Page 64 of Cloverleaf Station

Kieron looked back at Pol. “I’m not sure yet, but I promise I’ll do everything I can to rescue her.”

“Can you bring her back here?” Pol asked.

“No,” Kieron said with a sigh. “I’m afraid not. You … you know Papa Kriev and Mama Laina are courting another couple, right?”

Pol scowled. It was an unfairly cute expression on his little, round face. “It’s all they talk about,” he grumbled. “Parsen and Xivi all the time, gross. They have three kids too.”

“You’d be a much bigger family with them around,” Kieron noted. “It would mean more playmates, right?”

“No, because they’re all old kids. Like, ten! And they go to schools that are far away from home, and now Papa Kriev and Mama Laina want to send me and Szusza and Lorna and Ophred to schools like that too!” He crossed his arms grumpily. “I won’t go. I’ll run away first.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Yes, I can!” Pol pointed at the forest. “I can run away in there! I’ve done it before—I got lost for a whole day before Mama found me! She said it was lucky she caught me before nightfall because otherwise I could have been eaten by a cavernous tree.”

“Um.” Kieron tried to parse that sentence. “A carnivorous tree?”

“Yes!”

Actually … Kieron scanned a quick breakdown of Trakta’s flora and fauna in his implant and shuddered. Xilinn had been right to be worried. There were actual carnivorous trees in this forest, highly prized for the many pharmaceutical compounds that could be derived from the digested remains of their victims, usually an indigenous monkey-like species. If Pol ran in there, and no one went after him …

“You really shouldn’t do that,” Kieron said.

“I will!” Pol insisted, actually stamping his foot on the ground. “I will if I can’t see Mama again soon! I will, I will, I—”

“Okay, okay.” Kieron held up his hands. “I need to figure out a way to help your mama, though. That means no running off yet, not even if your other parents are talking about her like she’s never coming back. I won’t leave the planet until I make sure she’s safe.”

“You promise?” Pol asked.

“I do.”

“Okay.” The child took a deep, wobbly breath. “I promise to not run away, then, even if Papa Kriev and Mama Laina are shitheads.”

Kieron blinked. “Where did you hear that word?”

“From Devin at school! He says that about his other parents all the time,” Pol said proudly.

Not for the first time, Kieron wondered how harmonious many of these group marriages really were. He’d done the right thing, refusing Zak’s offer to bring him into this one even though it had hurt at the time. He’d never have been able to keep so many people from going after each other’s throats.

“Pol!” It was Laina, in the backyard a few dozen meters away. “Where are you? It’s time for dinner!”

“Go with her,” Kieron whispered. When Pol began to shake his head, Kieron elaborated, “I can’t look for your mama if I’m here watching you. I’ll stay in touch, though, I promise.” How, he wasn’t yet sure, but he’d do it.

“You have to,” Pol whispered fiercely.

“I will.”

“Pol! I won’t ask you again!” Laina shouted. “One more delay and you spend your next day off cleaning the family shrine!”

“I’m coming!” Pol shouted, then turned and ran for his house. Kieron watched him go, then climbed back up to his skimmer.

“To the port,” he said when it prompted him about his destination, then sat back and rubbed his temple with one hand.

He was going to have a lot of explaining to do to Elenus when he got back to Lizzie.

Chapter twenty-seven

It wasn’t often that Kieron saw Elenus speechless. It was even less frequent for Kieron to be the cause of this silence—right now might, in fact, be the first time he’d ever managed it. Not even the time Kieron had been on the brink of death seemed as stunning to Elenus as the fact that he was … well …