I nodded. “There is that. We’ll probably want to let Quinn and the others know, let them decide what they want to do with it. So, how was it? Your first use of MTV?”

  Tomas’s looked at the ground and spat out the last pit. “I’m not sure? I feel drained. In multiple ways, actually. When I saw where we were, I guess I kinda almost lost it, really. But, you know, playing helps me deal with things, so, uhm.”

  “I get it. You had to get it out of your system.”

  Tomas tilted his head just enough to see me with one eye. “Yeah. I just played the song that had popped into my head. Thanks for joining in. It’s nice to know what the words actually mean, you know?” I smiled. “The moment I struck the first note, it felt like I’d opened a drain somewhere. Everything bothering me just flowed out into what I was playing. I can’t really describe it. Kinda like standing in a knee-deep mountain stream and trying to not get sucked away.”

  “Feel better now, though, right?” I asked with a hopeful smile.

  “Yeah, actually. Better than I have in a long time. Mentally, that is. It sounds weird to say it this way, but I think that song showed me how to make peace with what happened.”

  “Oh?”

  Tomas took a deep breath and looked skyward. “I know Rowan would say something like ‘you can’t save everyone.’ It’s true. You can’t, but thinking about it a bit more now, I think Rowan would’ve also pointed out that at least they died free. Better that than meeting their end in a cage.”

  I somberly shook my head while retrieving my canteen. “True. Better to die on your feet than live on your knees. No matter how hard you push yourself, how much you plan, the universe still has a say. Still, you didn’t tell Rowan about any of this?”

  He sighed. “No. I couldn’t really face it when I got back. I have a bad habit of burying most things that bother me. She didn’t ask much. I think she knew something happened but didn’t want to force me to face it before I was ready. Heh.”

  The quiet note of introspective surprise made me give him a few seconds.

  “You know, Sam, I think I hate you.”

  I cocked my head to the side as I finished unscrewing the cap. “Oh?”

  Tomas quietly laughed. “Yeah. Just a little. I came back to the Glade hoping that Rowan and the other Harvesters would finally see me, finally recognize what I’m capable of, and there you were.”

  I finished swallowing a mouthful of water. “If it helps, I didn’t exactly plan to steal your spotlight.”

  He grinned. “Oh, I know that. Now, anyway. Like everything else, it just took me a bit to get it, for it to sink in.” Tomas suddenly snorted. “Sorry, it just hit me. As clear as everything looks now, I wonder if that drain opening wasn’t something like me pulling my head out of my ass.”

  I doubt I’m going to get a better opportunity than whatever this is. “Tomas?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You do realize Rowan and the rest know, right?”

  Tomas’s eyes narrowed as he looked over, head cocked to the side. “Know what?”

  “That you’re capable, dedicated. Loyal, even.”

  He blinked a few times. “I’m not sure I believe that.”

  “Look, you’re basically fifty years old, right?” I asked.

  “Yeah, what’s that got to do with anything though?”

  “I don’t know how true this is here, but in the roleplaying games me and my sister play, elves age differently, as in significantly different.”

  “Roleplaying games?”

  “I’ll explain that later. Look, listening to Rowan and the twins, I got the impression the Syr don’t usually consider anyone younger than about a hundred to be an adult, right?”

  Tomas faintly nodded. “Yeah, and?”

  “If you were human, based off the way you look, I’d guess you were in your late teens or early twenties. Half my age, basically, not almost twice it like you actually are. Think about it from their perspective. They’ve watched you grow up, known you your whole life, but you did in fifty years what it takes them almost a hundred. Haven’t half-elves always been rare?”

  Tomas blinked a few times. “Yeah.”

  “Wouldn’t you expect them to have some issues then? Reasonable ones, not just simply not liking you. Where I come from, eighteen is usually considered an adult. I’d have a hell of a time seeing someone as an adult at nine years old even if they looked twenty, so why shouldn’t they have the same problem?”

  “Well, put that way, I guess you have a point.”

