Sparrow & Tulip

"I'd like to close the outer portal," Mirjam said. "Would you ask your Warden to step inside."

"That's Nathan Durant," Kawehi said. "It would be best if he waited outside."

Emma looked at Theo again, raising her eyebrows. He shrugged, not having a clue what was going on. The women sat down on the little couches but Mirjam sat behind Amanda on a small chair. He and Emma sat down on the third loveseat.

"Again, I apologize for intruding on a private moment," Kawehi said. "There's no easy way to start, so I'll be direct; Theo is probably an emotive Talent. After it was discovered that Theo was carrying a control device, I asked a friend, Dr. Isram Aeolus from Showcase Whistle, to join us in the field to examine Theo's implants."

"I read that he was able to perform a microsurgical intervention in the field?" Amanda asked.

"I'm not sure what his protocol was exactly," Kawehi said carefully, trying not to even think about the illegal tech Aeolus had used with Theo.

There was a small smile appeared on Amanda's face. "I thought so. Please relax, there isn't a Yffliad who bothers with other's rules."

"You know them well," Kawehi said. "During his examination, Dr. Aeolus noticed that Theo carries both the bloodborne chemical markers as well as the neural structures of an Emotive Talent. He took pains to make it clear that the improvised control device did not interact with these areas."

Theo stared at her. "A what?"

"An Emotive Talent," Kawehi repeated. A Talent is someone with special skills and some of them run in families. Your aunt is a Talent for example."

Amanda nodded. "Your father and I were both rated as Talents, Theo. We were... intuitive mathematicians is probably the most accurate term."

"Why didn't you say anything before?" Theo asked Kawehi.

She smiled at him. "You didn't have enough on your mind already?"

He half-smiled at that and nodded. "Okay, that's fair."

"I'm an Emotive Talent, like you are," Kawehi said. "Which brings us to another, more sensitive, issue. I received orders to keep Theo's recovery as calm as possible. I've had some success in the past with this method. The first step is a simple trust and affection broadcast to the hostage. No one had any idea that Theo was a Talent as well."

"I apologize, Kawehi. I'm not at all familiar with your gift," Amanda said.

"Not many people are, we're fairly rare. There's always some backscatter between a caster and recipient, but as I mentioned, Theo's Talent seems to be quite powerful..."

"What is the end result?" Mirjam asked.

Kawehi was blushing fiercely but she kept her voice calm. "The end result is that Theo and I essentially fell in love at first sight."

The room was completely silent for a long moment.

"Damn, Sparrow," Emma said, leaning over to bump against her brother. "I mean, obviously we're hot, but during your own hostage rescue. I'm impressed."

Mirjam and Amanda both frowned, but Kawehi and Theo laughed with her.

"That's why I felt so weird when I met you?" Theo asked.

Kawehi nodded. "I'm very sorry. I was just trying to make you feel a little better about being kidnapped."

He laughed. "It definitely worked! But there's nothing to be sorry about, is there?"

Kawehi was still smiling but there was definite sadness in her eyes. "It's a question of consent Theo. It affected both of us but I already knew how to deal with it. You've never had a romantic relationship, correct?"

"A girlfriend? Not like you're thinking, no. But it doesn't matter."

"It matters a lot," Kawehi said. "For one thing, there is a serious age gap between us. More importantly, you didn't come to these feelings on your own. It was accidental but I took away your right to choose."

"Then what if I choose to keep my feelings for you?"

Kawehi chuckled. "That's not how it works. We'll start removing the chemical response your body made in the next couple of days."

Theo felt tight bands across his chest suddenly but nodded. He looked down, unsure how he was expected to deal with this. Emma tightened her arm around him. Kawehi got up and knelt down in front of him.

"Hey," she said gently. "It's not the end of the world."

"Will I remember you?"

"Of course you will. We're not changing your memory, just fixing some chemical signals to work properly. We'll still be friends, promise."

"Did the same thing happen to Nate?"

"No. There are a lot of different kinds of Talent and some of them are very rare. Wardens are specially trained guards for people like us."

"Mirjam and I met when she was assigned to be my Warden," Amanda said, smiling at her partner.

