My xora is firm and ready inside of her yet once again. I hold her hands down at the wrist and prop up her hips so that she has no control and beneath me, is entirely vulnerable. Mine. To hold, to worship, to do with as I please.
“Don’t hold back,” she says, full of trust that I cannot believe I deserve.
“I will not, Kiki.” And I do not for the full length of the lunar.
16
Kinan
The early light of the solar filters into the overlook room. I ignore it and the tasks and responsibilities it brings and instead, pull the tattered furs up higher over us. Kiki stirs but only slightly, shifting onto her side and throwing her arm carelessly across my stomach. I smirk and trace the line of her shape with one finger, letting it roam absently over her perfect skin, taut and unblemished, before finally exploring her hair and its many tresses.
“What do you call this style of your hair?”
She makes the pleasure expression without opening her eyes and my two hearts beat firmly beneath my chest plates. “My braids?”
“Braids.” I exhale. “I like these braids very much.”
“Thank you. Kuana braided them. I taught her how.”
“You honor her.”
“That’s what she said,” Kiki sighs. Her tongue flashes between her teeth and though I want to press my own mouth to her delicious, spicy, shorba mouth and taste that tongue once more, I see that she is slightly swollen there. I was too hard with her. She encouraged the roughness, but I will need to be more careful with her in the future. That thought thrills me. There will be a future between us. A bright one.
“I like your hair too.”
Surprised, I blink. “Thank you,” I say in her human language, for we do not have these words.
“You’re welcome,” she sighs. I think she will sleep again when she says softly, “Why is there a strip of white?”
I hesitate, warring with myself on whether or not to tell her — but I realize quickly that not to tell her the truth, would be to lie. “It might surprise you to know that eons earlier, our ancestors here on Nobu looked much like today’s Dra’Kesh. Their hair was the color of snow, skin red. Many generations later, once inter-planetary travel had been discovered, a portion of Nobu’s ancient population sought to leave.
“They wanted to find more fertile lands with less harsh conditions. They took off and, thinking they were heading towards the capital planet of our federation, Voraxia — the same place where Raku and Rakukanna are now seated in our capital — they made a mistake in their navigation. It led them to Cxrian. The native tribes they found there were either assimilated or decimated and several hundred rotations later, the planet established itself as an independent planet from the Voraxian federation. Their race they called the Dra’Kesh.
“Voraxia was at peace with Cxrian until, not many rotations ago, the Dra’Kesh population stopped producing kits altogether. In an effort to rekindle their diminishing numbers, they sought new females to breed.
“The Dra’Kesh are a proud race, most unwilling to mate with any outside of their race. However, a militant group believed that Nobu, having shared ancestry with Dra’Kesh ancestors, might be acceptable as an alternative. They invaded this tribe. My Okkari before me was felled and as his second, I championed our warriors to victory. But not without loss. Two females were killed that day, along with twenty-three warriors. One of the females was with kit.”
Images of that battle revisit me. The smell of blood. The taste of smoke. I was hardly more than a kit myself when Dra’Kesh invaders arrived on our planet, hungry for females. They succeeded, but only for instances before the battle hunger and fierce need to revenge came over me. In my tribe they called it tsanui and it is a sacred rite. I killed twelve fully grown Dra’Kesh warriors that day, but I could not stop just one of them from taking her life. The life of a female with kit. Not my own, but all kits and all females are sacred. That Dra’Kesh male died in pain, but it was not enough.
“What happened next?”
Blinking myself into the present, I quickly clear my throat and return my gaze to the brown face pressed against my chest, shining up at me. Purple against brown. Our colors look as if they were selected specifically to match. They look beautiful together. I wonder what our kits will look like.
“The Dra’Kesh planet was folded into the Voraxian federation. So as not to disgrace them, we agreed that the Bo’Raku would remain equal to the other xub’Raku, rather than treated as a protectorate, much as your human moon is regarded currently. I was named Okkari that day by my people and elevated to Va’Raku by the Raku of the time. The Bo’Raku of the time was exiled and the next, now fallen Bo’Raku took his place.”
