by Lea Linnett
“Nothing like you?” She nodded. “No. But equally beautiful.” He couldn’t help grinning at the pink flush that rose to Ellie’s cheeks at that. He knew what worried her—was he looking for someone else in her features? But no. She couldn’t look more unlike Calliope even if she tried.
“What you do have in common with her is that she was endlessly pushy,” he teased. “She’d debate me in class, challenge me to stupid dares in the cafeteria. She was never scared of me just because I was ‘Senator Kaan’s son.’”
“Oh please,” Ellie said, rolling her eyes. “I was plenty scared of you at first. She’s sounds braver than me by a long shot.”
“You still push me,” he murmured, tickling the back of her hand with a claw. “We wouldn’t be sitting here like this if it weren’t for you.”
She blushed further, her cheeks practically glowing in the light of the heat lamp, and Helik was captivated. He wished he could stay in this moment forever.
But he had to go on, so he cleared his throat. “As you can imagine, adolescent Helik fell for the fiery human in no time at all.” He smiled fondly. “We’d use any excuse to be around one another. Studying, playing sports, running the perimeter of the property together under the guise of ‘training.’”
“Did anyone suspect?”
“There were a few whispers, but nothing that caught. No one expected that sort of thing. Relationships between sub-species and levekk had always been banned, and with humans? It seemed to be the furthest thing from anybody’s mind.” He paused, worrying his lip. This next part was the most difficult, and he was quiet for so long that Ellie squeezed his hand. “Calli was the first person I ever lay with,” he finally admitted. “And the last, until you.”
Ellie went very still, her eyes wide. “It’s been… that long?”
“Yes. Like I told you, I tried to fix it, but I couldn’t even…” He gestured weakly at his groin, relieved when she nodded and saved him from having to elaborate.
She lifted his hand then, pressing her lips to his knuckles, and Helik felt the air leave his lungs. He forced himself to continue, knowing that if he didn’t say it now, he never would. “At the time, I didn’t know much about humans. We’re told from a young age not to think of sub-species in that way—especially humans—but we’re never told why. Or at least, I was never told why.”
The color drained from Ellie’s face. “Oh no.”
“Mm.” He nodded, his heart flitting somewhere between his throat and his ears. “We didn’t know any better, and Calli became pregnant.”
“Ou mai god,” she whispered, and it took Helik a moment to realize she was speaking in her native language. He got the picture, though.
“Yes. You can imagine how shocked we were when her belly started to grow. We didn’t even know it was possible. But I was ready to stay with her. Maybe it was because I was young, but I think I really…” He swallowed. “Loved her.”
His hands had gone slack in Ellie’s grip, but now her fingers clenched around his, her flesh warm against his bony exterior. “What happened?” she breathed.
“Whatever intentions I had were demolished pretty quickly. They found out about the pregnancy during a health check, and it didn’t take much effort to work out who the father was. Calli and I were practically inseparable. We couldn’t lie. One look at the baby, and they would have known it was levekk.”
Helik licked his lips, and the room around him began to darken. He felt like he’d shrunk down within himself. He was standing at the back of his own skull, peering through the muddy darkness at the memories as they paraded across his mind’s eye. The only tether he had to the real world was Ellie, and the distant warmth of her hands clasping his.
“They took Calli away,” he breathed. “She was only a few months pregnant, so there was no baby to speak of yet. I never got to meet it.”
A rustle of fabric reached his ears, and suddenly Ellie’s warmth was closer, pressing against his side with their hands still intertwined.
“I was never told what happened to her. To either of them. But it’s likely they were sent somewhere obscure enough that they’d never be found. That’s if they allowed the baby to be brought to term at all.” He crumpled in towards Ellie, seeking her warmth but unable to meet her eyes. “I don’t even know if Calli survived. Somehow, the media got a hold of the incident, and while I was never named, it tanked Mom’s program. I could see it being risky to have a human with that kind of secret hanging around.”
“You really think your mother would do that?”
