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AuroraBlue is awake. But she is not "better." At least not fully. She's awake, responsive, but not speaking. Taking her back to Hale's she sat on my lap the whole way, not saying a word but at least relaxed. I'm so far out of my element here that I don't even know what to think. Is she withdrawn because of some trauma? Or is this something deeper? Or even something metaphysical completely outside my areas of expertise?

I just don't know. Even keeping her with me on the orbital for a couple days before letting her go back to Lily and Cody, she doesn't speak. She's not acting like a normal child, but that's no surprise as she's not a normal child. Even if she hadn't gone through rapid physical development, or been somehow pre-conditioned to develop intellectually, she wouldn't have been like the other children in the creche or the kids who're raised with their families.

I know, somehow, that she was created with a purpose. I just have no idea what that purpose is. Or, really, who even set it in motion. Was it Mindo? Or was he being manipulated himself? Blue, perhaps? The big AI has his own agenda, of which I know but a fraction. I consider him a friend, in a hard to define, "I don't pretend to understand this relationship," sort of way. Blue was integral to Mindo's plans with Lily and later Aura. But was it Mindo's plan, or Blue's? x0x0, maybe? She was more deeply involved in this than she let on. Blue was hers, after all. As Nora had been my project, Blue Man was her creation. If AuroraBlue was somehow the result of Blue's agenda, it followed that x0x0's influence was in there somewhere.

Sometimes I wondered if I was being played here. Maternal instincts I, admittedly, didn't know I'd had, being manipulated? Possible. When it came to my girls, all of them, 'Brina included, my judgement was biased. I could see the possibility of being manipulated, but tended to de-emphasize it in my situational analysis.

Bad habit. One I'd need to moderate.

Having Cody bound by law, on a warrant issued off-world, didn't help either. He'd left me a note, trying to explain, but I'd have to pull some strings behind the scenes to cut him loose. There wasn't a lot of risk in doing it. Far as I knew, the warrant was for shooting a deputy. Hadn't even killed him. Would probably generate a bit of mukappara on the part of the locals, but that's the price of doing business sometimes.

At least pulling strings behind the scenes was a world I knew. Not as comfortable as doing an extraction myself, but it was much more my forte than parenthood. I suppose that's one of the reasons so few spooks have families.

We're not very good at relationships.