Her body tenses in my arms, fingers tracing small patterns over my plates. I take that hand and bring it to my mouth, then kiss my way down her palm to the inside of her wrist. “He will face his retribution in the tsanui where I will skin him alive, remove his plates, pluck out his eyes and his claws and his teeth and then leave him there to die.”
She snorts, the sound one of pleasure and flicks her eyes up at me. “That might be the most romantic thing anybody’s ever said to me.”
“It is the truth. For harming you, tsanui is my right. I will be cruel.”
“I know. I just…never mind.”
“You will tell me what is on your mind, Kiki.”
For a moment, I think she will not, then she says, “I’m just nervous to see him again.”
“You have built him up into a monster in your mind. And while he is monstrous, he is no different than any other male. Than me. He is only flesh and blood. You will see just how much he can bleed.”
She smirks again. “Xhivey.” Her pronunciation is terrible, but I am pleased that she tries in Voraxian all the same. “You still didn’t answer my question though.”
“You are correct. My long explanation is merely a way to tell you that we were once Dra’Kesh until Voraxia expanded from its current capital to other planets. They arrived on Nobu first. Blood mixed — back then the Xanaxana was strong, weaving many Xiveri mates. What you see now in this village and across the villages of Nobu are the product of those couplings, so many generations later. Some of us still have evidence of this.” I pull the strands of white hair flowing from my scalp towards her, letting them drape across the back of her hand.
She watches them without speaking and I can read nothing in her expression.
Disgruntled, I say, “Do you hate us because we have Dra’Kesh blood flowing through our veins?”
“Nox. I don’t. I did, but really the person I hated most was me.”
I feel anger at her words and it warps my speech. “Hating yourself for what another did to you is nonsensical.”
“It might seem that way, but it’s true. I don’t even really hate Bo’Raku. I mean, I do. But what I hate more was the fact that I couldn’t beat him.”
“All warriors lose battles. We are not invincible…”
“It wasn’t that I lost.” There’s a hiccup in her voice and when she pulls her gaze to meet mine this time, I understand that she’s revealing something to me that is utterly and profoundly sacred. “It wasn’t even that he raped me. I’d had sex before. I knew what it was like. My mom went through the Hunt and what she described wasn’t terrible. She even said she felt pleasure. Svera’s mom went through it too, but she wasn’t selected. Miari’s mom died.
“Mentally, I prepared for the Hunt. I knew that there were so many possibilities and I thought I accounted for them all. I knew my body would heal from whatever they did to me and it did, but…”
She bites her lips together. I do not speak. I wait for as long as it takes her, until finally she exhales, her breath fanning across my chest, making every place it touches tingle. “He laughed.”
I do not speak. I cannot. By her small admission — two little words — I am gutted. Flayed. Massacred. Dishonored. I feel that to share the same blood that he does makes me nothing in this moment and sud
denly I understand how Kiki must have felt. What drove her.
“It was the single most degrading and humiliating moment of my life. The pain I could have handled, but the laughter… I hear it all the time. When I’m asleep. When I’m awake.”
“Do you hear it now?”
She pauses. “No.
“That is because Pe’ixal is ruled by hate. Do not be like him. Not when there is something much more powerful that can drive you to becoming the greatest warrior Nobu has ever seen, for you are already the most fearsome Xhea we have ever witnessed.”
She bites her bottom lip and looks up at me, terror in her gaze dimmed. She shines brighter now than she did, or perhaps I am only imagining things. “The Xanaxana, you mean?”
“I was going to say love.”
She lifts a hand and gently brushes her fingers through my hair, paying particular attention to the strands in white. My scalp prickles as she scrapes her nails across it. “Pe’ixal,” she says. “Bo’Raku… I didn’t think I could even say his name out loud.”