  “And you probably grew up watching Aoife and the others work their asses off to get where they are, right?”

  I caught the sappy grin that popped up on his face right before he looked away. “Yeah. I remember when most of them were still in training. I’d wake up every day and go watch. I wanted to be like them.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Tomas sighed. “Mom died. I didn’t deal well with that.”

  “But you never forgot them, Aoife and the others?”

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “It isn’t just trust, is it? Not just the fact you know they’d have your back in a fight. You respect them, more than you do most of the other Syr.”

  Tomas eyed me for a long moment. “I’d be an idiot not to. Admittedly, I can be a hell of an idiot, but not that kind of one.”

  I grinned. “Tomas, the stupidest point in any man’s life is when he’s in love.”

  He stared at me flatly, but the faint pink starting to show in his ears told me I wasn’t far off the mark. “It’s a little more complicated than that, Sam.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes. It’s just—” He sighed and when he opened his mouth next, words boiled out. “Damn it, I miss having family, okay? I miss my mom, and even though I never knew him, I miss my dad, too. I miss living in the villa, all the kids I grew up with. Most of them are still there, you know.”

  The way his ire tapered off into something akin to grief stilled my tongue.

  “I said this before, Sam, I don’t want a warm bed. I want a family. You know, even though I hated only hearing stories about my father, I want to know that if something happens and I don’t come back one day, that some part of me is still out there. I— I just want someone to remember me. Is that so bad?”

  After a deep breath I answered with a mirthless chuckle. “If that’s bad then I’m absolutely fucked, too. Welcome to the club, Tomas. We don’t even have t-shirts.”

  He blinked. “T-shirts?”

  “Add that to the list of things I’ll explain later. You know, I’m willing to bet there’s a problem you missed.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the fact that using magic during pregnancy is dangerous for elves.”

  His mouth slid open. “It is?”

  I nodded. “Found that particular fact out during a rather embarrassing conversation we’re not going to get into. If you ask me, odds are you have caught at least one person’s eye, and I’m willing to bet they realize they can’t give you what you want and don’t want to torture you.”

  Tomas’s mouth moved but no sound came out. His brow came down as he looked away. “Fuck.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh when he repeated that simple word one more time with emphasis.

  “Tomas, I don’t know how the whole Harvester thing works well enough to give you pointers but talk to Rowan when we get back. If it turns out you can’t be a Harvester, you can at least train with them. Who knows, maybe that’ll get you the opportunity to find out who might be interested and talk with them.”

  “We’ll see.”

  True to his word, Tomas set out a bit later. After laying out the solar charger for best coverage, I went to pick up the message book and froze. I’d gotten used to just looking over elvish script, which was beautiful but utterly indecipherable to me, but I could clearly read the title now. Observations on the West Elwood Sand Snail. I flipped open the book, and sure as hell, all the pages that had previously been beautiful scribbling now made sense. The book, at least everything but the last handful of pages left blank for ‘personal notes,’ was an eye-bleedingly dry zoology text.

  Huh. The text for Babel’s gift popped into my head as I pulled out my pen. I wonder.

  Now let me tell you, writing in a language you never learned is a bit of an offputting experience, but doing it in a character set you didn’t know either is a whole new level of “I guess I know what the color nine tastes like” experience. With quick, deliberate strokes I wrote a simple phrase in Japanese kanji: “Dearest sister, reply back in the same fashion when you can.”

  Seeing as I had no idea where Jenna was or what she was doing, I didn’t expect an answer any time soon, but as I started stuffing my pen back in my shoulder pocket, pen strokes began appearing on the page.

  “New book, who ‘dis?”

  I smirked and started writing. “Someone found out the translator perk does more than vocal communication.”

  Her reply began flowing almost immediately. “Ah, a secret tool that will help us later, onii-chan! You have brought much honor to the Empire. Also, Khajit has manga if you have coin.”

  “Yeah, hard pass. Not interested in climbing that Brokeback Mountain.”

