by Amber Stuart
“I know,” he said. “I haven’t given permission.”
That time, I had to fight a little to keep my face expressionless.
I pushed his food around in small circles as I controlled whatever had risen in me from his response, even as I tried to understand what it meant. Remembering myself after a few more seconds, I speared another, larger piece of meat, offering it to him.
“Is that what you wanted to talk about?" I said. "Who I’m not sleeping with?”
“No.” He paused, swallowing the chunk of meat. “...Yes. I was worried, Dakota. I was afraid you’d been left alone too much. Ledi said... well, he thought perhaps I was being unfair to you, by not speaking to you about this earlier. He thinks I should have asked you what you wanted, in terms of who I allowed access to your room, or...”
Feeling me flinch, Nik fell silent.
After another few seconds where I gritted my teeth, I finally set down the spear.
For a minute I couldn’t quite look at him.
When I finally met his gaze, Nik’s eyes had turned nearly gray again, his expression melting back into that look that was close to blank. Even without the physical cues, I felt his retreat almost tangibly.
His fingers released me.
He leaned back a second later, his eyes noticeably darker now, and wary.
“Look,” I said.
Exhaling, I smoothed my braided hair with one hand, then once more picked up the spear. I reminded myself he’d been beaten, starved, probably drugged. Exhaling a second time as those thoughts grew more real to me, I did my best to let go of the anger, too.
“Okay, look,” I said, my voice more subdued. “...I’m sorry. I’m not trying to give you a hard time. I’m just not getting the rules here. I’m trying, Nik... I really am. I can tell you think this Ledi thing is some kind of favor. I can tell you think you're depriving me or something, and that I'd be sleeping with him if you just gave me the okay. I appreciate what you’re trying to do... I guess. I'm just really not used to people making those kinds of decisions for me.”
Nihkil didn't answer, or even acknowledge I'd spoken.
When the silence stretched, I felt my irritation return, even as I remembered the half-dressed, painted woman who’d been sitting on the floor in front of me.
Clenching my jaw, I shrugged deliberately into the silence, still not looking at him.
“What the hell," I said. "Ledi’s fine. Go ahead and make it legal if you want.”
I stabbed at a piece of meat, holding it up to him.
Nik made no move to accept it.
“Dakota.” His eyes and face looked stricken. “Dakota... I’m not selling you.”
My face grew hot, but I didn't lower my gaze.
“Fine. You just want me to have sex with your friend. It’s a little weird, Nik.”
His skin darkened abruptly. “I do not want––”
“Then what is this exactly... 'Nihki’?” I imitated Ledi’s accent, leaning closer so I wouldn’t be overheard. “Why did you want me to forbid you from taking cards? And why the hell are you pretending you need to 'take care of me' in relation to who I'm sleeping with? Believe me, Nik, if I wanted sex with one of these assholes, I'd be having it... whether you gave me ‘permission’ or not. I don’t care what papers you signed, or how many favors you handed out on the side...”
I was a little startled to see him pale.
For a long moment, he didn't speak.
His eyes flickered over my face as he seemed to be thinking about my words. When I looked away, he clasped my hand, tugging on me to move nearer to him on the bench. I understood what he wanted, but felt my muscles tense, even as I decided to do as he’d asked. Once I was close enough that he could speak directly into my ear, he lowered his mouth.
“Dakota. Do you want me?”
Looking up at him, startled in spite of myself, I flinched at the look in his eyes.
After another pause, I looked away.
“Nik,” I said, shaking my head. “Why are we doing this? Seriously. This can’t all be about sex. From what I hear, you do all right in that area...”
Anger flared in his eyes. “Are you going to answer me?”
“You already know the answer!” I snapped, turning. “Yes, okay? Yes.”
His anger deflated, even as his eyes shimmered in confusion. His fingers tightened on mine, right before he began caressing my skin.
“Why didn’t you ask, then?” he said, lower. “On the ship.”
“Why didn’t you?” I countered. “Oh... that’s right. Because you were too busy sleeping with every other frickin’ woman on board...”
“I did ask,” he growled. “I offered myself to you... the very first day!”
I gave him an incredulous look.
“Were you speaking code, Nik?” I said when he didn’t break the silence. “Because I’m pretty sure I would have remembered that...”
Nihkil’s eyes narrowed.
When I looked away again, he gripped my hand tighter. Seeing the conflict in his eyes, I tried to find words, but ended up looking down, to where his fingers wrapped around mine. I was still staring, reacting to his hands on my skin, when his fingers slid further up my arm, moving until they were stopped by the cuffs.
“Please,” he said, his voice low. “Please, Dakota... can we just stop this?”
I felt that thread between us seem to ignite, the warmth of his presence as he opened.
“Let me in you... please...”
My face grew hotter.
Confusion, combined with the sensations from whatever he was doing to me, made it impossible to know how to react. My mind turned over his words, fighting to make them real, or at least to try and make sense of them.
After another long moment, I found myself clasping his hands in return, almost in frustration.
“Jesus, Nik.” I swallowed, looking up at him. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”
I watched his eyes turn that denser blue again, even as they slid down my body.
