Second Wave by Anne McCaffrey Page B

coded into you. You’ll learn as you age and are around your prototypes more. They are so arrogant I sometimes think they created us to hold any humility that may have been part of their original characters.”
    “Nobles have no need for humility. They are infallible,” the new batch lackey replied with a sincerity that the others, Narhii could tell, found pitiable.
    “That’s what I liked best about Grimalkin. He was not infallible. And it was unfair, his disgrace. He brought back the mutant, even though he had to steal her egg from her mother, who had saved his life, you know, and was his friend, before the twin was born. But they were angry that he didn’t take both twins!”
    “How do you know that?”
    “My sib overheard Lady Akasa complaining about it. She laughed about how, since he was so devoted to that family and had left the other poor twin to grow up among them, the nobles had stripped him of his timer. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they froze him in his alter form, even regressing the form so that he was presented as a juvenile feline to grow up with the twin.”
    Narhii ducked back into the laboratory, stunned by this information and needing time to digest it. Not only did she have people, she had a twin! And she had been stolen from a brave mother before she could be born.
    She had to return to her people— had to. But the timer was useless beyond a certain point, and she gathered from the chronology of the technician’s thoughts that she had been born after the damage, in the distant future. If only she could lay hands on Grimalkin’s timer and learn how to use it, she would be able to return to her family, to her twin, and expose the disgraced noble, now her sister’s cat, for what he was.
    “Mu, there you are!” Odus said. “It is time to continue yesterday’s session. But today we must probe a bit deeper.”

Chapter 9

    N o, Khorii!” Elviiz said, holding her back when she would have dived into the water. “You will not swim.” He dragged her back into the shuttle, Khiindi a jump ahead of them. “The wii - Balakiire has an amphibious mode. If there are monsters, the vessel will be much less vulnerable than you are.”
    And though she seethed at her android brother’s assumption of command over her actions, she had to admit, as the wii-Balakiire sped into the sea and submerged, that he was correct.
    “Aunt Neeva and the rest of our people, especially those on the rescue teams, would be displeased if you perished,” Elviiz said.
    “What if the monster can attack vessels more easily than people and kills us all?” Khorii asked, still sulking a little.
    “Then at least I will not have to bear their reproach,” Elviiz answered, quite seriously. Of course, he was seldom anything but serious.
    Even so, the wii - Balakiire , with guidance from Khorii’s psychic sense of the location of Nanahomea and the others, brought them there quickly and with an unexpected benefit.
    Mokilau, though covered with strange sores and bruises and clearly shaken, floated beside Nanahomea while the remaining elders supported him.
    At Khorii’s insistence, Elviiz opened the underwater airlock and she swam out to join the LoiLoiKuans.
    “Your ship made the monster release Mokilau,” Nanahomea said. Khorii swam to the old mer man and gently applied her horn to his wounds, which healed instantly.
    All underwater healing did not deplete her—just the plague, so far. Unlike the last time she used her horn to heal while inside the ocean, the water was not disease-infested, nor were any of the other people, so her horn’s power localized to where it was most needed and restored Mokilau’s body to its uninjured state.
    The old man’s white lashes raised, his chest heaved, and he grinned, then flipped in the water, took a brief swim, and returned clutching something. “A trophy,” he said, flourishing a long green object that looked half fin and half frond. “I took a piece of its tail.” With a bow that