He looked between them. "I thought you were friends or married or something. Murra...sorry, Mirjam, has been around since I was a baby."

"Since before you were born," Mirjam corrected. "Claire, your mother, was Ollie's Ward when he came to Earth."

Theo saw surprise and anxiety on Amanda's face and Emma shifted slightly. Kawehi just looked amused, like always.

"You mentioned that Theo's gift is strong?" Amanda asked.

"When he and Emma were reunited, he cast to an entire parking lot full of people, including me and most of Marisol's IRT. It was an emotional event, but even taking that into account, the effect was powerful."

"That strong," Amanda murmured, giving Theo a strange look. "Let's come back to that. I think that Theo must have a lot of questions about what's going on. Unless you covered the situation already, Emma?"

She shook her head. "I'm not that much of a fuck-up."

Theo was surprised by the swear word and saw reactions of amusement and surprise. Emma sighed as she realized what she had said.

"I regret that my word was inappropriate. I apologize to everyone here."

Amanda chuckled. "Thank you for remembering security, Emma. We'll let that one go, but I'd appreciate a more circumspect approach in the future. Theo, this must all seem surreal so let's start at the beginning. My true name is Tulani..." Amanda's voice rolled off a long name in a language that sounded French to Theo.

"...and I am your father's twin sister. We were born far away, on a planet called Garradya Hoh to be precise. Our people were known as the Garragh."

Theo glanced at Emma who nodded slightly. Kawehi simply had the usual enigmatic smile.

"Your mother was from a small town called Wyalusing in the state of Pennsylvania," Amanda continued. "Your father and I were assigned Wardens when we first arrived here on Earth and that's how I met Mirjam and Oli'vehndra met your mother Claire. They were married and not long after that, a set of twins was born to the Tulani. You were named Tulani Chevarista-Elouan; Ynnyth Jaanthelme Thonya. But on your Terran birth certificate you were given the name Theophile Gautier Cosineau. Your sister, called Tulani Chevarista-Elouan Évariste Linyae Myrhaien was given the Terran name of Emmaline Placide Cosineau."

"What happened to them? My parents I mean?"

Amanda sighed. "It's still difficult to talk much about that awful day. I had just come back from home. Then we found out another world had come under attack. The people there are called the Ta'avi and they were close friends and allies of our people and we both had friends there. We were working on a transportation system that was able to evacuate some of the Ta'avi and bring them here."

"That's Ta'avi Town?" Theo asked.

"Yes, but they're just a fraction of the Ta'avi that your parents saved. I set up a beacon to help our equipment here hold on to the gate better. Your father took it from me, he was braver than I am, not to mention he was far better with hardware. But, of course, Claire wouldn't allow him to go alone and followed him through the gate. The place they landed was more populated than we'd guessed, there was a yearly festival going on there and they were able to evacuate almost two thousand people. But suddenly Ollie shut the gate from his end. We found out that something large had been about to hit. He would have realized that the energy released would travel through the gate just as easily as people. Their sacrifice saved the lives everyone in our lab and the rest of the building. Somehow, I know that they were really thinking of you and Emma. Your school rooms were right below our lab."

"Is that when I was kidnapped?"

"It was a few days later," Mirjam said. "The woman, her name was Nina Jenkins, kidnapped you and set up explosives in several labs, including the one that Ollie and Amanda used. The High Energy Physics labs were an obvious target, kidnapping a child on top of that, it doesn't make a lot of sense. I think there was more going on that we didn't understand."

"A rogue operative isn't necessarily logical," Amanda said. "And it was nearly both of you but Emma caught a flu and she had been in a separate area to avoid spreading it."

"I'm really confused," Theo said. "Why is any of this happening? People don't normally live underground, do they? And you have people with guns working for you. And how do you attack an entire planet?"

Amanda smiled. "This is where things become rather involved. Have you studied the evolution hypothesis before?"

"We weren't allowed to use that word," Theo said. "I kinda know what it means though. Like humans being born from monkeys, right?"

