“You will tell me if you are certain that you are prepared.”
No. I’m not. “Yes. Hexa, I am.”
He exhales gruffly, and then even more gruffly says, “Then welcome, Miari, to Voraxia.”
9
Raku
There is something wrong. Deeply wrong. So deep, even the winding stream of the Xanaxana in my chest is marred by it.
She has pulled away from me, withdrawn. Is it something to do with the food that she ate? Is it making her unwell? All was fine before. Better than fine. Glorious. Her Xanaxana stirring mine from the moment I opened the door.
I had been angry with her then, but she had just been hungry. Hungry. I know so little of my hybrid female’s anatomy, I do not even care for her properly — as any male should, and I am her Xiveri mate. I am weak. Is this why she shuns me and rejects my touch?
She does not even allow me to help her onto the glider, but instead struggles to reach the ledge high above. When she finally ambles on, my reflexes are all kicking and tensing with the urge to pull her against my body and hold her in the protection of my arms.
She may not be a youngling, but she has also never ridden a glider before. And here she stands near the stalyx railing while I steer us over the tops of the werro trees on the outer rim. She leans so far over the edge it scares the beats out of my hearts.
“Miari,” I grunt, “you will come here to me now.”
She looks at me over her shoulder and her mouth is down. There is a new, puckered crease on her chin and beneath her tunic, I see her tail swat the air in a telltale display of her emotions that I wonder if she has any ability to control.
It does not seem like it. How would she, with no one there to show her? I inhale, feeling exhileration at the thought that I might have such an honor. If she comes back. Right now she is so far. Too far. What went wrong?
“But I want to see.”
“You do not defy your Xiveri mate.”
Her lips twitch. “Doesn’t that mean you also shouldn’t defy me?”
“Miari…” I growl, angry because I can say nothing else. I stammer, “I am still your Raku. And you will come to me now.”
Her face twists into a mask of pure displeasure, but she still holds out her arms, balancing carefully as her feet carry her to me. She attempts not to touch me but I have no more patience for her aversion, so I grab her by the waist and wrench her against my body, settling her there so that we are front to back and she can see through the wind protector that curves over the front half of the glider.
The holo screen juts from it, but I sweep the controls aside with a flick of my fingers. It disappears leaving nothing but the treetops rolling out beneath us to meet a distant horizon.
I point to it. “Those are the Qath mountains,” I say, tracing their murky grey outline with one of my claws.
“Will we go there sometime?” There is hope in her voice I do not know how to interpret.
“Qath is an inhospitable place,” I say cautiously, “Very different to your small moon. Below the canopy, Voraxia is warm, yes, but above it is cold. Do you feel it?”
She nods. “I do.” She shivers and huddles a little further against my skin. Or perhaps that is what I like to think she does. Perhaps I just close my arms a little tighter around her.
“It’s really cold. I’ve never felt cold before.” She makes a soft pleasure sound which entirely contradicts her words and the fact that she wraps her arms around herself.
I cannot fathom how her limbs can be so relaxed when my two hearts are squeezed. Her garb is not enough for a voyage like this, not with such thin dermis. I should have considered this. Xok! Just another way in which I fail her.
Immediately, I draw the holoscreen before us and activate the shields. It is an unnecessary use of power in any other circumstance, except the one in which my Miari stands in a thin tunic, cold.
Her five little toes shift and shuffle on the panels below. Damn me to the center of the hottest sun that I did not even provide protection for her soft feet.
Staggering over my words, I say, “In Qath it is different. The mountain range is a reien farrn mountain and its heat is so great the cool atmosphere here does not penetrate the valley beyond it. Werros do not grow from the sands, leaving the entire valley desertous except for the oasis that is Qath. In its humidity and heat, life thrives, but being the only water source for miles, it draws all manner of life. It a violent, savage place. Where warriors and their families live and train, those that survive.”
