Zilla Glénan* lives on large farm, De Luna Mellis, with her three husbands: Judicael and Mael Glénan and Ignatius Dux. Zilla is taking time from her work in astrophysics to enjoy the family’s children, though some days, ‘enjoy’ is stretching the truth. Zilla goes to get the children up from her nap one day late in the spring cycle and finds that all the children are missing, gone out the window and down a ladder. Where, on a huge farm, could one six-year-old, Kasper, and three-year-old twins, Savannah and Savely, have gone to? The problem is, there are too many answers, and many of them are ones that are adding to the few grey hairs Zilla already has.
*the older sister of Elios Campbell, Runaway Star
Note: all Pandora Project stories are queer erotic romance and may contain explicit sexual scenes.
Bing.
Zilla looked up from the text she was editing — “Heliocentrism in Ancient Astronomy” — and switched viewpanes to turn off the timer. Naptime was over. Time to go round up Kasper, who was likely already awake and reading in his room, and then check on the twins. Savannah and Savely were at the inconsistent stage in napping — some days, they’d sleep for three hours, and other days, not at all.
She stood up, stretching her fingers toward the ceiling. Mmph. She’d been sitting still for more than an hour, and it had taken its toll. Another quick keypress on the terminal keyboard to close her files and then she headed for the sleeping wing of the house.
Kasper’s door slid open to reveal an empty room. Not a big surprise. Sometimes he wandered out to the playroom, rather than staying in his own room. When Zilla found the twins’ room empty, too, her heart started to pound. The twins hadn’t yet gotten to the point where they would wander out of their room on their own. Where were they?
She started to systematically search each room of the house. The playroom was empty, still clean from when Zilla had cleaned up the morning’s experiments with color mixing. Mael’s room was empty, as was Judicael’s, and Nati’s. The kitchen and living room were both empty.
In the utility room, Zilla finally found evidence of what had happened. The ladder was missing, and she knew that none of her husbands were using it. Mael was out with the bees, Judicael was adjusting the irrigation system for their newest crops, and Nati was blessing the crops at a neighboring farm.
The ladder turned up outside the playroom window. The children had snuck out, and she hadn’t heard a peep.
Scrubbing her hands over her face, Zilla took slow, deep breaths to calm herself. Think, Zilla. Where would they go? Kasper was six and the twins were so little, only three years old. They couldn’t have gotten far. Maybe they’d gone out to see Mael. They were fascinated by the bees — and the fact that such tiny little creatures produced something as delicious as honey.
Zilla found Mael out by the hives, but didn’t see the little ones anywhere nearby. She got flagged him down and, when he closed up the boxes and took his hood off, she asked, “Have you seen Kasper or the twins?”
“No.” Zilla could see Mael processing the information he could infer from her question. He always blinked twice as fast while he was thinking about people-things. Mael was far more comfortable with the farm’s livestock than with its human residents. “Did Nati take them with him when he headed over to the Rutilus Acies?”
“If he did, I’m going to rip out every last strand of that pretty blond hair your brother loves so much,” Zilla muttered. She knew that Ignatius lived most of his life on another plane, his attention focused on his devotion to Ceres, but if he’d taken the kids out of the house without telling anyone, they would have words. “Come on, we’ll see if Ju knows anything.” Even if he didn’t, she was going to need all hands on deck if she had to go hunting the kids.
“Ju?” Zilla stopped just inside the barn to look around. Mael must not have been paying attention to where he was going, because he plowed right into her. Zilla stumbled and Mael’s arms came around her, holding her upright.
“Sorry, sorry,” Mael muttered, kissing the top of her head and letting her go again as Judicael stepped out of the office.
“What’s going on?” Judicael was frowning, looking from one to the other. “I’m on a call to Tethys, is something wrong?”
“The kids are gone,” Mael said, at the same time that Zilla said, “Have you seen the kids?”
