“Xhivey. They are here to help you. I will eagerly await your return, Kiki.”
I drop my gaze. He sits up until he can reach me, then slides one finger under my chin, forcing me to meet his strange, alien look with one of my own, even if I try to shutter it. I’m sure he can see through me though. I feel utterly transparent. I want to kiss him and lick my lips, hating my reaction, but wanting to kiss him all the same.
“Just sleep,” I tell him.
He strokes the side of my face lovingly, and looks at me like I’m the sun to his universe. Heat begins to build between my legs and his rumbling gets louder. “Hurry back, or I will have to come and hunt for you.”
I wince at the word, a memory of an alien — this one red and savage — loping after me across hard, packed sands, a look of gleeful determination in his eyes, making me cringe. I pull away quickly and go to the door, refusing to look back as I step through it into the hall. It’s empty, but flashes of a half-heard conversation steer me to the left.
Careful not to touch the weird lamps that flicker with movement like glow-in-the-dark snakes, I run my hand along the wall’s bumpy surface to keep myself steady and eventually, I hear rustling up ahead and come upon an open door.
Kuaku — the bitch — is standing just beyond the threshold and I can’t imagine what she sees because her ridges are a mutiny of colors — everything from copper and red to grey and black. Colors I can’t name seem to strip her bare. Even her shoulders are tense by her strange pointy ears.
I understand her shock. I would be shocked too. I’m still shocked even though I’m not the one in love with him. Even though when he says he loves me, I believe he’s telling the truth. Standing before her covered in thick swabs of blue cum drying haphazardly across my skin, I swallow hard, open my mouth, but I can’t speak. I have nothing to say in my own defense.
Her eyes slit and she hisses, “Don’t tell me you’re having second thoughts.”
Is it that obvious? I shake my head. Wait — what am I even here for? “I’m not. I just…I told him I’d be right back.”
“Don’t worry. I plan on keeping him plenty distracted.”
Jealousy warps my pitch. It comes out higher, more sure. “What are you going to do?”
“Why do you care? You don’t even want him, remember? He’s an alien. Beneath you.”
I’ve heard as much from Jaxel and my own internal monologue for the past two rotations. They’re all I’ve focused on. What I’ve built my new self and my new self’s entire world around. But hearing the words from her now make them feel so trite. So worthless.
“Maybe this is too risky. And he seems…” Don’t say it. “He seems reasonable. Maybe I can speak with him and we can figure out a solution.” I look away, ashamed at my own uncertainty. What happened to me? A good fuck isn’t worth abandoning Svera and Miari.
She balks scathingly, in a way that makes me feel worse than I already do. “A solution to what?” In the dim light, her pure, black eyes flash with murder. “You think he would ever let you return to your home planet? Or somehow try to interfere with the Rakukanna and the Raku’s relationship? He would never let you near her — either of them. You are on trial because of what you did.”
My heart feels like it’s being dragged through coals. So much for hope. Hope is a useless fucking emotion. Everyone is just as bad as I think they are… “What trial?”
The colors in her face dim and she uncrosses her arms from over her flat, plated chest. “As soon as the first icefall is over, you and the other traitor who tried to stop the Raku from finding his Xiveri mate will face a trial by combat. You’ll have to fight Voraxia’s most vicious warriors and if you lose, you’ll likely be banished beyond the tundra to Nobu’s endless ice ocean where you can try to survive. Most don’t and you’re not equipped for it.
“And even if you somehow do manage to defeat your opponent which, let me repeat, will be impossible — then you might be allowed to settle here and keep your position as Xhea. Might. Perhaps the Raku will want to do something else with you for the trouble you caused him.”
“But would the Okkari really let the Raku banish me?”
“Who do you think the Okkari reports to? Raku outranks him. He is leader of our entire federation. Not that the Okkari would try to defy him. Why do you think he left you on that human moon even when he knew you were his Xiveri mate? He is a soldier first and deeply loyal to Voraxia. Why would he choose you over an entire galaxy?”