“But Svera, she isn’t a warrior. Will she be okay? Does she have to go to Qath?” I feel pleasure in my mouth as she struggles to pronounce the name of this region. It falls ungainly from her hybrid tongue, succeeding in sucking me further, and I am already so far gone.
“Hexa, she goes to Qath because Krisxox goes to Qath. I would not have any other male look after her on the ship and he has agreed…” though begrudgingly… “to take her as his ward for the foreseeable future.”
“Why him?”
“There are no other males strong enough to defend her against the Voraxians who have heard of the pleasures of this human moon colony and would like to sample such treasures themselves.
“The interest and desire for human females will only grow after you are presented, and Voraxia sees their new queen. They will want hybrids for themselves, and to mate with humans to create more hybrids like you.”
I push her hair over her shoulder. The world is quieter with the shield in place, no longer stained by the rapid whoosh of the wind.
“Me?” She points at her own chest. I find the gesture odd and humorous. “A hybrid? But why? I’m sure I look strange to you. I look strange to the humans.”
“Strange, hexa. The most beautiful female in all of Voraxia.”
She snorts and lifts her eyes past me, to the skies. I find the expression to be unpleasant and grunt, “Why do you do this?”
“Do what?”
“This eye lifting?”
“Rolling my eyes?”
“Hexa. And you make this unattractive sound with your nose.”
A sudden burst of pleasure explodes from her mouth, sharp and fast and seemingly unexpectedly because immediately she claps a hand over her lips. “Comets…” She makes the pleasure sound again. “Nevermind it. It’s nothing.”
It isn’t nothing. Nothing she does is nothing. Because right now my Xanaxana that should be docile, sated, and content, is uncoiling itself and I am bathing in it anew, as if this is the first time I am seeing my Xiveri mate, all over again.
I do not understand and I feel fury at this uncertainty. The Xanaxana’s first quell should be over, it should have passed. I have spent seed within my Xiveri mate and yet mating with her again, immediately, is suddenly all I can think about.
The pleasure sound moves me. I want to hear her make it again, but I do not know how and would not debase myself to ask. I am grateful then that she changes the subject, “So Krisxox will be the one watching Svera. But for how long? I’m sure he has things to do.”
“Krisxox will look after the traitor until her trial,” I grunt. Even my voice is laced with the Xanaxana. It wants to be heard.
“And then?”
“And then she will be returned to your moon.”
“Good.” She exhales and the little lines beside her eyes release. She pauses and there is a tension in her tone as she says, “Thank you, Xoran.”
I do not expect this name from her. Not here. Not now. I am troubled to think past it.
“You will repeat your question,” I mumble, realizing she has asked me another.
If she notices me falter, she is gracious enough to pretend she doesn’t. “I asked if Svera would be okay though? We discussed food for her, but not anything else — tools, a safe home. Will she have everything she needs to survive in Qath?”
“You ask many questions for your traitor.” I feel my ridges threatened by another treacherous bloom of emotion, but I am aware enough in this
moment to tamp the nerves that fire with color and keep myself restrained. “Should I be concerned that your own concern is not something born by kinship. What is she to you?”
I grip the outsides of her arms more firmly. Her eyes round. “She’s my friend.”
“Friend?”
“Yes, friend. I…does that word not translate for you?”
“Nox, it does not.”
She makes a face, nose pinching, lips falling apart. “You don’t have any friends? Any people you keep close and tell your secrets to? Your hopes and fears? Just hang out with?”
“Hang? Why would I hang with others and tell them my secrets? Is this a form of torture? Does she inflict this upon you?” My hackles rise but the pleasure sound comes from her again and it cools me immediately.
I relax the pressure of my claws on her skin, worrying that I might lose control and cut her. A Raku should behave with more self-mastery than this.
“Nox, not at all. She’s my friend. Someone I care about very much.”