“Not much about my mother surprises me anymore.” Ellie gave him a questioning look. “She’s not the warmest of people.”
Ellie nodded thoughtfully, before asking, “Have you ever thought about trying to find her? Calli, I mean.”
Helik shook his head emphatically. “It’s been over fifteen years. If she is alive, she wouldn’t be happy to see me. I ruined her life.”
Ellie’s hand abruptly left his, turning his face until he was looking her in the eye. “You were a kid. You didn’t know.”
“Please, I was almost an adult.”
“But they kept the truth from you.”
That made Helik pause, and while the warmth of the heat room was slowly seeping back into him, his heart still felt icy. He let himself gaze into Ellie’s eyes for a few moments more, craving the certainty he found there. She squeezed his hand, her mouth set in a determined line.
“It’s not your fault,” she murmured.
He pulled her close, crushing her to him, but then the thought of the last human he’d held close intruded, and it was like knives to his heart. He hadn’t been able to protect Calli. And no matter what Ellie might think, it was his fault. He should have realized that Calli would suffer greater consequences than he would if they were found out.
He couldn’t afford to make the same mistake again. This small, fragile human in his arms talked a big game, but if they were ever discovered, she’d be the one punished.
But he still didn’t want to let her go. He craved her warmth, her unerring confidence. He’d lived his life with so many different faces that he’d begun to forget who he was, but Ellie had just one.
And it was a face that he might be falling for, he realized, burying his own into her shoulder. He breathed in, inhaling that strange mix of cleaning chemicals and sweetness that was distinctly Ellie.
Could they continue to live like this indefinitely, always looking over their shoulders and living in fear of being discovered? He feared he would have to make a choice soon, but for now he pushed it aside, squeezing her tighter.
All he knew for sure was that he would never let Ellie end up the way Calli did. He wasn’t going to be the downfall of anyone else, ever again.
24
Ellie was kept busy in the week leading up to the Christmas party. She delivered Anna’s dress, finished off Helik’s soot, and found just enough time to throw together something for herself, but while creating garments usually filled her with joy, now something niggled at her.
She kept running over Helik’s story in her head. Suddenly, his strange, hot and cold behavior towards her at the start of the program made more sense. What happened to Calli would be enough to scare off anyone from relationships. He was terrified of Ellie ending up the same way.
But despite her assurances that she was fine in the Senekkar, really, she could tell he was struggling with it. She still spent her nights in his bed, and he still let her burrow into his side while they slept, but lately, something about Helik’s demeanor was off. When he held her close, his eyes were clouded. They talked over Ellie’s dinner almost every day, but more often than not he seemed distracted, his smile a little plastic.
He was reminding her of the Helik she’d met on her first day in the Senekkar, and her stomach rolled unpleasantly at the thought of him reverting back to that state.
She just had to prove to Helik that she wouldn’t end up like Calli, she decided, on the morning of the party. She
knew the risks and the importance of secrecy. Her run-in with Remmie was just a blip in the grand scheme of things.
The thought eased her as she pulled on her dress, a pale blue slip that she secured with a ribbon of the same color. She still had a length of the deep blue that she’d used to finish Helik’s soot, but she left it on the bed despite how it called to her. She couldn’t run the risk of anyone thinking they’d chosen to match; there was no room for whispers or suspicion today.
Roia would arrive any minute to pick her up, so she didn’t have long to spend on anything else. Her hair went up into a neat bun, and she put nothing but a smudge of black liner beneath her eyes and a dab of pink pigment on her lips, both borrowed from Anna, who had them to spare. There was nothing for her skin; not many products came in human colors in the Senekkar, and she’d never owned such things when she lived in Manufacturing. Augusta would have tanned her hide had she spent money on anything other than food and fabric.
She slipped into a pair of strappy, open-toed flats that she thought might have been made for a pindarro child rather than a human just as the front door opened. When she emerged from the laundry, Roia was waiting for her, and they quickly made their way down to the underground parking lot and the transport that waited there. Roia’s red gaze flitted over their surroundings as they boarded, no doubt looking for undesirables like Remmie.
