Darin had taken the assailant into another room and interrogated him. He was at the bottom of the cliff now, a pile of mangled bones and blood and whatever remained of his camo suit. He admitted, in the instant before Darin dropped him, that Kallen and the Dasyls had paid him for the deed – trying to save their slaving assets from the ruin I promised to bring.
“Hardly,” said Sol-dam, looking small and defeated. “He’s a Dasyl, of course he wouldn’t want to help us.”
“Darin said you talked to him.”
“Once, when I thought our prospects were much leaner than they are now. Before I thought to ask a misra. Stupid thing to do,” he muttered. He taped the bandage down to itself and stood back. “Best I can do. Let me know if it starts to hurt.”
I nodded. “Thanks.”
“Kallen belongs to the slavers now,” said Darin. He leaned against the kitchen cabinets, watching us. I was sitting cross-legged on the counter, the smell of rubbing alcohol thick and sour in my nose. “Can’t be helped.”
Sol-dam scoffed his own self-disgust. “We got Brittany out into the world. At least the attack will give people something to talk about. Get the story around more quickly.”
“Do we want that?” I said.
“The sooner everyone thinks they know what you are, the sooner we can show you off properly,” said Sol-dam. “Once we find a misra, that is.”
“Do you have other candidates?” said Darin.
Sol-dam leaned against the wall and stuck his hands in his pockets, letting his head fall back with a soft thunk. He stared at the ceiling as he talked. “Yes. A few. I’ll talk to them when this has passed. Give them a moment to…” He waved his hand in the air as though swatting a fly. “…take it in, I suppose. Consider the ramifications.”
“Of offending the Arkais by supporting a creature they just tried to kill, or just the existence of a talking alien?”
Sol-dam spat out a bitter laugh. “Well, shit. Both, I guess.” He gathered up his hair in a fist and let it fall with a sigh. “This is good, though. I think. It can be, anyways. You’re, ah, more sensational now, if nothing else. Stories with knives tend to circulate faster than stories without them.”
“Silver linings,” I said, and Sol-dam smiled.
“You’ll probably want to up your security,” Sol-dam said to Darin. He took his hands out of his pockets and crossed his arms. “Just in case. I doubt they’ll try again without a crowd, but you can never be too careful.”
Darin didn’t seem like he was listening, but he nodded. “I’ll see to it.”
“Great.” Sol-dam pushed himself off the wall and tried his best to smile at me. The expression was more apologetic than anything. I smiled back.
“Thanks for trying to help,” I said.
“Of course,” he said. “I’ll be back in a minute, okay?”
“Hmm…” Darin murmured. His eyes were deep silver pools of light, shining inwards. He didn’t react as Sol-dam bowed to us and left the room, and he didn’t stir when I touched his arm, my hand still slick with someone else’s blood. His nostrils flared at the smell, the sudden proximity of cold liquid iron, but he didn’t move.
“Darin?” I said. “Are you alright?”
“No,” he said, “but that is hardly new.” He turned to me and forced a smile to his face. His teeth, white and bright and amiable, didn’t match his eyes, still so distant. “I have something I need to do. I will see you later.”
He kissed me absently on the forehead and strode out of the room with long, purposeful steps.
***
Sol-dam was gone and I was sitting in the library when Darin came back in with the misra in blue, the one who’d been laughing as we left the gala.
“Um,” I said, closing the book I’d been staring at but not really reading. I’d spent the last twenty minutes slowly moving my fingers, trying to avoid letting my hand go stiff. I set the book aside and stood, walking across the red carpet to meet them by the empty fire. “Hi.”
The misra looked at me with covetous silver eyes. “Brittany,” he said, and he didn’t stammer over the first syllable. I suppressed a frown and shook the hand he offered me.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s a pleasure, misra…?”
“Mortan,” he said. “Misra Mortan of Arkang.”
Arkang. Where the Dasyls lived, and the Arkais with them. My blood stilled. The color must have gone out of my face, or my expression shifted, because he noticed and laughed.
