The clouds lay so heavily on the land they almost touched the ground, oppressive in their intimacy. The girl, willow-thin, steel-straight, stood on the platform of the monorail, one hand grasping the bar. The wet wind whipped her gown around her as she gazed intently with ice blue eyes back toward the tiny house, the house where a female in lace and sapphire slippers folded over her chair in defeat, her mouth the property of every man with the whim to take it. Is it dead yet? the girl had asked herself. Almost; the echo of her mother’s voice. Will it take a long time? the girl wondered. It will.
Alysha thrust the back curtain away as she stalked off the stage, oil-sweat running in rivulets down her face from her exertions. She ignored the forced arousal that whined from the pit of her body as she did the trappings that required it, the beaded harness that left nothing of her body covered, the jeweled belt that enticed the viewer with the heavy lock over the base of her tail. She paused at the door to the dancers’ corridor, one hand resting on the wall. It took several minutes for the white rage to recede and leave her the use of her eyes. She palmed open the door.
“Steel!”
A smear of sugar-white fur smacked into her hip and her breath expelled abruptly. After she’d regained her balance, a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth and she wrapped her arms around Rispa, pulling the slender girl up into her arms.
“Hello, little star,” Alysha said.
The young Tam-illee foxine, barely a teenager, folded one of her arms around Alysha’s neck, cradling something with the other. She leaned her tiny white face against the larger Karaka’An’s. The scent of raspberry shampoo rose from the girl’s body.
“You smell like sweat,” Rispa said, a giggle escaping her.
“Well, if you hadn’t run into me like a freight rail, you might have avoided getting all messy,” Alysha said, trying for a stern tone despite her smile. “So . . . why the excitement, kara?”
“It’s my Naming Day!” Rispa exclaimed, both downy white ears swiveling forward as she sat up in the gray feline’s arms. “And I have a present for you.” She held up the tiny package she’d hidden in the crook of one arm.
“Your Naming Day!” Alysha exclaimed. “If I had known, I would’ve gotten you something.”
“Why?”
Alysha chuckled, letting Rispa slide back to the ground and crouching beside her. “Because the Karaka’A give gifts to people on their birthdays.”
“That’s strange,” Rispa said, then pushed the awkwardly wrapped item at Alysha. “Open it, Steel, please!”
Touched, Alysha took the package and slit the paper with her barely extended claws. A pillow nestled in the tissue, made of gold velveteen painstakingly hand-sewn with glistening white thread. Misplaced stitches formed a random pattern along its edges, and a misshapen knot marked the hole that had been left open to stuff the pillow. Golden tassels had been sewn onto the four corners. Alysha almost didn’t smell the delicious, subtle scent that wafted from it over her own sweat. Gentle pressure revealed it to be surprisingly soft.
“Rispa! You didn’t make this yourself, did you?”
Rispa nodded proudly, then examined Alysha’s face. “Do you like it?”
“It’s wonderful,” Alysha answered. She imagined the young foxine sitting on her favorite ottoman, the broad round one, concentrating with furrowed brows as she plucked at the needle.
Reassured, Rispa said, “I stuffed it with my own fur, just like the Hinichi do. I read about them in the stories you lent me on your tablet.”
“Your own fur!”
The girl nodded.
Alysha stroked the pillow’s edge with one finger, suddenly afraid she’d stain it, then put it down on the tissue paper and enveloped Rispa in her arms.
“Eeee!” Rispa said, wiggling after a moment. “You hug tight, Steel. I guess you like it?”
“I love it. I’ll always keep it,” Alysha promised, her voice taut, just as Honey sprinted around the corner toward them.
“Steel!”
One hand on Rispa’s shoulder, Alysha stood. The Harat-Shariin tigraine grabbed her free wrist, her yellow-brown eyes molten in distress in a broad, open face. “Steel, come quickly, please!”
“What is it?” Alysha asked.
“It’s Angel, it’s Angel, she just got here and she’s trying to cut herself! You have to stop her!”
“Me? Why would she--”
“But she’ll listen to you, you’ll make her! Everyone listens to you, Steel,” Honey said. The pleading grated on Alysha’s easily irritated ears.
