by Chogan Swan
Kest stared at Daniel.
How?
“I think she may be a good spirit, but you should both agree on the path you will walk together.”
“We do so far,” Kest said.
Daniel followed Yasmin to the door. Kest walked with him.
At the door, Ayleana shook Daniel’s hand. “Thank you,” she said in Mescalero, looking him in the eye.
“I ask you to watch after my brother,” said Daniel, switching back to English..
“I promise,” said Ayleana.
Daniel nodded and followed Yasmin. On the sidewalk, Kest hugged his mom and assured her once again that everything would be fine and that he loved her. In moments, she was in a cab with Daniel headed to the airport and Germany.
“He’s very perceptive,” said Kest.
“I’ve noticed a percentage of Native Americans recognize me for what I am.”
“Different paradigms,” Kest said.
“Hmmm. Let’s go. We have another meeting.”
“Why don’t you have your people call my people?” Kest said. “I’m a rock star you know.”
“I just had my people call your people,” she answered, rolling her eyes. “Do you want me to yell it in your ear this time?”
“Nah, my people say—let’s go.” Kest climbed into the back of the SUV.
“Where’s my breakfast?” asked Daniels in a pitiful voice.
“No eatin’ in the car,” Ayleana mimicked Daniels’ voice so well that Kest almost glanced up to see if they’d somehow traded places. “Besides that, you know I can smell the sausage, egg and cheese biscuit you had the waitress bring out here.”
Daniels laughed. “Well, I held it out the window.”
“You might have tried,” Alyeana said. “But you got melted cheese on the door latch.”
“Dammit, I knew I shouldn’t have let anyone eat in the car. This reinforces my conviction.”
Ayleana snorted. “Are we going or what?”
“I have to clean the door first.”
“Ahhh!”
Kest shook his head. It was like she was the big sister and Daniels the little brother.
Ayleana turned to Kest. “Jonah wants us to meet them about an hour west of here. Do you need to get anything before we go?”
“No, I’m good,” Kest said.
“Then what are we waiting for?” Daniels said. Their tires squealed on the pavement as they left the curb.
Chapter 11 — Into the Wilderness
The miles rolled past the SUV’s tinted windows, displaying blue sky, cacti, mesquite, and the occasional coyote, armadillo or roadrunner. Kest and Ayleana moved from talking about music to playing music, switching back and forth on a small-bodied acoustic guitar Ayleana kept in the car. After that, they traded stories of things they remembered from childhood. Then a comfortable silence settled on them, and Kest's head started nodding.
Ayleana pulled him close and pushed his head onto her shoulder. His scent indicated stress. No doubt, he was still struggling with coming to terms with yesterday’s arrest trauma. She stroked the short-cropped hair of his head, a technique she’d picked up from babysitting, and was rewarded with a sigh as he drifted into sleep.
The filaments of her right hand’s fingertips dipped through the skin of his neck and into the low-pressure flow of his jugular vein. Not that she needed another sample of his DNA since she’d gotten enough material for that while patching him up last night. But, she wanted to know his body better. For her, a partner in symbiosis wasn't necessary yet. Her nourishment requirements at this stage of her body’s development were not demanding, and Kest might not even want to join with her that way.
The smell of him, sunshine, the musky smoke of testosterone and the remnants of her favorite soap from his shower last night all rolled through her awareness. His eyelids fluttered as he entered REM sleep.
~~~{}~~~
Kest followed the girl with the crystal orb again. This time her hair was dark black with almost a blue sheen to it. Her hooded face turned and she looked at him with dark eyes then motioned him to keep following. They walked through a maze of office cubicles then through a door to a prison. Her swaying figure led him through bars and walls, continuing to a courthouse where judges pronounced sentences and families wept as they separated.