I shook his hand with mine, tightening my grip to get him to meet my gaze.
“Not only that,” I said, irritated. “I knew you wanted sex. You were reasonably clear about that. But you must have known why I wanted to wait... and you never actually said anything, Nik, not in a way that I understood. Then you pulled that crap on the ship and didn’t even tell me. I had to find out from Ledi that you were sleeping with everyone...”
His expression taut, Nik shook his head, but I wasn’t sure to which part.
His fingers tightened on my arm, but he still didn’t speak.
“Are the stereotypes right?” I said, my jaw clenching a little. “Are morph incapable of not sleeping around? Because I’d rather if you just told me, if that’s true.”
He gave me a harder look. “No,” he said coldly. “They are not right.”
I nodded, not sure how to react to that, either.
“Okay,” I said finally. “Good.”
For a long moment, we just sat there.
I felt myself opening to him through the lock, though, seemingly outside of my control.
I fought back and forth in my head about whether I should be letting this thing happen with us... but, truthfully, I couldn’t really make myself want to fight it anymore, no matter how many reasons my brain supplied.
I still had no clear idea what was going on with him, anyway. When his eyes brightened suddenly, a twinge of fear hit me as I remembered where we were. I glanced around, conscious again of who watched us, what we were talking about... how we were talking about it. I sat close enough to him now that if I were any closer, I'd be sitting in his lap. His leg pressed against mine and he held his arm tightly and deliberately against my side.
I could feel him in my chest again, almost as if he’d laid his palm there directly.
Everyone warned me not to appear too intimate with Nihkil.
Ledi said the Council wouldn�
�t like it.
He said the High Court wouldn’t like it, either.
Shifting away from Nik slightly on the bench, I glanced around us, forcing myself to take a breath, absorb the details.
The hall echoed with voices and other sounds, disorienting me a little, but I managed to get the basic lay of the land once I wasn’t focused solely on Nik. The only people near enough to see much of what we were doing were the human guards, who stood chewing mong sticks in the opposite corner of the trellis, a dozen or so feet away.
A few seemed to be watching us pretty closely, now that I was paying attention, although they pretended they weren’t. I saw one man’s eyes stop where my thigh parted ribbons of dress, right before he looked at Nihkil’s hand clutching my wrist on the table.
He made a joke in a low voice, gesturing at me, and a few others chuckled.
I felt Nihkil stiffen, and realized he'd heard it, too.
I remembered then, the rest of what Ledi had said.
Nik was drugged. They’d been beating on him, messing with his mind. Mai-rhani said he was sick.
Whatever our issues, now was definitely not the time.
“Nik, hey... I’m sorry. I'm sorry, okay?” His hand clenched around mine, so I gripped him harder, too. “Nik, we should talk about this later. We’ll work this out later... all right?”
Lowering his head towards me, he nodded, pressing his face against mine.
“Nik.” I pushed him away gently, feeling my heart start to pound, in spite of myself. “Nik, we really can’t do this here. We'll get you out first, okay?”
His fingers wound back around mine.
He pulled on me again through that thread that hung between us. When I resisted, his frustration hit out at me.
"Dakota." He clutched my fingers. "Just tell me. Please. Make this clear to me. Do you love me? What I felt before... was that real?”
My mouth closed with a snap.
I found myself staring out over the crowded room again, buying myself time maybe, and having trouble thinking at all with him pulling on me through that thread. Realizing I could feel Nihkil misinterpreting my silence already, I shook my head, but my eyes never left the rest of the room. I scanned faces almost without knowing I did it, trying to think.
"Look, Nik," I began. “We really shouldn’t talk about this right now...”
I paused, my eyes refocusing on the crowd.
Everything had changed since I left the ring of seats by Mai-rhani, I realized.
Shrouded booths now dotted the slanted floorspace, colored in saturated red, orange and brown earth tones that blended into the high cliff walls. Humans, supernaturals, morph and other aliens strolled overlapping aisles, weaving in and out of walking machines and animals that snapped, squealed and barked from restraining leashes.
One of those boulder-headed lizards walked directly below the dais on jointed legs, its craggy face swiveling towards me and Nihkil like a puppet on wires.
I found myself reminded of a carnival I went to as a kid in upstate New York. We’d been visiting relatives of my mother's one late summer and a carnival came to town, and I’d never been to one before. I remembered there’d been a thunder storm that night, but we went anyway, probably because me and Jake badgered the hell out of our parents until they took us. I remembered the rickety rides, the weird face paint on tired-looking extras.
My mom got mugged that night, too, which scared me.
It was one of those memories that lodged permanently into my mind for some reason.
I caught a few looks from people watching us from the stands, the few who remembered us well enough to stare.
That wasn't what made me lose my train of thought, though.
Someone was watching us a lot more intently than those few casual glances would suggest.
More intently than the guards lounging in the opposite corner of the trellis.
I could feel someone’s attention on us, past whatever Nihkil was doing to me, past whatever issues or fears stirred in the forefront of my mind from our conversation. I'd always had good instincts when it came to knowing when someone wanted to do me real harm. It’s the only reason I'd survived in the business I was in, when a lot of people didn’t.
