by Amanda Milo
I am ready to bury my rootstem inside of her, but she’s grown curious about my chest vines so I exercise patience as she lifts a hand from the water and presses a dripping fingertip to my dry areas, seemingly fascinated by my skin’s reaction as it absorbs the dampness and sprouts a small leaf.
“Like marl!” she says.
I don’t know what that means, but it’s distracting to know that her Sproutling is hungry, starting to loudly crave tapriklut again—while I’m consumed with a need of a very different sort; I feel my tendrils swelling to a painful degree, and if we don’t hurry, I’m fearing they’ll have grown too big to all fit inside of her.
While she satisfies her curiosity, I start at her chin, just under her slightly kiss-swollen lip, trailing soft presses and licks down her jaw, making my way to her throat where I see someone has already marked her neck.
Not to be outdone, I nip it, my teeth going between the top bite, and the bottom bite.
She cries out, her lower half bucking against me, before she suddenly seizes, her limbs going rigid, her toes curling into my calves.
The moment it breaks, I crowd her opening, driving my rootstem forward, attempting to stuff my thickened tendrils past her bizarrely wonderful, tight ring of inner muscle.
“Ahhh!” she cries, and I go still, but before I can panic that I’ve hurt her, I sense her enjoyment.
I groan with gratitude. I am relieved I do not have to stop. She feels… her slick, inner heat rivals magma.
I feel my tendrils disperse, feel them inspecting her insides, and when one taps her upper wall, I feel pleasure accumulate in my pelvic region, so intense I feel like I’m bursting.
Her body is calling my nectar. She draws it from me, and I’m grateful the water is helping to keep us upright, and failing that, at least we’ll have a gentle landing.
I stagger backward, crashing against the cavern wall.
She doesn’t even notice.
She’s writhing on me, riding my stem, moving on me.
When she grinds us together, and her insides squeeze from the base of my rootstem to the tips of my fanned out tendrils, I rumble with shocked approval. “Preta…”
She moves her hands from my shoulders, and wraps them around my neck, clinging to me, our chests pressed together, the scent of crushed flowers and leaves and vines wafting up between us.
My doublethumbs catch at the fetching hollows at base of her spine. She arches her back, her head coming up, her mouth finding my ear as she pants, “You don’t normally move, do you?”
I pull back far enough to take note of her life-flushed face, her darkened eyes, the dew gathered on her skin that is causing the hair at her temples to stick. “Not naturally. A Kahav female has a fertile hollow for us to bury tendrils. We twine together, and the male half supplies nectar, and seed.”
Her question excites me, and I grope her until I find I can clasp her hips and use them to lift her and recreate her grinding motion, but on a much, much more pleasant scale.
She gasps in my ear, I grunt, and I yank her up this time, and slam her down on my stem.
My tendrils thrash wildly and she squeezes my neck hard before she starts mindlessly kissing the side of my face.
I drag her up, and repeat.
Faster.
Harder.
She’s squeaking with every downward drag, and my nectar releases in a forceful pulse when I thrust up into her.
She digs her chin into my shoulder, my hands have to be bruising her soft skin as I drag her body along my shaft and yank her down, until her inner tension releases in bursts, her body shaking, her insides flattening my tendrils as they squeeze every last drop of nectar from me.
I bellow, “Drogan!”
Startled, Preta begins to pull herself up but I keep her clamped tightly to me, nuzzling the spot on her neck that I marked, and quickly, she relaxes back into my embrace.
From behind the waterfall, Ryan hollers, “DON’T SAY MY NAME WHEN YOU NUT. IT'S FUCKING WEIRD.”
CHAPTER 27
PRETA
It’s ‘tarn time’! Over the last, oh, two weeks, three?—Chor, Mace, and Ammos have taken us to a new tarn each outing. They’re staggered one over the other, climbing in elevation as far as the eye can see.
It makes for a gorgeous view when we’ve gone up high, and peered over the edge, seeing them all laid out below us, a riot of colors and crystalline perfection.