“Not since breakfast. Just a second.” Judicael popped back into the office and Zilla could hear him begging off the call. “Okay, well, they won’t have got up to much,” he said briskly. “I would have seen them if they’d been through here to look at the kittens. So, is there anything missing from the kitchen? Juice, snacks? If they were running away from home, you know Kasper would pack food.”
“They put the ladder outside the playroom window so they could climb out.” Zilla scrubbed her hands over her face again, trying to think. “I don’t remember seeing anything moved around in the kitchen, but I didn’t really look. The cookie tin was still at the back of the shelf, so they didn’t get to that.” Unless Kasper had been extra careful about using the ladder and putting the tin back where he’d found it, but that wasn’t typical Kasper behavior.
“Okay, well, path of least resistance.” Judicael said, looking pensive. “Kasper’s got a pair of little kids with him who can’t decide what socks they prefer in the morning, except that they don’t prefer the ones you picked out. Why don’t you go and see if they went out to the strawberry field? I already told Kasper he couldn’t go out there once today. I’ll call Nati and ask him to come back, to meet you out there. Mael and I will walk the fenceline. The only worry I have is that they tried to get through to Gutta’s turtle pond. And we’ll see what else we can think of on the way. Call if you see anything.”
The turtle pond. Zilla hadn’t even thought about the turtle pond, or she’d have called Gutta already. “Thanks. Yeah. I’ll call you if we see anything.” Mael’s arm slid around her shoulders and Zilla leaned into him for a hug.
“They’re fine.” Kasper was a lot like Judicael, confident and adventurous. It was when that gave way to Nati’s dreaminess that there was trouble. Judicael came over and cupped Zilla’s face in his hands, tipping it up to kiss her forehead and her mouth. “Don’t worry. We’ll just have to put tracking collars on all of them.”
“It’s your fault he’s such a little sneak, you know,” Zilla grumbled as she kissed him back. “Between your genes and Nati’s, Kasper didn’t stand a chance.”
“Don’t worry.” Judicael gave her one more kiss. “In a few years, Vanna and Vely will be able to keep in him line. C’mon, Mael. We best get a move on, see if we can’t catch those three. And I’ll call Gutta. He has alarms on the pond, so if someone fell in, he’d know.”
Zilla took a slow, deep breath and stepped away from her twin husbands. “Call me if you find anything,” she said. “I’ve got my datapad on me.” Then she turned and headed out of the barn. The strawberry fields. Savannah and Savely both loved strawberries; Kasper wouldn’t have had to do much convincing to get them to follow him out there.
***
Zilla hadn’t found anything yet. It wasn’t as though you could look very far in one direction on the farm. Crops were intermingled so that trees shadowed low dells roiling with wild melon vines; the sculptured ground sloped up and over storage and maintenance units to create false hillsides for the strawberries. The paths were thin at this time of the season; plants of all kinds flowed over onto the places humans had left for themselves to travel. A sweet pea, escaped from half a mile down the path, twined up a monitor post and bloomed unapologetically.
Over a rise, a strange creature became visible, wobbling, lumpy, zooming down the slope and toward Zilla. Nati, on a bicycle, the panniers laden with doves in wicker cages and huge bales of flowers. He braked ineffectively as he approached her and stopped himself at last with his sandals skidding on the path. That was why he went through the damn things so fast.
“I haven’t seen them,” Nati said breathlessly. His dark gold skin was glossy with sweat, and his toga was somewhat worse for the wear — he must have been finished with the blessings. Shaking back his curls, he straightened up and hopped off the bicycle, propping it up on its stand. The doves fluted curiously. “The place Kasper knows best is where I let him help when people come to make offerings and pick fruit or flower,” he said. “The shrine by the road, with the wellspring. He knows how to open the locker door; I showed him when we were harvesting the apples. There’s shade and water there, and it’s safe.”
“Let’s start there.” Even though she’d known better, Zilla had been hoping that the children were with Nati. Now, her heart pounded and her breath came short as all the possibilities raced through her mind: were they lost? Hurt? Scared? Had a stranger found them and taken them somewhere else? Anything could’ve happened.
