Free The Fall by Christie Meierz

turned her tablet toward the whale sculpture sitting on her desk.
    “What am I looking at?”
    Laura turned her tablet around. Marianne stopped squinting and opened brilliant blue eyes. Those eyes had generated no small amount of discussion, back on the Alexander , before Adeline Russell’s scheming had gotten the ship kicked out of Tolari space. John and Smitty had come to an agreement that someone took the summer sky and turned it into glass, then broke it and formed her irises from the shards. Marianne sometimes commented that her eyes were so unusual no one noticed the rest of her.
    The Sural had, though. The evidence of that lay sleeping in Marianne’s arms. What she saw in the man—Laura cut off the thought. There was no accounting for taste.
    “You didn’t see the sculpture?” Laura asked.
    “What sculpture?”
    “All right, let me try again.” This time, Laura put the whales in front of her face and positioned her tablet as normal.
    Marianne’s eyes grew wide, and she whistled through her teeth.
    “You can see it now?”
    “Oh yes. But why turn your tablet around when you can set the view?”
    Laura straightened. “I can set the view?”
    The younger woman quirked a grin. “Someone there will have to show you how. But Laura, that sculpture is incredible. And he gave it to you, just like that?”
    “He said if it called to me, it was mine. And it did.”
    Marianne shook her head in wonderment. “What are you going to do with it? Does the Paran have an art collection?”
    “Yes, but I want to keep it where I can see it every day. Right now it’s on the desk in my sitting room.” She moved away from the desk and flopped into a chair. “So how’s little Rose?”
    “Sleeping all day and keeping me awake all night. I should come to Parania. Maybe if day and night were upside down, her schedule would be right side up.”
    Laura snickered. “I told you so. Now you learn the true meaning of sleep deprivation.”
    “You can’t blame a girl for hoping.”
    “No, but—” The guard by the door to the hall flickered. Laura groaned. “Listen, I have to go. My language tutor is waiting for me.”
    “Have fun!” Marianne reached, and the screen went blank.
    Laura chuckled to herself. Marianne, a gifted linguist who spoke seventeen languages… no eighteen… or was it nineteen now?—anyway, the young woman would find it fun. Laura pocketed the tablet and headed for the family library. When she arrived, Kellandin began, with great enthusiasm and a number of small wood tiles inscribed in Paranian syllables, a lesson she decided to call the Attack of the Pronouns. Symbols moved across the library table like military markers. Masculine, feminine, and… and… whatever it was. The whole concept made no sense. People were he and she . Things like chairs and tables were it .
    When Kellandin finished with her, the Paran was nowhere to be found. Laura took a meandering stroll around the stronghold grounds, picking at autumn-blooming flowers. She took refuge from the sun in a corner of the Paran’s private area of the gardens, under a tree and against the cool stone of a shaded wall, and pulled out her sketchbook.
    It fell open at the Boston summer house.
    “I wonder where my stuffies are,” she murmured to herself, slipping the stylus from its sheath in the book’s back cover. A few strokes added a hint of drapery to the windows of her rooms. Then her gaze fell on the hand gripping the stylus, and the deep groove on her ring finger. She stopped sketching to stare at it.
    The government thugs had ripped even the wedding ring from her hand when they abducted her, tearing her from home and family and leaving her with not a shred of evidence of her forty-one years with John. Not a single gift or personal item. Nothing that had been theirs together. No keepsakes from their children’s lives. Yet the crowning masterpiece of an artisan’s life sat in the sitting room of her quarters, the gift of a man she’d