"It's far more than that, but if you're not familiar with it, describing this will be a little easier. What we know is that Earth, along with other eleven other planets, were taken over by a civilization we only know as 'the Ancients' thousands of years ago in order to create colonies. The Ancients didn't settle on the worlds they had claimed, they created proxy races to do that. Taken together, those races are known as the 'prefcoria,' whether they call themselves Human or Garragh, or Ta'avi. Earth was one of the very first, research shows the Ancients here about fifteen thousand years ago.

Theo blinked. "That's a long time."

Amanda nodded. "To us, certainly. But very advanced races like the Ancients and a few others are essentially immortal. Most of the others have found technologies that prolong their lives. So these other kinds of people don't view time the same way we do.

"Garradya and the Ta'avi world called Te'varvfathi were the last two colonies to be established, they're only a couple of thousand years old. That was the same time that the beings we call Ancients began to disappear. That caused the empire they had created begin dissolving."

"What happened to them?" Theo asked.

Amanda shrugged. "No one knows. In fact, we don't even know what they called themselves. There are Others who were alive when they began to disappear, two of our allies are immortals, but they don't discuss the Ancients very much. Even back at the height of their empire, the Ancients kept themselves wrapped in mystery. There are a small number of entities that dealt with them directly, but none of them left a record of the experience."

"What happened to the empire?"

"Many different races decided that they liked the stability the Ancients had provided and a new coalition was created. There's a very long and grandiose name, but we call it the Commonwealth. They were kind enough to include the prefcorian our 'new' colonies and their own more advanced civilizations. But as the Commonwealth organized itself Earth was lost, along with any worlds they had created previously. As far as people here knew, they were alone in the universe. with me so far?"

Theo nodded, fascinated.

"That is how things have worked for the last two-thousand years. Earth faded into legend for the prefcoria and none of the older races had anything to say about this colony, nor any of the others that had already faded into myth. Then, in 1936, an automated mapping probe picked up radio transmissions from the inner planet of an obscure solar system. Very quickly we realized that a missing colony had been found. The colonies put together a contact team and sent the mission to earth. After studying the planet from orbit, they picked four places for their ships to land; the southwestern desert of the United States, a site in northern Europe, another in Ethiopia, and one within the borders of the old Soviet Union. They kept the landings unnoticed and made their first contacts with the leaders in each of these places.

"The goal of the contact teams to was avoiding the possible social upheaval that the existence of extraterrestrials had caused on other contacted worlds. They had a carefully worked out, long-range plan to gradually get everyone used to the idea before any public revelation was made. Unfortunately, the first steps of a global war had already been taken. The visitors couldn't come up with a plan that would stop the war. So, they stayed out of sight, ready to begin the contact process once the fighting was over. They were shocked when two nuclear weapon was detonated at the end of the war. Following that, there were dozens of tests."

"They were afraid of the nukes?"

"I'm sure that was part of it, the resulting geo-political situation wasn't terribly stable. But the real fear came from the repeated detonations. The energy pulse sends extremely specific ripples across space-time. Something was watching and must have noticed those ripples. The Ancients also left us with old and bitter enemies of theirs, including something known as the Black Swarm. We don't know when or why the Ancients started battling the Swarm or why they were never defeated. What we do know is that ever since the Ancients disappeared, the Swarm have been systematically finding every planet aligned with the Commonwealth and destroying it."

"And they especially like wiping out our colony worlds," Emma said. "That's how they killed mom and dad."

"Are you sure they found out about Earth though?" Theo asked. "The universe seems pretty big."

"There were a number of accidents that looked suspicious to the planners of the contact project," Amanda said. "Then, in 1961, a troubled young man was being transferred between prisons. Something happened during that trip between prisons, the transport was late and the guards refused to ever talk about why. Looking back, we know that they were intercepted by a team of hostile offworld entities and it included at least one Yffliadi neuro specialist."

"Dr. Aeolus is a Yffliadi," Kawehi said. "It sounds to me the Good Brother was one as well."

Theo shuddered at the memory of that screechy voice. "What did they do to the guards?"

"They seemed fine," Amanda said. "Later on, both faced significant mental health issues caused by the invasions into their minds. Neither one was the target though. It was the prisoner these invaders were targeting. His name was Charles Manson."

"He's the one that killed all those people," Theo whispered.

