There he was.
My heart picked up its already unsteady pace.
Then I saw the white-blonde woman beside him, with a sunburnt nose and long legs.
Fiori.
I sank back upon the plaid blanket, my confusion swirling in my gut, making me feel nauseous. All during this long, drawn out week, not had I once anticipated he might bring her with him. He never had, before.
Dalton picked out my tree with his gaze. It was easy to find. It was the biggest and oldest oak on the reserve. It stood out.
He saw me under the tree, but he didn’t smile. He touched Fiori’s arm and pointed to the oak.
She focused upon the tree. Her expression was pinched. When she spotted me, she didn’t scowl.
Something was wrong.
I got to my feet and headed toward them. Halfway there, I gave the soft whistle that Vara knew not to argue with. She trotted toward me, bringing Darb with her.
We all met in the middle, which was directly beneath the hot lights, and therefore thin of grass and short on people.
Vara and Darb settled beside us, both panting happily.
I cut to the chase. “What’s happened?”
Dalton opened his mouth to speak, swallowed, then tried again. This close, he looked wretched.
“Mace is missing,” Fiori said simply. The pinched look I’d noticed from afar was the product of a deep furrow between her brows. She looked like someone had sucker-punched her in the gut.
“Missing?” I repeated blankly. Only, in my heart, I knew. Dalton’s expression, Fiori’s battered look, told the story they could not.
“The ship he was on has gone dark.” Dalton’s voice was strained. “Three days now.”
Their beacon could have gone down. Or they were on the wrong side of a flaring star. A dozen other reasons why a ship might go silent ran through my mind. But none of them would cause a ship to stay silent for three days.
Now I knew why Dalton was late, and why he looked the way he did. If something bad had happened, Mace would be the second son lost to him and he’d never properly got over the loss of the first.
—2—
My first instinct was to take everyone back to my quarters. I had an obedient and well-trained terminal there and wouldn’t have to go through all the silly procedures to make a public terminal secure. I knew the quality of the terminals in the hilton that Dalton preferred. They usually left me with a need to wash my hands after I used them.
But three adults and two adult parawolves simply wouldn’t fit in my quarters. Someone would have to lean their back against the door at all times.
I had to get these two out of public view, though. They needed time to pull themselves together and I needed privacy to do what came next, which was to help them find Mace and get him back.
I left the blanket under the tree. It would either be stolen or someone would thoughtfully fold it and hang it over a branch for me to collect later. I was tolerably well known on the reserve, although I didn’t know a single other person’s name. I knew the faces, though.
I led Dalton and Fiori back to the hilton that Dalton used, and told Vara and Darb to help them along, which they did by nudging the human legs with their shoulders. That also warded off pedestrians who got too close and eased our passage around the busy concourse.
“Are you checked in?” I asked Dalton when we reached the rarified air of the upper passenger concourse. The atmosphere really did seem different here. Perhaps it was the perfumed, pampered passengers. Or the lack of unwashed residents.
He frowned. “I…no. We were late.”
Straight to the park, to find me.
I nodded and moved through the hilton’s doors. Low light. Hushed conversations. Polished surfaces. “Check in, then. We’ll talk in the room.” I pulled out my pad and moved over to one of the well-padded chairs artfully placed in a conversational grouping. With a flick of my fingers, Vara and Darb followed me.
I didn’t realize Fiori hadn’t moved to the front desk with Dalton until she said, right next to me, “I’m sorry.”
I looked up from the pad, startled. I shrugged off the surprise. “What have you to be sorry about?”
“Gabriel wanted to go and find Mace. I told him to talk to you, first.”
I lowered the pad, parsing this second surprise. Actually, a pair of surprises. One, that it had been Fiori’s idea to pull me into this. And two: That it hadn’t been Dalton’s first instinct. Although the second one wasn’t as big a surprise as the first. Dalton’s first instinct was always to immediately try to fix the situation with the most direct and obvious method. We were both guilty of that bad habit.
Once he’d got over that initial impulse, though, he’d come straight here.
I shook my head, because Fiori was clearly waiting for me to forgive her for what she apparently thought was a major imposition for me. The pinched look seemed to be even worse in this soft lighting. She looked…well, old. The white-blonde braid hanging over her shoulder was yellow in places. “Dalton shouldn’t have to deal with this,” I told her. “Not again.”
Fiori didn’t quite glance over her shoulder and I knew she had resisted the impulse to seek out Dalton with her gaze. “I slipped a sedative into his breakfast. Otherwise, I don’t think he would be handling it at all.”
Fiori was a medic. A damned good one, I’d finally figured out. Wherever Dalton went, she and Mace had gone with him. He and Fiori were not together. They weren’t a couple and had never been more than casual partners—which was how Mace had happened. But Fiori, like Dalton, had elected to raise Mace through to his majority. Where Dalton went, they went. Fiori would act as the colony medical service until they moved on to the next set-up.
She was dealing with her own shock and worry but had diagnosed
