The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novices kilba Sch and Bruhman1032.
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
---
Mark lay in bed for a while in the gray pre-dawn light and let himself do something he hadn't done in months. Absolutely nothing. There were no briefings queued for him to worry about, notifications waiting to be dismissed, or department heads, human or artificial, requesting his attention. He'd cleared the entire day three weeks ago and had defended it against every encroachment since.
He had made sure that he would dedicate today to spending time with Lyra.
He got up, showered, and dressed in actual clothes rather than letting his pendant do the work for him, putting on a plain shirt and a pair of work pants, then went downstairs to start making breakfast. The kitchen was quiet, early light cutting through the windows in long, pale bars across the counter, and he moved through it slowly, savoring the simple pleasure of cracking eggs from the chickens they had managed to clone and engineer and slicing fruit without anyone needing anything from him.
"You're up early," Marcos said, his voice low through the kitchen speaker to match the hour.
"Big day ahead of us," Mark said.
"So it is," Marcos confirmed, pausing for a moment. "I've taken the liberty of routing all non-critical matters away from you for the next eighteen hours. Reginald has the colony, and Knox has the perimeter. I have everything else. If something catastrophic occurs, I will inform you. However, if something merely urgent occurs, I will handle it and tell you tomorrow."
"Thank you, Marcos," Mark said.
"Don't thank me," Marcos said. "You rarely get to spend time with her other than when you're home. Plus, I think you're due for a vacation, so just go and be little Lyra's father today. That's worth more than anything you'd accomplish while working at a terminal."
Mark smiled and didn't answer, because Marcos was right and they both knew it.
Lyra came downstairs twenty minutes later, dragging her feet and rubbing her eyes, her hair a tangled nest on one side. She wore an oversized shirt that hung past her knees, which she'd claimed as pajamas, and stopped at the bottom of the stairs, squinting at him.
By the time her feet hit the landing, Mark had the pan going, eggs folding softly against the heat, a few strips of cured meat crisping at the edge, and a pot of colony-grown coffee filling the kitchen with a mouthwatering aroma. He cooked for her most mornings, but he wasn't always home when she woke up.
She climbed onto the counter stool and watched him work, chin propped on her hand.
"You're home," she said.
"Yes, I'm home," Mark said.
"All the way home? Or home until Marcos calls you about something?" Lyra asked, tilting her head.
Mark slid a plate in front of her and sat down across the counter with his own. "All the way. I cleared the whole day three weeks ago. Nobody needs me today except you."
Lyra studied him over the rim of her plate, squinting as she weighed the claim. She was a careful girl, slow to take a thing at face value and quick to ask the second question most kids never thought of. It was one of the things he loved most about her and one of the things that annoyed him and made him ache, because lately her careful questions had started circling the same worry.
"Why?" she asked. "Did something happen?"
Lyra wasn't trying to wound him, but her question told him plainly that somewhere in the last stretch of long nights and missed dinners, she had learned to read his presence as a warning sign instead of comfort.
"Nothing happened," he said. "I just wanted to spend a day with my daughter. I don't remember making that against the law, or did I?"
She considered that, then nodded slowly, the worry easing out of her shoulders. "Okay. So what are we going to do?"
"Whatever you want," Mark replied. "We can walk the city and see what there is to see. Maybe get into a little trouble."
"What kind of trouble?" Lyra asked, her eyes beginning to shine.
"The kind that doesn't end with Dr. Corven lecturing me about being a bad influence," Mark chuckled, earning a real laugh. Lyra dug into her breakfast, and if she could have, she'd swallow it whole. She immediately hopped off the stool as soon as she was finished.
"Go brush your teeth and get dressed," Mark said.
She shot up the stairs with more energy than he'd seen in weeks, and he stood in the quiet kitchen, his enhanced hearing letting him hear her moving above him. He let himself relax, thinking back to when he first took Lyra under his care, how simple it was to travel the stars and have her stare out in awe, and how she wouldn't leave his side.
He reached up and touched the pendant hanging around his throat, and after a moment of deliberation, he took off his shirt and pants, and thought of an outfit to wear for the day over what he had on. The nanoweave formed over his bare skin, creating a short-sleeve grey-and-black open flannel over a white T-shirt, dark grey shorts, and, instead of boots, comfortable sneakers.
He looked at his reflection on the window and nodded to himself. "Yeah, I got shit on."
They left the manor as the suns began to rise, drowning the city in gold-tinted red. Lyra dressed in a green tunic and sturdy boots, and she'd made an honest attempt at her hair, leaving it more tangled than before. Mark said nothing about it, taking her hand as they stepped out into the morning together.