We didn’t go up high today, because Ryan walked here on his own two feet. He’s limping like a sonofagun, but he’s made it, and I know I can’t baby him, and he’d hate it if I tried.
I worry my bottom lip as I watch him go right for the water, and I hear him hiss, “Thank dead veggies.”
He looks back at me, so I know he was trying to make me laugh. When he sees I can’t, his strained expression softens. “Get in here.”
I do, and he squeezes me, drags his stubble over the top of my head, giving me a moment to collect myself before he says, “I’m fine. It just got hot.”
Before I can do more than stiffen, he’s quick to assure me. “No infection: chill.” He gives me a tighter squeeze. “Just getting used to being worked again. ‘Kay?”
Hugging him back, I nod under his chin.
“Alright. Go frolick with your dragons.” He gives me a tiny ill-behaved shove.
See? He won’t let me baby him.
When he catches me watching him scratch at his jaw, he growls, “Preta.”
I’m not worrying over him now as much as I’m remembering this morning when he shaved.
Ryan was very much grateful to find out our aliens have razor blades.
The guys have razor blades because they ‘trim the moss’ off their faces.
Every morning, I watch them in fascination. In different kinds of fascination. I grin as I watch Ryan because it’s hot to see a man shave.
I smile in bewilderment watching my tree-dragons because I’m equal parts horrified that living organisms have to be shorn off their jaws and chin, yet at the same time, I enjoy ogling the way their back muscles move and the way a loin cloth doesn’t cover all of their ass.
I’m pregnant. Not dead.
I jump them just about every time. We have to schedule who I watch in the morning so that I don’t attack any one of them too often.
It’s insane.
I sigh happily, and Ryan smirks at me a second before he squeezes a fistful of water and it jets into my face.
“Jerk!” I squeal, but I’m laughing.
Charlie.
I pause. I’ve got goosebumps all of a sudden.
Charlie.
I take a deep breath. I tell myself that Charlie is fine. I don’t know how I know it, but I do feel that she’s fine. It’s the same feeling I have about Lydia, Zoya Quinn and Yahiro from the Alphapod trials.
How do I know this? How could I know this?
I’d asked Ryan about this. “But how do I know?”
I’ve squished those spotted beetles, the ones that swarm, and when they sense that one of their own is harmed, the infestation riles up, squirting nasty stuff and pinching everything they feel threatened by.
I wondered what else the research team added to me. This isn’t just me trying to reassure myself. Somehow, I feel people I care about.
Ryan’s jaw muscle had started twitching like he was reliving memories he’d rather not. “Whatever else they did to you was above my pay grade.”
Like he said before, he was a grunt and they considered him no more than living furniture. Dumb but mostly useful. Talking around him was fine, but it wasn’t like they’d ever have sat down chatted with him about how it all worked.
Guards were there to watch, not think.
I sigh now, and rub a hand over my arm, trying to get the hairs to lay flat.
Charlie!
She’s so front and center in my mind, that for a second, I think my head is playing tricks on me when I see her in the water below us.
It’s the four hulking fin
ned creatures circling her that tip me off.
Unless sister mirages come with some sort of aquatic aliens, that’s my sister down there for real!
“CHARLIE!” The sound of the water splashing is totally drowning out my voice as I try to run to the shore. I see my guys, every one of them, look up sharply as I shriek. I don’t wait for them—I run past them like a crazy person. “Charlie!”
Charlie slams into me, and we’re hugging, and I’m spazzing on her, and then she’s yanking away from me, shocked.
Last time she saw me, I looked like one of those underfed underwear models.
After they get addicted to heroin.
We’re in the middle of loudly reuniting, when I hear Mace. Not his speaking voice; his dragon’s bellow.
He goes full Apatosaurus, smashing his tail into the new alien standing closest to me, sending him sailing into the air!
