by Lea Linnett
Scott didn’t look at her as he smiled. “…Human?”
Ellie almost stopped in her tracks, her eyes widening. “Yeah,” she said, peering up at the other human shyly.
“I was pretty surprised that Devis wasn’t a fire-breathing dragon when I first met her as well,” he said with a grin, and Ellie laughed.
They made it back to Helik’s apartment building without another glimpse of the sleazy cicarian reporter, and Ellie was glad for the chance to talk to Scott one-on-one. For the first time since arriving in the city, Ellie felt like she didn’t have to hide quite so much. Of course, she wouldn’t be revealing what her and Helik did the night before any time soon, but admitting that they got on okay? That they were friends, even? With Scott, that didn’t seem as outrageous as it did when she was with Cara or the other humans.
He walked her into the lobby, drawing a shocked look from the cicarian receptionist as he registered Scott’s size, and Ellie breathed a sigh of relief.
“Seriously, thank you. I was a little scared of what that reporter was gonna do,” she said again.
Scott just tilted his head. “All good. I was worried he’d start going after other humans in the program. He’s too scared of me to get grabby, but with everyone else…” He shrugged.
“Are you excited for Anna’s Christmas party?” she asked, grinning when the bigger human rolled his eyes.
“I’ve never celebrated Christmas in my life. Oh, and you wouldn’t believe the questions Devis has been asking.” He put a hand on his hip, throwing his head back in mock derision. “‘What kind of species builds a holiday around giving each other material gifts?’ ‘Why is it in the coldest month?’ ‘What’s so festive about red, green, and yellow?’”
Ellie snorted, covering her mouth belatedly when the cicarian receptionist sent her a dirty look. “The yellow bit is all Anna. The girl is obsessed.”
“Ugh, we’re all gonna go blind as soon as we walk in, aren’t we?”
The elevator pinged as they giggled over that, but Ellie’s laughter stopped short when she caught sight of who stepped out of it.
“Scott? What are you doing here?”
Scott went momentarily rigid, the cogs in his brain visibly turning as he looked between Ellie and Devis, who approached them at a quick pace. Despite Scott’s compliments about the levekk, Ellie was reluctant to meet the female’s eye.
After a moment, Scott seemed to come to a decision, and his posture relaxed. “Ellie was being bothered by that reporter, so I escorted her home.”
“So you didn’t stay in the transport like I asked?”
Scott looked perturbed, but didn’t cower like Ellie would have as Devis regarded him carefully, her expression closed. Ellie almost frowned at that, after the way Scott had spoken about her, but her expression was wiped clean by panic when Devis turned her gaze on Ellie, her pupils tight with interest. “Good. That cicarian is the worst type of carrion crawler. So you’re Ellie?”
Ellie’s back straightened automatically, nodding at Devis’ shoulder. “Yes, ma’am.”
The female grunted, waving her clawed hand back and forth dismissively. “It’s Devis. You can look at me, you know.” When Ellie did so, the levekk smiled in appreciation. “Helik really does know how to pick them,” she mused aloud, and Ellie felt her blank expression falter, heat rising in her cheeks.
She glanced at Scott—whether for help or just to distract herself, she wasn’t sure—but the human wasn’t looking at her. His gaze was glued on Devis, and far from looking nervous or obedient, his mouth was turned down in a grimace, looking more like a disappointed father than an employee.
“You’re perfect for the cameras,” Devis continued, drawing Ellie’s attention, and she felt her heart climb into her throat. She just meant she was photogenic? Or was she implying something else? Ellie’s hands shook, and she tucked them behind her back. God, if she didn’t suspect anything before, would she suspect it now? Had Ellie reacted wrong?
She felt like she was boiling down into a messy puddle under Devis’ sharp gaze, her chest constricting. But the levekk only smiled again, the expression not quite meeting her eyes, and mercifully turned to Scott.
“Well, I’m finished here. Let’s head back.”
