“Missing Persons wasn’t much help,” Kaylin replied.
Kattea said, “No one is looking for me.” She tried to smile. It took just enough effort that she lost control of her eyes—a control that had been shaky to begin with. Tears began to stream down her face as she forced her hands to her sides, where they balled in helpless fists.
Krevel frowned. “Are you all right?” he asked the girl. He lifted his gaze to Kaylin, which was a silent repeat of the question he’d asked. Kaylin had nothing to give him. She wanted to explain—and given the recent events, with large chunks of the city disappearing—she might have made the explanation stick. But...then what? According to Caitlin, they already had a child—a newborn daughter named Kattea.
Kattea nodded. She didn’t speak for a long moment. “Can you tell me what you saw?”
“What I saw?”
“When the city disappeared?”
Kaylin threw him an “it’s your job” look.
But Krevel, frowning, nodded. “You might want to grab a chair,” he added. Most of them were filled at the moment.
Kaylin left to find a chair and was surprised when Kattea accompanied her. “He liked to tell that story, sometimes,” she whispered. “I’ve heard it all my life.”
Not exactly the stuff of bedtime stories, in Kaylin’s opinion.
“He loved being an Imperial Sword. It was what he did. He said it was important to know what you stood for. He would tell me stories about being a Sword. I thought maybe I could be one, when I grew up.” She paused in front of an empty chair, one of four against the wall nearest the Swords’ duty roster.
“But...there was no Emperor. There were no Swords left.” She smiled brightly, or tried. “I wanted— I know I can’t hug him. I know he can’t hug me. I know I can’t apologize or tell him that I always loved him. Or tell him that I understood why he left.
“And I want to do all those things. But he’s not my father. He will be. But he’s someone else’s father now. We’re strangers.” She exhaled and then turned, leaving the chair to blindly throw her arms around Kaylin. “I love him. But he doesn’t even know me.”
Kaylin held her.
“And it has to be enough to know that he’s still alive. When the Halls of Law were lost—he said it broke something in him.”
“He said that to you?”
Kattea snorted. “Not to me. He was never that honest with me. He treated me like I was a kid.”
Kaylin did not point out that she was, technically, a child. She also didn’t point that eavesdropping was rude, because rude or no, it was pretty much human nature. “Help me with the chair,” Kattea said, voice momentarily muffled. “I can’t— He won’t—”
Hugging her tightly, Kaylin said, “Do you want to leave?”
Kattea shook her head. “He loved his job.”
“Doesn’t look like he loves it much right now.”
That got a small laugh out of Kattea, which was probably as much as she could manage. Kaylin disentangled herself from the girl and helped move the heavy chair to where the corporal was waiting. Kattea brought it in close and crawled into it.
As it happened, Jared interrupted them before Krevel could start.
“Bad news for the private,” he said, waving Krevel back to his report writing.
“Oh?”
“Moran wants to see you.”
“I’m going to kill Clint.” She turned to Kattea and her father and said, “Can you wait here for a few minutes? Moran’s annoyed language isn’t suitable for children.”
“Or anyone, really,” Krevel agreed.
As she walked away, Kaylin could hear Corporal Krevel answering a young girl’s questions with growing excitement and pride in what he did. It wasn’t a bedtime story. It wasn’t a hug. It wasn’t a declaration of forgiveness, and it wasn’t—and couldn’t be—a homecoming.
But it was all she could get, and Kattea wanted it desperately. A story about the end of the world that she’d heard so often growing up, it was probably memorized. A story about the end of the world that wasn’t the end of any world but her own.
*
Moran’s eyes were ash-gray, which was not the color Kaylin had been dreading when she entered the infirmary. She motioned toward the chair the Hawks privately dubbed the Torture Mill, and Kaylin meekly sat in it.
“You didn’t come here alone.”
Kaylin shook her head. The small dragon squawked. Moran frowned in the general direction of the noise.
“Kattea is with her father?”
Kaylin was surprised. In retrospect, she shouldn’t have been. Moran was living with them, after all. Of course she knew.
“Helen was worried,” the sergeant explained. She examined Kaylin’s cheek. “Marcus is worried.”
“I’ve avoided the office.”
“And how did I know you were here?” She took the much more comfortable chair opposite Kaylin’s. “What are you going to do with Kattea?”