“I’m coming,” she said after a pause. She turned to Rispa, folding the pillow back into the tissue. “Go sit in the kitchen, please, arii.”
“Okay, Steel,” Rispa said. The girl leaned up to kiss her cheek, then picked up the pillow and left.
A nervous smile bolstered the edges of Honey’s mouth when Alysha returned her attention to her. The Harat-Shar scurried down the hall toward the last room as soon as she was certain the gray feline was following. At the door, Honey pulled away, fear radiating off her in waves.
“In there,” the Harat-Shar whispered.
Alysha nodded and stepped inside.
Movement—an elaborately staged dance, executed with the sharp jerks of panic. Alysha hesitated, eyes scanning the room. The Harem Rose, a Tam-illee foxine dancer still dressed in her gaudy green costume, circled the edges of the crowd. Cinnamon had taken counterpoint; the sienna-colored Aera stood absolutely still, her arms hanging stiff from her shoulders, long ears with their elegant tufts folded against the back of her skull. Moving around her, Daren, the Hinichi wolfine employed as Phantasies’ primary bouncer, crept toward the end of the room, paired with Tiell, the gaunt Asanii feline who served as the club’s manager.
But beyond them . . .
Alysha lost her next breath, her next heartbeat. The malignant hum of the holoknife had drawn her gaze at last to the object of the group’s attentions: a Malarai, her ethereally beautiful body drawn in reverse in the finish of the wooden floor. Completely naked, her snow-white skin lacking even fur to sheathe it, she shifted her balance constantly from one deformed foot to the other. A golden halo of spiral curls rippled around her head and upper body, drifting around her stomach as she swayed. Behind her, two white arches rose out of shadows of pale blue and lavender, the feathered wings too small for any of the Malarai ever to fly.
“Stay back!” Angel shrieked, her voice a fragile soprano. “Stay back! I’m going to do it, and you won’t stop me!”
“Angel, give us the knife,” Daren said, holding out a mammoth hand. “Please, just give us the knife.”
“No! I’m going to end it all! I’ve always wanted to . . . ”
Alysha walked closer, passing the frenzied Harem Rose.
“Give us the knife, Angel,” Tiell said, tail flicking against the floor as he leaned forward. “You don’t really want to kill yourself.”
“You! You’re the one who made me want to so badly! I thought . . . thought if I got away for a while, I could learn to live with it, but I can’t! I can’t! I can’t!”
The Malarai lifted the knife to slash, the blade a blur.
“Don’t.”
Angel stopped, glanced up.
Alysha met her eyes, saw in them her reflection; she stood silently, loosely, without the tense immobility that had imprisoned Cinnamon. Six feet at the tips of her ears, black hair falling in disheveled lines just below her shoulders, and blue eyes cold as winter nights, set in an implacable face punctuated by surprisingly full lips.
Alysha said again, “Don’t.”
“Who . . . who are you?” Angel whispered. “How . . . how can you . . . ”
“Hush,” Alysha said. She stepped to the Malarai’s side, her motions lacking the strain of those who watched, and reached for the knife.
“No,” Angel pleaded, but her voice had little conviction. Her glazed eyes followed the feline’s face, entranced.
Alysha gently disengaged the girl’s finger
s from the hilt of the knife and snapped it off. She tossed it to Daren, freeing her hands to catch Angel as the girl collapsed.
“Damn! What the Nii’s wrong with her?” Tiell snapped.
“Shock,” Daren said, touching the Malarai’s forehead, her eyelid. Alysha watched the Hinichi’s face as it hovered across from her own, measured the concern that twisted his mouth.
“Well, wake her up! She hasn’t danced yet tonight! I already announced her!”
“She just got here!”
“It’s your fault,” Tiell said, ignoring Daren to point at Alysha, a customary transfer of anger. “You’re always messin’ things up around here, Steel!”
“I didn’t do anything,” Alysha said. The slap whipped her head to the right, tangled her feet, and left her off-guard for the kick delivered to her side. She tightened her knees as they buckled, her body nearly crushing Angel’s limp form in her arms.
