Other (The Trip Chronicles Book 2)

Trip has learned to read, to trade favors, and to love the boy who raised him. What he hasn't learned is what "other" is supposed to mean. Garrett has spent a year and a half raising a juvenile K'nid — a shapeshifting mimic most people would call a monster — and has finally started to believe they've built something like a normal life. Then a stranger walks into their small routine: Barnaby, an adult K'nid who claims to be Trip's cousin, carrying word of other juveniles like Trip still being held in the field by a licensed survey operation that treats consent as an optional line item. The trail leads Garrett, Trip, and a growing found family of guild specialists, a forensic accountant, a duty-bound dwarf, and Barnaby himself out past the maintained roads to a hidden underground chamber where a respected consultant's "genuinely effective" detection method depends entirely on captive children who happen not to be human. To break it open, Trip will have to do the one thing every adult in his life has tried to protect him from: choose his own danger, in his own voice, for reasons that are finally his alone. Other is a story about found family, the difference between being told what you are and being asked what you mean, and the quiet, hard-won weight of a single new word.