When she thinks she can see him without crying again, she holds her baby close and walks silently back to Rana's.
The room has been replaced with - something else. She has no idea what this means. She has nobody to ask but Rana. Everything she asks places her further in his debt, of course, but it hardly matters now.
She steps inside.
"If there's something else we should do -
- we could bring them to court, it'd be scary but it'd be - differently scary than this place."
"I don't know. They - expect that they can get more from their father. I can't really give them anything."
" - yeah, okay." He turns back to the bar to ask about the food.
Bar has gathered that the kids are not going to have been surviving on wild berries for the last far too long and provides slightly less ridiculously proteiny meals, things that will be nice at room temperature - generous assorted sandwiches and chips and fruit.
He hands these to Cecelia and to Cassie. "If there's a problem, you can get us," he says to Cassie.
Nod.
And she can lead everybody up to room 205, where they can wait for the kids.
And suddenly: kids.
The kids are asleep, because it was the middle of the night. The girl is only asleep for a little bit, though. She wakes up confused, and, shortly thereafter, angry, and kicks her brother awake so that he can be angry, too.
"What have you done with us? Why are you even here?"
"Hi, yeah, my fault," she says, when Cecelia doesn't immediately answer. "Um, don't tell us your names because he's a fairy and you'll be entangled with him forever if you do. Your mom asked me to help her get you and now you're in Milliways. You're safe here. We have snacks."
"You're kidnapping us," says the girl, to Cecelia. "You can't just kidnap people, mom."
"It's safer here. You don't have to - your father doesn't control it, there's plenty of food - "
"Take us back immediately, or my father will have you killed," says the boy.
"I'd like to see him try. Look, you don't know where you are, you don't know what this is, making threats here is stupid, kid."
"My father is the most powerful man in the world. If you kidnap his children he will set his armies on you, and he will find you, and he will see you dead. - maybe not the Chinese woman, I suppose he might want to keep you."
Well, she's not super eager to send this very unpleasant eight-year-old back to whoever made him so unpleasant.
" - okay. If you want to go back I can talk to some people about it, but I think that you think this situation is a lot more alarming than it actually is, so I think you should calm down and eat something and stay a while. Time is frozen where you came from, you won't be missing anything if you take a day off classes or whatever and hang out with your mom."
"I hope my father has you all tortured to death," says the boy, before turning sullenly away.
The girl frowns at him and sighs. "I want to know what government you represent."
"My court's called Istime. Your human king could not find us if he marched his armies across the whole planet."
The girl is fairly distressed by the fact that she doesn't recognize that name.
"I want to go home," she says.
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
