaving Lizzie was harder than Kieron had expected. Not because he was worried about her, exactly—she was more intelligent than he was and to prepare her, they had run simulations of every scenario they could think of that might happen in his absence. He wasn’t even going to be gone for long, so that wasn’t it. No, leaving her behind was hard for two reasons.

The first reason was the soft one—that he simply wanted to be with her right now. The revelation that she cared for him enough to want to make him a forever part of her life, to give them a permanent and legal connection, was devastating. In a good way. It made Kieron feel like he’d been stabbed in the chest with a blade made from hopefulness, an edge that both cut and cured. It was bittersweet, to think that family could be something that made you feel good.

He couldn’t remember much about how he felt for his mother, or his grandfather, but Kieron knew that any warmth he’d had for them, or them for him, had been gone before he could speak. He had been a soldier-in-training and a disappointing one at that. Every touch had been a pinch, a slap, a smack—stand straighter, go faster, why are you so slow, why are you so stupid? They had taught him not to rely on family for any sort of positive feeling.

Zak had taught him that warmth could come from friends. Profound emotional connections could be made between people who had nothing in common other than the will to reach out, and what a revelation that had been. It wasn’t family, toxic, toxic family, and that was a good thing. Kieron didn’t need a family, when he had someone like Zak in his life.

And then he lost him, and then …

Well, then he had kept going. Made new connections, despite being sure he’d never be able to. Found a lover and a daughter and a sweet little ship who’d broken down his walls in Catie. And then, somehow, he’d looped back around to family, and now here he was, about to break up another family.

No. You’re making them whole. Xilinn’s spouses had thrown her to the wolves. If they didn’t want her, then fuck them. Kieron would take her.

If he could get out of this damn port.

That was the other reason it was hard to leave Lizzie—the presence of Traktan military personnel at the port had grown exponentially over the past twelve hours. They were working nonstop on the ships they were going to use to send away their political prisoners, undoubtedly trying to make them space-worthy for long enough to deflect blame if anything went wrong up there.

Now that they’d severed ties with the Alliance, undoubtedly the government wanted to keep their best resources for the people they valued, but these ships … they were heaps. They looked like they’d been salvaged from scrap piles and recycling centers. Their lights were flickering, hulls covered in shoddy patches while technicians worked feverishly to get them sealed up.

They wouldn’t last long. Or if they did, they wouldn’t be given enough fuel to get the people on them very far.

It took more than an hour, but Kieron eventually made it out of the port and to the skimmer he’d left tucked away behind a nearby shipping container. He let Lizzie take care of guiding it to the forest behind Pol’s house as he reached out to Pol. The boy’s implant wasn’t reacting very quickly—it felt sluggish, so slow that nothing but emotive bursts could come through instead of actual words. The emotions behind the bursts seemed an odd mix of frustrated and happy.

I’m coming, Kieron sent to him, giving up on understanding the blend of emotions. Meet me in the back as soon as you can.

He got another burst of frustration. Ooookay.

Getting to Pol’s house was easy—the flight lanes were practically abandoned, everyone huddled in their homes so that no one had to witness the atrocity that was about to happen. Parents, children, siblings—they were about to be thrown out, cast into space so that a group of fundamentalists could keep dissent under control. This place was about to be irreparably broken.

Or perhaps it already was.