Ask silly questions, get silly answers. “Mephisolou,” I said sternly, and that got his attention. “You can’t go taking things just because you want to.” The words sounded rich coming from a smuggler. From a spy. I’d thought, even after we’d bonded, I was taking on the care of an animal. An odd one that could talk. Now I felt like I was raising an unruly teenager. Children of my own had always been a distant hypothetical, a hazy-eyed dream that never quite reconciled with the messiness, the strangeness and the loudness of all the actual children I’d met.

Mephi crawled from beneath the blanket, stretched and then butted my hip with his head. “I was bored,” he said.

It was the same excuse I’d given Lin. Was this what my mother had meant when she’d cursed me with children who behaved like me? I scratched the thick fur behind his ears, the soft dander there coating my fingertips. “What did you want with that book anyways? You don’t know how to read this.” I’d started teaching Mephi to read, but nearly the entirety of this book was written in the language of the Alanga, far as I could guess.

I plucked it from the bed, took it to my desk and flipped through the pages again. How many times had I idly examined the words, trying to discern meaning that I just had no context for? I could ask Lin – she had an extensive library and who knew what her education had included?

No. Terrible idea. All my motives were suspect now, even to myself. I might be Captain of the Imperial Guard, but we were at sea, where threats were few. Best I avoid her until the awkwardness of that encounter blew over. Bad enough that we shared a secret. Bad enough that I’d convinced her she could trust me that far.

Mephi put a paw on my leg to get my attention. “It’s a journal. Someone named Dione wrote it.”

The air seemed to freeze in my lungs. “It… What?”

“I can understand some of the words,” he said.

“How?”

He tilted his head at me. “I look at them and they make sense to me.”

My mind ran in circles like a dog chasing its own tail. I needed to slow down, take the time to parse my thoughts. If Mephi could understand some Alanga, that further proved my theory that Lin and I were Alanga. If Mephi could understand some Alanga, I could use his help to decipher some of the journal. Dione’s journal – the greatest of the Alanga. The one I’d heard so many stories about. I could find out more about them and sift some truth from all the fictions the Empire had fed me as a child.