“Names have power here. More than this pleasure sound you call laughter. Pe’ixal’s name has been revealed for all of Voraxia to hear. He sits in a well of shame he cannot crawl out of and as soon as the first icefall ends, he will stand trial for his crimes and I will exact tsanui in your honor.” I press my mouth to the top of her head and inhale the scent of her hair. “He will either die or be exiled where the only beings alive to hear his laughter are the hevarr.”
She snorts again, making the laughter sound. “I’d love to see him get eaten by a hevarr. That would be fun.”
This time, I am the one to make this snorting laughter sound. “Then it is as you wish. And speaking of hevarr, you will need to meet with Hurr early on the coming solar. The hevarr has been successfully skinned. You will now help the xub’Hurr in the tanning and curing process.”
She blinks up at me and I know this time her expression is one of shock. “I’m not training anymore?”
“You are. You will do this in the latter half of the solar. All warriors have multiple positions. We cannot simply play with swords while the rest of the tribe does all of the work. I have been too lenient with you thus far.”
She gapes. “Are you calling me lazy?” She lands a punch playfully on my chest.
“Perhaps I am. How will you retaliate?”
She sits up quickly and throws a leg over my chest only to wince and clutch her thigh. Dramatically — near comically — she lilts to the side, collapsing onto a pile of pillows. “Cramp!” She shouts.
I cannot contain laughing sounds as I come to cover her. “If you think I will not rut you simply because of a cramp, then you are wrong. You have much more work to do, my Xhea.”
I impale her with my length without warning and she moans deeply from the back of her throat. Her eyes roll and she struggles to meet my gaze as I pound into her. “More work,” she moans, “You’re going to be the death of me…”
“Nox.” I capture her lips with my own and between pants and kisses, grunt, “But I will kill for you.”
Forty-eight solars later…
17
Kiki
Tre’Hurr laughs uproariously and I can only assume it’s because of my expression. “What is this?” Bile pitches in my stomach and climbs threateningly up my throat as I maneuver my paintbrush up and down the stretch of hide in front of me.
Other females stand in even intervals to my left and right in the huge screa chamber. One of the biggest in-built caves I’ve seen in the village so far, it’s second only to the Okkari’s training pitch, though this one is broken down into many antechambers — so many, I haven’t even explored them all.
In this cavern are a little more than thirty of us working, but some filter in and out. All are busy with different hides, carrying them from one antechamber to another for skinning, tanning, stretching and airing.
For the past however many solars, I’ve been helping carry newly skinned pelts from one place to another — all of them white Edena hides — and stretch them across wooden frames of varying sizes. Thinking back to all the manual labor I did on the colony, I thought this would be a breeze, completely underestimating how hard the work would be. Still, I find myself smiling as I notice a few faces shining in my and Tre’Hurr’s direction. They’re smiling too.
“Don’t act so surprised. This is dolloram, what we’ve been using to cure the hides.”
“But it’s never smelled so bad before — I mean, it’s smelled bad, but this is a whole other level. Like a bowl of rotten fruit was beaten to death with a fish.”
“Colorful, I’ll grant you that, but you should know better than anyone what this is.”
I stand back from it for a moment, head cocked to the side. Dread fills my belly. “Is this the hevarr?”
“It is.”
“It reeks.”
She laughs. “That it does. It’s an incredibly dense piece of material. We thought for your first time, it would be easier to start you with Edena.”
“And now what — I’m one of the team?” I smirk.
She looks at me, pausing mid-stroke and smiles up at me guilelessly, “Hexa.” She resumes working without saying anything else. As if that single word didn’t mean something special to me. As if it were totally obvious. “You have improved considerably over the past solars. You are almost as adept at this as nearly matured kits.”
“Wow,” I say, elongating the word, “You are throwing major shade right now.”
“Throwing shade?” She tuts under her breath in a way that’s become familiar over these past solars working alongside her in this muggy cave. “That is not possible. Another one of your human expressions, I must assume.”
