Séarlas and Franka were not Mateo and Leona’s children, but Mateo and Leona
were their once-parents, and no one knew how to feel about that. A version
of the two of them had twins in another timeline, but neither of them had
memories of that. This Leona lost her babies in a terrible tragedy on an
interplanetary ship that was breaking apart. They didn’t talk about it
anymore, and she never said it out loud, but those were her kids, and the
only way for her to get through the sadness was to believe that. The living
Séarlas and Franka were some of the first people they saw when they started
traveling through time, and had anticipated their births for years, only to
have that dream pulled away from them. Them being here right now wasn’t some
way of getting it back. It was just confusing and uncomfortable. That was
why Mateo never pushed for a relationship with Aura or Mario. Neither of
them raised him, nor even conceived him. To them, it had never happened, and
trying to force a connection was worse than pretending there was nothing
there at all, and just trying to be decent friends. The question was, what
did these two think? Did they see it the same way?
“We don’t expect hugs from you,” Franka went on after letting the shock of
the development run its course for a few moments.
“Hold on.” Ramses materialized some kind of little tool in his hand. “Do you
mind?” he asked vaguely, holding it between him and the twins.
“Do what you must,” Franka agreed, pulling up her sleeve, and nodding for
her brother to do the same.
Ramses used the tool to extract small samples from them. “I already have
your DNA on file,” he said to Mateo and Leona while they waited for about
fifteen seconds. It beeped. “I’m seeing a 92% familial match. That would be
low confidence for today’s technology, but substrate variance would account
for the difference. You two still have the core DNA that you were born with,
but I spliced in some extra code.”
“So, they are our genetic children,” Mateo asked to confirm.
“Their bodies are,” Ramses clarified. “I have no idea about their minds. I
never did figure out how to build a simpatico detector, not that that’s
exactly what we’re after.”
“I see that our tactics have bred distrust between us,” Franka acknowledged.
“Ya think?” Olimpia asked. If these two could be categorized as Mateo and
Leona’s kids, she would be their stepmother.
“Why do you think we took so long to introduce ourselves to you?” Pacey—no,
Séarlas prompted.
“I’m guessing that you tried to do it earlier in other timelines, but it
always went poorly,” Leona figured.
Franka smirked. “Yeah, you definitely get your intelligence from her.”
Mateo looked at Franka. “And you? You got my stupidity?”
Séarlas shook his head disapprovingly. “Your instincts. She got your
instincts and intuition. You may not be as educated, and you may not have
much interest in improving that, but you are the one who steers the team;
not as a leader, but as a compass. Not only can you see a threat a mile
away, but you can gauge how much of a threat it will be, and can
adjust accordingly. You treated me and Boyd differently than you did
Zeferino and Erlendr. You saw goodness in Arcadia when no one else did.
Mateo, after Horace Reaver captured you and Leona, and kept you separate, he
finally explained why he hated you so much. Do you remember how you
reacted?”
“That was so long ago,” Mateo replied.
“You’re being modest,” Séarlas judged, “of course you remember. He told you
that an alternate version of you in another timeline made a mistake, which
got his wife killed. You have no recollection of that, because you didn’t do
it. Yet after his story was over, you apologized. Do you know how few people
would respond like that? So no, father, she didn’t get your stupidity. She
got your heart.”
“Yes, so much love,” Olimpia jumped in again. “This is a living Rockwell
painting.”
“We know things that you don’t,” Franka volleyed. “We’ve seen things.”
“I’ve seen a lot too,” Olimpia defended.
“I mean, our abilities allow us to try out timelines, and choose the best
one,” Franka began. “This is not regular time travel where we have to go
back to the point of divergence and try again. Time is a crossroads, and we
have binoculars.”
“You’re seers?” Angela questioned. Seers were fairly common in their world,
but none of them had actually met one in person, or even heard a name.
People will just show up unexpectedly and it will be because a seer told
them to be there.
Séarlas shook his head again. “Seers typically see one possible future, and
if they don’t like it, they find a better one. We can see them all at once,
but only from wherever we are when we’re looking. It’s not perfect, before
you ask why we’re not all living in a utopia. The metaphorical binoculars
only show us so much before things get fuzzy. We can walk down a given road
to see further in the future, but once we do, we can’t walk backwards and
try a different road. We have to pick the best choice from our perspective,
and hope things don’t get worse. Then we end up at a new crossroads, and it
starts all over.”
They were all just staring at him. “It’s not a perfect metaphor either,”
Franka contended. “None of them really is. Time is a road,
time is a river. Time is just all the things that happen.”
“This is a great lesson on temporal mechanics,” Leona said sarcastically,
“but I have more questions. When were you gonna introduce yourselves
to us, and honestly so, instead of with aliases. Franka, why didn’t
you show up pretending to be someone else?”
“It’s like my brother said,” Franka replied, “I’m not intelligent, I’m
intuitive. In this day and age, when you meet someone new, you expect them
to be smart, and have something to give you. He gave you the slingdrive. I
have nothing like that to offer. My job was to tell him what to do,
and truthfully, to cultivate our assets.”
“Octavia and Miracle,” Mateo said, nodding. “Anyone else? You got Bhulan in
your back pocket? What about my third grade teacher? She on your payroll
too?”
