Dirty Burnout by R. Z. Held

Author:R. Z. Held
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: nanites, nanite install, escape, conquered planet, planetary empire, resistance force, carbon composite wings
Publisher: Rhiannon Held
Published: 2020-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

Part IV

Three days, four, stretched to a week. Michael’s husband and kids returned and settled back into their daily lives, and Genevieve helped with chores as much as she could, wings tucked away. Carex spent much of the day away from the house on business of his own—he didn’t volunteer any information, Genevieve didn’t ask—and returned at night to eat dinner and pass out on the air mattress on the guest room floor. She knew they needed to leave, needed to hide better from the Pax Romana who would be looking for them, needed to get out of reach of the Resistance who knew where she was. But she couldn’t make herself feel the urgency of those threats when Pyrus was stuck at the base. They should leave him behind and she couldn’t leave him behind. She needed to apologize to him, beg his forgiveness on her knees, and he needed to apologize to her and beg hers.

Day to day, her wings gave an excuse for her drifting during their slow healing process. She turned options over in her mind, getting nowhere—again—the morning of the eighth day at the breakfast table, letting the bustle of family life distract her in the end—again.

Her brother’s children were a study in contrasts—though they shared the same nose, the same caps of strawberry-blond curls, Will, the younger boy, had clearly been too young to remember the circumstances that made him an orphan. He would barely sit at his place long enough to eat two bites before he had bounced out of his chair, talking a blue streak to either or both of his fathers. He was shy around strangers, but had grown comfortable enough that he would talk near Genevieve or Carex, though rarely to them.

The older girl, Jaya, on the other hand, had the haunted eyes and stubborn silence of a war orphan who hadn’t learned how to feel safe again—if she ever would. Genevieve wished it for her, deeply, and found hope in the fact that she did speak, oddly enough often to Carex. Something in the quality of their silences over meals seemed to resonate for them, and this morning, between their empty plates, Jaya was patiently teaching Carex a few words of Idyllian, using her brother’s reading program. Rather than use the computer’s voice, she’d speak the written word, emblazoned over a cartoon farm picture, and wait for Carex to repeat her, correcting his pronunciation as many times as necessary without apology. Carex, for his part, approached the task with solemn effort, though she knew he could have spent the energy and quick-learned it in hours.

Then it was time for school, and Carex accepted the tablet from Jaya with murmured thanks. He even paged through a few more words as the children clattered out, herded by Michael’s husband. “Put together gatherer,” he muttered to himself in Lingua, as if personally affronted by its awkwardness.

Oh! His system was giving him a literal translation of combine harvester. “I’m not sure even I know what that would be in Lingua,” she offered.

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