“Thank you for coming to get me,” Ellie said once they were inside. “I could’ve made my own way.”
Roia grunted as she booted up the transport, the vehicle causing a familiar jerk in Ellie’s stomach as it lifted from the ground. “Didn’t really have much choice,” she said. “Helik’s orders.”
“Oh.”
That chafed a little, Ellie had to admit. She had planned on using one of the apartment building’s drivers, but now Helik had vetoed even that? What was next, forbidding her from shopping for groceries? Her lips pressed together as she pondered that.
“He’s just worried about your safety,” said Roia, her scratchy voice softening. “The Senekkar can be dangerous, especially with these reporters around.”
Ellie stole a glance at the xylidian, surprised. She knew it was because of Remmie, and deep down, she even understood Helik’s fear, but that didn’t stop the frustrated itch that had crawled beneath her skin. She wasn’t a child. She could look after herself.
“Well, thanks,” she said, unable to offer anything else.
The xylidian said nothing, and Ellie sank further into her seat. Helik’s assistant was the most terrifying kind of impenetrable, her black carapace seeming more like armor than skin. But she couldn’t stand the silence—not after days of Helik acting like a concrete wall.
“Do you know how Mr. Kaan is doing with the party preparation?” she asked.
Roia’s gaze cut to hers, and a flash of blue-ish sunlight bounced off her shiny cheek as they exited the parking lot. “His last message sounded excited, exhausted, and exasperated all at once,” she mused, the beginnings of a smile curving her thin-lipped mouth. “But I’m sure we won’t be able to tell either way once we get there.”
Ellie went still, her ears pricking. “You’ve noticed?”
Roia smiled magnanimously. “What? That he’s cinched up tighter than a pair of levekk trousers?”
Ellie had to cough to cover her laugh. “Well, I… I don’t know if I’d put it that way.” Except she would. “Lately, he just… doesn’t seem like he’s all there.”
The xylidian nodded. “He doesn’t like to let people in.”
“Yeah…”
Their conversation petered out, Roia focusing on the transports whizzing past as they pulled out into an aerial lane. All of a sudden, Ellie felt a wave of fear: should she have said that? To Helik’s assistant? How much was a lowly cleaner supposed to see? How familiar could she be after six weeks of working for someone?
But her muddled thoughts were interrupted when the xylidian sighed, running her tongue—which was orange, Ellie now noticed—along the outer edge of her red teeth.
“Helik has a lot of faces,” Roia finally said in a low voice. “You have to, in his world. But I’ve come to find that the more he gets to know you, the more those faces start to fall away. I still see them most of the time,” she added, “but sometimes I feel like I’m seeing the real him underneath, y’know?”
“What’s that like?” Ellie asked, suddenly less sure than usual whether she’d witnessed such a thing.
“Usually angry,” Roia said flatly. “I think emotions sneak up on him sometimes, and he doesn’t always know how to handle them.”
Ellie thought of how raw Helik had been when he told her about Calliope. She remembered the intensity of his expression as he held the auto-injector over her arm. A small thrill rolled through her navel—that was the real Helik. She was sure.
But she couldn’t tell Roia any of that, no matter how she longed to. The closer she got to Helik, the harder it became to keep the two sides of their relationship separate.
“Sounds a little scary,” she said instead, and the xylidian made a grating noise that Ellie recognized as a snort.
It didn’t take them long to reach Kaan Tower, and Roia rode up the elevator with Ellie to the hall where the party would take place, almost like a bodyguard. Ellie fell silent as they climbed, but not from nerves. She was excited. What exactly would a levekk version of a human holiday (with Anna’s influence) even look like?
As they stepped out of the elevator and into the main hall together, Ellie discovered that it looked… loud.
