marriage celebrations followed nine months later by a healthy son.
Tazia’s mother was no longer coughing; Tazia’s father had taken her to be seen by the city doctor who’d settled permanently in the village and who was happy to barter his services for a good, home-cooked meal and a little company, his wife having passed on.
Tazia’s father was enamored of his grandson and spoiling the boy terribly (“as a grandparent should,” Mina had added).
Tazia’s parents had given the money Tazia had sent them to the holy man.
She knew. Of course she knew. In her heart she knew she would never again drink her mother’s sweet milk-tea or hear her father’s gravelly voice. She would never again laugh with her brother, never meet his bride or her nephew. And she would never again feel her beloved teta’s kisses and hugs, her grandmother who had so patiently brushed her hair the many times Tazia had returned with tangles after a day of scrambling up trees and rolling down sand dunes.
She knew.
She knew.
• • •
Next mail drop, she ensured she was fixing a hydraulic lift on the lowest floor of the station, where no one would come looking for her and where she didn’t have to hear the excited cries and see the beaming smiles of her colleagues as they received care packages or unexpected gifts, or letters that made them shed tears of joy.
“Great,” she muttered when the relay tube turned out to have a hole in it.
“A problem?”
Her back stiffening where she crouched in front of the exposed inner machinery of the lift, she glanced up at Stefan. “Can’t you wear a bell or something?”
“No.”
Of course he didn’t have a sense of humor. Psy never did. She still couldn’t get her mind around the fact that two powerful cardinal Psy, including a gifted foreseer, had recently defected into a changeling pack. How could that possibly work? Changelings were as primal as Psy were cerebral. Like Stefan with his remote gaze and cool words.
“The tube is busted,” she told him. “I missed the last equipment request, so we’ll have to wait till next month.”
“Is it urgent?”
She considered it, aware Stefan was a teleport-capable Tk. He could bring in emergency equipment in the space of mere minutes if not seconds, his mind reaching across vast distances in a way she could barely comprehend, but the unspoken rule was that the rest of the station personnel didn’t ask him for anything that wasn’t critical. Everyone knew that if Alaris sprang a fatal pressure leak, they’d need every last ounce of Stefan’s abilities to get them to the surface.
“The other lift is still functional,” she said, hooking her spanner into her tool belt and tapping in the code that meant the computer would bypass this lift until she recorded it as being back online. “We can survive a month.”
He nodded, his dark brown hair military short. Since he wasn’t part of the Psy race’s armed forces, she thought it was because he had curls; Psy hated anything that was out of control. When he continued to loom over her, she rubbed her hands on her thighs and stood up. That didn’t exactly even things out since he was so much taller, but it made her feel better.
He reached out and gripped a lock of hair that had escaped her ponytail. “Grease.”
Rolling her eyes, she pulled it out of his grasp. “Was there anything else you wanted?”
“It appears I made a mistake last month in telling you no letter or package would come.”
Pain in her heart, her throat. “No, I needed to hear that.”
“However, instead of having you snap at everyone for two days a month, you’re now so quiet that people are becoming concerned.”
Tazia remembered how Andres had been poking at her this morning, trying to make her smile with those silly jokes of his. But he was her friend. Stefan was nothing. “I’m not Psy,” she said point-blank. “I can’t ignore hurt or forget that my family hates me.”
He didn’t flinch. “You knew that before. What changed?”
“You took away my hope.”
There was a small silence that seemed to reverberate with a thousand unspoken things. For a single instant captured in time, she thought she saw a fracture in his icy composure, a hint of something unexpected in those eyes she’d always thought were beautiful despite their coldness.
Then a tool fell off Tazia’s belt and she bent to grab it off the floor. By the time she rose, Stefan was gone. Just as well, she thought,