Jay

The frantic call from Madelaine came on top of a frantic day. Separate attacks at different ends of the city had forced the team to split up, Jay's morpher experienced a glitch that Kat would never admit to, and Jay still wasn't used to outranking Nate, which Nate found hilarious and Jay found annoyingly stressful.

He had actually missed his wife's first call, and the fact that she would call at all, never mind twice, was alarming in itself. She was good about not contacting him while he was on duty unless it was an emergency.

Today it was an emergency.

"I can't find Sky!" she cried as soon as Jay answered the phone. Her panicked tone combined with their son's name felt like a shot right to his heart, which still hadn't settled down yet from the battle and the rush of Power he had just come out of.

"Where are you?" he asked.

"At home. I put him down for a nap a few hours ago and he's usually up by now, so I went to check on him and he wasn't there. I've searched the entire house, every closet, drawer, cabinet, under the beds—I looked outside too. All the doors were locked, so I don't think he could've gotten out, but he isn't anywhere and I don't know what else to do!"

"It's okay," Jay said even though it was anything but. "It's going to be okay. We'll find him. Have you called the police yet?" It felt strange to ask because he was and was not the police. SPD served a similar function to the PD and their responsibilities did overlap, but missing persons generally wasn't in SPD's jurisdiction, and certainly wasn't within a Ranger's. But on the other hand, he and Nate were still figuring out the duties of their relatively nascent team within the wider SPD schema.

But on the other hand, the missing person was his son.

"I called them before I called you," Madelaine said. "They're sending someone over now."

"Good. I'll put an alert out on our networks too, and then I'm coming home. Oh, and I'll talk to Dr. Roberts on the way out."

"Dr. Roberts? Why?"

"In case Sky's special abilities might be relevant somehow. What if this is a new one?"

He could hear the frown in Madelaine's voice when she answered. "What, to just disappear? That doesn't seem likely."

Jay didn't think so either, but then, how many parents even had to consider the possibility? Sky had been born with the ability to create forcefields, the result of Madelaine's exposure to chemical enhancers while working on SPD's Morpher project, and while it was the only power they were aware of in Sky so far, who could say the genetic effects would end there? There was no precedent for someone like their son, who was only three, and barely at that. His birthday had been just weeks ago.

"Jay." Madelaine's voice dropped to a frightened whisper. "What if someone took him for his powers?"

That was an even more terrifying prospect, but if Jay let himself get paralyzed by all the what-ifs now, he would never move from where he was.

"We'll find him, Mads, I promise. I'll be home as soon as I can."

"Please hurry."

Mirloc

The boy had an angry red mark on his head that hadn't been there before. No doubt he had gained it by running into one of the infinite reflective surfaces in Mirloc's mirror dimension, where Mirloc had deposited him for a few minutes in order to steal him away from his home. Grown creatures became easily disoriented in that place, smashing headlong into themselves multiple times before learning to be wiser in their movements, so never mind a human youngling of three years. The boy was a mere babe by any galactic measure, including that of his own species.

While Mirloc had expected such fragility in a human child, he was admittedly taken aback by how loud and expressive he was also. The boy was only as tall as Mirloc's knee, but the noise he produced filled the entire house. His bright cherub's mouth was open wide as he wailed long and woefully, a sound sustained by more air and force than could have possibly fit in that small body.

The noise should have grated on Mirloc's nerves within the first fifteen seconds, but the mercenary had not gained his reputation or skill by giving into emotions so easily. He distanced his mind from the child's cries, prodigious as they were, and considered what might quiet him. A threat could work, but it could also just as easily have the opposite effect. Mirloc knew nothing of the minds of human children and what capacity they had for reasoning, but he knew how to read the state of others, usually foes, and he surmised that a threat would not only be insufficiently understood, but also, needless to say, unwelcome.

That left the option of coddling.

Mirloc carefully lowered himself to one knee so that he might be some measure less frightening (imagine that!). It had started to become bothersome anyway to have to look nearly straight down at his young charge. At first the boy didn't notice; his eyes were squeezed tightly shut in his fury, but the catch in his breath suggested he was wearing down. So Mirloc waited and the cries eventually subsided into wheezing gasps and then into nothing at all. The boy finally looked at the face of his captor, and when he did, Mirloc felt his vexation give way, like winter's frost beneath a spring sun, to something else he refused to name.

The child's eyes were as blue as day and as dewy as wet flowers.

Suddenly the wisdom of this endeavor, hastily agreed to as repayment of an old debt, seemed as lost as this innocence would be if Mirloc kept to the agreed course.

"If you are good," the mercenary said, and the slither of his voice sent the boy into a stunned quiet, "maybe you can go home again."