The silence that came after was the kind that fills with thinking.
I could feel it in both boys—Nocrez processing the fear and trying to find somewhere to put it, Neazzos moving past the fear already and into something more actionable. His tail had resumed its arcs. His jaw had taken on that particular set.
“So what do we do?”
Neazzos. And it wasn’t the soft scared version of that question—it was the sharp one, the one that meant he’d sorted through the situation, identified that something needed doing, and arrived at the part where he wanted to know his assignment. Ten years old and already processing a crisis like a soldier.
I didn’t know whether to be proud or heartbroken. I chose proud. I’d deal with the rest later.
“We’re not newborns.” Nocrez lifted his chin. His eyes were still too bright, still threatening, but his voice came out steady. “You keep treating us like we can’t know things, but we alreadyknow things. We figured most of it out. And we can help. We want to help.”
“We won’t just sit here,” Neazzos added. Not defiant—determined. There was a difference, and Neazzos had always known it. “Tell us what to do and we’ll do it. Whatever it is.”
Meti said nothing. Just squeezed my hand once, brief and certain, and waited.
I looked at them.
The three of them. Neazzos with his jaw set and his eyes already bright with the need to be useful. Nocrez with his chin tilted up and everything he felt written plainly on his face—fear and love and stubbornness threaded together in that particular way that was completely, unmistakably him. Meti, still and patient, with that quiet trust that I had the right answer if she gave me long enough to find it.
A hollow mission would destroy them. I knew that. Knew it the way I knew how to breathe—these were Aldawi cubs, which meant they’d inherited every ounce of their father’s instinct for purpose and duty, and handing them something manufactured to keep them busy would be worse than telling them nothing. They’d know immediately. They’d carry the knowledge of it like a weight, like an insult, and it would sit in them and corrode something I didn’t want corroded.
So I didn’t give them a hollow mission.
I thought about the two males inside the villa right now.
Xylo. The careful way he’d been moving for two days—favoring the side where he’d strained himself preparing for war, that precise compensatory shift of weight every time he stood from a chair that he probably didn’t realize I’d noticed. He was managing it with extraordinary discipline and the specific kind of pride that made asking for help physically difficult. He’d adapt. He’d push through. He’d be fine, and he’d get there by running himself down to nothing and then rebuilding fromthere, which was exactly his pattern and exactly what worried me.
Odelm, still healing from the attack. Pushing too hard. Ignoring the healer’s recommended rest intervals with the determination of someone who found stillness personally offensive. The cost showed in the tightness around his eyes that appeared late in the day, the moments where he went quiet in a way that wasn’t like him. He hadn’t mentioned it. He wouldn’t. He needed to play his music… It was a part of him as much as the tentacles that were regenerating.
Two clanfathers. Healing. Too proud to ask for help. Alone in this villa while I left with three others and the household’s center of gravity shifted.
And three cubs who needed a real mission.
This was not a coincidence. The Stars did not deal in coincidences.
“Clanfathers Xylo and Odelm are still healing,” I said. “Their bodies are working hard right now—growing back what they lost, repairing what was damaged. That takes time and energy, and while it’s happening, there are things they can’t do well. Things they might not notice they need help with, because they’re focused on healing and on not falling behind. And things they definitely won’t ask for, because asking for help with their own bodies goes against everything in their natures.”
Neazzos’s head tilted. He was listening with his whole face.
“When I leave,” I said, “those two clanfathers are going to be here without half the clan. Without V’dim’s gentleness or Z’fir’s steadiness or Kaede’s ability to make them do things they don’t want to do through sheer force of will. They’re going to be managing a healing villa with reduced household support and the weight of keeping everything together while the rest of us are scattered across the galaxy.” I paused. Let it land. “They need help. Real help—not someone sitting nearby to make them feelwatched, but actual, substantive support from people they trust and love.”
Both boys had gone very still. Even Neazzos’s tail had stopped.
“That’s you,” I said. “That’s what I need you to do. Not because I’m inventing something to keep you busy—because it’s real, and because you’re the right people for it, and because I genuinely cannot leave if I’m not certain someone is watching over them.”
I turned to Neazzos first. Looked him directly in the eye, because he needed directness—needed to feel the weight of a real charge landing.
“Neazzos. You’re the Shield.”
His tail went completely still.
“If anything comes near this villa—if anything feels wrong, if someone approaches who shouldn’t, if there’s a sound or a presence or something that your gut says isn’t right—you sound the alarm immediately. No hesitation, no trying to assess it first, no deciding you can handle it alone. You sound the alarm and you put yourself between whatever it is and your clanfathers.” I held his gaze. “Your job is early warning and first response. You’re the loudest voice in this household if something goes sideways. Nothing gets to Clanfather Xylo or Clanfather Odelm without going through you.”
Something moved across Neazzos’s face. The brightness behind his eyes—it didn’t dim, it shifted. Went from the excited, surface-level heat of wanting-to-help down into something steadier. Something that sat differently in his body. He pulled himself up to his full height and placed his fist over his heart the way he’d seen others to do his father and aunt a hundred times. The way he’d been copying, with varying accuracy, to those around him accepting a mission.
This time it looked like it fit.
“I won’t let you down, Mama.”