“Sure thing,” Scott said serenely, but his gaze was pointed.
Ellie looked between them in confusion. This was Devis seeming ‘human’? What had she missed? She couldn’t read either of their faces as they said their goodbyes, and she practically ran for the elevator, only glancing back to see the two tall figures exiting the building once she was safely inside it.
She twisted the handles of her shopping bags in her hands as she ascended the building, wondering what Devis and Helik would have talked about. She bit her lip. God, she hoped she hadn’t made the levekk female suspicious. She’d thought she was used to the city and its inhabitants, but between ‘Remmie’ the reporter and Devis, she couldn’t have been more wrong.
As she leaned against the elevator wall, all Ellie wanted was to go home. But despite everything, it was still the penthouse above her that came to mind, and not her tiny bedroom back in Manufacturing.
23
Helik let his head fall back against the tiles with a resounding thunk. He was sprawled across the floor of the heat room, the globe burning above him to his left and the door somewhere behind his head. He hadn’t bothered to strip off properly, only shucking off his shirt before he collapsed in here, and he missed the dry heat against his legs.
His conversation with Devis had not gone well.
Once Ellie had left, a strange calm had come over the levekk. Her usual energy had suddenly evaporated, her gaze steady, and when she and Helik sat down in his library to speak, he’d found her difficult to pin down.
“Do you think we can trust the humans?” she’d asked casually, her gaze on the ant-sized figures who passed by on the street far below them.
Helik had frowned, his brow plate almost creaking with the strain. “What do you mean?”
“We’ve let them into our homes, into our lives. I mean, they’re cleaners, too—it’s almost hilariously unoriginal.”
“Has your human done something?” Helik asked, trying to catch the female’s eye.
Devis shook her head. “No. It’s just… things have been tense since the program began.” She glanced at him. “You remember that nutjob at the commencement conference?”
A chill had run down Helik’s back at her words, the cicarian’s questions rushing back to him. “How could I forget?”
“He’s been…” Devis looked down at her lap, choosing her words carefully. “He’s been hanging around. Coming to my work. Trying to spy on my living space. I think he might have busted the lock on my office cabinet, but I can’t prove it, of course.”
Helik thought back to Kaan Tower and whatever had triggered the fire system, coating his entire office in extinguishing fluid. Had someone been inside? Had they been looking for something and set off the extinguisher to cover their tracks? His belly turned cold.
“And you think the humans have something to do with it?”
Devis shrugged. “It started then. I’d be disappointed if Scott had something to do with it, though. He’s handy.” Her tone was almost bored, but Helik saw something else there. It was muted, and hard to catch, and he couldn’t quite figure out what it was.
“You should have told me sooner,” he reprimanded. “I’ll contact a lawyer. Maybe they can—”
“No,” said Devis, finally looking at him. “I don’t wanna go through all that. I’ll deal with the guy.”
“How?”
Devis never gave him a proper answer to that, instead deflecting the conversation to questions about Ellie and the upcoming cultural exchange that Helik didn’t feel up to answering.
He sighed as he stared up at the heat globe. Had he made a mistake letting humans get so close to levekk affairs? Other species, like cicarians and xylidians and Calideez martians, had been working in clo
se quarters with levekk for centuries now, and while there were always hiccups, they’d managed to strike a balance of sorts. At least, that’s how the Council and Guides like to see it.
Devis’ concerns had shaken him. If one or all of the humans were somehow using the program as a way to destabilize their levekk masters, then he would eventually be the one answering for it. It was his program, his vetting procedures, and ultimately, his responsibility. He closed his eyes. That was all he needed on top of the stresses of whatever the hell he was doing with Ellie.
Ellie…
What if she had ulterior motives? She’d certainly been eager enough to pull him into bed with her, and why else would a human from Manufacturing look at someone like him with anything other than disgust or fear? Levekk were a rare breed in the Outer Districts; humans would only ever encounter them as the employers of their employers, or under far more intimate, illegal circumstances. Helik had no misconceptions about how some of his people behaved, whether their businesses were legitimate or underground. They wouldn’t exactly be seen as friends by humans.
