The Last Immortal : Book One of Seeds of a Fallen Empire

by Anne Spackman

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  Selerael reached her scrawny arms around Kesney’s neck as he submerged under the lake. He was teaching her to swim, only a few days after her first birthday, nearly eight long months after Eiron had left them. She had grown quite tall for her age, unnaturally quickly. At the age of one, he thought she looked more like a three year-old child. Though she was slight-boned, almost frail-looking, the arms latched around his neck held on with uncanny strength.

  Selerael knew he wasn’t her father. Alessia had often shown Selerael the likeness of her father in the holographic room, where she could simulate Eiron’s image. Alessia had told the child that her real father was coming home soon, but Selerael seemed to think of him as an imaginary creation. Nevertheless, Selerael had imprinted the image on her memory, Kesney knew. “Daddy” was one of her first words when she began to speak about a month and a half ago, when she reached forward to hug the leg of the artificial person that had substance only in the holographic room. But she never called him that. Alas for the cruelty of youth, Kesney often thought.

  Kesney tried to help take care of the child for the sake of his friend, and later because he genuinely cared for her. She was just as stubborn as her father, too, Kesney often thought, and she had him wrapped around her tiny finger. She called him Uncle Kesney, and made him give her his favorite still of him, her father, and Alessia, even though he’d already given her a birthday present.

  Today Klimyata had made a special dinner of Orian otassa and a frozen cream cake for dessert for Selerael when she and Alessia dropped by. There was nothing Selerael wouldn’t eat, it seemed, since she had cut her first teeth within in a month of being born. After a while, he thought her increased maturation rate had slowed to normal, at least he hoped so. Eiron had already missed the first part of his daughter’s childhood. But, he thought, if she suffered for his absence, at least she was the star around the scientists’ descendants. Everyone loved her, played with her and tickled her, teased her, and let her get away with almost anything—even the confirmed old bachelor Ctarin, who otherwise maintained that he had no time for children.

  “Time to go,” Alessia called from the bank where she and Klimyata were watching. Kesney let Selerael go to swim by herself to the bank, and she paddled easily to shore.

  Why? Why is she growing up so fast? Alessia didn’t say anything about it, but she hoped Selerael’s growth had gone back to normal. The others had assumed her growth rate to have been normal for Alessia’s people, but they were wrong. Alessia herself couldn’t understand the abnormality, except that it reminded her too much of a disease that had killed so many Seynorynaelians in ancient times. Yet the disease had only very rarely affected children, and it had been caused by the radiation of faraway Valeria.

  Maybe the serum in our blood has something to do with it, she thought again, and tried to convince herself that there was nothing to worry about now.

  Because recently the girl’s growth gland seemed to have resumed some natural control over her; the last bioscans showed no trace of disease, or that there had ever been a malignancy at work.

  To all appearances, Selerael was a normal, healthy child of three, but with a mind more than twice as developed as it should have been even for a child as old as she appeared.

  As though she were not a human child at all.