And just as I think I have regained mastery over my ridges, a fresh surge of color washes over me and I bathe in delicious copper jealousy. “What you speak of we call kin — the affection for mates and their offspring. You do not have mates, you have one mate and I am he. So forget about these friend creatures and remember that your place is by my side and in my breeding belt and with no others…”
“Nox!” She shouts, and then she grabs me. Her small hands mold to my arms just above the elbows. She shakes me a little bit, demanding my attention. She has it all. But maybe what she wants instead, is my calm.
My Raku before me was known for his temper. He prided himself on it, yet it was his downfall and made it possible for me to issue challenge to him. I vowed the day I struck him down that I would not become him, even if he was the one to sire me.
Looking deeply into my Miari’s eyes, I recognize her strength, hoping to leech it. I breathe in deeply, hold the air in my four lungs, then carefully release.
“Nox,” she says and I can feel her fingers lose some of their stiffness, and become soft again against my arms. “What you describe, we call this something else. A friend is different. Not a mate. Not kin. Not family. Not a baby. You…you are my mate. But Svera and Kiki are my friends. I care about them, but I don’t…touch them like I touch you.”
She licks her lips, lifts a hand, touches my face. Her fingers on my jaw only land there and linger for a moment. Then she withdraws and I am starved.
I feel myself stooping down so I can be closer to her, wanting her to place her hands on me again. Any touch she gives I’ll take. You are my mate. She is my mate. Hearing her say it is a new form of pleasure I have not experienced before.
“With friends, I can talk to them and laugh with them. We know about each other. I can tell them things that I maybe can’t even tell my mate, or my kin. And I never had any kin anyways so in a sense, they’re like my sisters.” She settles her hand on my chest and I am pleased.
I take another breath, tasting her ranxcera blossom air — now stained with a light glaze of musk, my musk — and hold it in my mouth, wanting to devour the taste. Wanting to commit this moment to the archive of memory forever.
“What is sisters?”
“You don’t have siblings?”
“This word does not translate.”
“It’s when a woman has more than one baby. The girl baby will be a sister to the other, and a boy baby will be a brother.”
“More than one youngling? That is possible for human females?”
A sudden image fills my mind, a dangerous one — Miari in our home surrounded by kits. More than one kit? We could have more than one heir…
Hope strikes me with all the savagery of a blade thrust straight through my chest. I clutch at it and watch her, impaled, as she speaks.
“Hexa.” She nods. “We actually have a problem of too many children.”
Too many? I do not understand and I humble myself by blurting out a question, as green as a kit learning everything for the very first time. “But then there must be many hybrids if the Hunt has been in practice since the previous Bo’Raku. Where are they now?”
She shakes her head as I speak and a certain sadness gleams in her eye and in her breath as she sighs, “Our women don’t go through with the pregnancies. It’s too dangerous.”
“Went through with…I do not understand. What happened with the other younglings?”
“They were aborted.” I still fail to grasp her meaning and she must sense this because she quickly explains, “The women went to doctors and the doctors cleaned the eggs out so that they wouldn’t become babies.”
“They did not want their young?” Rage eclipses reason. My plates lift away from my chest. I tower over my Rakukanna even though she is not complicit in this abhorrent act. The thought that she speaks of it glibly however, fills me with disgrace.
Would she dare do this with our young? What would I do if she did? I cannot think of it. It is a Xiveri mate’s responsibility to defend his mate with everything he has, down to his last breath, but against his mate in favor of his young? This has never been born in the history of all Voraxia. The bonds of Xiveri mates, forged by Xanaxana are too strong, and the younglings, too precious and too rare.
“Though this Hunt was not a human ritual, you mean to tell me now that females discarded their kits…
“Nox! That’s not it at all.” My Rakukanna’s displeased crease returns. Even her mouth turns down and her arms tense close to her body. She withdraws from me. “They don’t survive.”
Silence. My thoughts turn to a slab of helos, left out in the rain. All of the beautiful striations in its marbled, gemlike surface, are stripped away.
