by Zara Zenia
There was a knock on the door, and I looked to her. “Come in.” Lainey called out.
“Sorry to bother you,” Madge walked in. “I'd like to speak with you for a moment, Markathus.”
I looked down at Lainey, then back at Madge. I didn't want to move, but the woman's stern look told me that something was wrong.
“All right.” I kissed Lainey a little self-consciously. It was strange displaying a heresy like affection around another member of the species.
When I got out into the hall, she turned around without saying a thing and walked into her room. I followed her. “What's wrong?”
She shut the door and pulled out a cigarette. “You owe it to her to give her a chance. I have sat back for far too long while I waited for you two to come around. Now, it's time for business.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I'm talking about her future.”
I turned around to walk out.
“You see it.” She followed me. “You don't want to believe it, because you're afraid of getting hurt, but she's getting better, and if you love her you will find out if there's a way to save her.”
I stopped halfway through the hall. Then I whipped around and let my voice boom through the building with a supersonic blast. “You don't ever tell me what to do.” I ran back into my room and shut the door.
I didn't want Lainey to die, but I couldn't think about the alternative. Yes, I had seen the signs that she was regaining strength, but if I allowed myself to think that she was going to survive, her death would be an excruciatingly painful experience, worse than it already was. Watching her was already starting to tear away at my fragile mental state. Hope would destroy what was left of it, leaving only a broken man, begging to be put down and recycled.
But what if there was a way. She was different. I couldn't deny that. Nobody ever got better before they got worse. The process was steady. She should've been dead, but she wasn't, and if I were being honest with myself, Madge's concerns had a demented merit that couldn't be ignored. I owed it to Lainey to set aside my concerns, and sacrifice my sanity just like I vowed, because her life was worth more than mine, and if she wasn't terminal she deserved the finest medical care in the universe.
What if we could have a son, and I could help her buy a beach house? What if I could show her the universe, and help her raise our boy? I was being selfish. I wanted to ignore the changes in her condition because I didn't want to get hurt, but if there was a chance, any at all that I could save her, I couldn't pass it by.
I put on the crown and sat down on the bunk, hoping that Ferryn kept his crown open for personal communication. “Reproduction one dash five three nine.” It was strange to feel my human tongue passing over the soft, low tones of my native language.
I saw myself staring at an image of the black cubed building where hundreds of human women were waiting to die. That was her prison. Were we defective? Did the Fiori deserve to die? We did, but if there was a chance we could change we were worth saving.
“Eight five nine.”
I was standing in front of Ferryn's cube.
“Enter.”
He stood at the edge of the doorway. “Enter.” He hissed in English.
I ran inside. “I apologize if I—
“I have no time. You'll be leaving for Hermes shortly. In the meantime, I need you to stay off chat. Don't even leave the building.”
“Thank you.”
“Why are you here?” He sat down and went through something on his crown.
“She's stabilizing.”
He stopped and looked up. “You're delusional. She's going to die.”
“I didn't want to say anything, but Madge has been bothering me, and I think I should check into her condition. Can you bring a medkit?”
“If you have to choose between her and the first Fiori child in decades, what are you going to do?”
I didn't want to answer that question. “Can you bring it?”
“Yes.”
Chapter 13
Lainey
Madge walked in with a plate of food a little while after he left. “Here.” She set it down on the table and started to fix the pillows.
“It's OK.” I sat up.
She laughed softly. “You're an experiment, you know.”
“No shit.”
“I mean that I have no idea what to feed you. I knew the broth would be fine, and that you can eat carbon meat, but the plants are a crap shoot. Nobody's ever given your species Fiori food.”
“I'm dying and I'm starving.” I looked to my right and found a gray piece of meat sitting alongside what looked like orange peas. I picked the plate up and took a bite. It reminded me of turkey. “It's not that bad. What is it?”
“Kinda like ostrich, but it has fur. We call them klaku.”
I imagined a purple ostrich with fur running around under an orange sky through a field of pink grass. “I wanna see the stars.”
“You'd never stop exploring. I used to say that you should discover at least three planets in one day. You will probably never see more than three, but that's more than any other human. Consider yourself a real Neil Armstrong.” She patted my leg.
“So far as I'm aware I've only been to two.”
She inhaled sharply. “Valice is one of the most powerful fascist dictatorships in the universe. We could be found at any time. It's too dangerous to keep you here. He's gonna take you off planet.”
That meant I would see yet another landscape and die surrounded by a creature I couldn't understand. “I wanna die at home.”
“Of course you do,” A slice of light hit Madge's face revealing a pool of moisture ready to overflow and wet her cheeks.
“It's a surprise. We don't want you to get stopped and questioned, but it's an amazing place, one of my favorite planets in the reaches.”
