“Yeah.”
He nodded again, faster this time, like a mag player psyching themselves up to enter the game. “Did you see them?”
“Not yet.” Tayel took a steadying breath. After everything he’d been through, after everything she’d done to get here, this one thing had to work out. “I wanted to look together.”
“Can we just leave him here?” Jace asked, gesturing to Fehn.
“We’re not just leaving him; Shy knows he’s back here. She can keep an eye on him until help comes.”
“Okay.”
Tayel leaned against the closed cockpit door. Shy’s voice mumbled behind the steel, mixed with sharp crackling comm static.
“Sounds like she’s made contact,” Tayel said.
“That’s good,” Jace murmured. He stared straight ahead, at the snow through the open hold.
Her heart ached at his exhausted expression, at the way his perfectly rounded eyes glinted with desperation.
She walked toward the open door and hopped two feet down into the powder. Jace followed, and she helped him, easing his weight against her arm until he sunk almost up to his knees in the white. Glittering ice rained from the cracked dome far above them. Not quite snow, or rain, or hail, but shiny, silvery streams that marked it as the ice aether it really was.
Ahead of them, in the field of open space before the massive Delta shuttle, hundreds of battered survivors talked and cheered. Some danced. Some stood somberly away from the core of the crowd. Some sat speechless, just staring upward. Somewhere in there had to be Jace’s family.
She took a breath and stepped forward. Jace trudged alongside her through the snow, feathers flattening against the wind. They moved deeper into the crowd.
Every trace of red and yellow caught her attention. Each hue she swiveled her head toward was someone’s sweater, a paint job on a laser rifle, an Argel — but not one of the ones she was looking for. Every curved beak ended up a disappointment, every flash of feathers ended up someone else. Hopelessness added its weight to the fatigue. The cold breached her coat, her neck strained from peeking around the crowd, and her legs were so deep in snow they’d gone numb.
In all this, a glint of moving metal caught her eye.
Through a wall of human refugees, a Cyborn — modified facial features alight with joy — brushed snow off his jacket. His most favored leather jacket. The one with the Cyskull and Crosswrenches patch on front, and a tear in the arm because it had always been too tight. Beside him, a yellow-feathered Argel pointed toward the dome, her wing wrapped in her husband’s. The couple’s pleasant, laughing caw rose above the murmur of the crowd, a sound that took Tayel right back to her childhood, sitting on Jace’s bed, daydreaming of faraway places.
Sadness and joy and relief filled her in equal measure until she couldn’t hold it back. She let go a shuddered laugh.
Jace set his talon on her arm. “Tayel?”
His Mom’s gaze wandered the crowd for half a beat before it landed on Tayel, in that weird way it always would when one somehow knew someone else was watching. Her Argel features changed. Her beak sagged open. She tugged on her husband’s sleeve.
“I’m just so happy for you,” Tayel said.
Jace turned. His head cocked. His feathers ruffled to a happy plumb around his face and he let loose a desperate, Argelian-tinged caw, “MOM!”
His parents stormed him, and he shuffled forward. The three of them fell to the ground in the gentle way Argels did, chirping and cawing and holding each other close until Tayel couldn’t tell Jace’s red feathers from his father’s.
Watching them was like living a dream. Like seeing for a Moment that despite everything the universe had thrown at her, some things could still be perfect. Could still be right, even though so much else had gone wrong.
Otto sidled around the reunion and stopped at her side. “Hey, kiddo.” He nudged the baton against her back. “Playing mag at a time like this?”
She lunged at him and wrapped her arms as far as they would go around his bulky middle. “Otto! It’s so good to see you.”
“You too, kiddo. Screws, you have no idea. You too.”
The urge to spill everything at once was only overcome by tiredness. She wanted to tell Otto everything — about teaming up with a raider, infiltrating Castle Aishan, saving Jace from guards, controlling a ship’s offensive suite, fighting a Rokkir. She wanted to ask him about Delta, about how he found Jace’s parents, if he ever…
She slid out of his grip. “Otto.”
He winced, like he knew what was coming next, and she pressed past the lump in her throat.
“Were you able to find Mom?”
Otto sighed. “Tayel, yer Mom was” -he shook his head—“she didn’t make it, kiddo. I’m sorry.”
Her reply got stuck halfway up.
He opened a pouch on the utility belt across his chest. He dug his fingers inside, and with squinted eyes and perfectly still focus, he lifted something out. A thin chain at first and then — the necklace. The eir stone necklace Tayel had given to Mom on the day of the invasion. She choked back a sob.
“This was in her hand,” Otto said, holding it out. “Her last thoughts were of you, kiddo, I can promise you that.”
There were no words to say. She took the tiny pink stone, blurry through the tears, and squeezed it between both her hands. Otto hugged her. She closed her eyes. Remembered Mom the way she was. Remembered the movie nights on the couch, the long discussions about other worlds into the early morning, tossing a magball out front even though Mom had always been hopeless with a baton.
Tayel had never dared to hope Mom lived, but knowing for a fact — for an indisputable, irreversible fact — that she would never see Mom again hurt. It hurt bad. Some things did turn out perfect. Some others, just too wrong.
When she lowered her clenched hands from her face and Otto pulled away, Jace and his family were standing nearby, chatting. The crowd around them had migrated and clumped toward where Shy landed earlier, leaving Tayel, Otto, and Jace’s family in relatively open space as Deltian refugees carried items from the crashed shuttle.
“…And that’s why we think the raiders attacked,” Jace continued. “But if the Rokkir didn’t come in force to every planet like they did to Modnik, I’m wondering—” He saw Tayel and stopped.
“I’m okay.” She wiped her eyes. “Hi Arcen. Nita,” she said to his parents.
Jace’s father stepped over and pulled her into a hug. “Tayel, I’m so glad you survived. Every time Nita and I thought of Jace, we prayed to Alhyt that he guide you to safety as well.”
“Thank you, Arcen. I appreciate it.”
“And I’m so sorry about your mother. The universe has lost one of its kindest souls.”
Tayel smiled politely.
“Goodness, look at you,” Nita said. She took Tayel’s face in her talon. “Everything you’ve been through. I can’t begin to imagine how hard it must have been.”
“I didn’t even tell you half of it,” Jace said.
She shot him a mother’s patient look and turned back to Tayel. “If you ever need anything, you come to us,” she said. “You have put the light back in my life. As much as we can be, Arcen and I are here for you.”
“Thanks, Nita,” Tayel said. “I’m just so glad we found you.”
“Right!” Jace exclaimed. “I was getting to the best part.”
“Does it get better after you were abducted?” Arcen frowned.
“Yes! Well not good better, safe better I mean, but we have this friend, Fehn, who can wield dark aether — like a Rokkir — and when the Elshan guard chased us through the woods, he—”
“The Elshan guard chased you?” Nita squawked.