He let out a grunt of frustration, knocking the back of his plated head against the tile again.
He was agitated, his skin feeling as if it didn’t quite fit him, and he rubbed at his neck. Was Ellie using him? The longer he thought about it, the less he believed it.
He’d seen the fear in her eyes when she first saw him, but something else as well. Not anger. Not hate. No, it was… hope, or something like it. As if he could fix all her problems. As if he was worthy of being known. Maybe it was just curiosity, but whatever it was, it wasn’t malevolent.
Helik had felt their connection, like a switch flipping in his brain, and he couldn’t bring himself to doubt it.
But that didn’t mean Ellie wasn’t a risk—or at risk. Especially with reporters sniffing around.
He clasped a hand over his face, blocking out the light from the globe.
Ellie made him feel more whole than he ever had in his life. Or at least, since he was young. But he could feel that anxiety creeping back. For now, the dangers were only in Roia interrupting them with a comm call or Devis giving him a loaded stare, but tomorrow? It could be this reporter hacking his security cameras, or a colleague noticing an out-of-place glance or a human blush.
The peace they had was balancing on a knife’s edge, and Helik feared it would topple.
If they were caught, his career was over. Hell, his life on CL-32 was over. At best, he’d be house-bound for the rest of his life or sent to some backwater military station to fill a desk.
And that didn’t come close to what Ellie would suffer.
Helik’s breath suddenly felt very thin, his hands fisting at his sides. Ellie would be imprisoned or worse. Humans that ended up on the wrong end of a scandal usually disappeared, and Helik couldn’t bring himself to consider what happened to them. It was a wall in his brain that he just couldn’t climb over, and so he let his head roll to the side, pushing the thought away.
The last thing he wanted was for something to happen to Ellie. He’d been through that pain before. He couldn’t go through it again.
Downstairs, he heard the beep of the front door unlocking, and it didn’t take long before a soft knock sounded on the heat room’s door.
“Come in,” he called, and the strange mix of relief and trepidation that filled him when Ellie padded softly over to stand at his side was too complicated for him to parse. He looked up at her, enjoying the way her skin turned a golden orange in the light of the globe. “Hey there.”
But Ellie only raised an eyebrow, carefully lowering herself to the floor at his side. “What are you doing down here?”
He meant to sigh, but couldn’t quite find the breath for it. “Rough morning,” he said instead, and against his better judgment, he wrapped an arm around her body as the human sat, leaning her back against his side and draping her shoulder-blades over his stomach.
“How’s Devis?” she asked innocently.
Helik grunted. “She only just left,” he said, as if that answered her question.
“I know, I saw her.” A pause. “Scott was there too.”
His brow plate dipped into a frown. “He came with her?”
“Yeah.” Ellie bit her lip, as if unsure whether to continue. “But he also, uh… helped me out.” She arched over him, stretching her back, before finally admitting, “I had a bit of trouble out on the street today.”
Helik propped himself up on his elbows, watching her closely. “What do you mean?”
She blew out a breath, less a sigh and more a way of steeling herself. “There… was a reporter. The one from the commencement conference.”
A chill ran down his spine despite the blistering heat of the room around them. “I should have sent Roia with you.”
“Helik, no—”
“What did he say?”
“He was asking about Scott and Devis, mostly. A bit about you…” She hesitated. “He mentioned… Calliope?”
Whatever blood Helik thought might be pumping through his chest dried up in one swift second, his throat constricting in panic.
“Is it a person?” asked Ellie, shifting around to half-hug his torso. He made to sit up, dizziness grasping for him and his eyes unseeing, and Ellie shifted with him until they were facing each other, her smaller hands clasping his.
He stared at their intertwined fingers, his mouth opening on silence. This is what he’d wanted to say to her before Devis interrupted them. This was who he wanted to talk about. But to have it foisted on him so suddenly made the words die on his tongue.
