They found the new cleavage easily, bands of freshly exposed rock shimmering and sharp under the bans of more weathered stuff. A vague impression of the geologists who had preceded them peppered through the landscape, but nothing so specific to nail it down to a particular agency or school. A pocket of rock that had clearly been hit with a hammer. A scrap of cloth trash caught on the spine of a succulent. Everyone knew better than to leave their shit laying around in a territory that wasn't there's. 

Lidea left Sunny to it and took off wandering further up the cliff face, running eir hands over the rocks. A few rock fliers fluttered out of a crevice and tried to chase em off. Ey obliged, skipping a little further down toward a deep groove. Ey walked eir eyes up and down it, looking for the imprint of fossils, one thing ey had picked up a knack for from time spent with Sunny. 

A little squeak shook out from the crevice, and ey waited for the animal it belonged to scurry off or out. No sound of little claws on little rocks, though. Ey peered a little closer into the gap, curiosity taking em. There was something there, but it was bigger than expected. It chattered again and shifted, six limbs moving in the darkness. Lidea lit the top of eir staff and poked it into the crevice. 

"Shit." 

It wasn't an animal. It was a child. 

Ey didn’t know corrocco’s well enough to guess their age to the year accurately, especially considering the massive difference in size between the three sexes. This was most definitely a kid, though, probably of primary school age. 

"Darling, you have got to be far from home," ey muttered to emself, unsure if they understood Ilurian. Ey switched over to a combination of Universal Sign and Cottа́l. 

"Hey, come on out. Do you need water?” The accompanying Sign was shorter and stockier, subjects and predicates smashed together to form ideas almost everyone could convey agnostic of their native spoken language. “Move to me. Need water?”

The mention of water got them to twitch eagerly, but they weren't moving. Which was actually smart. In their place, ey’d rather take eir chances with a rock crevice over some random person. Especially anyone even remotely human-looking. 

Ey moved to eir knees to get smaller and dug in eir bag. This was what the badges and emblems of the higher ranks and orders were for: proof that you were being held to a higher echelon of expectation. Ey found eir metal badge and held it to the opening of the crevice. 

"I'm a magician. A kýrio. If you come out, I can help you." 

The badge was enough to convince them Lidea didn't intend them harm, and they scrambled out of the crevice to flop on the ground tiredly. 

Even as a child, the corrocco almost hit eir chest when standing, most of their height in their back arms. They were bipedal on a technicality, long, flexible bodies carried on bendy legs that ended in prehensile claw-feet, these particular ones shod in soft sandals that left their toes free to grip whatever climbing surface was at hand. Their arms were longer than their legs, and they rested their symmetrical hands on their thighs as they crept closer, double thumbs tapping each other across their palms. Their back limbs formed the most distinct part of their silhouette, long stilting things that reached over their head before turning downward on a backward joint. They transferred their weight to them as they walked sometimes. Now, the child used them to launch themselves forward a few steps at once, dropping into a crouch across from Lidea. 

They snatched the water flask from Lidea's hands and gulped down several long draws. The water splashed out over their hard, beaky mouth and shallow chin to wet the front of their rough spun tunic. Sweat coated their skin, making their fine, feathery hair damp right to the ends. Their wide, flat ears twitched at the sound of Sunny moving in the distance.

Lidea tapped the flask and brought it away from the corrocco's mouth. 

"Little drinks, darling." 

They nodded, eyes flashing huge at eir before narrowing down against the sun. They chattered in their native language of clicks and growls before remembering to add Sign. 

"Thank you. Drink. Big thirsty. Hungry." 

"My name's Lidea," ey said, digging into eir bag for some dried meat strips. "That's my friend Sunny down there. What's your name?" 

They gave a Sign-name that had the words for "sky" and "glass " in it.

"Can I call you 'Sky?' Would that be okay?"

The coccorro rolled the thought around and then made half the sign for sky. "Blue."

"Blue? You prefer Blue?"

They nodded then grabbed for the jerky. Their small, sharp teeth shredded it, making quick work of the lean, dry meat.

"Slowly," Lidea reminded them, and they nodded again. Elves and sylvan kept multiple names for complex, sometimes stupid cultural reasons. The Corre indige did it because of physiology. They could make sounds other species couldn't even hear, and their laryngeal construction favored vibrating growls, squawks, and squeals to the exclusion of pretty much every other phoneme type. Cyndaren and pherax with an A chromosome had a broad enough set of sounds to speak languages outside their collective. Something to do with proteins that created extra malleable tissue. Blue would never be able to do that. 

“What the fuck?” Sunny was tucking a rock into his bag as he picked over the rough terrain along the escarpment drop.

“Were there any alerts for missing kids at the travel station?” Lidea asked. 

“I didn’t think to look.” Sunny sat next to them on a rock. “Hey, little buddy.”

Blue moved tighter into the Lidea, curling up in the cavity of eir arms and digging their face into eir shoulder. 

“See who you can raise on the radio,” Lidea said. Ey hugged Blue tighter while Sunny dug around for the handheld.

“This is Grandmaster Artificer Childress calling for the constabulary. Stop.” Sunny held the radio up between them. It was the middle of the day, so the radio switchboard responded quickly. 

“Received, Master Childress. Constabulary representative available on line 147. Stop.”

“Received. Switching.” Sunny fiddled with the dial to send him over to the right frequency, and the officer on the other end was already calling out for him. 

Sunny ran the officer on the other end through the situation. Little Blue had indeed been reported missing two days ago, separated from a hunting party that had set out from one of the small corrocco villages at the base of the mountain. The search teams hadn’t made it that far yet. 

He was double-B gender, eight years old. He would get bigger, eye-level in the end. Certainly not the size of his AB compatriots and double-A and. No major medical needs to speak of, so it was just a matter of getting him home safe and sound. 

"If they can give us coordinates, we can bring him there," Lidea said. "Much faster than waiting for someone to come to us." Sunny conveyed this into the radio and received a hold in response. He rested the radio on his shoulder. 

"If we do that," he said, "we're not making it back by tonight."

"That was already going to happen."

"Fair." 

“Master Childress?” The radio buzzed, and Sunny returned to it. 

“Sorry. I don’t know if you heard that, but we can take him to a neutral meeting point, stop.” They didn’t even know there were corrocco villages close enough to lose a child from. There was no way the corrocco would give them coordinates to an unmapped enclave.

“Let me confer with the locals. Hold for more information. Stop.” 

The radio fell into static silence.

Blue had curled himself into Lidea’s body, but he leaned back now to give space to sign.

“Take home?” he asked. 

“We’re working on it, buddy,” Lidea replied. Blue fell back against em, and ey ran eir hand up and down his back a few times. Ey set eir chin on his head and gave him a quick squeeze. 

Something plasmatic boiled in Sunny’s throat, and Lidea cocked eir head as ey watched him tense, crunching eir brows in question. Neither of them could have biological children. Sort of. His was a birth defect he could get fixed whenever he wanted. He had just never bothered because he didn’t want kids. Probably. Maybe. Lidea’s sterility was cancer. They could have saved enough function to procreate with additional assistance, but it would have involved a more complex treatment plan and a much higher risk of recurrence. Cutting everything out was easier and safer in the long term. It had been an obvious decision. Not like ey ever wanted children, anyway. 

Probably.

That “probably” never quite tilting over to “definitely” haunted both of them, emerging at weird times. This was one of them. 

The radio crackled back to life. 

“I’ve gotten confirmation. Stand by for coordinates.”