  The way her lettering wiggled a little as she wrote made me wonder if she was laughing. “It’s not all yaoi, you know. I have perfectly good manga in there. Light novels, too. I have the entire Youjo Senki series I was bringing to swap with one of the guys at the lab. You’d love it. Trust me. No surprise sausage party. If we had a way to recharge my laptop, I have the whole first season of the anime on there.”

  I blinked. “Youjo Senki?”

  “Senki is the anime I was watching before we left. You watched like five minutes with me. Looks like it’s set in the middle of the first or second World War? English title is Saga of Tanya the Evil.”

  “Ah, right. It did look interesting. Also, test complete, swapping back to good old English,” I wrote. It sounds weird to say I willed myself to write in English, but that’s exactly what I did. “Let me know how this looks.”

  “I mean, your handwriting sucks no matter what language you write in, but I can still read it.”

  “I’m experimenting, trying to figure out how this translator function works. It’s not like it came with an instruction book, you know?”

  “Fair. I swear, it’d be fucking nice if anything magical came with one. I’m tearing my hair out over here. Don’t get me wrong, Fiachra is legitimately trying, but I feel like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest over here.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I know it’s not helpful, but everything. I know Fiachra is doing what he can, but there’s just so much to learn, to memorize, and it’s so fucking unstructured that it’s hard to tie things together. Even if I get it right, the spells all fizzle. The only thing I can reliably cast makes my finger glow about as bright as the light on my camera.”

  I distinctly felt eyes on me and glanced around. Seeing nothing, I got up and dragged my rifle with me over to the rocks before settling down to write, “PHONE. HOME. ET PHONE HOME!”

  “You can eat my whole ass, Samuel Byrne. This shit is just so frustrating. Fiachra thinks my ability to harness and store magic might be stunted because I’ve never trained it. Just my luck, phenomenal cosmic power, but instead of the bank of deep cycle marine batteries I need to run it, I got one of those little hearing aid coin batteries.”

  “Could be worse. At least it’s not a potato battery?”

  “Oh hi, how are you holding up? Because I’m a potato.”

  I grinned. Portal had been one of my favorite games before I enlisted. I was the one who introduced Jenna to computer gaming, and it started with Portal. “Simmer down, GlaDOS. I know you; you’ll find a way around it eventually. You remember when I told you about Tomas’s ability, MTV? Well, he kinda used it.”

  I went back to our packs for my canteen and took a drink while figuring out how to describe the experience.

  When I looked back down at the book, the page was filled with big block letters: “AND?!”

  “He grew a tree.”

  Seconds passed. “A tree?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s kinda underwhelming. What, did he play some song from the Pocahantas soundtrack or something?”

  “No, actually,” I wrote. “The end credits song from Frieren. Went from empty ground to a twelve foot or so wisteria tree without me noticing it was even there, left him drained as hell. Speaking of, let Aoife and Rowan know about the wisteria since it’s invasive. We’re only a little east of where we ran into the FSA scout groups, it’s on top of one of the fingers. Can’t miss it.”

  “So you’re just chilling and letting him rest?”

  “Tomas went to see if he couldn’t scare up some kain fruit since they restore mana. Speaking of which, you’re familiar with kain fruit, right?”

  By the speed and jerkiness in the way the letters appeared, I got the impression she was irritated when she wrote, “I’ve been popping those little red bastards to keep from falling over every day. Was going to suggest giving him some. Why?”

  “So you haven’t actually seen them on the plant?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Jenna, they’re coffee.”

  Seconds passed. “Excuse me?”

  “We came across some growing wild. I’m no botanist, but it looked exactly like how I remember coffee plants looking.”

  Almost a full minute passed before hurried lettering showed up on the page. “So, I’ve got places to be. I’ll check in when I get back. Thanks!”

  I chuckled. “Don’t thank me, thank Tomas. His mom evidently used to grow it.”

  “Duly noted. Later!”