Star Bright (Big Sky Alien Mail Order Brides #22)

Chapter 10

Well, shit. Darcy had half a second to grasp at the wall before the handhelds were clearly out of reach and she was plummeting.

This was why videogames were better.

The rope went taut, jolting an oof out of her, and she swung in a short arc, coming to rest beneath the easy route she should have stuck with.

Not that she’d been trying to show off or anything.

She dangled a moment, catching her breath from the adrenaline rush, slowly rotating to bonk first her feet then her head as she scrambled to get her weight back under her and orient to the wall again. Her hands were trembling a little, which was ridiculous because she knew the safety measures. But knowing it in her head and in her body were apparently two different things.

“Darcy!”

When she heard it again, she realized Vash had called out to her at least twice already. How embarrassing. She twisted around a little to see Vash standing next to Yadira and a dripping Ug with a naked little drakling boy beside him. Definitely embarrassing.

“Both hands on the wall,” Vash barked. “We’ll get you down.”

“I’m fine,” she called. Thankfully, her voice was steadier than her hands. “Just got a little cocky about whether I could keep up with Yadira.”

She cast a grin at the teen.

Who stared at her, green eyes fixed wide and horrified.

Because she’d just watched someone fall…

Darcy wanted to smack herself in the head again. When the withdrawn teen had asked what the climbing wall was, Darcy had thought it would be the perfect chance to give the girl some of that physical outlet Vash had mentioned for the beast hiding within her.

Who did she think she was? Some drakling expert? As if her own mental state hadn’t been so bruised that her friend had to give her a place to run away. Not just embarrassing but reckless.

“I want to try next,” Atsu demanded as Darcy’s feet hit the ground.

“No,” everyone said at once even Ug in his growling voice.

So much for her flying adventure.

“A buffet will be served in fifteen local minutes in the dining hall,” Kong’s voice announced through the intercom. “All honored guests are invited to attend.”

“I’m starving,” Atsu announced as he streaked across the gym toward his discarded clothes.

Meanwhile, Yadira looked more stricken than ever.

As they followed the map to the dining room, Darcy turned Vash briefly aside. “I am so sorry,” she whispered. “I wasn’t thinking at all and now I’ve made things worse.”

“Did you fall on purpose?”

She grimaced. “Definitely not.”

“Then as you told me before, it is no one’s fault. The therapist said there would be lingering issues, and of course falling would be one. Which explains why Yadira’s beast has hidden itself.”

“Green eggs! My favorite,” Atsu yelled.

Vash sighed. “I wonder if being a bottomless pit is also a symptom of grief.”

Atsu pointed at one of everything, while Vash helped him more intentional selections.

As Darcy contemplated why the eggs might be green, Yadira shuffled up next to her. “Are you… Did you get hurt?”

“I’m fine,” Darcy said. “The harness and helmet worked like they were supposed to. I was just startled.”

“I should’ve been watching.” The girl’s voice broke. “I should’ve been watching the rope. I should’ve been watching you. I should have made sure you didn’t—”

Darcy reached out one hand as Yadira’s voice pitched upward. The kind of rise that came before a terrible fall. “Yadira,” she said softly, soft enough that the girl had to catch her erratic breaths to listen. “This was my first time rock climbing, and yours too, at least like this. And you were better at it than me. When I try again, I can just stay on the easier path until I’m ready to try something else. I’ll spot while you do the harder one, and with some practice maybe I’ll get good enough to join you.”

The girl stared at her with preternaturally green eyes. Abruptly, the pupils distorted to inhuman spindle shape and narrowed to slits, like an angry cat. The little hairs at Darcy’s nape prickled in alarm, and somehow she knew she wasn’t just with the unhappy teen anymore.

“You’d climb with me again even though I let you fall?”

Darcy drew a breath to explain that it hadn’t been Yadira’s fault, or even an issue with the climbing equipment, just a momentary misstep that the device had rectified quickly enough that she doubted she was even bruised.

But some wounds weren’t visible.

From Vash’s comments and her reading of the drakling specific parts of the IDA handbooks (there’d been many draklings IDA patrons over the years, including one that accidentally ended up featuring in the interstellar hit, The Great Space Race) she knew beings with shapechanging abilities tended to be more physically demonstrative than many species, probably because they were in such close contact with their beast.

But it was impulse not academic manipulation that had her brush back a knotted lock of auburn hair from the girl’s forehead. “I would climb with you again. But if I reach too far, just let me know.”

After a heartbeat, Yadira’s pupils returned to their regular shape, and Darcy’s hackles subsided. Who had she been talking to: the girl or the beast? And why did she have the feeling that the latter—lurking though it was—might be easier to reach than the former?

