Hearts and Stones - Robin D. Owens

Acknowledgments

Thanks for all my readers who hang on Facebook with me and can answer the odd question when I’m hurredly writing, and my critique buddies who see portions of almost everything…

Passage Through Stone: Thanks to my dear friend and long-term critique buddy Alice Kober for doing a full edit under a quick deadline.

Homing Stone: Many thanks to the readers who helped out with Holm’s death duel details as related in Heart Duel: Kelly Self, Kendal Ogles, Melanie Luther, Shawna Lanne and for my excellent and new beta reader and fellow writer: Karina Steffens.

Fractured Stone: I’m grateful for everyone who read the Staying At Home story and enjoyed it daily and helped me keep on working. I must also mention Rebecca Ho for her suggestion in the scene with the young cats and rules in the fighting salon, and Shara Forrister who reminded me where the rules were originally laid out. (Heart Search).

Passage Through Stone

Colorado Area, UStates Middle Region, Earth, WorldStates Year 236, Spring

A massive shadow in the sky angled over Levona, and noise enveloped her in a thunderstorm. She cowered in a mud-slush coated gully, frozen like choice prey of a predator.

Booms sounded, and terror flashed through her. Then she glanced up and saw the white, angle-winged aircraft. Spaceship. Stunning sight, no starships around for more than a decade.

The ship passed. Not a military plane, a government threat. No, a vehicle to escape the UStates and the Earth and sail to another planet.

Months ago, word had spread through the underground mutant network that folks in the psi ghettos had pooled their money and bought three starships. They planned to escape Earth and establish a colony on another planet. She hadn’t believed it.

Now she’d seen a starship just overhead and her terror transmuted into hope.

Hope. Her whole body shuddered with the vigor of her breath.

Since the Earth’s space colonization era had ended about fifteen years back, Levona thought this sighting indicated the rumors were true.

She popped above the lip of the gulch and watched as the huge ship headed for the city of CentralConglom. She’d scrambled her way out of her hometown, home slum, a little over two years ago.

“I have to go back,” she murmured as dread clogged her throat, but escape beckoned.

I go where you go, the young cat, Pizi, said, in actual telepathic words pinging through Levona’s mind. These were the first words the small cat had sent mentally, rather than transmitting simple images trailing feelings, though Levona had felt a surge of hope from Pizi, too. She sent back love and felt it return.

The small female squirmed in the side-pocket of Levona’s pack. She reached around and opened the flap and Pizi stuck her head out, rotated her ears, then angled her nose up to the sky. As if she’d be able to smell the spaceship.

Maybe Pizi could. Levona had sensed the power in the small animal when she’d found the young cat two months ago. But neither of them knew the cat’s talents, and Pizi’s eyes were crusted over, a continuing malady.

“Yeah, time to return to the city,” Levona said aloud. Carefully, she adjusted the pack, her mind busy with the maps unfurling in her brain, one of her psychic talents. Once she saw a map, she always recalled it. She made maps in her head when she traveled. Right now, she knew all the folds of Coal Creek Canyon, Colorado, the twists of the river down to the plains and the city of CentralConglom.

I am tired of being carried! Pizi fussed, sending a barrage of emotions and images along with her demand.

“Okay,” Levona grumbled, drew out the cat and attached a rigged-up harness so she could walk on her own. Levona let her mind interface with the small dust-colored tabby, so Pizi could “see” where they were going. The cat would slow Levona down, but there’d be plenty to think about on her — their — way back to the city. Like how to get accepted for the journey on a starship to a new planet.

Pizi lasted a full half-kilometer on her own before she wanted back in “her” pocket in the pack. That surprised Levona, and reassured her a bit that … if anything happened to her, the little cat could survive on her own. Or at least find another mutant human companion to bond with.

The sun dipped below the western mountains as she and Pizi reached the bottom of the canyon. No more aircraft raced through the sky, but the road busied with traffic