“Indeed.” I laugh lightly under my breath and pick back up my brush, moving it over the horrifying-smelling hide in even strokes, just as Hurr and Tre’Hurr taught me. “We did something similar on the human colony, but we didn’t have dolloram, or any particularly effective tanning solutions for that matter.”
“What did you use then?”
I shrug. “We mostly just mixed sand with acolic acid and did the process once instead of soaking the hides after and applying salt. We didn’t have enough salt to spare. Or acolic acid. In fact, the only thing we can spare is sand. If y’all ever need any, you know where to go.”
She smiles at me slightly, her laughter ceasing as she turns back to the skin with her brush. She dips the frazzled hairy brush tip into the thick, grey goop and applies a layer onto the pale grey underside of the pelt. “Your colony will not have these worries again. I am sure.”
Something irks me then, a recurring thought I’ve had, one that I finally have the courage to voice. “Do Voraxian females resent human ones?”
Tre’Hurr’s ridges flash white with surprise. She opens her mouth to respond, but just then there is a commotion at my back, towards the entrance of the cavern. I turn and am surprised, just as I am every time, when Reema enters the cave. Currently auditioning for different roles, she’s begun helping the xub’Hurr these past few solars and sometimes we are stationed close enough to one another to speak. I’ve learned a lot about her.
Her mother is a xub’Xhen — what I’ve gathered to be some sort of scientist who studies organic matter — and her father is Garon, the weapons keeper. She doesn’t like skinning or tanning, but she likes the brining process because she gets to paint. She likes painting. They don’t have artists here on Nobu, so she hopes that in the coming solars, when she vies for a title of her own, she’ll become the xub’Garon, apprentice to the weapons keeper — she wants to take after her daddy. She doesn’t think she’ll have a chance for the post however, because there is only one xub’Garon and no female has ever vied for it before. But she still hopes. She also likes sweet shorba fruit and nut bread pudding — we both do.
“Surprised again, my Xhea,” Tre’Hurr says with a chuckle. “I would have thought seeing Reema would be a common sight for you. Especially after all I’ve heard of
this human moon and its fertileness. You must have babes suckling on breasts and little kits running rampant.”
Reema is looking for something — someone — and when her gaze meets mine she smiles sheepishly and waves in the human greeting custom I taught her. I wave back and watch her until she is directed by Hurr into the antechamber where hides are soaked. Lifting my paintbrush back to the hevarr skin, I tell Tre’Hurr, “It’s just crazy to me how few like Reema I’ve seen — and she’s not even that young. I mean she’s obviously younger than we are, but I don’t know if I’ve seen any babies at all since I’ve been here.”
Tre’Hurr nods and a skein of grey grief winds across her forehead.
Stupid mouth. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”
“Nox, my Xhea, you are correct. The Okkari’s village is the largest on Nobu. We are just over three thousand. Of that, we have only two hundred and ninety who do not yet have titles and, of those, only thirty two kits. No babies have been born in the past four rotations.”
I curse. “Comets, that’s terrible. And even for kits, that isn’t very many.”
“It is not. It makes it hard to picture this human colony you speak of. The thought of kits and their games, suckling babes and the guileless laughter of youth helping to carry us through these long ice storms is truly a wonderful thing to imagine. But so distant. Like trying to snatch ice from the air before it lands without it melting.”
“I’ve tried that. It didn’t work.”
She laughs lightly, but it does not reach her ridges. “We all have. So for now we are content to treasure our little ones. The few that we have. It is a wonder we have any sane adults at all with how badly we spoil our kits.”
I smile and we lapse into a pleasant silence. Around me I hear other females talking, renewed laughter and the occasional high trill of a much younger voice giggling among them. Distracted by thoughts of children, I drop my brush and when I turn to retrieve it, kick the bucket of dolloram accidentally — the screa bucket.
Taken to Nobu: A SciFi Alien Romance (Xiveri Mates Book II) Page 19