The city still surprised him sometimes. He'd watched it grow, signed off on half its plans, and even so, some mornings he turned a corner and didn't recognize the place. The military base, which sat just behind the city hall, was now the city's heart. Under Mason's guidance, the colony had been reshaped into rings spreading outward from the military base.
The main avenue ran straight from the base's outer gate to the western wall, paved with S-Alloy slabs that absorbed sunlight rather than reflected it. The buildings along it had grown with color and small, deliberate details. Someone had trained flowering vines along the residential blocks' second-story railings, and they spilled purple and white flowers down the facades.
"Where are we going first?" Lyra asked, swinging their joined hands.
"I've been cooped up for a while now," Mark said with a contemplative face. "How about you choose?"
Lyra tried to imitate Mark's contemplative look as she decided. "Then let's go to the big park. The new one with the pond."
"Then the big park it is," Mark said with a smile.
As they walked, the avenue began to fill with people, though it never felt crowded, since, after all, the colony still numbered fewer than a thousand. People nodded as they passed, and a few offered a good morning, which Mark returned in kind, but no one stopped him. No one pulled him aside with a problem that couldn't wait. Word had spread that the colony's unproclaimed leader was off the clock, and the city had quietly agreed to leave him to it.
Lyra narrated things as they went, pointing out what she knew and asking after what she didn't. The bakery on the corner of the third ring, where the sweet rolls were, in her professional opinion, better than anything anyone could make.
They then passed Esther's shop. It was a shop that had sprouted from the ability to do more, thanks to the systems put in place, and where hand-made clothes were sold.
Then they came across the little plaza where a knot of older colonists met each morning to play a card game whose rules hadn't been cemented yet, and the players just made them up as they went.
"That's Mr. Aldous." Lyra pointed at an old man laying down cards. "He always wins. Mrs. Patel says he cheats, but she can't prove it."
"Does he now?" Mark asked with a soft smile.
"Yeah," Lyra confirmed. "It is so obvious. But he's really old, so everyone lets him."
Mark laughed at her remarks.
By the time they reached the park, the morning had fully settled over the city, the suns high enough to begin to warm the air, and Lyra slipped her hand free from Mark's and ran ahead the second the green opened in front of her. The park was Ceres' work as much as Mason's. It was a wide stretch of cultivated grassland threaded with paths and dotted with groves of transplanted trees. At its center lay a pond, fed by a recirculating system Mason had built to keep the water fresh. Reeds stood thick along the banks. An animal that kind of looked like a duck paddled across the surface, dragging a small wake behind it.
Lyra crouched at the water's edge, watching the not-quite-ducks with awe.
"Ceres says that they are called marsh-skimmers," she said to Mark when he caught up. "They eat the bugs that would eat the crops, so it's good to have them around. She likes them a lot, but she also liked everything."
"That she does," Mark said, settling onto a bench near the bank. "But how do you know what Ceres likes?"
"I talk to her a lot," she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "Through the school speakers. She also helps with the garden project. She knows everything about plants. Did you know some flowers only open at night? They're called moonbloom and they glow a little, and the bugs that pollinate them can only see in the dark. Ceres showed me a picture."
"I didn't know that," Mark said, genuinely unaware.
"Neither did I until she told me." Lyra brushed the dirt off her knees and climbed onto the bench, leaning into his side. "I like the AIs. They talk to me like I'm an equal. A lot of the grown-ups treat me like a little kid."
Mark put an arm around her. "You are a little kid, Bug. But you're also very gifted. Anyone who can't see that has the problem, not you."
She didn't answer, pressing closer to his side, and they sat watching the marsh-skimmers patrol the water.
After a while, they decided to keep exploring, and about halfway around the far side of the pond, they ran into some wolves.
Three of them lay in a loose heap in the shade of a transplanted grove, their gray-and-white coats broken by the light filtering through the leaves. They were huge, though not as big as Atlas or Ivory, each one near the size of a small horse. A collar circled each thick neck, a slim band of dark alloy carrying a small sensor array and a compact speaker, the translation collars Marcos had built to bridge the gap between wolf and human speech.
Lyra sped up, leaning toward them, her whole face open with interest.
"Easy, now," Mark said, catching her shoulder before she could close the distance. "Let them come to you. Even friendly ones don't like being rushed."
The largest of the three raised its head as they approached, ears turning, and held them in a steady gaze. Mark knew it by its markings rather than its name. It had a clean blaze of white across the chest that ran true through Atlas and Ivory's bloodline.
The collar gave a soft crackle, and a built voice came out of it, the translation rough but clear enough. "Pack-leader's cub."
Lyra grinned. "It knows who I am."
"You sound pleased, not surprised," Mark said.
"Why would I be surprised? They're smart. Ceres says they remember faces for years. And I was always with Snowball, but she became a big meanie and doesn't like to be with me anymore. I think she left the city, I haven't seen her in a while." She crouched down, bringing herself to the wolf's level. "I think I saw this one before, by the school gardens. Hello again."
