The Stolen by Celia Thomson

thought you would be interested. St. Petersburg, where Alyec is from.” She passed Chloe pictures of an exotic city, with spires too long and thin to be mistaken for those of American churches. Onion domes dotted the skyline. Everything seemed to be covered in gold like a fairy-tale kingdom.
    â€œWhat’s this?” Chloe pointed to one of the other photographs, of a building with a wall of large white stone blocks. A woman was walking along it, a woman with long black hair. “It looks familiar. I saw it in adream.” She suddenly felt the crowded market street again, the shady, quiet alley with the horrible smell.
    Kim looked at her strangely but turned the photograph over. “It is one of the old sulfur bath complexes in Sokhumi. This part of Abkhazia was a famous retreat with spas—the natural hot springs and mineral water there were supposed to have curative powers.”
    S
ulfur … This is a little too weird.
    â€œDoes sulfur smell like rotten eggs?” she asked, afraid of the answer.
    â€œAlmost identically.” Kim put the photograph down and looked Chloe in the eye. Her black velvety ears lay almost flat against her head, turned backward. Chloe couldn’t tell if she was upset or listening for footsteps in the hall. “You dreamt that, too?”
    â€œYeah. It was humid, and there were people, and … it was kind of confusing. Modern and ancient at the same time. And it
stank
. But I remember that wall.”
    â€œSokhumi is the city where our pride eventually settled after we left the Middle East for good. Only one of the Mai from that diaspora came
back
to Abkhazia—our previous pride leader. Her dream was to gather all of the scattered Mai in Eastern Europe and unite them somewhere, like the United States.” She carefully put the photograph away and closed the folder. “But she was killed in a skirmish between the Abkhazians and the Georgians.”
    â€œThere were other exiles, from all over, who rested and waited for her”
Chloe murmured.
    â€œWhat did you say?” Kim demanded, fixing her like a mouse with her eyes.
    â€œIn my dream I
was
the pride leader.”
    â€œThat’s … interesting,” Kim said slowly.
    â€œDo you think I could be related to her?”
    Do you think she could be my mother?
    Kim opened the notebook again and looked at the picture of the bathhouse in Sokhumi again. “It’s possible…. But she had only one daughter that we know of, and she is dead….” She sounded reticent, and somehow Chloe didn’t think it had anything to do with the disappointment about the two of them not being related. There was something else….
    Maybe she was jealous of Chloe possibly being the daughter of the old pride leader. Maybe it meant something, like inheritance in an aristocracy. Maybe she would take over when Sergei’s term was over. She wondered if that entailed anything besides running a real estate empire and tracking down lost and orphaned Mai.
    What was it the two guards had said when they were rescuing her?
Where’s our glorious Pride Leader?
This
wouldn’t even have cost him a life. Assuming he has more than one
.
    â€œKim—before I went unconscious, one of the people who rescued me said something about the pride leader not risking losing ‘one of his lives.’ What did she mean by that?”
    â€œTraditionally, in the past, the leader of the Pride isalso a true military leader, first into a battle or on the hunt, last to retreat—” One of her ears flicked. A moment later Chloe heard the noise, too: footsteps echoing loudly down the corridor. It sounded like Olga; she was probably coming to check up on Chloe.
    Kim leaned close in, too close for a normal human. Kind of like Amy’s cat, when he would push his nose and foul-smelling kitty mouth into Chloe’s, smelling delicately around her face before withdrawing. “Listen to me, Chloe.
Do