Deluge

The girls had exhausted themselves crying, and gradually the noise simmered to a generalized whine of anxiety, discomfort, and boredom.

Nobody was mistreating them, but neither were they exerting any effort to make things easier for the young ones.

Needing some distraction herself, Murel decided to use the kind of tactics employed by Petaybean child minders and teachers of restless classes. “If my snow leopard friend was here,” she said, “she would eat all of those bad people and set us free.”

Huy’s lips curled into a small smile, Chesney laughed, and the little girls who had heard her looked mildly interested.

“Also,” Murel added, “she’d bring us all ice cream.”

“What’s that?” asked the smallest girl, the one the others called Daf.

“It’s sweet and smooth and cold and really yummy,” Murel told her. “It comes in lots of flavors. Where I live, we make it out of snow mixed with milk from our horses.”

By the time she explained what a horse was, what snow was, what a snow leopard was, and how that leopard would manage to bring ice cream and kill bad people as well, Huy and Chesney caught on and launched into telling the tallest tales they could imagine or remember about their own worlds. Huy might have been raised on a space station, but her father had told her stories his own parents and grandparents passed down to him from the ancient cultures and peoples who settled their world.

“We had a dragon in my father’s family, and if my ancestor knew what was happening to my father and me, he would come and carry us all away,” Huy said. “If we pass by close enough to my father’s world, I’ll call him.”

“You can’t yell that loud!” a six-year-old cynic told her.

“Don’t have to. He can read my thoughts. He would be very displeased with these people, and before he took us away, he would scorch them with his fiery breath.”

The people who brought their food didn’t scold or threaten them, but neither could they be persuaded to bring extra toilet paper or wash water. They didn’t molest the girls in any way, which was a relief. On the contrary, they seemed totally indifferent to them, as if children were some inferior species beneath their notice.

“We’re just hostages,” Huy said. “They’ll use us to make our parents do what they want them to. I hope they haven’t hurt my dad.”

“My brother says they’re taking us all to a prison colony. Maybe you’ll get to see your dad there.”

“Will they try to make our parents say that Madame is a criminal, Murel? What did she do to make them mad at her?”

That was a story Murel knew all too well, so she told them about the trip she, Ronan, and Ke-ola had taken to Halau, how meteor showers destroyed the homes of Ke-ola’s people, forcing them all underground, and how the soldiers would have just left them there with nothing if Marmion hadn’t launched a rescue mission.

“If it hadn’t been for Madame’s ship picking up the survivors, then going back to find other people still trapped, they’d have all died. The officer in charge must have got his ears laid back by his superiors.

Somehow he convinced the company superiors that she had kidnapped the people of Halau and their sharks and sea turtles, and that’s what she’s charged with.”

“But that’s so lame!” Chesney said.

“Of course it is. And the people in charge will realize that when Marmie’s friends tell them what happened to her. The people who want to ruin her don’t want anybody to know she’s in trouble.” Murel explained about the magnetic field and volcanic activity on Petaybee making interplanetary communication impossible most of the time. She left out all the parts about she and Ronan being seals, and about Kushtaka’s people and their history. Who knew what might be done to the kids to make them or their parents talk? She took a deep breath and gulped as a few possibilities crossed her mind, then put those thoughts firmly away. Need to know, Mum would say. She’d tell them when and if they had a need to know.

Ronan agreed that was the best way to handle it, though in the stories the boys told, they tended to massacre the entire ship’s crew with their bare hands or, better yet, blow up the ship, once all the good people were safely ashore. Then they would storm the prison, and after battles that involved fencing with some sort of laser-beamed or edged weapons, overcome the guards, free the prisoners-well, the good ones, at least-and of course, for a happy ending, blow up the prison. When he shared some of these tales of valor with her, Murel said she thought there was an excess of blowing things up.

We males like explosions, he told her. Especially when we’re mad and helpless to do anything about it.

Not as helpless as some people think, she replied staunchly. While she was glad Ro and the boys were keeping their spirits up, it hurt a bit to hear him referring to himself as one of “we males.” Their twin-ship had always been the main “we” in each of their lives-the selkie nature they shared with their father was the second-most important group to them. Family had come third. Now Ro seemed to think being male, a condition that excluded her, was also important. She had certainly not said “we girls” or “we females.”