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CHAPTER ONE

The afternoon breeze had come in right on time with the tide, rustling its ghostly fingers through the loose-woven, blue-green grasses of his hut. It sent the thin twist of smoke above his small, ornamental brazier into a disorganized panic, picked up the heat and cloying smell of the smoldering herbs, and left as a gift in their place the cool, clean scent of salt, sea, and sand. The Tea Master sat sideways in the doorway, a scraggly black cat with one white ear asleep in his lap, his back against the thin frame, and closed his eyes to the sun and turquoise waters as the breeze caressed his sweaty, tanned face, as if to say: I know you.

He could taste the distant rain with his indrawn breath, feel the lightning in it, and knew the storm would pass quickly when it finally came sometime overnight. For now, though, the crowds were thick and loud and happy, and he opened his eyes again to watch the mesmerizing dance of people—human, alt-human, not human—all with a love of the beach in common. Except one, who moved among them, peering at faces, searching.

A small, chirpy flock of ehrlets hunted at tide's edge, unconcerned by the people. Halfway between dragonfly and lemming, he could almost believe they were fat seagulls if he squinted enough, and then the sea, too, almost looked like home. There was nothing to be done about the two crescent moons hanging unevenly high in the sky above, although there had been plenty of nights on Earth he'd had enough to drink to believe he was seeing a dozen.

Though, truth was, he hadn't had a drink since the night he arrived. Arrived suggested something more casual and less disorienting than how his time there had begun—one moment standing in an alien spaceship and the next being ankle-deep in surf with a cat attempting to claw its way inside his exosuit—but it had been the clean restart he'd needed. Someplace else, someone else, all in a subjective instant. He wondered if he would change again, now that he could see his endless, peaceful, perfect summer was, in fact, coming to as abrupt an end as it had begun.

The sky had shifted into the striated purples and reds of the Corallan sunset, framing the not-quite-human silhouette of the seeker against the half-dome of sun just now slipping below the horizon. They strode now with purpose, determined and relentless as the tide, unerringly toward his hut.

Three standard years, four months, and twenty-two days to find me, he thought. Am I more upset or relieved?

He wasn't sure; of all the people he expected to finally track him down, this one had never even crossed his mind as a possibility.

She stopped and stood in front of him, hands fidgeting together in front of her, extending and then retracting one claw at a time in a gesture he'd long ago learned was one of extreme stress. "Fergus Ferguson?" she said, at last. "You've changed color. Nanites?"

"The sun."

"I didn't know humans could do that." 

"It's called a tan."

"It suits you. You look much less like a pale, dead cave-thing." 

"Thanks, I think," he said. "Sit, Qai?"

She did, folding her white-gray fur-covered legs under her with all the grace of a panther, her long tail curled tightly against her thigh, and watched warily as he made her a cup of tea. His cat came out, took one look at the alien, and ghosted back into the safety of the hut.

He set the tea in front of her on a hand-carved wooden tray. Taking it, her hand shaking, she sipped, and then curled her lips back in a grimace, showing sharp teeth. "It's bitter," she said.

"It's meant to be," he said. "The tea is a metaphor for life."

She set the cup down. "I have no need for any more bitterness, then," she said. "I fear you will not forgive me adding some to yours."

"If you're here, you must need me." 

"I do."

He tossed the remaining tea on the sand, turned the cup upside down on the tray, and stood. "So, where are we going?"

"Space," she said. 

"Of course."