“You’re over-breathing,” Nati said, as though he were telling her she had missed a button. He patted her shoulder, slightly awkwardly. “It’ll be fine. Kasper would know what to do if they met a stranger. No one’s fallen in Gutta’s pond lately. It’s good we haven’t heard anything,” he finished cheerfully. “Means nothing’s wrong.” Eschewing the path, he hiked up his toga and started to cut through the strawberry fields. He didn’t get a few steps before he stopped a picked a strawberry. Taking a bite, he looked thoughtful, then approving. “They’re very good.” He offered her the rest of the strawberry. “You should try it.”
In some ways, Nati was like a child, himself. Zilla loved him dearly, but they were so different, she sometimes wondered how Judicael had managed to fall for both of them. She sighed and smiled reluctantly. Maybe it was that Nati had the innate ability to make everyone around him smile and enjoy life a little more just by being near them.
Obediently, she opened her mouth for the bite. He was right, it was delicious. He was always right about the harvest, though. That was Nati. “He gets it from you, you know,” she said, repeating what she’d told Judicael. Kasper was their son — she’d merely been the surrogate — and it showed in so many ways.
“Which?” Nati looked like he was wandering off, but he managed not to step on a single plant, even if he wasn’t looking at his feet, and it seemed that he did have a general direction in mind. “Did you know that you can see our house from the top of most of these hills?”
“All of it. I blame you and Ju for all of it.” She loved all of them, though. Zilla and Nati weren’t sexual partners — he only slept with Judicael, as far as she knew — but that didn’t make him any less her family. She sighed and scrubbed her hands over her face, then started picking her way through the plants, following Nati through the field. “You get to explain to him why he’s not allowed to give me an ulcer, when we find him.”
She looked down the hill and, sure enough, there was the house, sprawling and beautiful and perfectly in tune with the rest of the landscape. She loved her home. It was Judicael and Mael’s family home, passed down through the generations since the family had colonized Luna, and Zilla had fallen in love with it as soon as she’d seen it, had fallen just as hard for the house and the farm as she had the twin brothers themselves.
“Of course. He should be more respectful of his mother.” Nati kept wandering.
“Do you think he’ll follow in your footsteps when he gets older?” Zilla asked. It seemed likely, at least at the moment. Kasper loved helping Nati with the blessings. He often asked if he could go along when Nati was traveling to other farms. He was only six, though, and his interests changed frequently. She rather liked the idea that he’d devote himself to Ceres, though; it would offer him the opportunity to travel without being in the kind of danger joining the Guard would put him in.
“I don’t know. I don’t think about that much,” Nati said, making his way down the back of the hill where it was a steeper than the other side. They could see the grove of trees that marked the Shrine not far off. “I think he has plenty of time to get tired of me before he’s old enough to think of those things. That’s the way of it. Children aren’t plants. They are a bit when they’re small, but then they turn into people.”
There was a track that ran by here, separated from the fields by a white fence. Cart traffic was rare even in season and the track was closed until harvest. Worshippers still came up once in a while, climbing the stile at the end of the road and walking to the shrine. It wasn’t like there weren’t other places to worship, but sometimes people preferred to make the walk to this shrine, perhaps in hopes of finding Nati there. He was a popular figure in some circles, not that Zilla thought he had any idea of that.
“Look.” Nati pointed downhill and Zilla could see the door to one of the equipment lockers standing ajar.
She rushed down to check inside. The children weren’t here, but they definitely had been; the careful stacks of baskets were tumbled over and, if she checked, Zilla knew she’d find several missing. “They went berry picking,” she said, turning back to Nati. “Did we miss them out in the fields?”
“Well, they were gone a while, and it wouldn’t take long to get enough to eat. They would go to the shrine,” Nati said. He sounded completely certain.
“Let’s go check. I’ll send Ju a message and let him know we’ve found some sign of them.” Zilla pulled out her datapad and quickly typed out a message, then followed Nati toward the shrine.