"He was the ringleader of the people who did the killing. It happened at the worst possible time as well. The Contact Project was in the process of revealing our existence here on Earth. I don't understand social engineering well enough to explain the details, but the publicity of the murders and the resulting trial derailed their plans. Specialists that got close enough to examine Manson confirmed that his mind had been heavily tampered with. Once there was proof, the First Contact mission of the Commonwealth ended. Instead, the focus became the long-term defense of humanity. This place, it's called Echo, is one of the training facilities that produces the specialists needed to keep humans safe."

"That's all those wars all over the place? Y'all fighting?"

Amanda shook her head. "While some have been started by our enemies, neither side is works in the open. We're working to create places where humans will be safe and they're fighting just as hard to keep humanity divided and confused."

Emma noticed the look on Theo's face and put her arm around his shoulders. "It's the old 'I've got some good news, and some bad news' routine, kiddo."

Theo raised his eyebrows. "Kiddo? We're the same age, Emma."

"Actually, no. I'm eight minutes older than you are."

Kawehi started to grin as Theo rolled his eyes but his face went abruptly pale. The happiness he saw in Mirjam had evaporated and her body language had shifted to edge-of-the-seat wariness. When he glanced at her, Theo saw her eyes were locked on him. And Aunt Amanda looked uneasy and upset. He looked at Tulip and even though she tightened the arm around his shoulders, he could physically feel her weary sadness.

"So, am I the next Charles Manson?" he asked quietly.

"No," Kawehi said firmly. "He was already having some mental health issues brought on by the disintegration of his childhood."

Theo looked at the floor. "But they weren't too nice to me sometimes," he said. "I still have nightmares about it."

"Yes, he does," Emma said. "I've seen them, it's the first place we found each other. Theo, even if they were planning to do something like that to you, another Yffliadi took that crap out of your head."

He didn't respond, meeting Mirjam's pale gray eyes. "I don't want to go back there, but maybe you could find another place for me to live alone? I don't want to hurt anyone, especially y'all. I know I can't stay here like this."

"You're not going anywhere," Emma said angrily.

"But Theo is correct, Lieutenant," Mirjam said. Not only do I not have a defense against 'casts, I am compromised emotionally in this situation."

"That's exactly why I need to stay near Theo, Warden," Kawehi said. "I have been trained to deal with this kind of situation. But I think the danger is minimal at this point. I have not seen any signs that Theo was ever trained to use his Talent and has not been a trace of ill will toward anyone. In fact, he exposed himself during a fire-fight to rescue one of the team that had been wounded."

"Of course he did," Amanda said firmly. "Theo carries the blood of the Tulani mixed with that of a valiant Terran hero. Your home is with us, Theo. Nothing that happened to you is your fault and you've been gone too long. None of us are going to lose you again. Some of the smartest people on the planet are right here, including some Yffliadi neural specialists. We will find out what happened to you and if there is a problem, we will fix it."

"Yes, ma'am," Theo said.

"Lady Amanda, I've been considering this problem since I realized there had been a feedback loop between Theo and I. Marisol Guiterriez and the rest of her IRT have headed out to the Ranch for some badly needed down-time. They're going to lose a team member and will have to start reorganizing. Henry and Nora were both on my training team and know how to assess this type of threat.

"Dr. Isram Aeolus, the Yffliad neurotech, has also asked to work with Theo as much as his schedule allows. Three experts in neural modification, along with the presence of most of an Intrusion Response Team provides an excellent situation to fully evaluate Theo's talent."

"I think it's a good idea," Mirjam said. "It's close and they already have a working relationship with this facility."

"But what if they're tired of having me around?" Theo asked. "I was kind of a pain in the neck."

"But what if I already spoke with Marisol?" Kawehi teased him. "Everything has been taken care of, Lady Amanda. It just needs your approval."

"I don't know if anyone has been listening, but he's not going anywhere without me," Emma said flatly, tightening her arm around Theo's shoulders.

"Of course not," Amanda said. "I'm thinking Rachel would be good company as well, if her schedule is open. How long will you be available to work with Theo, Kawehi?"

"That's my priority until I hear differently. My commander has some concerns about the reliability of my pairing with Warden Durant. Until that's resolved, we've been removed from any further active service."