Lost Change

Chapter 107

I lay on the sloping perch and watched Minna tap away at her tablet. The sound from the screen droned on about the weather forecasts, but it was just boring background noise. The bank had been just as uneventful as the rest of the buildings we had checked, and had left me with nothing else to do but think about what Trenil and Minna had said.

Which I kept doing even when we got back to the hotel room, and all through dinner, and even after, up until now.

I closed my eyes, and spent a long, long moment hoping as hard as I could that Trenil was right.

I opened my eyes.

I spread my wings and glided down to land on Minna's leg.

I looked up at her.

"Hi, Minna... there are some things I need to tell you."

I waited with a horrible sense of nervousness and trepidation as Minna looked down at me. I had done it. There was no going back now - however Minna was going to react, however our relationship was about to change, for better or worse... there was nothing I could do to stop it. I felt my stomach tangle up in knots and desperately hoped that my friend was not about to hate me.

There was a brief moment of incomprehension on her face... and I felt the tension inside me vanish as Minna's confusion faded away to joy. She looked down and slowly set the tablet down on the table, and I heard her whisper quietly as she did. "I knew it." She looked back up at me with a growing smile. "Hello, Nate."

I blinked up at her. That... had not been the reaction I had been expecting. "Um. Aren't you surprised I can talk? That I'm smart?"

She smiled a little more and shook her head. "No. Well. Maybe a little, that you can use actual words. But..." She looked over her shoulder and motioned towards where my harness was hanging from the hook on the wall. "I was pretty sure that you were smarter than you were letting on, even if I didn't know just how much of our language you could understand, or that you could actually talk. There have been a few points where you seemed to react to things I had said in ways that didn't make sense. Words you responded to that you shouldn't have understood, ways you reacted that didn't fit what I knew of your instincts and training. And points where it felt like you had communicated with me. A few dreams I had - like the idea for your name, which just so happened to be a gift from Trenil a few days later as if he had seen the same dream too, a few memories that didn't quite seem like they were mine. The image of an unfamiliar shuttle's manual just popping into my head. How did you get that, by the way?"

I sighed a little. This was not what I had expected at all. All those months of worrying... and Minna had already figured it out on her own. She had known what I really was this entire time.

And it hadn't bothered my friend at all.

"Trenil looked it up and showed it to Ivy. She passed it to me, and I passed it to you."

"Ahh. So Trenil knows too. I've been trying to figure out if the rest of the bond handlers actually knew, or if it was being kept a secret from them too."

I looked back at her blankly. "When did you figure it out? That I wasn't just an animal?"

She frowned a little and looked back at her tablet for a moment before she answered thoughtfully. "I think it was really back when we first hunted down that sicora. There were little clues before that, but I didn't start putting anything together until then. You were just so worked up and angry about the sicora, and almost seemed desperate to go fight it... and then you suddenly calmed down when one of the guards called out that it was dead. From several houses away, in the middle of the night."