by JA Huss
There’s more banging noises from down the hall. Veila talking again. Only her tone is too low for me to pick out actual words.
I begin walking that direction, down the long hallway, and then there’s a wide set of open stairs leading up to another level. I walk up slowly, trying to be quiet. Not to sneak up on her but so I can hear what she’s talking about.
“…and then I added some passion limes. What do you think? Will it be good?”
At the top of the stairs I stop and look around.
It’s a kitchen. Like the biggest kitchen I’ve ever seen. Long white countertops, two sinks, and huge stove. Serpint has a stove in his quarters. He likes to cook. But when I say cook I mean he likes to order shit from an autoshopper and then heat it up.
This is not what Veila is doing. She has that stove packed with large pots and there’s food all around her. Round, red vegetables, and long stalks of green ones, and hourglass-shaped orange ones. And then off to the side are cut up bits.
The whole place is a mess. Knives and silverware are haphazardly strewn across the various counters. Small brown bags of ingredients sit opened. There’s a long slab of raw protein on a cutting board. And steam from the boiling pots fills the air.
Veila’s back is to me as she stirs something within one of the pots. And she’s still talking to the Rexbot, who has settled on the countertop beside her and appears to be listening to her yammer on about passion limes.
“…vitamins, right? They say you need those…”
But what the fuck is she wearing? An oversized long-sleeved shirt that even from the back makes her look frumpy.
And while her hair is still piled up on top of her head, it’s messy now. Most of it has fallen out of the sophisticated updo she had going on the last time we talked just a few hours ago.
The bot spies me and chirps. This makes Veila whirl around and orange sauce goes flying off the end of her long stirring spoon.
“How the fuck did you get in here?” she demands.
“Your bot let me in,” I say, putting up my hands. Because her eyes are lit up white. She looks like an evil silver demon in this moment.
“What?” She whirls to address the Rexbot. “What the hell? Why would you let him in here?”
The bot flies up out of her reach just as she takes a swipe at him with her metal spoon. His chirping fills the room and my eyes follow him as he descends high up into the dome.
But then I get lost in the view.
The fucking view. I walk forward, unable to even process the threats that come spilling out of Veila’s mouth because I can’t quite believe what I’m seeing.
The thick, reinforced vacuum-grade plasti-glass dome starts at the floor, curves all the way up—several levels up—and allows me a full-on view of one side of the Harem Station ring.
But that’s not what has me breathless.
Because this ship—due to the nature of the top-level airlock on the outside of Harem—is positioned in such a way that looking from one side of the dome to the other affords a view of both of ALCOR’s gates.
I’ve seen them together before. When you enter the ALCOR Sector through one of the gates you can see the second gate immediately because they are positioned on opposite ends of Harem Station. And if you swing your ship around in the right way, you can see both of the gates at the same time.
Typically no one does that. So when you enter the sector you only see the gate you’re aiming at, and not both.
Right now, standing here in this dome, on this ship, in this dock, I can see them both at the same time and when I tip my head up I see the blobs of suns and the reddish-purple nebula that everyone calls the Seven Sisters. They are far, far away. Thousands and thousands of light years away.
When open the gates are fiery blue-violet rings with long, crackling tendrils of purple reaching out along the perimeter like flowing hair in zero-g. The inside of the gates are a deep, blue well of… well… no one really knows what the inside of a gate is made of. Space, for sure. But blue space, not black space. So some different kind of space.
Right now the gates are locked so they’re black on the inside. But the crackling perimeter is still lit up and there’s a bright beam of light shooting out from the main gate straight into the center of the far gate like a pathway.
Which I don’t recall ever seeing before.
Like ever.
But then again, I can’t recall a time since my brothers and I landed here that the gates have been locked.
They are never open for free passage. But they aren’t typically locked, either.
“Wow,” I say just as Veila’s metal spoon cracks against the side of my head. “For fuck’s sake!” I yell, turning to face her. “What the hell?”
“Why are you here, sneaking around my place?” She’s fuming. Like if she wasn’t wearing that stupid frumpy shirt and her hair wasn’t all messy, I’d be afraid of her.
But somehow, despite her blazing silver eyes, she can’t quite pull off the whole villainess thing. So I just kind of smirk at her and say, “Calm down, you silver freak. The bot let me in! I just told you that!”
She grits her teeth and sets her jaw, clearly unable to reconcile me invading her space.
“What are you doing? And why are you dressed like that?”
Her brows furrow in confusion. Then she looks down at herself, realizes she’s wearing her comfy clothes and someone just caught her in them, and then the rage is back. She picks up a long knife from the counter and points it at me. “Get out!”
But I’m not ready to get out. I need answers and maybe she doesn’t have all of them, but she has some. “What’s going on here? Is this ship your home?”
Her knife is shaky in her hand as she continues to point it at me. “Get. Out. Or I will cut your throat with this knife from across the room.”
I laugh.
But then the damn knife is hurling through the air at me and I just barely slide to the side in time for it to miss piercing my throat.
