Sebastian closed the office door and turned back around to face his former partner. Technically Hazel was also his legal wife, but that was one of those headaches he was going to wait to solve until after things got a little more settled.

  “You baby him too much. That’s why he turned out like this,” Hazel said.

  He shook his head. “I had to learn how to care for him. He’s not like Nora. He was born with a gentleness in him that I never could teach out of him.”

  “Because you baby him.”

  Sebastian rolled his eyes as he walked back over. “You’re being too harsh on him. If you want a relationship with him, you have to ease up, Hazel. He’s not even going to like you at this rate.”

  “I don’t need Fletcher to like me. He’s my son, not my friend. I’m going to see that he makes something with the rest of his life, with or without your help.” Hazel walked around her desk. In her office. As a general.

  Sometimes he regretted that he was the one who ended up with the permanent spy position, especially seeing how much prestige Hazel accumulated while he whittled away his time in the colonies, dredging up small pieces of information to pass on in hopes of making a tiny difference in the secret war effort.

  But it had to be that way. She’d always been more of the soldier and him the spy, that’d been clear ever since their first assignment together during the Second Unhuman War three and a half decades prior.

  “He’s no soldier.” Sebastian watched as Hazel pulled out a bottle of whiskey alongside two glasses. Of course she also had access to the fancy booze.

  “Want a drink?” She poured herself a glass and held the bottle above the other.

  “That’d be great.”

  “Being a soldier is in his blood, Seb.” Hazel replaced the stopper on the bottle and then held one of the glasses out to him.

  Sebastian took it in hand, not drinking quite yet. “His degree is in math. Find him an analyst role. He’d be great at something like that.”

  “You’d see our son wasting his life behind a desk?”

  “I’d like to see him happy.”

  “He will be once he gets settled.” She clinked her glass against his. “To having the Anders family whole once more.”

  Sebastian hid his frustration. Of course Fletcher went off blabbering about becoming a teacher and all that nonsense. Sebastian had gone to a lot of effort to hide as much of Fletcher’s shortcomings—shortcomings by Hazel’s standards—from his spouse, but since she’d gotten to confront Fletcher without him there, the boy had been idiotic enough to spill all sorts of things Sebastian would have preferred Hazel didn’t know about, at least not right off the bat.

  They both took a sip, and Sebastian embraced the smoky, woody taste of the liquor.

  Hazel sat down. “I already spoke to Colonel Simmons out at Fort Wooddell. Fletcher will be joining the Hotshots.”

  “Hotshots? Come on, Hazel. Fletcher will struggle enough in standard training. He doesn’t need anything that intense yet.” Sebastian took the seat opposite of her which only recently had been occupied by Fletcher.

  That boy… He couldn’t believe how many problems Fletcher managed to cause in such a short time, and all by accident too. Maybe he had been too soft during his upbringing. “Besides, he’ll never agree to it.”

  “That’s where you come in. He values your opinion highly, Sebastian. Your first official assignment is to get him onboard. Oh, and, you’ll be taking over the informant sector from Garcia.”

  “That’s a little too important of a role for a lowly lieutenant, don’t you think?” Sebastian had never been promoted past first lieutenant thanks to his illustrious spy career.

  “The paperwork is already in. You’ll be a full colonel by the end of the week.”

  “Careful. It’ll be your job I come for next.”

  Hazel leaned back, glass in hand and a smile on her face. “Did you ever think we’d be here?”

  “Landing cushy office jobs or arguing about our child’s future?”

  “You know, I hated you the whole first year we worked together.”

  “I hated you for the first three,” Sebastian countered.

  “Even when we got married and had Nora?”

  “A little less during the conceiving part of that process.”

  They both laughed and sipped their drinks.

  “Fletcher’s birthday is a couple of days away. I brought a few of his favorite books from his collection with me as a gift. You wanna sign your name to it too?” Sebastian asked.

  Hazel shook her head. “I don’t need you to teach me how to parent. I managed Nora just fine.”