The orb in her hand cast a bubble of light around them. They moved through halls of government, where laws flowed out in bundles of documents carried by an army of clerks. They left the building, walking onto a plantation. Cane fields rustled in the wind and a crew of men and women—all dark-skinned—labored under the gaze of overseers. The sun dropped below the canopy of trees surrounding the plantation and fires sprang up by the huts on the edge of the fields. She held up the orb, showing Kest the scenes they had traversed spinning—spinning as though the people were an ocean and a waterspout pulled them into the sky. The scene in the crystal faded until all Kest could see was the girl’s face behind its dying light and her eyes, demanding something from him.
~~~{}~~~
When the SUV left the main road, bumping onto the hardpan trail, Kest jerked awake and sat up, untangling himself from Ayleana.
“Nice nap?” she said.
“I needed the sleep; the dreams were creepy. Thanks for the pillow, though,” he said, rubbing his eyes.
The SUV slipped into four-wheel drive and wound up the side of a foothill to one of the mountains in the Baboquiveri range. Kest wasn’t positive which mountain, but he could see Baboquiveri Peak to the southwest like a giant thumb pointing to the sky.
The diesel engine growled along in low gear as they crawled up the path until they pulled under the shade of a large camo net and stopped.
Daniels opened his door, stepped out and stretched his arms over his head. Kest followed Ayleana out and looked at the surrounding desert. Except for the ticking of the engine cooling, the only sound was the wind in the mesquite.
Then he heard another noise.
The sound of children’s voices chanting, “Aylie, Aylie, Aylie.”
“This is where you keep your fan-club?” said Kest.
Ayleana grinned, shouldered the guitar case and stepped around a bush. “Come on,” she said.
Kest followed her up the hill on an artfully constructed path. As she walked ahead of him, she freed her tail from the harem pants and stretched it.
Keeping that concealed all the time must be annoying.
Still a bit clumsy with sleep, Kest slipped on a patch of loose pebbles, but before he overbalanced, Ayleana snagged his wrist with her tail and pulled him upright.
“Thanks,” he said.
“No problem. You were sleeping hard.”
“Maybe I still am, stumbling around like that.”
“Pity you’re missing a tail. They’re quite helpful for keeping your balance.”
“Color me jealous.”
The chanting grew louder as they climbed. When Ayleana’s head rose above the lip of the rise, the chanting changed to cheers. Still, Kest was unprepared for what he saw when his head rose above the scrub.
Over a dozen kids and a dog, a frisky Belgian Malinois, cavorted in front of a long, adobe ranch house while surrounding Ayleana. Though he was expecting them to be young, the toddlers dancing and clamoring for Ayleana’s attention were smaller than their voices had led him to expect. Their word pronunciation was what he might expect from five-year-olds, but of the entire crowd of fifteen children, none was even close to three yet. They were active and coordinated, and none wore diapers. But, the proportions of their little bodies indicated most couldn’t be much past two years-old. Yet they were skipping, cartwheeling and jabbering to each other and Ayleana in complex sentences—at least those who weren’t trying to capture the tip of her tail. They were all—every one—girls.
Ayleana held up her hand. “Bandit, sit!” she said. In seconds, they were all quiet and mostly still—even Bandit.
“This is my friend Kest,” she said. “Say hello and intr
oduce yourselves. Line up in alphabetical order, please.”
The girls formed a queue. The first marched up to Kest and curtseyed. “My name is Ambrosia,” she informed him.
“It is a pleasure to meet you, Ambrosia. I’m Kestrel Tashquinth-Avsar. You can call me Kest. What is your last name?”
Ambrosia giggled, putting her hand over her mouth. “All of our last names are the same, Kest... Rodriguez al Bahari de Casablanca y Cordoba.” The name, spoken with a perfect Castilian accent, took Kest a moment to sort out. A Spanish woman had married a gentleman from Casablanca. The rest of the girls curtseyed with equal grace and gave him their names. Kest locked the names to the faces and stored them together on a shelf of his memory house.