“Veila,” I yell.
But she’s already reaching for another knife and I’m ducking back into the stairwell and stumble down several steps to avoid being hit.
I regain my balance and yell, “Stop it! I’m not leaving until you tell me what the hell is going on!”
“Get out!”
“No. I’m not leaving! Just calm down!”
She doesn’t answer me. I wait it out. But the only thing I hear from the room above is loud heavy breathing. Hopefully this is her way of dialing her rage down to a more manageable level.
The bot begins chirping excitedly. But she doesn’t respond. And all I hear from her is the continued heavy breathing.
“Is… everything OK up there?” I ascend a few steps and cautiously peek my head up to assess the situation.
Veila is leaning over. Palms flat on the countertop, head hanging low so that her messy silver hair is covering her face, panting.
“Are you OK?” I ask. Because she doesn’t look OK.
And she doesn’t answer me, either.
“Veila,” I call.
“Just shut up,” she spits. But then she leans over even farther and disappears behind the counter.
The bot begins beeping. But it’s not any beeping I’ve heard it do before. It sounds more like an alarm.
Something inside me shivers and a chill runs up my spine. I leap up the stairs, cross the room, and find her on the floor on the other side of the counter.
She’s still hunched over, holding her stomach with one hand and using the other to push the bot away. He’s hovering close to her, spinning back and forth to look at me, then her, blaring beeps out like crazy.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
Veila shakes her head and says nothing.
But I know what’s wrong.
There is a puddle of blood between her legs.
“Shit,” I say, crossing the distance between us and kneeling down at her side. I look up at the bot and say, “Call her medical t
eam. Quick!”
But the bot doesn’t move. It just sends out a series of sad beeps.
“Then just call someone! Anyone!”
But all I get in response are the same sad beeps.
“It’s no use,” Veila whispers. “I knew this was coming. This is how it always happens. I just figured I had…”
But I don’t hear the rest. Because she slumps over to the side and goes unconscious.
The bot begins screaming out beeps and rises in the air. I look up at it as it flies across the room, then stops. Beeps again.
“What?” I ask. Then I see Veila’s wrist band light up and words are translated as the bot continues to beep excitedly.
Pick her up and follow me or she will die.
I feel terrible for hesitating. Because there’s a part of me that thinks… Maybe Veila dying isn’t such a bad idea?
But there’s another part of me… the soulmate part… that would do anything to save her.
I grab her under her knees and back and lift her up. I scan the room for the bot, find him hovering over the top of the stairs, and then rush forward, following him back down the way I came.
He leads me down the hall to the large main room, then stops at a wall panel and flashes a light at it. The wall opens up to reveal a large state-of-the-art medical facility and a medical pod that isn’t pod-shaped but box-shaped with an open frame enclosure.
I realize it’s not a medical pod at all. It’s an autosurgeon.
I place Veila’s limp and now very bloody body onto the scanner surface, then back off as the autosurgeon comes to life with a flash of light. Plasti-glass walls shoot up from the bottom of the frame, sealing her up inside. And then the tech springs into action.
A wave of light scans her body and then robotic arms emerge from the frame and begin cutting her clothes. A few seconds later they are peeled back to reveal her body and the table splits in half, opening her legs and bending her knees simultaneously.
Various medical instruments become active and I have to turn away after that.
I don’t want to see this. I don’t care how much I hate her, no one wants to be seen in this kind of situation. And if she were awake she would be screaming for me to get out.
I lean against the wall and stare out into the large living room as the loud, buzzing medical instruments inside the autosurgeon do their thing.
The bot appears beside me and begins to chirp and I find myself wishing for Veila’s wristband.
Just as I think that, the bot reaches out to touch my shoulder. I look up into his spherical face and then he turns and takes off across the room, disappears down a hallway, then comes back holding another wristband.
I take it when he offers. But the screen doesn’t light up with text. This wristband has a voice translator.
“She will be unconscious for several hours,” he says. His voice is low and even. Almost without emotion. “Would you like to go back to your station?”
“No,” I say. “But shouldn’t we call someone for her? Isn’t there a doctor here?”
“No. Aside from you and her, there are no humans on this ship at all.”
“What?” I admit, I’m a little taken aback at that revelation. “No humans at all? Just borgs and bots? She has no family, then?”
“Just me,” the bot says.
I don’t know why this bothers me so much, but it does. If I were hurt I would hope that Luck and Crux would at least be notified. And if one of them were hurt I’d want to know too.
When Luck and I got hurt out on the salvaging jobs we never called home and told people about it unless it was serious. Like that one time Luck almost got his head cut off by that woman at Fornax Station. I didn’t call anyone though. I just put him in Lady’s medical pod and we came here to Harem for treatment.
I thought he was gonna die that time.
But that was the only time. Otherwise Luck would fix me up, or I’d fix him up, and that would be the end of it. But we had Lady and Beauty. We were our own family of sorts.
So it bothers me that Veila has no one but this bot.