  He had his own thoughts about how Nora turned out, but that wasn’t an argument he was ever going to get into with her. Trying to change Hazel’s mind about anything was a wasted cause. She was a soldier first, even before being a parent, a mindset he’d personally never gotten behind. Hazel’s top priority would always be the Mixed, not her children, and he saw it as his personal mission to make up the difference for Nora and Fletcher, though he couldn’t say he was doing all that great of a job at it.

  They would never agree about Fletcher. Sebastian stood by his decision to raise his son to be kind to Unhumans, knowing that the transition into the Mixed, a society full of Mixhumans, would be easier if his son didn’t have the blanket bigotry most Human children were taught. But Hazel saw Fletcher as a traitor to his people and to her own ideals, something that she might not ever forgive. But it was his job as Fletcher’s father to help her at least try to move past her own bias, however difficult of a task it might be.

  Sebastian downed the last of the whiskey and set the glass on the desk. “Thanks for the drink. I’m going to find Nora and see if I can smooth things over with her.”

  Hazel reached across the desk and grabbed his arm before he could stand. “It’s really good to have you back, Sebastian. Things have changed while you’ve been gone, and I don’t have many people close by that I can fully trust.”

  He winked. “Sounds just like old times.” Patting her hand, he stood and nodded to her. “General.”

  “Lieutenant.”

  Sebastian walked out of the office as Hazel’s words sunk in. Surely the Mixed couldn’t have fallen that far since he left. Then again, if even half the rumors he heard surrounding the “Hexed Human terrorists” were true, then things had changed a lot, and the thought of that worried him, especially with how deeply entrenched Nora was in everything. Not to mention Fletcher would soon be in the same boat.

  Being in Finnack Mountain Base again felt strange. It was like coming home, but everything was just a little bit wrong. And there seemed to be a lot more eyes watching his movements, further triggering the warning bells in his head. Something intense was going on behind closed doors amongst the Mixed leadership, and Sebastian suspected that Hazel was on the losing side.

  Sebastian flexed his hands as he walked, his feet sure in their path. It would be fine. He’d adjust. Just like riding a bike, he could never really forget how to be a soldier. Obviously he was just being jumpy right now after having spent so much of his life acting as a deep agent in the colony and then his recent stalking thanks to Fletcher’s stupidity.

  He shook his head without thinking about it. How could his son have been so naive? Defying a Human general and the Security Secretary? Why did Taki take such an interest in Fletcher anyway? Had he realized who he was, with his relation to one of Taki’s former protegees?

  Or did the general pick up on the same threads as Sebastian? Whatever Fletcher claimed, Sebastian refused to believe that the Unhumans dragged him out to Bren’it’p for something as minor as education.

  The only good news about the disastrous reunion was that Fletcher was safe from whatever plots awaited him. The assassination attempt was surely only the start of some larger plan, though for the life of him, Sebastian couldn’t fathom what the end goal would be for a single Human living among the Unhumans.

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  He resisted the urge to sigh as he made his way through the base. There was still the matter of Fletcher’s secret Hexing. At least the boy had enough sense to not go spreading anything about that during his brief time as a captive.

  Sebastian was very familiar with how Mixhumanity worked, and the one thing he was sure of was that there’d never, ever been a case of a Human becoming mixed with a [Demanlic].

  If Hazel thought she had big plans for Fletcher’s future now, he could only imagine how much worse it would get if she learned about his true potential. If he had his way, he and Fletcher both would take that secret to the grave. It would be better for everyone that way.

  His destination loomed before him, and Sebastian slowed to a stop. He’d been so busy worrying about one child, he’d forgotten to properly plan what he was going to say to his eldest.

  Nora might not forgive him for this one, but he had to make her understand why he did what he did. She’d always been jealous of Fletcher since he was raised in the “luxuries” of the colonies, and try as he might during the few times he got to see her during the twenty-three-and-a-half years since the family split, he hadn’t been able to fully heal that hurt in being taken away while Fletcher got to stay. She was mad at Sebastian for keeping her existence a secret, but it seemed she managed to redirect quite a bit of that anger towards Fletcher anyway. Sebastian had a sneaking suspicion it came back to that old jealousy about her younger brother seeming to get a better life than her.

