Gratuitous Epilogue : Touchstone Extras Read Online Free PDF Page B

and they're not sure if
my enhancement means they're wrong, or if learning when older is
only possible when a touchstone is involved.
    There won't be any more
Setari adoptions for a while. Plenty of the Setari are in
relationships (mostly with other Setari) but not ready for kids.
Nils and Zee are very much in a relationship now, but they've no
immediate plans to move out of barracks, and keep going off
together on their weekends. They're both really really private
people and they want time alone together.
    Sometimes I envy them
all that time alone, but only sometimes.
     

Chapter 5
    April
April 10
    Islands
    Contact with Tare and
Kolar was made only two days after the last time I wrote. It took
them another few days to scan the last short section and calculate
an end to end run of both routes, but after that the floodgates
opened.
    It takes between three
and five hours to get through now, instead of just one, and there
are long patches where nothing's aligned enough to get through, but
we're actually a lot less cut off than everyone feared we'd be.
They're now trying to work their way to the Pillar where Second
Squad was stranded to see what condition it's in. And also to
Channa, since there's been people stuck at the mining installation
there.
    Tare and Kolar (and the
Channan staff) didn't have any convenient touchstones to let them
check the condition of other planets, and so for four months could
only guess what had happened. Kolar had had no warning whatsoever,
and from Tare's point of view I'd vanished and a bunch of people
had gone haring off into deep-space to look for me and then all of
the Ena had melted down and they could only hope it wasn't the
beginning of the end. They didn't know if I was alive, whether the
colony had survived, or whether all of Muina had been destroyed. At
least the decrease in Ionoth numbers and the slacking of the tears
into real-space gave them hope. Of course, once Muina's collected
four months of news had been transmitted, there was a media frenzy
over the whole drama of my kidnapping by the Cruzatch, and the
risky destruction of the malachite marbles, and then the short
eternity of picking collapsed building off the top of me and hoping
they got to me before I died.
    And Lira.
    I've been trying to
imagine what it would be like to be in Lira's position at her age.
Used as a tool to destroy her world, trapped in a half-life, doing
what she could to sabotage her captors, and then after connecting
with me finding that everyone she knew was dead and she was part
ways responsible, and that she might possibly not really be alive.
And now a new life, a soap-bubble existence which nobody can
definitively say is real.
    There have been
articles talking about how dangerous Lira and I are – the things we
could be used for – but mostly it's open adulation. The 'MBC',
wanting to keep on KOTIS' good side, are careful never to be too
full-on, but even they maintain a 'Caszandra-Watch' page which is
constantly updated with the latest images and stories about me and
my family. And a lot of that is now about Lira, who is after all a
gorgeous Lantaren who helped save them all. There's now a couple of
billion people fascinated by the idea of her.
    Naturally some pretty
unvarnished opinions of her have leaked out of the talent school,
but these are very inconsistent. Some people claim she's
traumatised and describe her as clinging to Ys for support (Ys is
still getting positive press for being so brave during my dragon
day). Others say Lira's cold and arrogant – the classic evil
Lantaren. But mostly she's seen as a true Lantaren princess and
it's almost expected and accepted that she be a bit imperious and
pampered. I make sure to check the news and keep alert to what
stories are going around about them. Lira finds anything about her,
positive or negative, to be annoying, but doesn't seem too caught
up by it at the moment – the people immediately around her are more
interesting. Rye gets embarrassed