The hall was an explosion of red, green, and yellow. Red tables and chairs with deep green coverings lined the room, and the walls were spangled with yellow, star-shaped icons of varying sizes. Across the back wall behind the stage was a gigantic mural, with swirls of color in a variety of shades—all matching the strange palette that the levekk (and Anna) had chosen—looping together to form something so abstract that it made Ellie’s head hurt.
But one decoration stood out from the others. In the corner, just a short distance away from the mural, was a massive fir tree, its needles swaying slightly in the breeze coming from the air conditioning units. She stared at it with wide eyes, wondering how the hell they’d managed to lug something of that size up to floor seventy-whatever. She hadn’t seen a tree like that since leaving Manufacturing.
Glancing around, she found the crowd of aliens now milling about the room even more eclectic than the decorations. It was mostly levekk and humans, but their pinks and yellows and deep browns were interrupted by the occasional inky-black xylidian, sea-green cicarian and other beings. Some had followed the color scheme to the letter, wearing elegant crimson gowns or garish green jumpsuits, but many had forgone the dress code as Ellie had.
Her eye was drawn to the levekk fashions, most of which she’d only ever seen in the pages of a zine and some she’d never seen at all. As she and Roia hovered at the edge of the room, a tall levekk female floated by, her tight, white bodysuit trailing a black, train-like skirt that threatened to brush the floor. To Ellie’s left, a few levekk scowled at a gaggle of humans who stood close by, and she studied with interest the way their matching gray jackets climbed the edges of their jaws and extended down to cover the first knuckles on their hands, leaving their pale claws exposed.
Roia soon excused herself, disappearing amongst the crowd, and Ellie cautiously set off after her. She swung her head as she walked, keeping an eye out for Helik. She’d given him his soot the night before and had yet to see what it looked like on him since he’d rushed off that morning while she slept. But he was nowhere to be found, and her search was interrupted by her name being called from somewhere behind her.
She turned to find a riot of yellow launching towards her, and soon her arms were full of Anna as the girl pulled her into a hug.
“Ellie! Thank you so, so, so, so, so, so much!” the girl squealed, squeezing her tight and crushing all of the air rush out of Ellie’s lungs.
“No problem,�
� she wheezed, too aware of the disgruntled looks the aliens around them were wearing.
Finally, she was released, and Anna stepped back to give her a twirl. “I could not be happier with this!”
Ellie laughed, Anna’s contagious smile taking over her face as she surveyed her work. The yellow dress nipped in to Anna’s waist almost perfectly, much to Ellie’s relief; she’d never had a chance to measure the girl herself and had to take her at her word when making it. It fanned out at the hip in a tumble of buttercup-yellow waves which floated around her as she spun, the silky fabric reflecting the light perfectly. The torso was simple, but well-fitted, and Ellie was happy to see how well the bright color suited Anna’s tanned skin.
“I’m so happy you like it,” she said, as the human came to a sudden stop, her dress swishing.
“Different ‘L’-word, Ellie, I freakin’ love it!” the girl crowed, drawing a few more sidelong looks from the crowd. “No one’s ever done something like this for me before.”
She stepped in close, grabbing Ellie’s arm and steering her off to the side. “Anyway, have you seen everyone else yet?”
“No,” said Ellie, looking over her shoulder distractedly. She’d been making her way towards the mural and the stage beneath it, hoping Helik would be there, but Anna pulled her in the opposite direction.
“Well, you gotta! Cara found beer.”
Ellie sighed, but the smile still echoed on her face, pleased to see the other girl acting so animated. She allowed herself to be dragged over to one side of the hall, where Cara and a few other humans were seated around a table. A tray full of bottles sat in the center, and at a quick glance, Ellie could see everything from xylidian spirits to human beer.
“Hey, there’s the seamstress! Anna’s been circling the party for nearly an hour looking for you.”
Cara already had a glass of the brown, bubbly beer waiting for her when Ellie was slung into a seat at the table.
“Where did all this come from?” she asked, staring at the ocean of bottles sitting before her, but Cara just grinned.
