• 39 •

Myra steers in and out of a storm cloud. A white streak of lightning inscribes the red sky ahead. The shuttle rolls. It judders through eddies of air, swirls of draft that push it up and down the firmament. Myra aligns the vessel. She reduces speed and moves the throttle. She lowers the flaps, stabilizes speed and noses for landing. She lines up against the planet, brakes at touchdown.

The land’s pulse is perceptible even in the vessel. Myra looks back at her passengers. Vida is a little green but recovers sufficiently to smile at Amber and Tempest seated behind him, nonchalantly so.

It is Myra’s position as president of the Arbitration Assembly that allows such ease of intergalactic transportation for the family. She could just have easily enveloped all three, transmitted them in a swoop and flash to the remote galaxy. Instead, she chose to borrow a repatriation shuttle not on live commission to the planets. Naturally, government commanded she fund her own fuel. Not a problematic task on dual income, with Vida’s thriving professorship in Cosmos Medicine at Techno Institute. His stellar decoding of the navigation map is reason for their early arrival.

Novic is not expecting them—should it matter?

Myra worries. She has not been to Grovea since childhood, not since T-Mo, her bona fide bloodline. Later, when Tonk was wed to her mother, his human status limited the privilege of intergalactic tours, though his prosperity would have permitted it. But Tonk was not a man of the voyaging ilk. The arrogance that curled his lips when he said it made “voyaging” sound like prostituting.

Vida unhitches the girls from the vessel’s capsules.

Myra takes his hand. “Your arm to navigate my waist,” she smiles. “Our way is this.”

Aloft there is nothing of the storm that endangered landing but for Myra’s airborne aptitude. Rather than darkness is a jeweled sky pregnant with diamonds, stars each blinking an intimate eye as personal as it is seducing. Out yonder is emergent coral on a volcanic beach. Black pebbles run along Turtle Cove.

Amber and Tempest bob and chatter toward the cove.

“Careful now,” calls Vida. “Or you’ll be deported for too much happiness.”

They arrive at mangroves at the far shore. The coast veers into Rocky Point. Here, amethyst sand falls from waves of the great reef. Far left, a foot trail climbs to the main esplanade of the inner city, Bruthen, the capital of Grovea.

Up on the boulevard, the girls go crazy like freed animals. They tumble straight and in circles, zig-zag and in forward bursts, arms spread like birds, chaotic hair adrift. Now they are doing a waltz, now a foxtrot.

Myra eyes them. “Good seeing Amber like this,” she says.

The earthy girl shimmying carefree in the sand is far different from the thick-haired, flat faced child who stepped into their kitchen back home, a little girl wearing peanut eyes and unforgivable clothes, clutching in her hands a bundle of everything she owned.

• • •

It was the morning of the Shiva raid, the day Myra’s attack on an alien spaceship full of Shiva guards restored tranquility to Middle Creek. It was the day Mayor Jenkins said to Myra: “The key to the city is yours.”

Myra savored the moment, the neat salutes from Middle Creek rangers, a thunder of clapping from rescue teams . . . She sought and discovered adulation in Vida’s eyes but found nothing of Tempest who had vanished.

The child emerged several hours later at home in the kitchen with a little girl who smelt a bit rough, whose hair was locked in two thick braids.

Myra looked up, half-frowning and then astonished. “Why, Tempest,” she said. “Who’s your friend?”

Vida took one look at the girl accompanying their daughter and pointed without a word toward Tempest’s bedroom.

The new girl climbed but hovered at the landing. Her arms still nestled her sack. Downstairs Tempest lingered. Her eyes searched Vida’s.

“Can we? Can we, can we Pappy?”

She squealed with glee at the tilt of his chin toward the stairs. The two girls scooted all the way up to the bedroom.

“I am exasperated that Tempest never seeks instruction or affirmation from me,” said Myra.

“Yet she obeys my chin,” agreed Vida. “It is what it is. I am glad to also notice that you don’t say Mum’s good anymore when she insists on calling you Migsy.” He smoothed the curl of her brow with a finger.

“Why didn’t you suggest a bath?” said Myra. “That little girl she tugged along—”

“That little girl’s alright.”

Myra closed her eyes. “We don’t know a thing . . .”

“In time.”

Didn’t take long to link the new girl to Balmoral, the broken man rescued from the alien ship. Once you put together what the child had witnessed . . . you couldn’t fault Vida tilting his chin up the stairs for the girls.

Despite a fair distance in build between them, not much stood in age between the girls, Myra was sure. She couldn’t help but notice vulnerability in the new girl’s jaw, something that piled years to her appearance. She was attractive. Sort of—one had to look for it first. The symmetry of one eye to the other, the distance from the bridge of her nose to the flute, the height of her cheekbone from her jaw, all called up a defining beauty. But when she spoke . . . the scratch!

“Amber,” said the sand in the girl’s throat when Vida asked her name.

Myra stood straight-backed, arms crossed. Something about Amber brought Myra unease. While the girl appeared relaxed with Tempest and Vida, with Myra she stayed remote. Albino eyes looked at Myra as though they knew her secrets, but which?

The girl’s father was as good as dead. Last Myra saw him, back in his house in Camp Zero, he was curled in a corner, baring teeth at anything that came close.

Mayor Jenkins agreed without question that medical confinement was the solution, the only solution. “If you and Vida wish to adopt Amber . . .” he suggested. Vida was already nodding.

“Does Amber wish it?” snapped Myra.

And frankly, did Myra?

Since the girl joined their household, Myra felt alone, felt she was losing Vida, losing Tempest . . . Even then, despite Tempest and Amber’s bond—the girls were close as a thumb and a nail—they had their fights. Spiteful fights that took joint effort, Vida’s and Myra’s, to snatch apart the girls who were vicious as mastiffs. How the fights started was anyone’s guess. One minute, the girls were burrowed in their secret language. Next, Tempest had roared across the room. Or one moment Tempest was stepping inside a hula hoop, bringing its edges to her waist, spinning . . . The next Amber had crept, snagged a foot with a heel, sent Tempest sprawling face down, limbs open. And then a fight.

Sometimes the minds behind the tiffs were rash, foolish. Often they were calculated. Lethal. What Amber lacked in strength she made up with agility. Now a head grip, an elbow combination, reverse swap, then suddenly Amber was on top. Flip, and Amber was pinned. Hook, dodge, kick, block, upper cut. Now Amber had wriggled to offset Tempest, then both girls had tumbled.

Even as Myra and Vida snatched them apart, used monumental effort, there was no anchoring peace. The girls lunged, pressed forward, threw hands and legs. Myra determined that one day she would arm them with gloves, bolt them in a room and let them finish whatever the thing, the one that set them off.

“We need a vacation,” said Vida, releasing his seize on Amber after one such wrestling bout.

“And I know just about where,” panted Myra, freeing a writhing Tempest.

The look Amber gave Myra was poison.