When they had all filed past, he looked up to see a tall woman striding out of the house. She wore a desert-sand camo sports tank top and yoga shorts. Her coffee skin and height as well as her tawny brown hair triggered his memory. She’d been on the stage with Galt at the theater... had dragged him away after he’d been knocked down by a bullet. She walked over to Kest and smiled. Kest felt himself start to flush. Without doubt, she was the hottest-looking woman he ever remembered meeting, her eyes were friendly and her smile was dazzling.
Kest smiled back and beat his libido back into line the best he could.
“Thank you for your courtesy to my daughters,” she said. “My name is Amber Rodriguez al Bahari de Cordoba y Casablanca.” She held out her hand.
Since her hand was turned palm down, Kest took it and bent to brush her knuckles with his lips then straightened. “Kestrel Tashquinth-Avsar, at your service.” What else could one say when a princess greeted you? “Your daughters are all very well-spoken and a credit to you.” Kest couldn’t help glancing at the skin-tight waistline of her tank top, noting the ridges of a six pack that denied ever sharing a waistline with an infant.
Fifteen girls. All through surrogates?
They all held aspects of their mother though. Her face or her skin... something.
Ayleana walked past Amber and took his elbow.“Hi Amber,” she said.
“Hi Aylie.”
“Gotta get to our meeting now. Talk later?”
“Sure.” Amber turned to Kest. “A pleasure, Mister Tashquinth-Avsar, and thank you also for your prompt assistance Friday evening.”
“You’re welcome, of course, and the pleasure is mine,” he said as Ayleana led him away across the yard through the crowd of tiny girls and into the house.
“Wow!” he said as they stepped in the door.
“A bit?” she said looking at him out of the side of her eyes and grinning.
“Fifteen of them.”
“Oh, I thought you were just talking about the mom.” She snorted then giggled.
Kest sighed.
No sense denying it.
“Yes, she deserves a ‘wow’ too.”
Ayleana patted his arm. “Testosterone production functioning within parameters,” she assured him. “By the way, you should be prepared for a proposition from her.”
Kest stiffened. “Ah?”
“She’ll want a sperm sample from you, I expect.”
Kest coughed, almost choking. “She wants more babies?”
“She’ll be looking to the future I’d imagine,” Ayleana said. “This time she's baby daddy shopping for her girls. We can keep samples viable for decades.”
“They all seemed... precocious... advanced for their age.”
“I’d say about the same as you were then,” Ayleana said, “except you had that testosterone poisoning thing working against you.”
They were still standing in the entryway. A large living room stretched to his left and a hall leading to the right started its journey straight ahead. Ayleana slid out of her sandals. Kest followed her example, feeling the tiny grains of desert sand under his feet at the entryway, no doubt tracked in by a score of tiny... girls.... They were too agile to be called toddlers.
He followed Ayleana to the left where the living room opened onto a long dining or entertaining room. An antique piano stood against the wall. Kest took an involuntary step forward to examine it, but Ayleana touched his arm. He stopped, noting the gilt letters embossed on the mahogany music shelf.
Serenity
This was somebody’s baby.
“Go ahead, Kestrel,” said a voice off to his right.
Kest turned to see a young guy in his late twenties—maybe early thirties—pouring iced tea into a glass.
“May I offer you a drink?”
“Thank you, whatever you’re having looks great,” Kest said. “Are you?..”
“Jonah,” said the man coming forward with his hand extended. “I’m sorry. I’ve been following your path at SST for three years, and I feel like I know you.”
“It’s an honor to meet you, Mister Galt.”
“Please, just Jonah is fine. I’m sure you know Galt isn’t my real name.”
Kest nodded. “You can call me Kest,” he said.
“Kest then. We caught the debut of your new album last night when Alex sent me us a copy. You’re welcome to play Serenity any time, but we should probably go find Tiana and all of us enjoy a nice chat.”
“She’s coming up the hill from the garden,” said Ayleana. “I’m sure she heard us drive up and couldn’t have missed the triple quintuplets in chorus.”
“They were excited to see you, weren’t they?” Jonah smiled. “As any sentient of good will and good sense would be,” he added.
