Did Seri want to meet her? What if she turned out to be horrible? Did he really need a possibly toxic relative in his life?
“Give me all the information you have on her, and then I’ll decide,” he said, before turning a glare Severo’s way. “I am so mad at you right now.”
“I know, and you have every right to be. I crossed a boundary, I know that…”
“You did… What if it had turned out the other way? What if she was clearly involved? Or what if the simple fact was that I was just abandoned? Then what?”
“I never would have told you.”
“So, you’d have kept it a secret forever?”
Severo winced. “Okay, now that I’ve said it out loud, it sounds really bad. I don’t know, Seri. I just wanted to know. So, I pushed, even though I said I'd stay out of it. I still pushed them into doing this. Maybe it was just me being selfish and wanting to know the truth. I wanted to know…so I sent someone else to do the dirty work. I shouldn’t have. Regardless of the truth, I should have respected your wishes on the subject. I’m sorry.”
“Not that I don’t LOVE to hear couples fight, but technically, she didn’t pop up because we looked,” Cyprus added, reminding him he was still on the phone with them, listening.
“What?” Seri asked in confusion.
“We had just found out which Nymph Settlement you were taken from today. Well, Killian did.”
“Ah, Seri…I’m here, too,” Killian said hesitantly, which wasn’t like the Siren at all. “I have to apologize for something. I…peeked into your sealed birth certificate from the orphanage, to check your original gender…”
“You what?!”
“I’m sorry… I wouldn’t have done it, but… We were down to three children, and three different settlements… Settlements are really bad at files, and taking photos of their population. Many don’t have ID Passbooks. Otherwise, I’d have just gone off of your parent’s photo… It turned out that I didn’t need to look at all, as your mother called literally seconds later.”
“She called?” Severo asked.
Cyrus snorted. “Yes, us looking into it had nothing to do with her finding out. She saw your last news conference.”
“Okay…but how is she so sure that I’m hers then?”
“See for yourself. I sent the info to you, Severo.” The phone dinged. “Check out what I sent you, and then let me know what you decide,” Cyrus said before hanging up.
Seri stared at the phone and hesitated. Severo was the first to move, but he didn’t go for the phone. Instead, the man grabbed Seri’s tablet and started tapping on it. “You can look at it on this, it’ll be bigger.”
Severo signed into his email, and soon enough, the man was handing it over to him.
Seri took it, hands shaking a bit. He found that while the Dweller had signed in, he hadn’t opened the new email. Taking a deep breath, he opened it.
He gasped at the image at top. Hand shaking even more now, he brushed over the woman’s facial features on the screen, tears filling his eyes. Pressing holographic mode, the image floated upward.
“So that’s how she knew,” Severo rasped.
The woman looked exactly like him. Or rather, the female form that he could change into, looked like a mirror of her.
Severo’s hand brushed his side. The man hesitated for a moment before wrapping his arms around Seri and pulling him back against his chest. “I’m so sorry, Seri.”
“She would have found me anyway.”
“Maybe…but I shouldn’t have pushed.”
Seri sighed. Some of his anger had dropped away on knowing that the woman would have found him anyway. At the same time, he knew he was being slightly unreasonable about the whole thing. Him not wanting to know didn’t change the fact that a crime had obviously been committed. It was the CEB’s job to dig into it. And as he wasn’t the only child stolen and dropped off randomly, it was even more so their duty to find out what happened.
“It’s your job to dig. Crimes were committed.”
“It wasn’t and never has been my job to dig, and even less so now that I’ve transferred. My job was to fetch, that was it. I stepped out of line. And I even tried to make excuses by saying that I stepped away from the investigation, but I really didn’t. I keep poking and asking them for updates. Please, yell at me as much as you want.”
Seri glanced back, and said, “No.”