My heart is pounding. My fists are clenched. “But the Okkari hasn’t mentioned any of this. And he’s made it seem…” Oh stars, no. Don’t even think it. Don’t breathe it life. Don’t be so fucking naive.
“How can you believe that he thinks anything of you beyond your capacity to breed kits for him?” Soft, cruel laughter floats between us. “You need to escape now if it is truly your desire to see your people again. If you even value your own life.”
Her tail flicks back and forth behind her and reminds me of the sand cats that used to roam the human moon. The last of them died out a few generations back but I still saw carvings of them. My dad used to make them out of petrified nightshade and sell them at the market. Dry sand swirling through the air. Every other market conversation punctuated by my dad’s rolling laughter. But he left us when I was young. After my mom went through the Hunt. My parents started fighting then. Everything changed. Because all the Hunt does is ruin.
Energy drains out of my shoulders and fleetingly forgotten hate froths in my mouth. “You’re right,” I tell her. “What now?”
“Come.” She leads me into the room behind her and then through a labyrinthine maze. She knows her way well, like she’s been here before. A pang of treacherous irritation flares again, and makes me remember yet again why I need to be free of this place. I can’t believe for a second that I forgot. I can’t believe for a second that I wanted to believe in him.
My left knee threatens capitulation and my stomach lurches and sinks. The strange thread tearing through my abdomen has begun to unravel — not itself, but the rest of me. I force myself to plunge on, even though every step feels like wading through the mire. The temperature gets cooler the farther we go until finally, the walls turn white.
We enter a small room, the cold so desperately cold I can’t imagine what in the comets this will mean for the outside. Thankfully, the bitch thought ahead and turns to me with a fur-lined outfit similar to the one I wore before. Shoving aside one last hesitation, I shove my feet into the in-built shoe holds, surprised that the legs don’t bunch up around the ankles and hips like the last one did. I lace up the chest piece and throw the hood over the bushel of my tangled hair and as I hold up my now-gloved hands I see that there are five fingers on these gloves instead of six. The suit was made for me.
Emotion taunts me and for just a fraction of a second I wonder if this is the right decision, if I just shouldn’t go back. Why would I go back when he didn’t even tell me about my trial? Unless…
“How do you know about my trial?” I say, voice leveled heavy with accusation.
But the bitch just laughs. “Everyone in Voraxia knows about your treason. All anyone talks about are the tortures the Raku will devise for you for attempting to keep him from his Xiveri mate.”
Xiveri mate. There’s that term again. “If the Raku thinks Miari is his Xiveri mate, then that means that he got her, doesn’t it?”
“Of course. Did you really think you could stop him? He is leader of the Voraxian Federation and a fearsome warrior. He cannot be stopped by the likes of you.”
I hate the way she speaks to me. Like I’m nothing. It reminds me too much of the way the red alien looked at me, spoke to me, hurt me — and I could do nothing to stop him.
I bite down hard with my back teeth and try to keep myself from hitting her as I say, “And now? Where is Miari?”
She flashes yellow then and quickly looks away. “They are in Illyria, Voraxia’s capital.”
“And?”
“How…how is she?”
“How should I know?”
“If my trial is talk of the town, then she would also be. What do people say about her?”
The bitch waits for a moment, as if considering what or whether to tell me. Finally, she says four little words that change my life. “She is with kit.”
Stunned, I let the revelation sink in, but only for seconds that take eons. She’s pregnant. Possibly forced to mate. Abducted by strangers — aliens — I’ve never even heard of. I failed her. I failed her in every possible way. Not again. Hate flowers again in my chest, finding purchase in my doubt and hanging on. Turning away from the bitch, I swallow hard and look at the only other door in the room, the one that emanates such oppressive cold.
“Tell me where to find a transporter. I’m ready to go home.” The bitch hesitates one last time, ridges flashing an unsettling peach. She seems uncertain herself, and I don’t like it. Barking sternly now, I say, “Do you know the way or don’t you? I did my part. If you want me to leave, then tell me the way.”
