~~~
If the Colonel did hear of my chasing down the car, he said nothing to me of the incident. Life went on after Emily's death. Kendra and Millie began to drift apart from me, though, as they spent ever more time on boys -- ever less on Scouting, church, and study dates.
Sadly, Major, no pup when I'd met him eleven years before, failed to awake one morning. His family buried him under an apple tree at the rear of the Gordon farm. Onto a stone that I buried with him, I painted in Tan script the words, "Wa-su-es kum mir lu-kal lar-in-i es," 'You were a faithful companion to all of us who loved you."
By nights, I slipped out to the tree and sat under it as I tried to peer into the future and make sense of what I was supposed to do. One night, as I was walking towards the tree, I glimpsed a glowing blur of motion swiftly heading for me. Something as diamond-hard as I am struck me and bowled me over.
At once, I was grappling with that something on the ground. A fist, striking my face, bent it in till it began to flow back into shape.
Hurt, but angry, I writhed, clawed, and rolled till I got into position to thrust both arms up and out to break my assailant's hold on me. I got in a short right cross to the jaw that stilled my assailant. Flinging my assailant into the air, I kicked up into an armored gut.
For an instant, I saw my assailant starfished against the sky before he or she (sorry, I'd had no time for a gender check!) landed in a heap some yards off. Running to my assailant, I stripped off his or her ski mask and looked into a face that might have been my own.
The Tan girl, pale about the lips, was gasping for breath in a way that alarmed me. Laying my hand atop her solar plexus, I let crystal-shaping gift flow into her. After a moment, her wheezing eased, and she spoke to me.
"What did you just do?"
"I healed you with crystal-shaping gift. Kuma, I presume?"
"How do you know who I am?"
"Four of us Tan girls came to the earth. I've met Dala and Lona, and I know that I'm Mira, so only Kuma is left."
"Wow. You must've done well on your ACT's."
I felt a warm glow inside. "I did do well on them, thank you."
"Where'd you learn to fight so well?"
"The Colonel taught me from his special-forces manual."
"You must've been an A student."
I was liking Kuma better all the time. Just then, she looked wide eyed over my shoulder. Turning to see what had caught her gaze, I noticed first a gleam of metal. This was part of a nine-millimeter automatic in the Colonel's hand.
"I didn't hear you come up," I said to him softly.
"You weren't supposed to, Belle." His eyes flicked to the girl over whom I was kneeling. "You're Camille, I take it."
I hadn't got around to asking her earth-name. The Colonel, as usual, was ahead of me.
He invited Kuma/Camille indoors. Mom got up and served everyone milk and pie. As the four of us ate this, I learned that Kuma was Camille Delacroix of Dothan, Alabama. All right, the Colonel had already known her earth-identity, but I hadn't!
"You ran a long way to be here tonight, Camille," Mom said softly.
"I didn't mind running a little ways to meet one of my own kind." Kuma had a Deep South accent to go with her way of speaking.
"How did you find me?" I asked her.
"From the Internet! I Googled the set of search terms Afghanistan, orphan, albinism, scleroderma, and tetany, and up popped your Web site. Your picture on it was a dead giveaway. I figured that the poems and stories of Afghanistan and Atlantis stood for what happened to the world where you and I were born."
I glanced uneasily at the Colonel. He gave me a thin smile. He'd hinted strongly to me of my Web site's being a security risk, but hadn't quite told me to take it down. Taking it down now would be closing the barn door after the horse had fled.
"Why did you attack my daughter?" Mom asked Kuma.
"I was following tradition among superheroes. When two of them meet, they have a fight to find out about each other. After the fight, they become friends."
Note to self, I thought. My children will never read superhero comics.
Mom sniffed. "A Whitman Sampler says friendship better than a fight says it."
"I'll remember that, Mrs. Gordon. I don't think that Belle minded the fight, though. She beat the snot out of me."
Like became love just then. Still, loving Kuma would never be easy.
She spent the night with me. When I asked her of her crystal-shaping gift, she told me that Dr. Ventnor had told her that I'd learned to control it with the memory-crystals. As soon as she'd begun to see halos, she viewed her whole set of crystals. She managed not to blow out a single light-bulb, much less a hard drive.
"Lucky you," I murmured. Still, I was glad of my experience's having saved younger Tani some of my problems.
When I asked her what was on her crystals, she could give me only vague impressions of growing plants, telling tales to children, and pouring out water to the rising sun. I frowned. Were her crystals blurred, or were her perceptions of them?
I had an idea. "Ru nal-es nal Tan, mi la?" I said to her.
Her eyes got big. "You're speaking the speech in the crystals, aren't you?"
I nodded. I'd asked her, "You don't speak Tan speech, do you?" Her response to my question was as good as answering it "No." Still, it made sense to me that she didn't. She was barely older than Par-On, who'd been three years old, three years younger than I, when Ul ended. It was unlikely that she recalled any of her childhood tongue; she certainly could never have learned to read.
I smiled at her. "I can teach you to speak our people's language, and to read the old books."
She sighed. "Another class." She gave me a wry smile. "I'm not an A student like you, Belle. Still, you won't be grading me, will you?"
She and I lay awake a while longer as she told me of her life on a small farm in southeast Alabama. Her adoptive parents gave her much freedom. She often camped out in the woods at night, or spent the night at a friend's house and called her parents in the morning. "You're just farther away than most of my friends are," Kuma said. "My parents won't mind that I've come here."
I doubted her statement. In the morning, though, at breakfast, she did call her parents, and they let her spend the day with me. Both the Colonel and Mom looked outraged at Kuma's lack of supervision, but smiled sweetly at her.
After breakfast, I did teach her a few words of Tan speech and at least the sign for "sand." Mostly, though, she wanted to learn things from the Colonel's special-forces manual. It felt good for me to play the Colonel. I taught Kuma only skills to protect her from harm. The girl who'd greeted me by knocking me down and punching me in the face needed no lessons in destruction.
Ironically, it wasn't Kuma who'd bring ruin...
I'm getting ahead of my story again. About mid-afternoon, I talked her into viewing my set of memory-crystals with me. It fascinated her to see her betrothal ceremony, of which she'd kept no memory, and to learn that somewhere she had a husband-to-be named Un-Thor.
"Do you know where he is?"
I shook my head. "I think that one of the boys lives somewhere in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, or Iowa. Lona and I have looked there for him, but we haven't found him."
"Why there?"
I told her of the outrageous crime-fighting events in those states. Kuma, to my dismay, looked delighted. "I hope that it is Un-Thor who lives there. He sounds as if he knows what to do with his gifts."
I gave her the Colonel's best frown. "We're supposed to use our gifts only as Dr. Ventnor and our parents tell us to. Using them recklessly endangers us all."
"Of course, Mira!" Kuma said in such a bright tone and with such a bright smile that I doubted her wholly.
After supper, she ran off into the night, I hoped home. I wished to run with her...
"That girl," Mom said in her best Southern matriarch's voice, "is running wild. It's a shame that her parents give her no discipline."
The Colonel nod
ded. "Still, our Belle will be a good influence on her."