She wavered, unable to reach out to him—too terrified by what he proposed to accept it, yet equally unable to refuse. And as she hung there, she suddenly felt something else. Something she’d never felt before.

Her eyes snapped open, and her head turned as they locked on Samantha. Nimitz’s mate crouched beside her, and now the cat’s emotions came roaring through her like yet another hurricane. She’d felt Samantha’s presence—the “mind-glow,” the ’cats had called it after they learned to sign—countless times before, but never like this. Never so intensely and powerfully. It crashed and roared with Samantha’s own sense of shock and discovery… and a terrible, singing joy and astonished recognition.

There was too much going on, too many pressures and impossible demands, for Honor to sort out what was happening, but she felt Samantha reaching out. Stretching. There was no word in any human language for what the ’cat was doing in that instant, and Honor knew she would never be able to truly explain it even to herself, yet she had an instant of warning, a brief flash of awareness. Just long enough for her to cry out, although she would never know whether it was in protesting horror or in shared joy.

It didn’t really matter which it was. She could no more have stopped what was happening than she could have halted Manticore in its orbit. Nothing could have stopped it, and she watched through three sets of eyes—hers, Nimitz’s, and above all, Samantha’s—as Hamish Alexander’s head turned towards the ’cat. As astonishment and disbelief flared in those ice-blue eyes and he reached out a hand just as Samantha hurled herself from the floor into his arms with a high, ringing bleek of joy.

Chapter Twelve

“HOW could it have happened?”

It was the first coherent sentence Hamish Alexander had strung together in almost ten minutes. He cradled the wildly purring treecat in his arms, as if she were the most precious thing in the universe, and his blue eyes glowed with disbelief and soaring welcome as he stared down at her. He knew what had happened. No one could have spent as much time as he had with Honor and Nimitz—and Samantha—or, for that matter, with Elizabeth and Ariel, and not recognize an adoption bonding when he saw it. But knowing what had happened and understanding it were two different things.

Honor stared at him while the echoes of her own shocked disbelief rippled back and forth within her. Unlike White Haven, she was one of the greatest living human authorities on treecats. More members of the Harrington clan had been adopted over the centuries than any other single Sphinxian family, and she’d spent much of her childhood, especially after her own adoption, reading the private journals of those earlier adopted Harringtons. Some of them had contained speculations and theories which had never been publicly discussed, not to mention an absolutely unrivaled store of first-hand observations. On top of that, Nimitz and Samantha had been the very first treecats ever to learn to sign, and she’d spent endless hours since then “listening” to their fascinating explanations of the treecat society and customs even her ancestors had been able to observe only from the outside.