“What’s happening to her?” I ask. It’s not an entirely dumb question. I get it. She’s miscarrying those babies. But it seems more serious than that and I want to know why.
“She’s been through this before. She’ll recover,” the bot says.
He didn’t really answer my question but I don’t ask again.
I might not know Veila very well. Hell, I hardly know her at all. But I get that she would not want me knowing her private medical history. Even if I am her soulmate.
It’s not a real bond, anyway. We’re not in love. We’re not even in lust.
Is it weird that I don’t really have the same urges for her as my brothers do for their fated princesses?
Maybe.
I glance over my shoulder and immediately wish I hadn’t. There’s a lot of blood on the autosurgeon table. Veila’s head is tilted to the side, facing me, and there’s a tube down her throat. Her body is listless. Lifeless. And it jerks back and forth as the autosurgeon performs the procedure between her legs.
I turn to the bot, feeling sick. “Is there anything I can do? I don’t know what to do.”
“You should go home. There’s nothing you can do. She will wake up in a few hours and she will not want you to be here. I didn’t think she was this close to the end when I let you in here.” He pauses. Sighs.
“The end.”
“This is always the final outcome when she’s pregnant.”
Which reminds me of something Veila said earlier about Corla.
She was probably pregnant dozens of times before she ever left the Cygnian System.
That’s what they do to us.
Starting at age eleven.
I walk over to the dark blue, half-circle couch and take a seat with my back to the open door of the medical center. I prop my elbows on my knees and lean my head forward into my hands, wondering how life got this way.
How did I get here? How did we all get here?
The sounds of the operation fades and then ceases. And I know that the bot has closed the door to the medical center.
And when I straighten up and look over my shoulder—he’s gone.
But he stayed with her, I realize. And that makes me feel a little better.
CHAPTER ELEVEN - VALOR
I must fall asleep on the couch because I wake up confused, looking out onto the dark expanse of empty space through the window.
“I’m fine,” I hear Veila say, and realize she’s awake.
I sit up and find her propped up against the open doorway of the medical center, wearing a thin white robe, looking tired, and not at all like herself.
“What the hell?” I whisper.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she hisses. “What are you doing here? Get out!” Then she turns to the bot and says, “Get him out of here! Now!”
“Hold up,” I say, getting to my feet. “What are you doing? Where are you going? You should be in bed!”
“Get out!”
“And what the hell happened to you? Why are you… pink?”
Veila stumbles forward, but the bot is holding her up with both of his grippy hands so she doesn’t fall. She pushes him off her and leans against the wall again. Then she glares at the bot and says, “Stop touching me. I can do it myself.” Presumably referring to walking. But she can’t do it herself, because she takes two tentative steps and falls to her knees.
I rush over and bend down to grip her arm. She struggles in my hold, but she’s far too weak to fight me. “Where do you want to go? I’ll help you.”
“I don’t need your help,” she seethes, jerking her arm free. But when she tries to stand back up, it’s clear she’s not going anywhere without someone’s help.
Normally I’d poke her about this. Make her admit that she does need help. Maybe even make fun of her weakness and vulnerability.
But I’m not thinking clearly. She looks… well, nothing like the Veil
a I saw even a few hours ago. And certainly nothing close to the Veila I saw when I woke up earlier today.
She is no longer silver. Like at all. She is just… pink. As pink as Lyra or Delphi. Her long, messy hair, her furious eyes, and even her glow is a light shade of pink.
But not the rose gold of earlier when she was drinking the tushberry juice, either. That was a glow of health. Or at the very least, not near death.
Her glow now is tinged with gray. A color I’ve never seen either Delphi or Lyra display. Not even when Lyra was in the medical pod after we blew up the Cygnian warship near Bull Station.
So I don’t say anything. I just lift her up to her feet and hold on to her arm as she shuffles across the room to the couch. Then I hold her tight as she eases her body down into a sitting position. She pauses there, catching her breath, then turns and slowly crawls up the couch and tucks herself into one side of the curved back, fingertips reaching for the silver blanket.
I help spread it across her body because it’s painfully clear that she will not be able to manage this.
She doesn’t say another word. She doesn’t protest or fight me. And that might be the clearest sign that she is not well. She simply closes her eyes and falls asleep.
I stand there like an idiot for several minutes. Just looking at her. Wondering what the hell I’m witnessing.
Is Veila… dying?
That should be a good thing, right? I mean, all I’ve thought about for the past several months since I first saw her hologram threats from Lair Station was how I wanted to kill her. End her life.
And here she is. Pathetic and weak. Listless and vulnerable.
And I do not want to kill her. Not at all.
I want to hold her and tell her everything is going to be OK.
“You should leave.” The bot’s voice comes from the wristband on the couch. I must’ve set it down before I fell asleep earlier.
“No. I’m not going anywhere.”
I don’t add why I’m not leaving. I don’t even understand it.
Because I feel wholly different about Veila right now.
I feel that bond we were meant to have. I feel the tug and pull. I feel my cocks stiffen a little. Which makes me sad and sick. Because there is nothing sexy about this woman before me.