Her features harden. Her colors die. She cocks her head to the door and says, “Follow the eastern sun until you reach the black screa cliff face. The door to the Okkari’s private transporters will open for you as you are Xhea. It won’t for me, so you have to do this on your own. Inside, you’ll find the transport pod. You’ll be able to take it where you need to. You’ll have plenty of time. I’ll keep the Okkari distracted. By the time you reach your pathetic human planet, you’ll be a distant memory for him.”
The thread in my chest opens up, forming a hollow gong which rings. I take another painful step until I can feel the cold breach the barrier of the door and my gloves and wonder if the temperature outside hasn’t dropped even more significantly.
“How far?”
“It is a quarter span walk, not far. Though with your short, stumpy legs it will probably take you a half span at least.”
“I don’t know that measurement,” I snap, ignoring the insult. “How many paces?”
She shrugs, her ridges swirling with a tendril of black. “Three hundred. Then you’ll be free.”
I turn to the door again and this time she presses her palm to a panel beside the door before it releases and slides open, letting in a burst of bright white light and a blitzkrieg of frigid, biting air. I take the first step outside of his home quickly, before it’s too late. Before I succumb to the oasis and let it drown me.
“Human.” I turn. Her ridges are calm once again, and I can sense a satisfaction simmering beneath her words. “Don’t come back.” The door shuts between us silently, with no great ceremony.
Putting the house to my back, I turn to face a shocking sky. Red strips shine through a limitless white, which screams down at me. Cold falls from it like needles and melts where it touches my skin. Squinting, I see the murky outline of cliffs in the distance, just as the bitch promised, even if they do look farther than three hundred paces. Three hundred of their paces is probably five hundred of mine. The world is flat everywhere else and there are no houses here. We must have come out on the other side of the hill.
I measure out forty paces and when I look back, the purple alien’s house is barely visible. Ahead of me the horizon is still just a seamless white, only the vaguest outline of something up ahead to give me direction.
I take another twenty steps, then another ten, then another five. The wind feels like fire. I don’t understand how something so cold could feel like this. It’s even worse than it was on top of the mountain, and I hadn’t thought that possible then. Does that mean it can get even worse than this? Meanwhile, the ground beneath my feet has shifted from plush, springy white to a hard, unyielding cold, like the tundra I ran onto, even though the female leader told me not to. If she said not to run onto the tundra, why would they keep transporters here? Maybe she lied. Maybe Kuaku did. After all, she wanted me gone. Why did I think she’d care if I lived?
A blast of cold cuts across my cheek and I can’t push forward against it. I turn my back on it and even then, the needles seem to flutter around and even through my suit. It hurts and I feel the fluttering in my chest devolve to the first whispers of a very real panic.
I turn around, but I’m not so sure I’m facing in the exact same direction. Trying to orient myself, I look back for the house — gone — and then for my footsteps — but they’re gone too, erased as soon as they’re created. The wind is too hard. The white is too white. The cold is too brutal. I need to go back to where it’s safe. I can fight him there about the trial. I can fight him there about Miari. I can fight anything in the warm, but in this cold white it’s getting harder and harder to move and to breathe — both things I desperately need to do.
Picking a direction, I take a step, only to feel the hard cold beneath me rumble, the sensation almost exactly like when the red aliens touched down onto our moon colony in their large sky ships. Is there a port around here? I haven’t gone three hundred steps yet, but maybe she just miscounted. I must be close. No other sound could sound so large or so exactly like an off-world transporter.
Hope lifts my chest and urges me forward, but where I walk, the ground beneath me darkens. There are no shadows overhead and it’s too white and all encompassing for me to have created a shadow myself.
Confused as much as I am curious, I bend down and swipe away the top misty layer clouding the packed cold and jump — damn near out of my own suit and skin — when the shadow passes by below my feet. Something is moving down there. And then I feel it. A muted thump and a distant, terrible wail coming from below. From underneath.