“Be still, I am, ah, not of a kind with the Dasyls. They’d be the first to tell you.”
“Really?” I said softly.
“Really,” he said.
“You…can say my name.”
“I’m glad to know I said it right.” His smile turned knowing and he winked. “Oh, these are – ”
“Hi!”
“Hello!”
Two tiny bodies came stumbling forward, staring at me with wide eyes. His children, the ones I’d seen scuttling around at the gala. They were small and sweet, a boy and a girl no older than ten. The girl still had most of her baby fat on her, with pudgy cheeks and round squishy arms. The boy was significantly thinner, though he didn’t look much older besides.
“Brittany,” said Mortan, “will you watch them for a moment? They are so fascinated by you, I think it will keep them out of trouble.”
“Uh…sure,” I said. I’d babysat before, almost everybody has.
“Thank you.” He and Darin sat in the fireplace chairs and began to talk quietly.
I sat on the carpet with the children and crossed my legs, pushing my hair out of my face. There was a matt of blood in it, congealing blue and shiny, that I’d missed. Oops. I tucked it behind my ear and smiled at them. They were both staring at me, questions burning in their eyes.
“I’m Tany,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Titus,” said the boy, proudly.
“Tamila,” the girl said quietly.
“Are you a boy or a girl?” said Titus.
“I’m a girl.”
“What’s wrong with your skin?”
Right to the point, I thought, laughing. “I don’t know,” I said. “I was born that way.”
“Like a birth defect?” said Tamila, the girl.
That smarted a little, but I smiled. “Sort of. Except it isn’t a bad thing. It doesn’t hurt, it just looks a little funny.”
“It’s ugly,” said Tamila, and her brother pushed her into the wall. She bonked her head and glared at him.
“I think she’s beautiful!” he said – a little louder than he meant to. Luras and Mortan looked over at us, Mortan scowling at his impolite son, Luras smiling in amusement and very clearly trying not to laugh. I stuck my tongue out at him when Mortan wasn’t looking and Titus giggled.
“Behave yourself,” Mortan said, wearing an appropriate don’t-make-me-come-over-there scowl. Titus looked down sheepishly.
“Sorry, dad,” he said, picking at the carpet.
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
For a second I thought that meant he was talking to me, but then I followed his scowl and found it fixated firmly on his daughter. She looked between her dad and her brother with wide, indignant eyes.
“But I didn’t do anything!” she protested, popping to her feet, like she intended to contest the issue with little baby fisticuffs.
“Oh really? How would you like it if I called you ugly?” said Mortan.
“Awful,” Tamila said immediately. “Why would you say that?”
“Why would you say it to Miss Tany?” Mortam pointed at me and raised an eyebrow at her.
“Because it’s true!”
“Ah ah ah,” said Mortam, wagging a finger at her. “You think it’s true. I don’t think it’s true, and Titus doesn’t think it’s true. And Luras Darin certainly doesn’t think it’s true.”
Behind him, Darin blushed and looked down, but I caught him smiling.
I chimed in. “You know, sometimes we only think things are
ugly because we’ve never seen them before,” I said to Tamila. “But even if it is an opinion, you don’t have to think I’m pretty.” I shrugged. “You don’t have to be pretty to matter.”
Tamila blinked at me, like this was the first time in her life anyone had ever told her that. She scrunched up her face in thought. “…Do you think I’m pretty?”
“Very,” I said. “Very, very pretty.”
“Oh.” She looked at her feet.
“I think your skin is pretty,” said Titus.
I smiled at him. “Thank you, sweetie.” I turned back to Tamila. “It’s okay to think somebody isn’t pretty, but it’s probably not something you should tell them.”
“Why?” she said, with all the grumpy curiosity of a toddler.
“Because it might hurt their feelings,” I said. “And you don’t know if they’re having a good day or a bad day. If they’re having a bad day, you don’t want to make it worse, do you?”
“…No,” she said uncertainly.