“You won’t get your night’s pay for this stunt!” Tiell turned from her, pointed at Cinnamon. “Get goin’, Cinnamon! We’re runnin’ late. You’ll have to do. What are you lookin’ at? Go!”
Alysha didn’t move, holding herself taut around the limp body of the Malarai and ignoring the white pain that coruscated along her ribs. Only when the last of the room’s occupants had removed themselves did she feel it safe to unlock her muscles, to trust that the wrath had been packed too far inside to leak. One of her arms slipped beneath the Malarai’s thighs, skidding across the furless skin, and she cradled Angel to her breast. The girl weighed less than her antigrav weights at the Academe; in a few short moments, Alysha had settled the Malarai on one of the couches and covered her with a thin lilac blanket. A tired exhalation escaped her nose, and Alysha “Steel” Forrest, Alliance Fleet cadet and reluctant exotic dancer and prostitute, hunkered down on the floor, placed her back to the couch and one hand over her aching side, and fell asleep.
To Discover and Preserve.
“You didn’t know that, I’m certain . . . ” the commandant said that first day, one whose beauty remained unsullied by the methods she’d found to pay for it and all the following days, “that our primary mission was discovery. Many of you are of border worlds. You know the Fleet as the ships passing through your night sky, guarding you from the sensor-dark. Some of you are of Earth, where ‘Fleet’ has an irrevocably military meaning.”
As the lean man dressed in black paced the stage in the clean, bright auditorium, Alysha watched, so intent her body had trembled.
“The rest of you have only stories to go by, stories and building specs and ship classes. And the ship classes might fool you. Scout. Destroyer. Battlecruiser. Warcruiser. Familiar names to someone like me, born to Terra, born to Terra’s history of war and aggression. To you, thank God, they are only names. Because Fleet’s real mission is to discover and to preserve.
“First—to explore. To find new worlds, to learn new people, to open space to colonists and adventurers and traders, to people who simply want to live. We document new plants, uncover new remedies to old diseases, bring back news of alien worlds, unlock one after another of the universe’s precious secrets. That is our primary mission.
“It is only with second thoughts that we think to preserve—not even to protect, shield, defend, or attack—but to preserve: our way of living, our freedom, our right to the pursuit of happiness. And it is for that secondary mission that we call our ship classes by names of war and equip them with a kind of might unequaled thus far by any race in known space. Because the things we’ve discovered are so important to us that we must, must, preserve them, and do so against enemies we have not yet even named.”
Commandant Brighthaven paused on the stage, the cloak still settling around his slim, broad-shouldered shape. “The Academe is like no other school you’ll encounter in the Alliance. It is a combination of university, research facility, science academy, and military institution. And while we’re most interested in mental fitness, we cannot deny that there might be a need, one day, for a more tangible kind of health. You’ll be stretched here, perhaps to your limits. Some of you may even choose to leave—“
The sunlight smeared her eyesight with tears. Ignoring the drawn-out shrieks of her triceps and back, she concentrated on the tiny black dots dancing across her vision and peeled the numbers down from sixty. Her biceps and forearms wailed a counterpoint, and oil-sweat streamed through her hair and pelt, slicking her workout uniform to her slender body. The bar hovered so close to the underside of her chin that she could smell the cool metal and the talc rubbed into her unfurred palms.
“Hold it, Forrest,” Lieutenant Shaver said, his low tone revealing reluctant approval. “Thirty left.”
She ignored him, staring into the light and feeling the seconds drip past with every rivulet of sweat. Not even swim meets at home had prepared her for this kind of physical punishment, but pride had always proven stronger in her than fatigue. She counted the black specks. Twenty-two, twenty-one . . .
The first week of classes had blown past her. She’d been giddy with joy over the opportunity to learn, sullen with hatred over the nights that earned it . . . yet the shadows of the evening always dissipated beneath the brunt of the sunlit days. As the autumn waxed, Alysha found a home for herself at the Academe in Terracentrus. She hardly noticed the weeks slipping through her fingers, as the bar was slipping, powder succumbing to the oil-sweat that ran between her knuckles over the thin dark webs of flesh joining her fingers.
