Gathering of the Titans: The Tol Chronicles Book 2 Read Free Page B

guess. I was also mad because I wanted to do some of the stuff he was doing, but I didn’t understand it. I sort of took that out on him.”
    “You’re kidding. Really?”
    “Yep. Used to sneak in and mess around with his electronic stuff when he wasn’t home, but I could never even figure out how it worked. It made me angry.”
    “Too bad you didn’t have any sisters. They would have realized what was going on and probably helped you two to communicate.”
    “There...there were two sisters, once.”
    “Two sisters? What happened to them?”
    Tol stood up and walked over to a window to look out at the bright sunshine shimmering and dancing over Selpla’s flower gardens. “Ever hear that childhood vaccinations can be harmful?”
    Selpla thought for a moment. “I remember some fearmongering about that a few years back, but it was all disproven.”
    “It isn’t all malarkey; they just spread the wrong alarm. I had two sisters, twins, named Resu and Vesu. They were the youngest.
    There was a really tough strain of yample beast fever going around— one of those that had spread to goblins—and mother had taken the twins in for their vaccinations. They were about a year and a half old at the time. A feverish yample beast actually came crashing through the wall of the clinic and trampled nearly everyone in the waiting room. My sisters were the only fatalities. After the death rituals we were never again allowed to speak of yample beasts or the twins around the house. Any mention of either set my father off in a fit of pique. My mother refused to discuss them at all.”
    “That’s simultaneously the most tragic and yet darkly amusing family story I believe I’ve ever heard,” Selpla said, taking his hands in hers in sympathy. Tol shook his head, as though to clear it of the memories, and then continued. “Aspet the brain won a full academic scholarship to Mernalview Polytechnic and majored in...” he pulled a laminated card out of his beat-up old wallet and read it with some effort: “Digital Technology, with a minor in Cultural History.”
    “It’s so sweet that you carry a copy of his diploma around with you,” Selpla said. Tol ignored this.
    “When I finished secondary schola I’d had it with books and classrooms, on the other hand. I enlisted in a Tragacanth Inland Guard regiment and served most of that four-year hitch at Fort Ullglava in the absolute middle of smekkin’ nowhere.”
    “Oh, yeah, I visited there once on a follow-up about a soldier who got into a fight on the GRUC. Not exactly a social destination. Laudable grain fields, though,” Selpla smirked.
    “The farmers’ daughters were about the only perk. After I got out I went through the EE academy in Goblinopolis and I’ve been doin’ that ever since.”
    “Where were you born?” Selpla asked, sipping her stankabru.
    “On Berquin Avenue in South Sebacea. A couple blocks north of the corrections facility.”
    “Hard to think of a tougher neighborhood than that.”
    “True. Except that even the street thugs seemed strangely respectful of children. I don’t remember any kids getting snatched or even particularly harassed by anyone but other kids. Of course at the time I thought that was normal, but as my cop career progressed I found it more and more atypical of rough neighborhoods. Being an adult on Berquin was a daily crap shoot. Being a kid was not. I don’t know why. I do remember the heavy, concertina wire-topped fences around the scholas and the armed crossing guards, though.”
    “Depressing.”
    “The nice thing about being a kid, as I said, is that you think whatever is happening to you is normal so you don’t worry much about how everyone else does it. My first girlfriend lived on Berquin, too: three houses up from us. Her name was...Ki...Kim... Kimia. Haven’t thought about her in years. How about you? Long string of jilted lovers?”
    “Not really. Most of the guys I met were society jloks who lived in their own