“And if they’re having a good day, do you want to make it bad?”
“…No.”
I smiled. “That’s why. It’s not a bad thing to think it, because it’s just an opinion, and you’re allowed to have as many of those as you want, but you should always try to be really nice to people, because you want their day to be as nice as possible, don’t you?”
“What about mean people?”
I laughed. “Sometimes mean people are only mean because someone called them ugly. If you tell them they’re pretty, or you like their dress or their smile, maybe they’ll be nice.”
Tamila had a powerful frown going now, and she was staring at the carpet with straining concentration. After a minute, she looked up at me and said, “I’m sorry I called you ugly. You’re not ugly at all.”
I smiled. “Thank you, sweetheart. It’s okay.”
She sat back down. “So why are you so short?”
I burst out laughing – and so did Darin. Mortan’s eyes darted between us in amused confusion, and he started laughing too, giving into the flow more than any understanding he had of what we found so funny.
They talked for a long time. I didn’t catch much of it, engrossed as I was with the kids’ questions. They had lots of them: where was I from, what did I do, what was my favorite color, could I fly, why does Mr. Darin have scales, etc. But I did hear Mortan complaining about the inefficiencies of ensalia turom.
“Solar power?” I said suddenly.
The minister gave me a tremulously interested look. “Solar,” he says slowly, and I realized I said it in English. I cleared my throat and corrected myself in Sarchan.
“Solar,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, smiling. “You know the concept?”
“Concept?” I said, forgetting my manner in my excitement. “More than that.”
I walked him through it, slowly, taking my time with the chemistry of it all – renewable energy was, thankfully, at the center of my wheelhouse, and just the fact that I could name any of the chemicals involved in photosynthesis, a process for which they had no basis and certainly no name, was visibly impressive to the minister. He nodded thoughtfully, his face stony and blank. His head was titled slightly, though, and that was a sign he was paying very close attention.
Then he smiled. “We have, indeed, misjudged you.”
No shit, I thought, but I only smiled back. “You have.”
If he took offense, I couldn’t tell. He looked to Darin, who was smiling like a madman, even by human standards. The minister frowned at him, but Darin’s expression didn’t waver. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was trying not to laugh. Hysterically.
“What did I tell you, Misra?” he said. “Deep as seaweed, she is.”
I snickered. He meant something like “quick as a whip” I’m sure, but it lost basically everything in translation.
“Madam Brittany,” he said. “Tany, if I may call you such?”
“You may,” I said. He’d earned it, he’d been nothing but sweet and polite.
He beamed. “Madam Tany,” he said, lingering on the name, maybe just enjoying the way it felt in his mouth. “I am of a mind with Luras Darin and Dr. Sol-dam, as far as humans are concerned.” He gestured to me with a general up-and-down motion of his hand. “And I would like to represent you in the high courts.”
“The high…” I felt myself go stiff. “You…like, go public.”
“Yes. I think you are more than ready, you likely have been for quite some time…and Sol and I have been gathering misras of a kind for months now.”
“How many?” I leapt to my feet, hope and energy swelling inside me like a water balloon. I thought I might burst at any second.
“Thirteen.”
“Out of?”
“Many more,” he said, “but thirteen is more than we need. They represent many different provinces and many different minds, with their backing, we shall have little trouble, I think. Especially with this solar power to entice the more…archaic of my coworkers into official first contact.”
Perfect. “Sol-dam just said he was looking. When did he meet you?”
“He didn’t. I heard Kolar telling Kallen about you, and how your sentience could undermine the whole industry of forced labor.” He shrugged. “Kolar wanted to use it as political leverage, get back in good with the Dasyls, I’m sure – point is, I heard, and I came here, and I see he was not wrong.”
“What do we do now?” I said.
He smiled. “We get you dressed, and go someplace with lots of cameras.”
Epilogue
The next week was a nightmare blur of color and faces.
