“I like educational videos of Earth.”
Max winced. “Don’t expect Earth to be like the videos.”
That brought another raspberry. “I recognize difference between entertainment and reporting.”
“But you may not know that even the news reports are edited. Sometimes they may make Earth look more violent. But often, they will ignore all the small ways that human beings can make each other miserable. I had a downstairs neighbor that would pound on her ceiling every damn night because I woke too early for her and she hated the fact I would take a shower in my own apartment. There are a million petty annoyances.”
“I can be a million times million annoying in return,” Xander said.
“I bet you could be,” Max said wryly.
“A million times a million times a million.”
“But I don’t want you to be exiled from your home. Give me and Rick a chance to figure out a solution,” Max argued.
Xander trumpeted his unhappiness.
“Right, right. You’re an adult; I’ll stop telling you what to do.” Max lifted his hands in surrender. Letting his kids grow up was harder than he thought. He still hoped that Xander didn’t do something to hurt his own future. Max would volunteer himself and get himself exiled from the Hidden World only Einstein would never let him go. Einstein was barely willing to let Max breathe, so asking to be released with only a contract to keep him from spilling all Einstein’s secrets–that would not happen.
Max settled in for a long afternoon of watching the winding road that led to Einstein’s house and reading over Xander’s shoulder. The Hidden ones wrote about Einstein in ways that would make Jesus Christ blush and stammer out that he didn’t deserve that much praise.
Too bad he was such an asshole.
It was hard to think of Rick and Einstein as having the same genetics. Instead of creating a clone, Einstein had created his exact opposite. The archvillain had fathered the hero of the story. Or at least the sweet octopus who did everything to try to make the world a better place. That was pretty damn heroic.
Max had to hope he pulled himself out of his funk or they’d all grow old here.
Worse, their child would sacrifice his right to live on his homeworld. The thought made Max ache. In the distance, a wispy cloud of dust wandered into the sky. It must be a large vehicle to raise that much dust. Max appreciated the excuse to avoid reading about Einstein’s glorious accomplishments and all the famous Hidden ones who had honored him in one way or another. Hidden ones didn’t name children after people but they did believe in tattoos.
The thought made Max slightly ill. Idiots out there had tattoos of Einstein’s red patterning on their skin.
He was staring at the cloud of an approaching vehicle when alarms went off, lights flashing and an ear-shattering warble echoing through the halls. Xander fell off his chair, and Max leaped to his feet.
“What is that?” Max shouted over the racket.
“Unknown,” Xander shouted back.
Xander struggled onto his tentacles, and Max ran for the door before his youngest could. If there was danger out there, Max would handle it.
He would hit and hit and hit until he had worked through weeks of frustration. And if this was some danger that he couldn’t hit, Max might take it out on the nearest wall.
Chapter Eighteen
Rick came rushing down the corridor, and Max pressed himself into a convenient bulge in the wavy corridor to avoid getting mowed down. When stressed, his husband was a little clumsy and flaily and prone to break things, and Max didn’t want to be the thing broken.
“Alarm centralized in lowest level northeast quadrant,” Rick bellowed as he flailed past. Xander barely ducked under a tentacle that whipped through the air, and Max raced after them.
“Where are the other two kids?” Max seriously hoped that his children had not exploded something. Again. Okay, that wasn't fair. Kohei did not blow things up. But given how violent his language had been lately, Max was not putting it above him to start. But James was an expert at fire and explosions and billowing smoke. If it were not for an advanced fire suppression system, Max was almost sure he would have burned their house down. Given that their house was a ship that floated in space, that might’ve been bad.
“Also unknown,” Rick shouted.
Well shit. His children had blown something up.
Max cursed the staircase all the way down. What was so logical about uneven steps? They were stupid. And dangerous. And hard to run down when he was scared that his children were burning alive because they did not have the sense God gave a goose with a traumatic brain injury.
Twice Max had to catch himself on the railing, blessing the fact that handrails crossed the species barrier.
Rick reached the secured door in the center of the main floor, two tentacles going around the handle and all the other tentacles bracing against the wall as he pulled with all his might. The door had been locked every other time they had tried it, but this time it flew open with such speed that Rick somersaulted backwards, his tentacles flying in the air so that for one moment his dark, mottled beak was visible before he rolled onto his other side, his tentacles splayed around him and his hat on the floor.