Suddenly, the clear sky turns, and we’re standing in the middle of a terrifying mini-tsunami, leaves and vines whipping—
Oh no. The vines aren’t being torn up by wind; they’re shooting from my aliens! They’re headed for Charlie’s aliens!
A wave of water comes at us, but just as I’m preparing to watch us all drown, it lands… around us. We’re not touched.
Relieved, gasping, I look up to see that Ammos has joined Mace, hell-bent on colliding with the alien Mace lashed, and as one of Charlie’s guys checks that she’s okay, from behind me, I sense Petrichor.
He snarls, so deep that the vibration of it skitters up my back.
Chor?
Heart hammering, I spin and shout at him—at all of them. “Stop!”
Chapter 28
PRETA
I have amazing aliens.
The fighting stopped immediately.
And then Mace brought the earth up to trip Charlie’s alien and a water jet nailed Ammos in the eye and then it was Charlie shouting for everyone to calm their shit down, and Ryan pointed out they could do that if Charlie’s aliens weren’t being dicks and while I appreciate that he jumped to their defense...
Charlie’s gone dead still.
In that moment, I know exactly what she sees with his ‘military-issue’ buzz cut, and I know exactly what scenarios she’s imagining as she prowls towards him.
It takes some fast talk to assure her that my guard didn’t take any advantage of me that I didn’t want him to while I was in prison—or out of it!—and it takes some good natured teasing to get her relaxed, but whew, my heart leaps with joy when I catch her up on the big news—and she catches me up on hers.
We’re both gonna have ‘Sproutlings’!
I’m ready to clap my hands and grab her arms and jump up and down, so relieved to have my sister safe, to have her here, and I’m so excited that I get to be aunt, and—
Wait.
I look at her aliens. Her fishy-aliens. Fins, gills, alien-eyes, alien hands—
My eyes drop down, wondering just what, uh, what her aliens are packing. Thankfully, they’re wearing pants because I’m pretty sure it’s rude to ogle your sister’s alien’s junk—but man, I’m curious.
I’m suddenly curious about a lot of things. She’s human. They’re basically a legged male, mermaid! “But how?”
“What do you mean how? Same as you.”
I very, very much doubt that.
“Valos,” she finishes confidently.
I look at my aliens. Ummm… Hide, Ryan! “This baby isn’t valo.” My hand goes to my stomach, and instinctively, my eyes dart to Ryan.
The air charges proportionally to the length of silence that stretches out from these words to her outburst.
“You fucked a guard!”
See? I knew she wasn’t going to take this well.
“The guard has a name, and I’m right here,” Ryan bitches.
I roll my lips before clearing my throat. “His name is Ryan.” I want to smile at him, because we’re all going to be able to laugh about this someday. Charlie will come around—
“You fucked a guard willingly?”
Okay, so right now, she’s a little horrified, but she’ll be okay! She just needs a chance to get to know Ryan.
Charlie dives for him.
Blink; I’ve got her arm. My mouth is opening to order everyone to move, when I hear Drogan’s words from when my programming was just starting to get hacked and overtaken by my pregnancy drives; ‘It initiated like a protect-mode, and you want to move your unit away from the threat.’
Charlie’s no threat. Rational me knows this; I consciously relax, and I can even joke to myself that I caught her just in time—I saw what she did to her guard—I happen to like my guard’s pretty face, and Charlie’s got that mean elbow.
My extreme reaction has me making a note to fill my sister in on the fact that there are phrases she can never say around me. She’s going to have to talk to Ryan in order to find out what these even are.
I shake her to get her attention. I’m marveling though: she’s awful impressive, with this instantaneous killer haze. Hers is borne of equal parts training and sisterly (over)protectiveness, not laboratory-infused, but all the same, it is awe-inspiringly fierce!
Still. She knows I’m a big girl. She knows I wouldn’t be playing Swiss Family Robinson if I’d spaceship wrecked with a creeper guard. I’m not stupid!
I narrow my eyes at her. I love her, but I’m growing a little freaking offended here!
