Stolen - Nhys Glover Page 0,18

strangled gasp. “No! You’re not going anywhere. I’ve lost one of my sons, I’m not losing anymore!”

But Meida wouldn’t back down. He let his exploding starburst gaze rest on Mother. “We have to find her. I think… I think Rian acted as he did because he was defending our podmate.”

Dead silence fell in the room before our extended familial pod began to laugh uncertainly. They often did this when Meida said something stupid. Maybe they saw this as one of his inappropriate jokes.

But I knew he wasn’t joking. I knew he must have felt the same odd sensation I’d experienced not long before the news came of Rian’s death.

Meida had put a name to it. And as crazy as the idea was, I resonated to the truth of it.

Rian had died protecting our podmate.

“I felt it,” Nial spoke up, defending Meida’s outrageous suggestion.

Not to be left out, I added my support. “So did I. Not long before Rian died. A knowing. It’s hard to explain. I didn’t think twice about it because… because of everything that was happening then and since… but I felt… something.”

My brothers nodded determinedly.

“That’s ridiculous. You’re children! You…You’re barely seven!” Mother cried, throwing up her arms in exasperation.

“We’d be warriors if not for the storm. We’d be in our late teens or early twenties, if we were human. Adults.”

“This is absurd. You’re grieving your brother’s death. Trying to give it meaning. It’s understandable. But when you have a chance to think this through…” Maica said, taking the role of mediator for once.

Meida glared at his father. “It is the meaning of Rian’s death! Rian didn’t do crazy. That’s my job. If he did this totally uncharacteristic thing, he did it because his biological urges circumvented his rational thinking. The podmate bond forced him to give up his life defending his podmate. And unless we save Jenna before they kill her, we’ll be dying along with her, no matter how safely away from the action we are.”

I was so used to Meida talking nonsense that, for a long moment, his words didn’t sink in. Then the reality of it hit me hard.

If Jenna, this unknown human woman my brother met and recognized as our podmate, were to die, so would we. That was what happened to pods who lost their podmate.

All hell broke out.

RIAN

I watched as my new hands moved in well-choreographed gestures to bring up the on-board navigation system. The visual data, when it appeared, included the wormholes that covered the galaxy like holes in Swiss cheese.

I used that very Gaian description in my head because it reminded me of Mother. Right now, I needed everything familiar I could find to keep me from losing my mind. Mother’s many sayings usually left her podmates and young scratching their scalps in bemusement. When she’d explain a meaning it often left us even more in the dark than when we started.

Like the time she described the spatial anomalies that allowed us to travel light years in the blink of an eye as ‘wormholes’, and then compared wormholes (what was a worm?) to the holes in Swiss cheese.

I asked why cheese has holes in it, and why call it after a country with high mountains? Was the cheese like the clouds, and did the mountain tops poke holes through those clouds the way something else poked holes in cheese?

“No, my darling,” she’d said with a laugh. “The Swiss invented a way of making cheese. The method created distinctive holes, I assume. Not that I ever liked Swiss cheese. Too strong a taste for me.”

And though I was no wiser, after this explanation, whenever I thought about the many spatial anomalies that permeated the habitable band of the galaxy, I thought of Swiss cheese.

Long white fingers, so different from my short stubby ones, brought specific data to the centre of the holographic screen.

“There is a path linking this location directly to the coordinates you gave me,” my new body co-pilot said aloud, although I could understand his thoughts as easily as I could his spoken words.

That was what came of sharing the same brain. Two minds somehow drew on the same bio-hardware to make conclusions, the thoughts from the process communicated into both minds at once.

It could get pretty frenetic inside my mind if Charsus was thinking a lot of thoughts at the same time as I was processing. It became a bit of a tug-of-war at times, getting the use of the hardware. A brain, even one as sophisticated