Vash returned with a plate, artfully arranged with tidbits. “Yaya, you must eat something. These are you favorites.”

She looked at the plate, and for a moment, Darcy wondered if she’d just smack it out of her father’s hand. Then with a sigh that slumped her shoulders, she took it and shuffled toward a table up against a window overlooking a small sculpture garden.

Vash let out a shorter breath. “Even though I can fly, I’m still walking on eggshells with that one.”

“We have that saying too, and our teenage years are also tricky. Is there someplace in the universe where no one struggles and the transitions between life stages is effortless?”

He turned back to the buffet to assemble another plate. “If there is, they don’t need the Intergalactic Dating Agency.” He glanced at her. “Which foods would you like?”

“Oh. I’ll just leave the three of you. I need to…” Except she had no actual caretaker duties beyond making sure nothing bad happened.

And if something bad was going to happen, it would probably happen right here.

“Let me grab a cup of…” Abruptly, she noticed there was no coffee carafe. Probably wise of Kong to have removed any potential drakling irritants, but she’d only had her first three cups this morning, and after that blunder on the climbing wall, she could use another few cups to settle her nerves. But she settled for a glass of some sort of milky juice with colorful swirls, like boba except in ribbons.

“The sky is burning!”

Atsu’s cry of alarm sent them both hurrying to the table.

The boy was kneeling on his chair with his nose pressed to the window. “See? Ash is falling.”

So much for settling her nerves. Darcy took the chair next to the boy, across from Vash who sat next to Yadira. “It’s not ash. It’s snow.”

“Snow?” Atsu bounced a few more times, tipping the chair back precariously until she wedged her foot on the lower rung to anchor it to the floor. “I’ve read about snow.”

“You don’t have snow on Skyearth?”

“Not where I live. Where I used to live. I don’t know what it’s like now.” He twisted around to look at her. “You’ve never been to Skyearth?”

“I’ve never traveled off this planet,” she admitted.

“Me either. Until now.” Though his eyes didn’t change, he abruptly stilled, the irrepressible restlessness transforming into something alien.

No, she decided, not exactly alien, just too grownup for a child his age.

The boy pinned that unblinking gaze on Vash. “Because Addah thinks we need another mother.”

Darcy took that awkward break to sip at her juice. It was…good. A little strange, with more than a tinge of heat, which she probably should’ve expected, but good.

And maybe she wanted to hide behind her glass while she waited to see what Vash would say.

Vash matched the boy’s stance, still and steady, and for a moment Darcy could clearly see the resemblance like a mirror through time. “Your mother flies—still and always—in the skies our hearts. But I also wanted more for you then memories.” He tilted his head to include Yadira in the explanation, but the girl sat even more frozen than Atsu, as if she were clinging to a terrible cliff no one could see. “I wanted more hands to help guide you and build our lives again, maybe along a different path but still a good one. I wanted other eyes to help watch over you, and to share with me when I have troubles that shouldn’t bother you. I wanted another heart, beating like mighty thunder with ours, a music of love goes on like the winds that circle through the seasons of our lives, changing perhaps but always there.”

Darcy bit the inside of her lower lip. That had not been her experience with Christopher. There had been no elemental force to their connection, just convenience and habit, more monotony than music.

Vash put both his hands on the table. “But now, I think I was wrong. I didn’t just change everything by choosing to come here and putting us in stasis, making us vulnerable to the ship’s malfunction. I was wrong to make this choice for us without being sure it’s what we all wanted.” He turned his hands palm up on the table one stretched in the direction of either child. “I won’t ask for your forgiveness, not yet. But I will say again that I am sorry for what I’ve done to us. I would give you a whole universe of skies, but only if that’s what you both want.”

Atsu reached across the table to link his hand with his father’s. “I forgive you, Addah,” he said sweetly. “Ammi always said I was a handful and a wingful so no wonder you wanted someone to help you.” With his other hand, he snagged Darcy’s next to him. “You don’t have wings, and your hands aren’t even strong enough to hold onto the rocks. But if Addah thinks he can hold you—”

Darcy jerked straight. “What? No. That’s not—”

“No! I don’t want that,” Yadira exclaimed. “No one to hold. No one to fall.” With a choked howl too deep for her throat, she shoved back her chair and ran.

“Yadira.” Vash started to push to his feet.

But Atsu threw himself back in his chair with a wail. “Why is she always so mad? I wasn’t even trying to make her mad this time.”

Darcy rubbed the little boy’s back. “It was nothing you did,” she consoled. She glanced at Vash. “But maybe you can explain to Atsu that we are not…that I am not an Earther bride. Let me go talk to Yadira.”