  Fletcher had only been two when the family split up in the refugee camp, which meant he didn’t know anything but life with only his father. Nora, on the other hand, had been seven, plenty old enough to keep hold of the core memories of what it was like to be a whole family while also having the understanding that it would never be like that again.. No wonder she was bitter about all that was taken from her while Fletcher lived in ignorant bliss.

  Shaking his arms out, Sebastian stepped into the training room. He hadn’t gotten much time with Nora, but those precious few times he’d been able to return to the base for longer debriefings, he’d gotten to know most of her obvious habits—like going to hit things when her anger got the best of her.

  This was one of the small rooms which held older equipment, but Nora had favored it ever since she was a teenager and first learned martial arts. Just as he expected, he found her at the center, boxing gloves on as she unleashed a fury of punches into a hanging sandbag.

  It always caught him off guard how much like her mother she was. He found it a little unfair that both kids took so much after Hazel. Fletcher may have shared his hair color and build, but those green eyes were so distinctive, it marked him as Hazel’s son more than anything else. And then Nora shared every one of Hazel’s attributes except the eyes, leaving him the odd man out in the Anders family.

  Sebastian stepped behind the sandbag and grabbed it as it swung, holding it in place for her.

  “Go away,” she said. “I don’t want your half-hearted apologies. You made it pretty clear who your chief priority is.”

  “It’s not like that, Nora, and you know that,” Sebastian said.

  She stopped hitting the bag. “Why didn’t you tell him? Are you really that ashamed of me?”

  “I didn’t tell Fletcher about you because I didn’t want him to grow up missing more than he had to. I couldn’t avoid telling him about his mother, but adding in a sister he would never know seemed extra cruel.”

  “Well, it was pretty cruel to lie to me about it for all those years. I’d always ask you to share things with Fletcher, and you never once brought anything back from him with the claim it was too dangerous. For twenty-three years I’ve believed I was forming a relationship with him through letters, but no. You didn’t give him a single one.” Nora’s face was hard and angry. There was hurt buried in there, but she emulated her mother in trying to hide such things.

  “I’m sorry I lied. I should have told you the truth.” Sebastian had no problem admitting his fault. This was one of those issues he kept putting off solving, but clearly that had been a rather large mistake.

  “Wanna spar?”

  That was the closest to an “I forgive you” he was going to get for a while.

  He smiled. “You’re on, kid. But don’t go crying to your mom when you lose.”

  “Bring it, old man.”

  Sirens went off as they walked to the mat at the far wall, but neither of them were worried. Just a radiation warning for those who might be outside where the danger lay.

  Sebastian pulled off his shoes as Nora removed her gloves. Both of them stretched out—Sebastian more than his daughter given that the years had long ago caught up to him. His doctor always said he was in exceptional health for his age, but Sebastian knew what he used to be, and it was hard to accept that he’d never be in that kind of shape again.

  “Ready?” Nora asked as she stepped onto the mat, her feet bouncing with each step.

  “Please. I’ve been doing this since before you were even born.” Sebastian squared up against her, raising his fists to chest height and remaining light on his feet.

  “Say when.” Nora matched his form.

  Sebastian struck out towards her shoulder, catching her off guard just enough to get a glancing blow. “When.”

  Nora laughed as she jumped to the side. “That was dirty, but it’ll be the last hit you land.”

  “Big talk doesn’t mean anything without something to back it up.”

  Her right fist lashed out to his stomach, but Sebastian was quick enough to block it with his own hands. He was then forced to step back as her left arm swung up towards his side.

  Nora kept him on the defensive, sending a kick towards his abdomen that he barely managed to catch. He held onto it, forcing her to hop around on one leg. She was just out of arm’s reach, until all at once she spun away, ripping her leg free but giving him the opening for his own strikes.

  Sebastian kept his hits moderate as he went on the offensive, ensuring they were quick and light. Nora mostly ducked and sidestepped them, showcasing her advanced agility. Whatever he lacked in speed at his age, Sebastian made up for with experience, his instincts giving him plenty of notice whenever Nora changed tactics or tried for a sneaky punch.

  They’d both worked up a thorough sweat by the time someone interrupted them.

  “Excuse me, sir,” a private said from the door of the room, a Mixhuman leaning heavily into her [Undine] heritage based on the trail of scales along her face and neck.