They passed under an arch overgrown with roses and into the shadows of old nut trees; Nati reached up and plucked a low-hanging white bloom from the arch. “Here.” He offered it to her, for an offering. “I’ll go ahead.”
In the light and shadows, he looked like something mythical, all long and leggy and golden. The shrine to Ceres was a dense and tangled garden; chaos except that Nati knew the meaning and place of every plant. Ju tried to explain once that it was like a poem or a hymn, something Nati was writing, but to the common eye, it just looked like a lot of green, with occasional ill-marked pools. Zilla had come in here once, looking for Nati, and ended up on her backside in a pool, up to her ears in green water. Nati had come running out from somewhere to make sure the fish were unhurt.
At the center of the shrine, ancient, white pillars from Earth stood around a dais and altar; set to one side was a brazier that always smouldered. The altar was usually bare when Nati wasn’t working, but today there was a little handful of strawberries on the white slab. Nati peered over the altar, down the other side, and then looked over his shoulder at Zilla, smiling.
Zilla set the blossom atop the altar and then stepped around it to see all three children sound asleep on the steps.
Kasper was sprawled to one side, a hand tucked beneath his dark, berry-stained cheek like a pillow. Savannah’s little shirt was patchy red with berry juice, and she’d managed to get the meat of the berry in her hair, somehow. Her head was pillowed on Kasper’s foot, of all things. Savely was, as usual, pristine. He’d obviously been eating the berries, too, because his lips were bright pink, but there weren’t any stains — dirt or juice — to be seen anywhere on him. He’d tucked himself against the stair rail, his back to the post, and his head lolled over on one shoulder. Precious, all of them.
“I believe preserving the moment for posterity is in order,” Nati said, rather quietly. “Ju and Mael shouldn’t miss this.”
He was right. Zilla pulled her datapad out again and brought up the camera function, then tip-toed around to get a good shot of the children. So sweet.
The recording was soundless, and not even Savannah, a notoriously light sleeper, stirred as it captured the image. “Now, how do we get them home without waking them?” Zilla whispered, putting the datapad away and setting her hands on her hips.
“We don’t. But we can wait until they wake if you want.” Nati rubbed a hand over her back lightly, less awkwardly than before. “I knew they were well.”
Zilla sighed and leaned into the touch. “Of course you did.” Nati had a way of simply knowing things to be true, without any explanation for why he thought such a thing. It drove Mael crazy, and Zilla thought maybe that had been one of the attractions for Judicael. She wished, sometimes, that she’d known them when Nati and Judicael had first gotten together; it would have been interesting to see how Mael had negotiated his twin’s relationship in the early days, before she’d come along.
“I need to go and get the doves, I can’t leave them in the sun too long. If you want me to carry the children back, I will. Or you can wait on Ju and Mael.”
“Go on,” Zilla said, smiling indulgently. Now that she knew where the children were, and that they were safe, she felt almost flooded with relief. “I’ll wait here. I have some work I can get done while they’re sleeping.” She stepped away from Nati to find somewhere to sit. “It’s still your job to talk to Kasper, though,” she said, pointing a finger at Nati.
“We will have words,” Nati said solemnly. In the shadow of one of the pillars was a tall golden urn with a well-sealed lid. Nati went to it and opened it, then reached inside and pulled out a handful of grain. Once he’d re-sealed the urn, he brought the grain to the brazier. Muttering a prayer, he tossed the grain onto the low flames and fire jumped up to feed. Nati dusted off his hands, bowed to the altar, and padded back the way they’d come.
Settling down on the lowest step, Zilla leaned back against the railing post. She pulled out her datapad to get some work done, but found herself watching Kasper, Savannah, and Savely sleep, instead. They were beautiful. For all that she’d teased Judicael and Nati about Kasper’s genetic link to them, she could see a bit of herself in him, too, and of Mael. She could see herself and all three of her husbands in each of the children — not just in their appearances, but in the way they spoke and thought and acted. Her beautiful, wonderful family. Even when they drove her crazy with their antics, she loved them all fiercely.