The thump comes again and when I look up, it’s without caring that I have no points of reference to guide me. None of that matters. I don’t know if whatever is below the hard cold can get through it, but the thumping is enough to shake my whole body, to lift my feet off the ground, to make me stumble. It’s big. And I don’t want to be here to find out just how thick that hard cold is. I thought fighting khrui was difficult, but I’m in the alien world now where I know nothing of monsters. Because everyone is.
I take off running as hard as my suit will allow, stumbling every third step on the tremors the thumping creates. Exhaustion is forgotten. So is Miari, Svera, the colony, the differences between human and alien. All I feel is a fire across my chest and a desperation to live claw at me…and then the splintering crack of the hard cold beneath my feet.
A deafening shriek scrambles my brain waves. I slip and slide to my knees, but I only stay grounded for the length of a blink. Everything lurches. The cold hard gives way and I go flying as something huge — huger than aliens, huger than khrui, huger than homes on our colony, huger than ships to take me away — breaks free of the cold prison that had kept it at bay.
A singeing sort of heat sears my entire right leg as soon as I stand and I come down hard on my knees. I glance at my suit to see it shredded by some strange colorless goop. Steam rises from it and judging by the sudden inflexibility and immobility in my entire right side, I know it can mean nothing good.
Another screech blasts through the white and sends me flying over the hard cold, propelled by nothing but the wind it creates. I land on my stomach and when I look up, I see it, and seeing it, I pray to the universe for a quick death.
The mammoth of the Hard Cold Below has three limbs and is clawing it’s way out of the water with strange smooth tentacles, bringing forth one giant body that’s completely eyeless. All that sits in its round gelatinous center is one enormous maw.
The size I can fathom, but that maw is what makes me shudder. Round and wet, it has no teeth. It’s only a gaping white and pink, inside of which I can see organs and flesh and the stuff of nightmares. And I’m going to be inside of that. The only question is how long it will take to kill me and how. Will I suffocate? Or will whatever stomach acid this creature contains eat me alive?
I stagger up to standing as the tentacles jolt forward, latching onto the har
d cold and, with impossible strength, pulling the creature towards me. It moves slowly, which is the only advantage I’ve got at the moment.
Lurching in ungainly steps, I run for my life and as I run I scream, “Okkari!”
The word shocks me because it sounds so right that the thread in my chest settles, calm. As if in acceptance of something greater. And as I run for my life, this strange calm settling in my chest in spite of my terrifying and impending death, it’s with the thought that funny enough, Svera may have been right all along.
I’m starting to think that there is a Tri-God, a divine force who rules the cosmos, and that the Tri-God has a bitter sense of irony and a funny sense of humor. Because right now as I imagine being chewed alive by a beast with no teeth, devoured for eternities, I prefer the Hunt. And all I wish, is that I’d stayed in the oasis.
9
Okkari
This is not my Xiveri mate.
The knowledge blankets me even before I wake. The body attempting to slide into my nest is not my Xiveri mate, she is not Kiki, she does not smell of miaba or zxhoa or crova. She smells of something foul. Worse than overripe fruit or rank meat, she smells like corpses rotting on a battlefield. My Xanaxana reels and my body begins revolving against the zyth fur, coming to life. The warrior in me flares.
“What have you done with my Xiveri mate? Where is your Xhea?” The female is one I recognize in the glow of the ioni. Kuaku. And she is as naked as her name-day.
“Okkari…” she says and there is a seductive lilt to the female’s tone.
With neither mercy nor warning, I snatch her up by the throat. “Kuaku, you have lost your senses!”
She claws at my hand and I release her with a shove, sending her stumbling backwards until she hits the wall. Fear eliminates the pleasure expression that she had worn on her face. “Okkari, I did not mean to…”
“You did not mean to defile these furs, disrespect my Xiveri union, and dishonor me, my Xhea and yourself,” I seethe, “Nox, you could not possibly have meant to do these things. But you will tell me now what you did mean to do, and you will tell me where my Xiveri mate has gone and why you appear to me now in her place.”
Taken to Nobu: A SciFi Alien Romance (Xiveri Mates Book II) Page 9