I found myself thinking about that carnival again, even as a shiver passed through my skin.
For the first time, it hit me that I must have had that feeling that night, too. Like we were being hunted. Like someone meant me and mine real harm.
I trusted that feeling now.
It overrode the conversation with Nihkil so completely, I barely noticed that I'd never answered his question. It took me a minute or so more to find the source of threat in the crowd, and by then, the hairs on the back of my neck stuck up like a wolf’s.
When I found him, I knew pretty much instantly.
He stood alone on the main floor, despite all of the bustle around him.
His feet balanced smack in the middle of what looked like an upturned crate, like a street performer might use as a stage on the wharf at home. He wore what looked like a homeless guy’s coat, too, like one of those leather coats I associated with the Australian outback for some reason.
No one seemed to be looking at him but me. People walked right by him, almost as if he wasn’t there... or really, more like he was just a nondescript piece of the scenery, like a lamp post or a garbage can.
His eyes shone white, seemingly without pupils.
He didn’t seem to notice anyone else who passed by him, either, even when they crossed our respective stares, and I flinched when he smiled at me. Something in his smile reminded me of that Ted-Bundy-wannabe in Seattle, the one who tried to kill me in that alley.
Something in his whole demeanor scared the shit out of me, frankly.
"Nik," I said, without taking my eyes off the guy with the weird eyes. "Nik... do you see that man? Is he a morph?"
Nihkil had been watching me, his eyes wary.
Now, that wariness faded. I watched as it was replaced by a taut, almost predatory look. His eyes jerked out over the crowd, following mine.
"What man?" he said.
Looking back over the cavern’s floor, I found those white eyes a second time. I continued to stare at them until I felt Nihkil lock in on where I was looking.
His entire focus zeroed in on the guy, like an inhaled breath.
I was about to speak again, when the man with the white eyes waved at us. His fingers looked overly thick and too long, like a monkey’s hands, or a gorilla’s.
Something in that wave felt weirdly like a warning... in that split second, I found myself thinking the warning was meant for Nik, not for me.
Either way, my whole body tensed as the man opened his coat.
The white shirt he wore beneath barely showed from the several harnesses he wore, displaying black and green unmarked balls strapped to his chest. The metal spheres hung there in an odd spiral pattern, and I’d never seen anything like them before, but something about them still struck me as all-too familiar.
As I watched, the man held a finger to his lips, like a “Shhhh” gesture back home.
Nik’s fingers gripped mine, tight enough to hurt.
"Dakota!” he said. “Are you wearing armor? Any kind of protection?"
I gave him a disbelieving look, just before my eyes glanced down the sheer folds of my dress. Fear leaked into my voice, making it harsh.
“You’re fucking kidding me, right?” I said.
I watched Nihkil's gaze follow mine down the dress.
He shocked me then, moving in that soundless, liquid way he had, grabbing ahold of my body with his long legs, swiveling around and then using his weight to pin me, forcing my body almost level with the table. It brought my mind back to our one and only ride on the Enfield, back home. This time, he actually bothered to talk to me, though.
“Don’t let go of me, Dakota!” he said. “Cover your head! Hide your face against me! And g
et as much of your body under the table as you can...”
I clung to him, doing as he said, feeling his arms wrench in the bindings as he tried to cover me with his body.
A flash lit up the crowd.
Sound came an instant later––a deafening crack, followed by a roar.
A wave of vibration impacted outward, a circular wall of sound, pressure, vibration and air.
I’d never been in a bomb attack before. Gantry had told me stories about the Middle East and other places, but it always struck me as sort of unreal, like hearing someone describe a movie. In any case, I had no idea how to protect myself in something like this.
I felt that first wave hit and it seemed to suck the air out of the room.
Silence fell in the same set of breaths, long before the actual impact of the concussion reached us. Nihkil's body tensed, even as he pushed me down harder against the bench, until my upper body lay more than half under the stone table. He held his breath right before that wave of air and sound hit.
Hot air blasted us.
I didn’t even had time to feel real fear.
The force of it knocked us both flat, then expanded outward in waves, even as dust, rock and metal hit me in small chunks, moving fast enough that the contact burned and pitted my skin.
In the few lightning glimpses I got before I closed my eyes, I saw kiosks rip apart like paper, saw people thrown across the room as if in a dream, bodies broken against walls, a metal section-divider bend and twist as if under a high wind. Chunks blew out from the floor where the man with the white eyes had stood, throwing debris in a wide arc.
Metal and stone crashed down not far from us. I saw a piece bounce off Nihkil’s back before it fell to the ground and melted partway into the floor.
I tried to fight him when I realized he was letting himself get hit by the brunt of the blast... when another hot flood of air hit.
That time, I heard Nihkil grunt, right before his legs crushed down on me painfully.
Something landed hard on my calf, burning my bare skin.
I yelped, jerking in my limbs, but Nihkil kept his weight on me, heavily enough that I couldn't move more than in a few inches in either direction, and then only my arms and legs.