  Sebastian released his hold on Nora and stepped back. “Yes, Private?”

  “General Anders would like to see you in her office. It is a… family emergency.”

  “What’d Fletcher do this time,” Nora muttered as she pulled her shoes on.

  He was thinking the same thing as he followed suit, and together the three of them left the training room behind.

  As they walked, Sebastian asked Nora more about her personal life, trying to make up for the past twenty-three years he’d been more or less absent due to his duties in the colonies. Understandably, she shared very little, and he gave up after a few minutes when he noticed the anger ebbing underneath.

  He hated that he’d had to leave her. He should have taken both kids, but it was a daunting task to become a single parent of two children while simultaneously ingraining himself as a deep cover spy. It’d seemed so logical to split the kids up after Hazel received her new assignment back in the refugee camp.

  Now, however, it was clear that that might have been the single greatest mistake of his life pertaining to his kids. Who knows how having Nora around might have influenced Fletcher? Maybe his son would have grown up strong and forceful, instead of the gentle, easy going boy he was now. Maybe Nora would have gained a little softness and been able to view the world in a less harsh light occasionally.

  Fletcher might not be Hexed. Nora might be married with kids. His children might have turned out normal if not for that decision.

  Sebastian kept his emotions from showing on his face. Those two were never going to have a normal life, and it was stupid to think otherwise. They’d been born—as Nora so bluntly put it—as a cover story.

  He loved them as much as any parent loved their kids, but he had to accept the fact that unlike all those other parents, he was never going to be able to provide the same kind of stability. That was a fact, and there was nothing he could change about it.

  Arriving at Hazel’s office pulled Sebastian from his thoughts. Clearly this was about Fletcher, but he couldn’t imagine what trouble his son had managed to get himself into in such a short time.

  Hazel waited in her chair behind her desk, her hands folded in front as though this were any other meeting. The private allowed Sebastian and Nora to enter and then pressed the button to have the door slide shut behind them, giving the three of them privacy.

  “So a secret family meeting about what to do about my wimpy brother?” Nora mused as she crossed to sit in the chair across from Hazel.

  That left Sebastian to stand. His body was already feeling the effects of sparring, but he wasn’t about to start acting elderly now.

  Hazel frowned, and Sebastian knew something was wrong. Very wrong. But as she spoke, it was somehow worse than he could have imagined.

  “Fletcher’s outside.”

  “In the radiation?” Nora asked.

  Hazel nodded, and Sebastian’s heart sank. There was no keeping that secret now.

  “So he’s going to be a Mix, like you…” Nora leaned forward, one hand tapping at her knee.

  “Maybe. It all depends on his species.”

  “What do you mean?” Sebastian took a step forward.

  “This is a heavy Cloud, worse than we normally get, and it’s not dissipating fast so he’ll likely be trapped for a day or more. Based on the estimates of the radiation density I was given, we’ll be lucky if he doesn’t fully convert while he’s out there. If fortune favors us, he’ll be an [Elf] or [Jinn] with a slow conversion rate, in which case he’ll hit only eighty to ninety percent, but that’s still a significant change in his life.”

  “And if he’s something with a fast conversion rate, like a [Bloodhound] or [Goblin]?”

  “Then we’ll have a full Unhuman on our hands, and Fletcher Anders will be dead.” Hazel said it flatly, but Sebastian could see the emotion she had hidden underneath.

  “There are safety bunkers out there.” Sebastian remembered enough about the base to recall that fact.

  “He wouldn’t know that.”

  “But he might find one.” He wasn’t going to give up hope, not yet.

  “Maybe. He’ll still be Hexed in that case.” Hazel watched him with curiosity.

  He had to be careful or else he might spill a secret he was hoping to hold a while longer.

  “But not nearly as much.”

  Perhaps still not enough to be discernable, just as it had been the first time around. While he didn’t know for sure how quickly [Demanlics] converted, Jeric and Addy were Hexed at the same time as Fletcher originally, and they both took on a far higher percentage than Fletcher.

  There was a chance this secret would last.

  A small one, but a chance nonetheless, and if they could keep it, it would make the difference in not only Fletcher’s life, but in the world as a whole.

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