“Sivan, you must—” Rann started towards Sivan, desisting as Vox’s hand gripped her arm and Sivan flicked what was surely a warning glance.
Silence. It lingered too long, crawling up Tokela’s nape; for a scant half heartbeat he wanted to clap his hands over his ears as though they were shouting. Instead he kept his eyes upon Sivan, narrowed into the fading light.
Did you know my dam? He couldn’t speak it aloud, but no doubt they all heard. Somehow.
“We mean you no harm, Tokela,” Sivan finally said, though she did not meet his eyes. “Eat. We will uphold the truce, even as you must. We will take you back to the guardian threshold and return you to your place.”
Quite final, it throttled any remaining speech Tokela might possess.
HE WAS so… small, Sivan considered.
Yet fierce. Savage! Vox had growled, and while that might be likely, there was also a… well, a dignity that seemed strange in one so young, and an undeniable strength of will.
The last had proven itself when Tokela had made them wait while he’d removed the claws from the shigala—and that done quicker and neater than any of their own hunters, Sivan had reflected as the boy sniffed the razored claws, grimaced then secreted them in his clothing.
Trophies! Vox had scoffed.
Maloh had merely pointed out that any being Tokela’s size who could take down a shigala deserved any reminder he wanted.
Sivan said nothing; her thoughts were complex enough.
They saw Tokela to the threshold. Maloh offered to take him through. The charged shield made an accounting of every passage, tallied it and sent it to the Arrogate; if Maloh accompanied the little one, it would be noted as no more than a lesser transgression with planetary natives, likely overlooked.
And Maloh well knew how to cope with the shield should the boy have difficulty.
He didn’t. It jangled alarms in Sivan’s brain, fitted another piece to a too-complex puzzle, another suspicion barely fathomed.
It was impossible, what she was thinking.
Wasn’t it?
The threshold sparked and snapped as the two breached the exit. Through the haze of energy, Sivan could see Maloh shudder off the lingering pressure of the guardian, then kneel to converse with the boy, quite serious. She rose again, making a gesture; it seemed familiar to the boy, for he returned it. With a last glance towards the portal, he retreated across the meadow.
“Sivan.” It was Rann, insistent.
Sivan did not break her silence, watching as the boy ran across the grassland then slid, smooth as water, into the trees.
They were all like that, Sivan’s own people would claim; more animal than anything. A fine way to justify taking a planet, Maloh often scoffed, pretending the inhabitants are less, somehow. Creatures to be tamed—or held in their own little habitat whilst the conquerors scrutinise them.
Maloh’s own people had made their choice long ago: assimilation.
Sivan’s brother preferred classifying the little natives as “belonging to their world”. Whatever it meant, it was a quality Sivan’s own kind had alternately shunned and, though not openly admitted, envied.
This world, after all, had set itself against them from the beginning.
“Sivan.”
Turning, Sivan peered at her companion. Rann’s breath hung, misting damp, and her eyes were filled with starlit shadows, turned toward the little one’s departure.
“Sivan,” she insisted, “we cannot just… let him go. Not with what happened. We must do something.”
“You know our hands are tied in this, Rann,” Vox answered instead. “Sivan has done what she could. More than she should.”
Yet Sivan felt she had not done enough. Moreover, she could still sense the boy’s… presence, dwindling into the mortal rot of the ancient forest’s supremacy.
A presence that had changed before their eyes. From the moment Rann had reached inward and between, taken the weight of the world away from him, to siphon the poison from his system.
“It wasn’t just that,” Rann murmured, following Sivan’s thoughts. “I didn’t change anything except the poison. The change was already there. He… helped, Sivan. He reached back, Between.” Laying her head against Sivan’s shoulder, she furthered, “I thought their psionics lost. Bred out, long ago. Is he some sort of throwback?”
“I don’t know.”
Rann parsed the lie with a frown. “What do you know, then?”
“Blood and star-iron,” Vox growled, “what is it about these little natives? First your brother, then—”
“Enough, Vox!” Sivan snapped.
Rann’s eyes were large as the Lost Station, considering it all as Maloh returned, breaching the threshold’s shimmer with a shake and stagger. A further reminder: she was more hampered by the portal’s disorienting effects than the native boy.
The native boy. The lost one’s son.
Maloh padded over, frowning. “Now. Are you going to tell me what you were on about?”
Sivan shivered as Maloh put a hand to her cheek and trailed it down to rest on her shoulder, peat against glacier snow. “Your hands are cold, Maloh.”
“Mm. I can’t abide that thing.”
“I wonder,” Sivan whispered. “Were his hands cold? When you touched him just now?”
Maloh frowned, harder. “Our little Shadow, you mean?”
“Shadow?” This from Vox, frowning.
Maloh slanted her gaze after the native boy’s path. Her smile, sudden, also quirked fond. “If the old sgral—the old kowehokla—is Little Fish, then that young one is Little Shadow. First he’s here, then… ssst!” She flicked her fingers. “Gone! But to answer you, Siv, his hands were warm as a good hearth.”
“Warm.” Rann’s words were hesitant, heavy. Pondering. “He’s not of our people, yet the portal has no effect upon him. What does it mean, Sivan?”
Sivan was afraid she knew. Maloh, too, for her grip turned into a caress.
“Sivan,” Rann persisted, “whoever this boy is… whatever he is—”
“It’s something we should never have interfered with, is all it is!” Vox intercepted.
“But we have, haven’t we?” Rann shot back. “We have, and it’s formed… I formed it…” She trailed off as Vox shook his head; where such a rebuttal usually swayed her, instead she stiffened, turned to Sivan and said, flat, “It was already there. But it has awakened. We cannot