Jonah turned to Kest. “Have you met Amber?”
Kest nodded.
“Good, good. Thank you for your help on Friday evening. That could have gone much worse.”
“I’m very glad it didn’t.”
At that moment, the screen door opened at the back of the dining room and a female nii, taller and more muscular than Ayleana, came in. She wore a harness with twin kukri knives strapped between hip and thigh on both sides, and a pistol on her hip. Other than that, she wore nothing. The dark skin on her face and hairless head framed a nose almost identical to Ayleana’s, and white teeth smiled at him. Though only covered by leather straps, she seemed well clothed with her self-assurance alone. The skin of her legs was not a uniform color like her upper body. From the waist down, it was a swirl of dark cherry and chocolate all the way to her feet.
Kest relaxed. It was strange how her comfort with her lack of clothing transmitted itself to him.
“Tiana,” Ayleana said. “This is Kestrel Tashquinth-Avsar.”
Tiana stepped forward, hand extended. “Kestrel, well met.”
“Kest, my branch sister, Tiana.”
“Thank you for your hospitality, Tiana.”
“By that he means he’s intending to clean out your refrigerator,” Ayleana said.
“Nothing in there I eat anyway,” said Tiana.
Kest smiled.
“Shall we go out on the deck?” Jonah suggested.
“Definitely,” said Ayleana, taking Kest’s elbow and steering him to the screen door.
Kest glanced at her, touching her hand like a question. She grinned back at him, letting him know she was fine. They sat at the glass-top table. The view of the sere landscape stretched for miles from the deck.
Jonah plunked a glass down on the table. “It’s desert tea,” he said.
Kest sipped. “Thanks,” he said. It tasted just how Grandmother Tashquinth made it.
When they were all seated, Tiana looked at Jonah. “Do you mind if I start?”
Jonah shook his head, waving for her to continue.
Tiana looked at Ayleana then Kest. “I’m glad you both managed to get out of that situation after the concert last night as well as you did, Aylie. I’m sure it comes as no surprise to you that I know about it, but you should know that I had to piece it together from very little information. I am impressed how well you hid your tracks, and though you might be expecting me to tell you that you went too far, I won't. You showed restraint, and I doubt the local government
will ever figure out what happened or why.”
Ayleana tipped her head down, acknowledging her branch sister’s complement.
Tiana turned to Kest. “Kest, you should know that Ayleana proposed that we recruit you, and Jonah and I agree with her. We’d like to take you on a trip to show you what we have working to see if you might be interested in being part of it.” She turned to Jonah and sat back.
Jonah leaned forward. “We’ve been impressed with your study record and the contributions you’ve made to SST. We designed SST to encourage the public, government and organizations to work together to overcome differences and find win-win solutions. But, government, leadership and the parties have shown no sign of departure from the destructive partisan rhetoric that's caused so much turmoil and violence, especially since the last election.”
Kest nodded.
“Even though we hoped SST would be enough, that was never the only element of our strategy, and that’s what we want to share with you. Will you come? It will take a couple of days. We’d leave tonight and be back Wednesday. I know that isn’t any lead time for you, but things are moving fast and we are escalating our schedules.”
“I’d love to see what you have working, and I certainly can’t go back to school now,” Kest said.
Ayleana waved a hand. “Okay, but I want Kest to rest before we leave tonight. Kest, can I ask you to let Tiana check out your physical condition after lunch?”
Kest nodded. His ribs were still causing him discomfort when he moved.
“Good, then I’ll want you to take a nap. We both should. These next two days may be demanding if the last forty-eight hours are any indicator.”
Chapter 12 — Get Ready
The physical examination Ayleana asked Tiana to do after lunch ended up turning into an extended treatment for Kest and training for Ayleana. His ribs had deep bone bruises in three places, and Tiana and Ayleana both spent two hours with the filaments from their fingers diving into his torso. Tiana demonstrated techniques that all took place somewhere inside him while Kest rested on a massage table.
