“Is it true?”
Kaneya looked up at Erilde’s question. “Is what true?”
“That you fell from the sky when you were a baby.”
Kaneya’s heart dropped. “Who told you that?” she asked nervously. Dayiath felt her unease and reached out to her mentally. She held onto his presence as if it were a lifeline.
“It’s just a rumor,” Erilde answered, “I thought maybe Auciet was stirring something up, but… it’s not something she’d know, would it?”
She wouldn’t. The only people who’d know about that were other Harpers who were around back then…
“It’s nothing,” Kaneya answered hastily, “I got into an accident when I was little, and people blew it out of proportion.”
But Erilde was very close to the truth. No one could explain the blast of light that streaked across the sky one night eighteen Turns ago, or the burnt wreckage of something large and metallic that appeared the next day near Kellad Hold. The discovery of the wreckage had been covered up by the Harpers involved, but the sole survivor of the crash could not.
A baby girl, miraculously unhurt, nestled in a cracked glass and metal capsule amid the twisted remains. She was quietly adopted out to a young Harper couple, and her origins considered an open secret.
Even though she loved her parents and brother, the knowledge that she came from somewhere else had always haunted Kaneya. If someone in the darkness of space was looking for her, she wanted to be found.