“Well...The Overseers,” Séarlas admitted. “That’s thanks to you. We didn’t
know where either of them was before.”
“Yeah, we guessed that they were with you,” Marie said, “and the Arborist.”
“It’s not like how Arcadia did it, though,” Franka insisted. “We don’t force
or trick people. We don’t...tell them everything either, but they make their
own choices.”
“My little intelligence officers,” Leona snarked.
Séarlas tensed up, so Franka placed a hand on his shoulder, and spoke before
he could say something that he regretted. “We knew there would be hostility.
This is the tough part, and it was always going to be like that because of
one mistake we made long ago. I told you about the crossroads. At a real
crossroads, you could walk back, and take a different path, but for us, we
can’t. We had one single good opportunity to show ourselves to you. It was
after our alternate versions died, and some of the initial sting from that
had worn off, but before you went off to...be king of Dardius.”
“I wasn’t king.”
Franka went on without responding to that, because it wasn’t the point. “We
didn’t know that the babies were going to die. Space is more difficult to
see into. It’s hard to explain, but it’s easier with an atmosphere. The
point is, it was a tight window, and we missed it. We wanted to know when
you were going to come back to the stellar neighborhood from Dardius,
and unfortunately, by the time we saw that happen, we had passed our turn.
From there, too much was going on, and showing up would have only made
things worse. Gatewood, Varkas Reflex, Mateo dies, the rest of the team
dies, you disappear into the past, you jump to the Fifth Division, and the
Third Rail. I don’t know if you can believe us, but we kept looking for
opportunities, and each one was worse than the last. Eventually, we decided
that the only way we could have a relationship with our parents was to...”
“Be antagonists,” Leona finished for her.
“We don’t like that word,” Franka said, “but we appreciate your perspective
on that. We prefer to see ourselves as tough-love mentors.”
“You’ve been trying to get us to murder someone!” Leona shouted.
“The Oaksent’s future is profoundly clear to us,” Séarlas maintained.
“With him, we don’t have binoculars, we have a planet-sized telescope. He
has..to die. That’s the only solution. If you’re worried about him becoming
a martyr, don’t. His loyalists see him as a god-king. His death alone will
shift allegiances for millions. Gods can’t die.”
“Neither can Bronach,” Ramses reasoned, “so what does that make him?”
“The man behind the curtain,” Franka suggested.
“Learning who you are has not changed our position one iota,” Mateo tried to
tell his once-children. “If you find a team who is willing and able to do
it, we won’t get in your way, but we won’t help either.”
“What if it’s Team Kadiar?” Franka put forth.
It was not a good idea to say that. The twins had hardly looked at Romana
since she showed up. It was between them and the parents. She had to respond
to this, though. “It won’t be. I don’t care what my mom and dad say,
we will interfere if you approach my sisters.” She all but
growled.
“Okay, okay,” Marie stepped in. She hadn’t talked much either, but she and
her sister were the diplomats. “Romana is right. Team Kadiar is
also off limits. They literally crew a diplomacy ship. I won’t have
you corrupting them, or even trying to. This has been a tough day. One thing
I’ve learned as a counselor is that the breaks are just as important as the
talks. We would like a place to retire, and will reconvene in a year. I
understand that the anticipation might be difficult for you, but we will
only experience less than a day. That time apart will make things easier. I
promise you. We have learned a lot—maybe too much already. The human brain,
even one designed by Mister Abdulrashid here, needs time to consolidate new
information. Does this sound okay to everyone?”
They all agreed to take a break. Mateo had to reframe his thoughts on all
this. He hadn’t raised any of his other kids, and in fact, Kivi was born in
an entirely different reality, so he didn’t really even conceive her. He
still saw her as his child, though admittedly, in a different way than he
saw Romana, or even Dubravka. Franka and Séarlas weren’t nothing to him. He
didn’t know what they were, but he already knew that they weren’t
going to be strangers who he didn’t care about. A good night’s sleep would
hopefully help with this. Thank God Marie was here.
There was an Alaskan king bed for Mateo, Leona, and Olimpia to share. The
others each had their own rooms with regular king beds. When they woke up
the next day, the twins had reportedly skipped over the interim year as
well. It could have been a lie to endear them to the team, but even if it
was true, it wasn’t exceptionally impactful. It didn’t solve their problems.
Probably only one thing could do that, and that was a common enemy.
Annoyingly enough, he was right on time. The angry Fifth Divisioner, also
known as A.F. had finally found the location of this secret base, having
evidently been searching for it since he discovered that
Séarlas-slash-Pacey-slash-his nameless engineer had betrayed him. He had a
fleet at his fingertips now, and had the space station surrounded. He
remotely managed to shut down all systems besides life support and
artificial gravity. It was more than that, though, the team’s slingdrive
array wasn’t working either. Mateo might have been able to get them out with
his dark particles, but he still needed more time to recuperate.
Séarlas sighed. “Goddamn, I wish I hadn’t given that man quintessence
technology.”
“Why did you?” Mateo asked.
“You asked us to move on to Plan B for the assassination of Bronach Oaksent?
You are Plan B.” He scoffed and shook his head. “A.F. was Plan A.”