The wolf rose without hurry and padded toward them. Mark stayed where he was without any worry. To him, the wolves had become just like dogs, just bigger. At the end of the day, they hadn't attacked a single human, so he knew the animal meant no harm, and he wanted Lyra to read that for herself. It lowered its great head to her height and breathed her in, an absurdly gentle gesture for something that size.
"Small one," the collar stated. "Grows. Last season small. Now big."
"I'm bigger now," Lyra repeated.
"They keep better track of us than most people would believe," Mark said.
She laid her hand on the wolf's head, and the wolf let her, its amber eyes drifting half shut. The two smaller wolves watched from the shade, alert but unbothered, and after a moment, one of them let out an enormous yawn, flashing teeth as long as Mark's fingers, and slumped back into the grass with boredom.
"Why do they come into the city?" Lyra asked, working her fingers into the thick fur.
"There are a few reasons for that," Mark said. "Ceres laid out corridors so they can move through without trouble. We also don't hunt what they hunt, so the territory's good to them. And I think they're curious. They watch us and try to work us out, just like we do with them."
"Pack shares territory," the collar put in, as though it wanted to set the record straight. "Two-legs. No fight."
"No fighting," Mark agreed, looking the wolf in the eye. "We'd like to keep it that way."
The wolf made a low sound deep in its chest, something between a rumble and a huff. The collar let it pass without translation, but Mark understood well enough that it was agreeing. It held his gaze a moment longer, then turned, knocked its nose hard enough against Lyra to stagger her into a fit of giggles, and ambled back to the shade with its packmates.
Lyra watched them go, awestruck.
"Best thing that's happened all day," she declared.
"Don't get so ahead of yourself," Mark said. "The day's barely begun for you to go ranking things this early."
A few hours later, they were having lunch at the bakery Lyra liked. It had small tables set out front. She wolfed down two of the sweet rolls she'd been talking up all morning while Mark drank a cup of the dark colony coffee. Hollis, a broad man who'd worked a freighter galley before the colony, came out to top off the cup.
"Good to see you out, sir," he said. "And good to see the little one looking this happy. She stops by most mornings on her way to school. Polite, every time. Always a thank you. You raised her right."
Mark looked at Lyra, who had cream on her nose and her full attention fixed on a third roll. "I'm trying. Most days I feel like I'm getting it wrong."
"That's usually the sign you're getting it right. The ones who reckon they've got it all sorted are the ones who haven't." Hollis said, clasping Mark's shoulder. He gave him a short nod, went back inside, and Mark sat there watching Lyra eat, telling himself the man probably knew what he was talking about.
After lunch, they walked the rest of the city. Mark let Lyra pick the pace and the path, and she led him on a route driven by her curiosity, doubling back twice when something caught her eye.
They stopped to watch a crew raise a new residential block, the printed sections swinging into place under the lifter drones while Mason's voice came from one of the site's speakers, calling adjustments by the centimeter. They passed through the central square, where the quest board stood, and Lyra read the listings as if she were actually going to do them.
"I could do this one," she said, tapping a listing. "Sort seeds for the agriculture team. That sounds easy enough."
"You would have to clear it with Ceres," Mark said.
"But I already talked to Ceres," Lyra countered.
"Then you're already halfway hired," Mark said. "After all, connections are some of the strongest driving factors when it comes to hiring."
As the day progressed and the suns began their slow drop toward the western wall, the light slid from amber to deep copper, washing over the whole city. Around this time, Lyra's energy finally began to give out. Her steps began to drag, and her running commentary thinned to the occasional murmur. Mark crouched and brought her up onto his back without being asked. Lyra looped her arms around his neck and set her chin on his shoulder.
"Today was good," she said, closing her eyes and letting out a yawn.
"Yeah," Mark said. "It really was."
"You're not going to vanish again, are you?" Lyra asked. "Not going back to your office to work?"
The question was almost slurred since Lyra was half asleep. He slowed his stride and took his time answering.
"I can't promise I'll never be busy," he said. "There are a lot of things that need to be done, and a fair share of it lands on me. But that's why I built the AIs. So I wouldn't have to carry all of it by myself anymore."
He shifted her weight a little higher. "The only thing I can promise you is to try to do better, Bug. About being here. About being your dad first and everything else after. If I let it get bad, I'm sorry. You deserved more than that from me."
Lyra stayed quiet for long enough that he thought she might have drifted off to sleep.
"It's okay, Papa," she finally said. "What I like is that you are here now."
Mark gave a bitter smile as his heart melted, then carried her home.