“What did you say?”
Her back teeth bite together as she speaks. “The human women that get pregnant from the Hunt and go through with their pregnancies? It’s a death sentence. No female has ever survived it and most of the babies don’t either.
“What do you think happened to my mom? She was part of the first selection, got pregnant along with five other women, and when I came out of her, I ripped her apart. She and another woman were the only two who were able to give birth to living hybrids. That’s why there’s only two of us — me and Darro. The other four babies died and so did all the women.
“Nowadays women aren’t willing to take that chance. They have to abort the babies to survive, and some of them don’t, even then. We don’t have very strong facilities…” She pivots, crosses her arms over her chest. Her gaze meets mine, but in her stance I can sense both shame and a rage that eclipses it.
She says, “Two dozen women have died in the past rotations from the abortion or infections they got afterwards. And even those that do survive, for some the trauma of the procedure — both mentally and physically — leaves them destroyed for life.
“So no, you’re wrong. They do want their young, but they can’t have them. That’s why the Hunt is torture on top of torture. We never asked for it. We never wanted it. But the earlier Bo’Raku or whatever he was called came and made a deal with our Antikythera Council so that every rotation we have to provide women or they’ll take away the Drolax Dome that keeps us safe from whatever wild things haunt our planet, like that monster you killed. It’s a completely unfair trade, but there’s nothing we can do. We can’t fight you. We can’t fight Bo’Raku. His people kill the ones that try to.”
Her eyes are full of water and I open my mouth but there are no words, and it does not matter. In my hesitation, she turns away from me fully and wipes at her face. The window between us is closed.
I do not attempt to touch her, for my emotions are too volatile. Too many questions, tortured images, realizations of the consequences of my own actions and those of my kind, my ignorance, wounds ripped open, all race through my mind.
I think of the unborn kits — human and hybrid — and the human females whose lives were destroyed…it is too great a tragedy to bear. I am Raku, responsible
for all of Voraxia’s people, and for the continuity of its future. When she told me that the Hunt was not a human ritual, the suffering it could and did cause these creatures was not among my considerations. The lives lost. I am ashamed that it did not even occur to me. And now this loss is a price paid by the whole of Voraxia.
And Bo’Raku, one of my own, knew of it.
Caused it.
Bo’Raku…
He would have known of the younglings discarded. He would have seen with his own eyes the lessening population of human females. He would have known of the agreement with the Council and would have not only been complicit in it, he would have had to uphold it.
And he would have had to slake his lust on unwilling females. If I had come but a rotation later, my Miari might have been among them. The thought causes supernovas to flare in my mind.
Bo’Raku’s claims of innocense were untruths, told directly to his Raku when I first questioned him, when I first put him to trial. And even after evertyhing, he has no fear of me. But he will. He will.
I turn to my holo screen and quickly draw up communication with Bo’Raku. I send him an order to meet with me later this span. I want this taken care of before the ceremony. I want him burned and buried.
Fury makes my hands shake, so I flex them and quickly set our course for the High Galley of Illyria, near the river valley of our home, rather than the longer tour I’d planned to take her on.
She glances at me when the glider changes course, but she does not question it. I wonder if it is that she does not care or if she trusts that I will keep her safe no matter where we go. Somehow I doubt it is the latter. She has no trust for me other than in my ability to uphold a pact. Xok — have I been denser than a block of werro root this whole time? Every pact she has made has not been for herself, but for another.
My chest fills with a ranxcera-laced breath. I am honored, and humbled by my Rakukanna. “You are not a leader among your people,” I say, voice soft.
She makes the unattractive sound with her nose. Her arms tighten across her chest and I am distracted for a moment by the way the fabric folds around her mounds. I want to cup them with my hands and taste them with my lips. Nox…I cannot, because like her females joining in the Hunt, she is unwilling.
Taken to Voraxia Page 11