Eleven. Ten. Nine . . .
Alysha bared her teeth, eyes so tightly closed her matted lashes stuck to her cheeks. The second day she’d had a few hours to herself and spent them in the auditorium’s antechamber. The Alliance’s flag hung there over a pedestal, its glory implied by its setting: the rounded heights of the wall were space-black, jeweled with pinpoints of stars, some labeled, others not, each pricked from the tapestry by subtle holographics. To stand in that hall was to know what she would be preserving—and to hear the call of those discoveries, waiting for her hands, her hands that were weakening even as she hissed her defiance of failure at the metal bar. . . .
“One! Let it go, Cadet! Angels, girl, when on the Fields did you learn to do that?”
Alysha grinned at the lieutenant wearily, then flicked her sodden forelock back over one ear with a twitch of her head. “Just now,” she said.
The Harat-Shariin pumathine’s shaggy brows rose. “Well, then . . . let’s see if you can learn to run a few laps for me. Just now.”
She didn’t allow her eyelids to sag back over her ice-colored eyes. “Yes, sir.”
And turned . . . and forced herself to run. . . .
An hour later, Alysha woke, body cramped from her uncomfortable position against the couch. No one was in the common room, and she stood, turning to the sofa.
Angel was gone.
The Karaka’An frowned and touched the blankets; they’d cooled, and her frown became more pronounced. She wondered if the Malarai’s condition had worsened enough to require hospitalization, and if so how they’d lifted Angel without waking her. Ears flattened to the back of her skull, she padded toward the servant’s door and used it to enter her room through the closet. She was just closing it when a hand gripped her shoulder, grinding the jeweled strap of her harness into her skin.
Alysha’s face froze in surprise. When Tiell had docked her night’s pay she hadn’t expected to service customers, but the heavy wolfine Hinichi staring down at her, his breath drugged, wouldn’t be here otherwise. The rote words spilled from her mouth. “Your pleasure is mine. How may I serve you?”
The dark brown wolfine curled his meaty finger into the loop that depended from her collar and yanked her against him. “Whore! You were supposed to be here an hour ago!”
“Pardon me, sir, I’m sure you can—”
He slapped her so hard she would have fallen had he not been holding her up by her neck. Alysha pulled her feet back underneath her, stunned.
“Shut up! Do you have any id
ea how expensive this damned key is? Far too expensive for you to be flippant!”
He thrust her toward the bed and she crawled onto it. The wolfine lunged after her and smacked her across the jaw so hard she tumbled to the mattress, face throbbing. Her heart galloped forward as she caught her breath, unable to move from the shock. The first time she could excuse as anger, but the second?
“My pleasure! My pleasure should have started an hour ago! Believe me when I say I’ll make up for it!” This time his blow fell on her unprotected ribs. Alysha clutched her side.
“Get up!” Another fist, this time against the base of her spine. Her eyes ripped open as bile flooded her mouth.
“I said—”
Alysha jumped from the mattress, intercepting his next swing. Her claws sprang from her fingers as she raked him across the cheek, opening it from ear to jaw. The scent of blood exploded against her nostrils. He struggled against her, wrenching her hands away as they approached and roaring at her in outrage.
“Rhack you, whore! You’ll scar me!”
“You should have thought of that before you hit me!” Alysha snarled, her vision smearing into a white mist that left the Hinichi a pale gray blob against the iridescent background. She felt her claws sink through his tunic into his chest; she yanked her hand viciously against his pectoral before a hard punch to her gut choked her breath from her and left her wheezing.
“I paid to hit you!” The Hinichi stared down at himself, dragging his hand over his chest where the skin gaped open in ragged slashes. He hopped up and kicked her several times across the bed with a booted toe. Alysha coughed scarlet spittle, trying to shield herself. “Curse you! I’m going to find the manager and get you raked across a field of nails!”
She heard the door slide shut, but the scent of blood did not altogether fade. Alysha closed her eyes and tried to compose herself, but the shudders running through her body wouldn’t cease. She fought the urge to vomit and cautiously rolled to her knees.
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