I spoke with people in front of rotating black orbs Sol-dam assured me were cameras. I answered questions, I signed things, I attended and kind of usurped a university lecture about the allegedly miniscule potential of solar energy (Mortan got a kick out of that), and I convinced them I was alive. Not everyone, obviously. It would take a miracle and a half to make a whole world change its mind at once, especially for a belief so long held.
But it was enough. Enough to change their minds and spur their hearts to undo all the wrong they’d done throughout the universe over their long and illustrious careers as cosmic slavers. Progress. Finally.
And now, here we were. Here I was, rather, sitting at the edge of one of a hundred-passenger mess halls on a massive black ship bound for Sol, still reeling from meetings with leaders with a hundred honorifics and representatives of organizations that had long maintained their belief in alien intelligence. The hall was wide and tall and ringing with seven-paned windows, staring out at the Sarchan sun and its many rocky planets. I rested my hand on the windowsill and watched it all grow smaller, swinging left and right in an orange chair bolted to the ground.
Heading home. It was all so surreal.
I was waiting for people. For Jonathan and everyone. I was, naturally, the first person to board the ship while the other humans were being located, cleaned up, and apologized to in excess.
Jonathan, I’d been told by one of the naval officers escorting us back to Sol, had ended up as one of a thousand exotic animals in some rich moron’s house in the desert. He’d made some good friends, and they’d been, apparently, planning an overthrow of the house and everybody in it when the Sol-dam arrived and told the rich man to fuck off and let him talk with the creatures, to see which of them were sentient. Most of them were. This time, he didn’t need an avalanche of evidence to convince anybody.
Katy had been the subject of behavioral experiments. When they told me, they left out the “behavioral” qualifier and I nearly had a heart attack. She and Dr. Hal-dam, a really nice Sarchan woman in her fifties, had gotten along swimmingly, and they’d been secretly compiling evidence of their own to prove Katy’s sentience when they got the miracle call from Sol-dam.
Naomi…we found Naomi in a house with a Sarchan man, just…hanging out. Living in much the way I’d been with Darin after he’d wrecked the cage. They
drank tea and went on walks and grew flowers in a little garden and were generally having a nice time. The Sarchan in question was, apparently, coming with her, so I guess she got her hot alien after all.
Everyone else, the people I didn’t know near as well, had been scattered in zoos and civilian households. Mr. Cravits apparently managed to jump ship and spent the last year in the wilderness, cautiously sampling the local fauna, taking notes, and generally trying not to get caught. Sarchan children had taken pictures of him running through the woods, and he’d developed a following as the world’s newest cryptid.
They’d all be here before the hour was up, or so I’d been promised. Infrastructure was flawed and inefficient no matter where you were, so I wasn’t optimistic about their arrival times, but it hardly mattered. We were going home. I could wait.
I was glad for the silence, actually. I hadn’t had a moment to myself in a while. I propped my feet up on the wide windowsill and let my head droop against the back of the chair. The air smelled like sterile metal and cleaning agent. Across the hall, a little vacuum bot scuttled along the walls, buzzing quietly as it bumped into things.
Someone slapped their hands down on the table behind me. I swiveled to see who it was.
“Okay,” said Jonathan. “What in the ever-loving fuck could you possibly have done—”
I launched myself out of the chair and tackled him in a hug, suddenly overcome. I felt like my heart was trying to eat its way out of me through my throat. “You’re alive,” I said. I’d known he was, they all were, but I hadn’t really believed it until now.
“Yeah,” said Jonathan. He gave me a big squeeze. “Last I checked.” He stepped back, smiling and looking more confused than I’d ever seen him. “What did you do?”
“I, uh,” I said. I couldn’t tell if I was blushing. I probably was. “I made a friend.”
Jonathan quirked an eyebrow at me. “You made a…friend,” he said blandly.
“I did.”
He only laughed and shook his head. “You made a fucking friend.”
“I did!” I said, suddenly indignant.
“I’m not saying you didn’t,” he said, holding up his hands in mock surrender. “It’s just a really weird way to save the world.”
A Pet For Lord Darin Page 15