When they reached the manor, it was completely dark, which was unusual because the house's lights usually came on by themselves at dusk. Mark set Lyra down at the front door, and she scrubbed at her tired eyes while he reached for the handle.
"Marcos, the lights are out," Lyra said.
"Are they?" Marcos answered in an innocent tone that made Mark smile, because he knew why the lights were off. "How strange, little Lyra. I think it would be best if you go in and have a look."
Mark pushed the door open, letting Lyra step into the dark entryway, and the lights came on all at once as the house erupted.
"SURPRISE!"
Lyra shrieked in fright and grabbed onto Mark's leg. Her face went through a wave of expressions. She was confused at first, then understanding dawned, and joy took over.
Green and gold streamers looped across the ceiling, which had, lately, become her favorite. A banner ran the length of the far wall with a "HAPPY BIRTHDAY LYRA" that was spelled out in hand-painted letters that wavered just slightly. The long table had a ton of food, and at its center stood a three-tier cake crowned with sugar flowers Lyra had been talking about earlier. Moonblooms.
The room was full of people. Dr. Corven stood by the cake with her arms folded and a real smile on her face, rare enough that Mark marked it. Severus and Titus held up the back wall, both wearing party hats someone had clearly browbeaten them into, and both looking like they'd rather face live fire. Octavia had let her hair loose over her shoulder, her scarred face open for anyone to see.
Talos stood near the window, his prosthetic hand resting on the sill, towering over them all, and even his weathered features carried something that, on a Strathari, counted as delight. Kenjiro stood with a warm smile. Sister Elara was there. Her friends from school and the Orphanage were there, though some had been adopted by other colony members.
Every speaker in the house was alive, and as the shout of welcome faded, and seven voices tumbled over one another in a disorderly chorus.
"Happy birthday, Lyra!" Ceres rang out over them all, the brightest of the lot.
"Many happy returns," said Reginald.
"Happy birthday, kid," Mason celebrated.
"Congratulations on completing another orbit," Ferrum offered.
"Happy birthday, ma'am," Knox said, though it sounded like a salute.
"Happy birthday, sweetheart," Vita said warmly.
"Felicitations on the anniversary of your birth," Sterling declared with a flourish. "May the year ahead prove as remarkable as you are."
Lyra stood rooted in the doorway, her hand still locked on Mark's leg. Then her face crumpled as she burst into tears.
Mark thought something was wrong, then she spun and threw her arms around his waist, pressing her face into his side. "I thought you forgot. I thought you forgot, Papa. You were so busy, and I didn't say anything because I didn't want to make you feel bad about it, but I thought you forgot my birthday and I was going to spend it on my own and..."
Mark knelt and pulled her in. He held her while she cried into his shoulder. The room had gone quiet, and everyone watched with tenderness.
"I didn't forget," he said, his throat tightening. "Bug, I could never forget. I've been planning this for ages. I didn't forget. I never could."
Lyra drew back, her face wet and red, still not ready to believe him. "Like back in the station? You planned it?"
"Every piece," Mark said, smiling. "The Moonblooms on the cake, I had already known what your favorite flower was. The whole city had a hand in making your first birthday in this new world of ours special."
He wiped the tears off her cheeks with his thumbs. "You're loved, Lyra. By more people than you can imagine. You were never going to spend today alone."
She looked around the room again, at every face turned toward her, at the streamers, the banner, and the cake, then back at her father. The crying broke apart into a hiccuping laugh, and she threw herself at him a second time and held on.
"This is the best thing that's ever happened to me," she said into his shirt. "And this time I mean it. This is the new bestest thing ever."
"I told you not to go ranking things too early," Mark said with a chuckle as he held his daughter there in the warm light of a house packed with people who loved her.
"Now," Marcos announced over the speakers, "I'm told there is cake. And I have it on excellent authority that Dr. Corven intends to oversee the cutting of it personally, so I'd recommend an orderly queue."
"There will be order," Dr. Corven confirmed, taking up the cake knife with open menace, "or there will be no cake."
The room laughed, and the party found its feet, and Lyra was carried off into the middle of it, handed from one embrace to the next. Mark stood at the edge and watched for a while, then felt someone come up beside him.
Talos had crossed the room, his prosthetics carrying him with a faint unevenness. He stopped at Mark's shoulder and looked out over the celebration.
"This is good," Talos said. "A child being surrounded. Being loved... My people had long forgotten this. We lived too long for birth milestones to be celebrated. Plus, they thought too much of forever, and not enough of now."
"Yeah," Mark said. "We try not to make that mistake."
Talos nodded slowly. "Good."
His eye drifted to Lyra, who'd just been hoisted onto Severus' shoulders so she could get a proper look at the top of the cake. "The now is worth more than they ever knew... And that is not something anyone ever realizes until the now becomes just a memory."
---
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