[LEGACY VERSION] The Emperor of Time (Book 1 - The Kaireyeh Chronicles)

Chapter 2 - Barenin

Barenin Lyr sat cross-legged on the floor and watched his son play with blocks. Yuichi was three, chubby and bright-eyed, his fine black hair frizzed about his face. He squealed as he knocked over his latest tower.

Barenin had taken on the identity of Alexi Valentin, Colonel in the Miravec Ground Force, member of the Caelian Resistance. He'd known the name before he'd taken it; in the paradox, Alexi was always the identity he built for himself.

Alexi grinned and clapped. Yuichi threw himself at Alexi in a hug before pushing off and running back to rebuild his tower.

During his wife's pregnancy, Alexi had hovered over every pre-birth monitoring session, using his thoughts to shift the genetic readouts like he did when his own DNA was scanned. The quirk of Kaireyeh that let him move between almost-human and Aezthena states also kept him from encrypting himself; he had to be careful no one saw his true DNA signature. He had to be extra careful with his son's genetic code, especially in this era.

Minutes after the boy's birth, he'd pinged the medical monitors with his thoughts and set them to screeching. In the confusion, he'd focused himself Aezthena long enough to slow time around the babe and plug in the encryption key. He'd felt the scream of his son's pain, but it was over quickly, the most damning markers of Imperial Kynaston DNA buried beneath the encryption. Yuichi now carried the more suitable markers of the bastard Kynaston line Alexi claimed as his own.

Yuichi whirred a plastic aircar in circles while he built his next tower. Alexi never understood how he could still produce human children. No other Aezthena could--their biology was too different, too warped from their roots of humanity, too synthetic. But no other Aezthena could move between almost-human and Aezthena as he could, either.

His hand comm chimed. It sat in the pocket of the brown and red uniform jacket he'd tossed over the back of a dining chair. Per standard Miravec Ground Force procedures, he had an implant installed in his jaw, but he had deactivated as much programming as possible and modified the rest to bounce signals to his hand comm. Miravec comm implants did more than relay messages. Sometimes his human focus lapsed. Sometimes he needed it to lapse. He could let no one know the synthetics of his true nature.

In that moment, he was unfocused, aware of his identity as Alexi Valentin yet not immersed in it. He felt the strong, direct thoughts of Oji, his wife, approaching their quarters before the door light blinked from red to green and she entered.

The comm stopped chiming, and he put it out of his immediate thoughts.

Oji stepped inside and spotted his uniform jacket first, as he'd known she would when he'd placed it on the chair. She saw the glowing lines of his open work holos scattered above the table next and frowned, just a slight downturn of the lips. She didn't like his job as a colonel in the Miravec Ground Force. But she'd known about it when they'd met in the Resistance, and when they'd married. It was part of who he was, a cover for his real work in the Resistance, but no less true an identity. He didn't do identities in half measures. He could feel the old struggle in her thoughts--the war between her duty to the Resistance and her hatred of the Miravec.

She met his eyes and flinched. He knew his eyes sheened gold. Her alarm spiked, then she stifled it.

His mental walls were too open; he tried not to listen to thoughts if he could help it, but they always bled through with lovers and those close to him. He couldn't help picking up the feel of Oji's thoughts, but he strengthened his walls to keep from hearing specifics. He would not take away her privacy any more than he had.

He'd told her he'd been injured in the war and his eyes replaced with high-quality prosthetics. Not entirely untrue--he'd just never specified which war. He told everyone that the implants sometimes malfunctioned and gave off that gold sheen.