“You do realize that he’s—”
“
The Muffin, horribly awake for this hour of the day, came charging into the kitchen, waving a tattered picture book. Maj sighed. Whatever the manufacturers said about these books being “childproof,” they had not yet run them past the Muffin.
“—thirteen,” her mother said after a moment, looking slightly bemused.
“Oh, yeah, Mom, it’s no problem,” Maj said. “I’ll manage.”
“It was lost,” the Muffin said, “and I found it under my bed.” She waved the book under her mother’s nose. It had an earnest-looking dinosaur on the cover.
“That’s where most things go,” said Maj, who had previous experience in this regard with her little sister. The Muffin regarded “under the bed” as a storage area of infinite flexibility.
“Will you read it to me, Mommy?”
“But you can read it yourself, sweetie,” her mother said, wearily taking another swig of coffee.
“It’s good to read to people,” the Muffin insisted. “
Maj and her mother gave each other an amused look. “Well, honey,” her mother started to say, and then the phone rang.
“Now, who can it be at this hour?” her mother said, looking up. “They’d better not be expecting imagery, because they’re not going to get it. Hello?” she said.
The Muffin looked annoyed and wandered over to the other side of the table with the book, where she climbed up on a chair, slapped the book down on the table and began to read aloud to herself.
“No,” Maj’s mother said to the air over the recitation of dinosaur names, “he’s not available at the moment; may I take a message for him? — Yes, this is Mrs. Green. — Oh.—Oh. And it’s landing where?”
There was a pause. “Seven-fifteen? There wasn’t any problem with the plane, was there?”
Maj’s eyebrows went up. “—Oh, well that’s good,” her mother said. “No problem. Yes, we’ll be there. Thank you! Bye now!”
She blinked, “hanging up,” and turned to Maj. “So much for the virtues of getting up early and having half an hour to relax,” she muttered, and glanced at the Muffin. “They’ve diverted our young cousin’s flight to Dulles.”
“Isn’t that good for us, though? We don’t have to go all the way down to BWI.”
“It would be good if he wasn’t landing in three-quarters of an hour,” her mother said, getting up and swigging down the rest of her coffee at a rate that made Maj wonder one more time if her mother had an ablative-tile throat. “Better get dressed, honey, we’ve got a plane to meet.”
“Ohmigosh,” Maj said. “My meeting with the Group—!”
“You’re going to have to abort it,” her mother said. “This is family stuff, hon, sorry…I think you’re needed. Tell them you’ll talk to them later.”
“It wasn’t just a talk, it was—!”
But her mother was already on her way down the hall, and a second later she was banging on the bathroom door, shouting, “Sweetie, the sky is falling, better come out of there!”
Maj heard a strangled noise come through the faint sound of rushing water. Reluctantly she got up and went off to get dressed, after which she would have to rush to commandeer enough time on the computer to tell the Group she was going to have to miss out on the briefing.
Fortunately, it being the awful hour of the morning it was, the traffic into Dulles wasn’t too bad. Maj could almost have wished it was a little worse, in that there would have been more time for her to lose her bad mood completely. The reaction of the Group, when she had stuck her head into Chel’s work space and announced that she couldn’t stay for the meeting, was all too predictable, especially from those who had stayed up late. “Look, I’ll meet you all early here tonight,” Maj had said as she turned to go, and Shih Chin, usually so good-tempered, had actually growled, “Miss Madeline, if you’re late tonight…we’re going without you. The battle starts at six central—”
“I know, I know, I won’t be….” Maj had said, unnerved by the mutter of annoyance coming from the others. She had fled, then, intent on getting into the bathroom for at least a few minutes before she would have to get dressed and pile into the car with the rest of the crowd. Now here she sat, feeling rather hot and bothered, insufficiently showered, and altogether not caring whether she made any kind of good first impression on anybody.
Yet she was still distracted by the one connection she couldn’t put together.
The Muffin was oblivious to all this, and to everything else, as the car pulled out of the fast-speed “lanes” and chimed at her father for him to take control back to do local approach. She was singing “We have a cousin, we have a cousin!” at the top of her none-too-small lungs as Maj’s dad slipped into the airport parking approach and brought the car around into the access circle, where once again the local remote control computers took it off his hands and guided it into the parking facility. Nothing was allowed to randomly circle within a kilometer from the airport center. There were too many things cycling through the neighborhood at the best of times to allow parking-place anarchy in, too.
“We’re running early,” Maj’s mother said, somewhat surprised, from the other front seat, as the car settled gently into the parking place that the local space control had assigned it.
“Welcome to Dulles International Aerospace Port,” said a pleasant male voice through the car’s entertainment system. “To better serve our visitors, please note that parking rates in short-term are now thirty dollars per hour. Thank you for your cooperation in keeping our airport running smoothly.”
Her father grunted, a sound which Maj knew concealed a comment that would have been much more vigorous if the Muffin hadn’t been in the car. “Come on,” he said, “let’s get in there and fetch our guest before we have to go into escrow to get out again.”
A couple of rows from their space was the shelter for the maglev car that ran to the main terminals, and they all made their way to it, wincing a little at the sound of cars all around them parking or winding up their engines to take off again. Maj looked with some dry amusement at the poster inside the shelter as they climbed into the maglev car which almost immediately slid up to meet them — GROWING AGAIN TO SERVE YOU BETTER! This was Dulles’s third “refit” in the last twenty years, almost finished — so the airport kept promising — now that the fifth runway, the one for the aerospaceplanes, was finished, and the additional wing to Terminal C was almost done being extended and overhauled to service it. It wasn’t entirely ready, though, and so it came to pass that the place where they met Niko looked more like a building site than a terminal.
And Maj, all too ready to be annoyed with him, caught the first sight of the youngster standing over near the “designated meeting” area with the AA flight services lady, and immediately felt all her annoyance drop off her in embarrassment. It was impossible to be angry at anyone who looked so small and lost and scared, and who was trying so valiantly to hide it.
He really was kind of small for his age, his dark jeans and sober sweatshirt and plain dark jacket like something left over from a school uniform, suggesting that he had somehow been trying to avoid notice, and indeed he looked uncomfortable, standing there out in the open, as if he would have preferred to be invisible.
Maj’s dad made straight for him, and Maj hung back a little, watching the kid’s face as he registered this tall, balding man heading in his direction, waiting to see his reaction. The boy looked at her father with dark, assessing eyes. He was himself shadowy — dark hair, a little bit olive of complexion, and had sort of a Mediterranean look, though with high cheekbones. As Maj’s dad came up and paused there, towering over him, the slightest sign of a smile appeared, and it was a relieved smile.
“Martin Green,” her father said to the flight services lady. “And this would be Niko.
“
“Professor Green, can I get you to look into this, please?” said the flight services lady, holding up a “little
