Page 57 of His Human Believer

I crack open my jaw and produce a short flame.

Rexan shrieks with delight and produces one of his own, which is approximately the size of my thumb.

My daughter is on the grass at my feet, methodically removing every flower from a plant that took four years to establish. She is two. Her skin is like her mother’s, which is to say very nearly colorless, and her horns are small and coming in unevenly and she has no fangs at all. Her teeth are blunt and human. Her claws are blunt as well. She has a tail and she is entirely unaware of it and it knocks things over constantly.

“Fira,” I say. “Not the whole plant.”

Fira Coalstone regards me with her mother’s precise expression and removes another flower.

“Daddy, why doesn’t Mama have a tail?” Rexan questions

“Because she is human.”

“Why doesn’t she have horns? Why doesn’t she have fangs?”

“Because,” I say, “she is human. There are a great many things about your mother that are different and every one of them is correct.”

The boy considers this with total seriousness.

“Fira doesn’t have fangs,” he says. “She does not.”

“Is Fira human?”

“She is half of one.”

“But am half too and I have those things.”

I shrug. “It’s a toss up as to what you will get from your parents. But all bits are valid.”

“Which half?”

“Does mom wish she could flash flame?”

“Ask her.”

My bound sits three meters away in the ugly chair. It came from Salo in a shipping container and it is upholstered in a fabric that I believe was once a pattern, and it has been in the garden since the beginning of dry season.

She is heavily pregnant with our third. She glances at us. “I do have to admit I wish I could flash flame. But on the other hand, I’ve got the both of you to flame for me, so I don’t miss it that much.”

Some observations, five years on.

This house is not too large.

Both closets are full in the primary bedroom. There are three offspring’s worth of objects on every horizontal surface. Somebody has drawn on the wall of the second library room in permanent marking implement.

The east room is a studio. The acoustic treatment runs floor to ceiling on the north wall, as she specified, and the shelving went where she wanted it, and the window is at her back when she records. The Listening File has been produced from that room for four and a half years and her subscriber figures have doubled in that period.

She still takes cold cases, but takes fewer of them with a greater reach

The Skyggjar is under permanent protected status. Eleven confirmed sightings in five years. All documented. None harmed, none captured or killed.

There is a survey team now and I have been out with it twice with Bane. He specializes in fire beasts but says it is the finest fieldwork he has done in his career.

Dagr is nineteen.

He studies fire biology at the Academy, which means I supervise him, which means the boy who saved the Skyggjar with his own throat now brings me coursework that is late. He is insufferable and I would not have it any other way.

Yorick Vail is eleven years into a life sentence in a Galactic facility. I do not think about him often.