by Bertina Mars
Tiny arms wound their way around her leg, a head digging into her stomach. “Mommy!”
“Carina!” Mira grinned, running her fingers through the dark hair on her six-year old daughter’s head. The Zethrad genes were more dominant than the Earthling genes, as Arzak liked to brag, and their daughter exhibited just that.
Though small and still soft with baby fat, her cheekbones were pronounced, and her skin only a tad more opaque than her father’s. But she shared her mother’s brown eyes and her love of science, her curiosity in everything that went on around her.
Arzak looked over from where he laid on the grass and looked at Mira with that infamous smirk of his. She smiled back. There was a time when she wanted to kill him for that smirk. But now… It was home. It made her feel like flying. “You’re just in time, my vassa.”
“Thank you for waiting up,” she sighed, lifting Carina up on her hip as she joined him. She pressed a quick kiss to his lips.
“How are your horosomes?” His English was perfect by now, just as her Zethradan was, and though he tried to be as interested in her passion for science, Mira knew it wasn’t Arzak’s thing.
She laughed, though, appreciating his attempt. “My chromosomes… Are still not shrinking,” Mira said proudly. In fact, it had been that way for almost 6 months now.
And it was a burden lifted off of her shoulders that she would continue to age and grow old while Arzak never did, while everyone else around her remained practically immortal while she withered away. “Lazred left a message, too. Something about another tribe-”
Arzak kissed her again, longer this time. Not even Carina’s squirming and noises of playful disgust at her parents’ public display of affection could interrupt them. “Not now.” His voice was low, serious. It was a command.
“Tell me it’s something I shouldn’t be worried about.”
“It’s nothing you should be worried about. Just a tribe I have to deal with. But not tonight. No work tonight.”
“Daddy said you would tell me about the stars again,” Carissa interrupted.
The little girl found the perfect position on the lawn inside of the garden, her feet on her father’s legs and her head in her mother’s lap, fingers playing with and ripping at the grass as her big, brown eyes stared straight up into the night sky. She pointed a finger up, picking a start at random. “What’s that one?”
Mira looked up. There was no way to tell which one Carissa was pointing at, but she obliged her anyways. She pulled away from Arzak, who gave her a kiss on the ball of her shoulder. “That’s… Scorpius, in the middle of the Milky Way.”
Her lover and her daughter both stared up at the sky as Mira went on to explain Scorpius, how it was located in the middle of the Milky Way, which led into a discussion on the Milky Way and how far away that star was compared to them, if they could ever travel there. Even Viera came back from the house and sat with them on a nearby chair, staring up.
Mira Hawthorne was beginning to love the stars again.