Taking one look at my face, Charlie laughs.
And just like that, we’re okay. She pulls me in for a hug, and everyone relaxes.
Note to self: maybe wait to inform Charlie of my Care-of-Concord gifts… the ones that altered my nutritional needs. Since she’s got her own aliens, I’m pretty sure she’ll laugh over how we’ve been making do here, not freak, but she will not like hearing what the research team did to me.
I mean, look how she reacted when she thought I’d been forced by a prison guard!
No need to give her a heart attack within the first five minutes of being reunited.
I rub the back of my neck and send her a grin.
That surprise can wait until supper time.
EPILOGUE
PETRICHOR
The other evening, a strong storm shook the hometree straight to its roots, and silt dropped into our mugs of freshly brewed zemerac tea. All three members of the human tribe reacted somewhat poorly.
“Stop this incessant whining!” Maceous ordered. “It is just dirt.”
Charlie, who had been discussing future housing site options, had looked to her aliens. “Maybe not under a tree.”
Today, Preta and her sibling have been aerially inspecting the territories in search of many things, one of them being locations for Charlie’s tribe to explore. But the sisters have a greater goal. They say mechanical parts from the ship that brought them can act as a conductor, and allow them the ability to speak with their father on the other side of the stars.
Outrageous.
Yet it makes them happy. Ammos formed a vine for Charlie to hold onto, and she described an Earthen method of clamping a rider’s feet to a mount’s sides. He repeated the same for Dason, one of Charlie’s husbandmen, who sits behind her. Though their mounts don’t sound like Kahav Guardians, the trick is working and I have rigged Preta in the same.
Mace swoops past us, Ryan pressed low along his back to reduce air resistance in his quest for speed. “Keep up, Grandpa,” he quips, returning the mystifying insult that Dason lobbed at him earlier.
The humans have a competitive spirit that encourages us to race each other for the simple enjoyment of listening to them playfully trade these boasts and insults.
This scent…
My nostrils flare, and I feel Preta’s knees tighten as my ribcage spreads with my great inhale.
“What is it?” Preta shouts over the air current.
This… seems almost familiar.
There’s no need to signal the others; Mace and Ammos have caught it too. We make our way down,
darting below the canopy and landing gently, ever-mindful of our precious cargo.
I look to Ryan, and feel my lips lift above my fangs, air cooling my gums.
“Quit it,” he orders without heat.
Like it or not, he too is precious cargo. Even if he does find our Guardian-form smiles disturbing.
There is no need for the humans to dismount; as soon as we three Kahav touch soil, we find the source of the scent. It is a dead being.
A dead human being.
It smells faintly like Preta and Charlie, but not Ryan, and I suppose this is because the corpse is female.
It appears there was a great struggle. This is not so very surprising; every time we have come upon humans, there is some sort of altercation. They do not seem to be the most peaceful of species.
I look to our humans, curious to their reaction at seeing yet another of their kind fallen, but their expressions are devoid of anything but wariness.
Kahav have excellent vision, and it is Ammos that drops his head, nudging his nose across the shine amongst the dirt. When he uncovers it enough, he catches it in his teeth, and twists his neck to place the find in Charlie’s small palm.
Charlie peers down at the thing, and her lash-fronds wave rapidly as she blinks in clear consternation. “Preta?”
“Yeah?” Preta’s legs squeeze my sides and I feel her rump leave my back as she stands in the stirrup-contraption and peers at her sibling’s hand.
“Preta, this is my dog tag.”
I feel Preta’s jolt of surprise as she half-shouts, “No way!” She pauses. “The prison let you keep your tags? I don’t remember seeing them when we got to hug at the crash site.”
Charlie’s brow turfs have climbed high on her head. “Nope. I knew they’d be confiscated as soon as I got to the prison, so I took them off. I left them with Dad.”
Now it is my turn to startle as Preta falls into the riding position.
Then, the sisters begin shrieking.
It is as completely disturbing as it was the first time it occurred.