Vash stared back at her, troubled. “That’s not your responsibility.”

She gave a crooked grin. “We want every guest to feel welcome and comfortable.” Before he could stick her with explaining to the little boy, she hurried after the teen.

Just as well most of the facility was still locked. She was able to query her datpad about anomalous life signs and tracked the girl to an empty corridor. Yadira was huddled in one of the locked doorways, knees drawn up until she was smaller than Atsu. Darcy found it hard to believe that those narrow shoulders would ever sprout wings.

She wondered if Yadira was wondering too.

With a muffled grunt, she collapsed to the cold tile next to the girl. “No one will—or can—ever replace your mother,” she said quietly. “Your father knows that too, even though it probably seems like he fumbled a bit there, trying to find his way across a route he’d never been on before.”

Yadira mumbled something into her forearms crossed over her knees as a pillow for her head.

Darcy tried to distinguish the words, but even her translator was struggling. “You tried what?”

The girl lifted her head to glare Darcy. “To replace her.” Her fingers tightened around her own arms, hard enough to blanche the skin. “I tried to do all the things she did. But Atsu never listens to me. And Addah is even worse. And nothing from the cookbook tastes the same.”

“Oh, Yadira,” Darcy whispered. “No one expected that from you.”

“And all I wanted to do was go with my friends to the cliffs where we could jump off into the lake and pretend that we were flying. But when I got to the top I just…couldn’t.”

Darcy’s heart clenched. “But you wanted to try the climbing wall anyway today? You are so brave.”

Yadira glared at her. “Only because there was a rope to make sure I didn’t fall.”

Darcy winced. “And then like a nincompoop, I fell.”

The teen looked at her. “Nincompoop?”

“An old-time Earther word for someone who makes silly mistakes.”

“It wasn’t your fault. You’re not a drakling.” She sighed. “At least you didn’t laugh at me for using the rope. All my friends would’ve said I was a nincompoop for that.” She looked down. “They will all be very old now. Probably they wouldn’t want to be my friends anymore even if I hadn’t used a rope.”

Darcy had read that draklings were a vigorous, long-lived race—and that something in their secretions conferred a certain amount of protection from telomere degradation in their intimate partners, which was being studied as a longevity supplement but so far only seemed to work if there was an emotional component as well—but somehow, the thought of the little girl’s friends as centenarian elders coming to the end of their long, vigorous lives was more heartbreaking than thinking they were already gone.

“Oh, Yadira,” she whispered again. “I know it’s not much, but would you like a hug? It’s okay to say—”

The girl threw herself into Darcy’s arms. Darcy closed her eyes as she held the shaking girl.

“I try and try to summon my beast,” Yadira whispered. “But it won’t come. Why won’t it come? What if Addah decides we’re too much trouble? What if he leaves us too?”

Darcy held back the urge to say oh, Yadira again. “Your father isn’t going to leave you. He knows all your favorite foods and he didn’t even scream when you bit him.”

“I bit him?” The girl jerked up straight. “I forgot that. I haven’t done that since I was littler than Atsu. I better say I’m sorry.”

“That would be the right thing to do,” Darcy said sincerely. “But from what I’ve seen, he would take any pain for you, and that’s why if he does make a mistake, you can tell him, and I think he’ll do his best to listen now.”

When Yadira’s grip on her lessened, Darcy stood up and held out her hand to the girl. “I think your brother ate everything in the buffet, but since the kitchen is open, what do you say we go look for something else?”

By the time she got the drakling girl filled with yakisoba noodles and lemon sorbet, Yadira was starting to wilt. “Why am I tired?” she mused around a jaw-cracking yawn.

Darcy thought about her earlier list to Vash: cryo and crash, shock and sadness. Adding adolescent angst on top of that along with her apparent belief that she’d been in charge of mothering her family, no wonder the girl needed a nap.

When they returned to the lobby, Atsu had already retreated to his fort, just one bare foot sticking out past the blanket draped over the chairs.

Vash was pacing by the windows, watching the doorway where they emerged. He halted mid-step, obviously yearning to race across the room but uncertain if such a demonstration would be welcomed.

Instead, Yadira ran to him, slamming into him hard enough that Darcy guessed he’d have the bruises her safety harness had protected her against.

But from the way he enclosed his arms around her so gently, his eyes closing in relief, in this moment he didn’t mind that life didn’t always come with guide ropes and cushions.

She’d always kept her safety harness on with Christopher, Darcy realized. She’d never trusted her hold on him, never took off her helmet, never even tried to ring the bell.

She’d never wanted to risk the fall.

What would it be like to know there was someone to catch you?

Someone with wings.