Maybe it would have been this difficult anyway.
He nodded, jerkily. Ellie’s hands abruptly morphed before his eyes, overlaid by the memory of another set of hands: slightly darker, the fingers just a little shorter, but just as fragile.
“What was she like?” she asked. When he met her eye, he was sure that she somehow already knew, her fingers squeezing his.
He tried to answer, but his mind kept sticking on one word: was.
It still hurt.
Helik blinked at the floor. He’d thought he’d gotten over this, or at least pushed it far enough down inside him that it wouldn’t affect him so. It was so long ago now, but as the memories bubbled back up, they brought all of the pain right along with them.
“She…”
He met Ellie’s eyes, grounding himself. Her smile was soft, half her face cast in shadow by the globe.
“She’s the human the reporter was talking about. The one who went missing.” Saying the words was like pulling teeth, but the effect was immediate. The cold still ate at his veins, but he no longer felt frozen. Suddenly, he could move his fingers to cover Ellie’s, he could feel the warmth from the heat room distantly on his skin. “She was also one of the most beautiful humans I’ve ever seen.”
He half-expected Ellie to frown at that, but her eyes only widened, glittering in the light. “How did you meet?”
“It’s a long story,” he warned, running a thumb over the human’s knuckles.
“I think I have time,” Ellie said, then grinned. “Unless you want me to go dust the library again.”
Her smile was infectious, and it stole onto Helik’s own face before he could stop it.
“My mother,” he began, sobering, “was a politician. Just like me. And just like me, she was always coming up with schemes and programs that would push her career a little further. Helping people was just a happy side effect. Her chosen project was a sub-species school.”
Ellie frowned at him as if to say, ‘You’re not like her,’ but leaned forward with interest nonetheless. “Like fundaments school?” she asked.
“More advanced. This was a special program for adolescents—teenagers, I think you call them?”
Her eyes bugged. “But we don’t get to go to school after the age of thirteen.”
Helik’s smile turned wry. “My mother tried to change that. I doubt she actually cared about the kids going thr
ough it. It was always about appearances with her. But she set it up in a quiet bit of countryside and started bringing students in for a six-month trial.
“The revolutionary part,” he added, rolling his eyes, “was that this wouldn’t just be for sub-species.” He heard Ellie take in a breath. “It was meant to be a proper education,” he continued. “Worthy of a levekk adolescent. And to prove it, she brought me in. I was at the perfect point in my education to join in, and she thought it might open my eyes a little. She had no idea.”
Ellie shook her head, her lips still parted in shock. “I can’t believe something like that existed,” she said. “I mean, we have sub-species doctors and stuff out in Manufacturing, but… Those sorts of skills are usually passed down through families. It’s so hard to break in if you can’t find someone to teach you.”
“You can imagine how good it would have looked if it had worked out,” said Helik. “My mother would have gone down in history for ‘civilizing the sub-species of CL-32’ or something equally ridiculous. It’s not like there aren’t sub-species schools on other planets, right?”
“Are there? Do you think it’s that different?”
He met her eyes. “I hope it is.”
They shared a long look that made Helik’s stomach flutter, and he dropped his gaze.
“Anyway.” He drew in a deep breath. “So I go to this school. Mom’s not there unless she’s analyzing the program’s performance, so I’m alone with a handful of other levekk adolescents and a whole estate full of sub-species for six months. We lived together, ate together, we barely left the property. And while I was there, I met Calliope.”
He glanced at Ellie again, worried she’d be uncomfortable, but the girl was listening with rapt attention. “Go on,” she prodded. “Tell me about her.”
He chuckled, even though the memories made his heart ache. “She was small—but then, you all seemed small to me. She had brown skin and deep, dark hair. It was so thick I couldn’t brush my hand through it without tangling it. And her eyes were brown.”
Ellie blinked at him. “So…”