“Reaches?”
“The places the Imperium knows about but has no interest in infiltrating. They're called that because we can reach them but we haven't touched them.”
“You're a part of an Empire. Killing. Conquest. Humans evolved away from that shortly after you left when they destroyed the Berlin wall.”
She nodded her head. “We're not as smart as you. It doesn't matter how much we can do. We're vicious predators, worse than anything Mao or Hitler could've hoped for. I've devoted my life to saving species like you from my own kind.”
“Do you hate your species?”
“No. But I can't respect them. I look at Fiori like a mother looks at their child. They have a lot to learn, and I just wanna shake them and tell them how to think, but I can't. I have to watch them develop, and with my species that's a slow process.”
I took another bite of meat. “Is he OK?” I motioned out into the hall.
“He's thinking. He's a young lover—an infant. So he's going to be dramatic and emotional like you'd expect a teenager to be.”
“How young is he?”
“I'll let him tell you.”
“Is he coming to see me?”
“I think so.” She took the tray when I finished and left me alone. There was nothing to do—no TV, no books. I would've killed for something to distract me, but it wasn't going to happen, so I just scooted down and covered myself in the cushy black blanket she’d given me.
I rolled over and faced the wall, thinking about what was going to happen. I wanted to leave. I'd rather be anywhere other than in that tiny cell. Madge was nice, and being with Markathus was wonderful, but everything was just too raw.
I could feel death in the room, staring me down, sitting on the edge of the bed laughing. I felt him in the cold dry air that crept in underneath my blanket no matter how hard I tried to protect myself from it. He was inescapable, but at least I was going to get the final laugh. I was going to see the stars, and experience love. Once I had, I would be satisfied, and even though he might've been able to take my future from me, he couldn't change the fact that I had seen things no other human had ever seen.
I was scared. I've seen thousands of people die. That's a part of cancer research, so I knew what it was like to die with dignity and what it meant to let death win. If you fight it, you die suffering. That's what he wanted. I had to smile, and watch the world from my bed while that thing ate through me, and that was exactly what I was determined to do.
Of course what I really wanted to do was kick and yell while death dragged me to my grave. I couldn't die. I still hadn't told him I loved him, and he needed to hear that. He was so sensitive, more than any other human I had ever met, and I hurt him when I blamed him for what was happening to me. I accused that beautiful man of causing this when the only thing he wanted was to save me. He had risked his life for me. He was abandoning his species to live on a foreign planet, even though he knew his heart was going to break, all because he wanted to comfort me when I was dying.
Dear, God. I couldn't possibly have found a lover more beautiful and devoted.
I would probably die before I understood Markathus. The best part of love isn't the sex, or even the companionship; it's solving the mystery of what's underneath your lover's skin. Markathus and I were never going to experience that.
The Fiori were a mystery. What Madge told me didn't make sense. Madge and Markathus were both so human. They felt pain and anger. They cried and laughed. Were they concealing their true selves or were they just so similar to humans that I didn't notice a difference? There was something deeper that I would never fully comprehend moving behind his thoughts. I caught a glimpse when I caught the Fiori's eyes in the freezer.
It was empty and unfeeling, nothing like Madge or Markathus. That was the essence of the species.
There was too much left unsaid between us. It was time to break those walls down. I threw my feet off the bunk and stood up, trying to shake off the way the floor swam below me. It was the first time I had walked since arriving on the planet, but I managed to make it to the door OK.
I had watched them open the doors before. All they did was stick their hands on the front. So I tried and it opened right away. I peeked my head out. Madge was at the end of the hall siting in front of the door staring at what looked like a tablet.
“Uh, Madge…”
“He's across the hall.”
“Thanks.” I walked up to the door and pressed my hand against it. He jolted then suddenly turned around. He'd been excited about something.
“Are you OK?” He took me by the hand and pulled me in.
“Yeah.” I stood next to him feeling a little awkward. I didn't know what I had planned on doing when I walked in there, but I didn't like the way we were just staring at each other awkwardly, so I sat on the bunk and leaned against the wall.
He sat beside me.
“I don't know you. I don't care what you say, you're not the same man and that bothers me. I want to get in your head. That's why I'm here. I want to understand you, who you are and make decision about you by myself.”
“What do you want to know?” His voice was dull and he sounded drained.
“How do you change shape?"
“I'm a shifter.”
“What is that?”
“I was altered when I was younger.”
“What can you do?”
“I can change into any species.”
“Any?”
“Well there are limits. I can't change into methane or arsenic based life. Size is an issue too.”
“Hmm.” I rested my head on his shoulder. “What do you look like?”
“I promised myself that I wouldn't show you until I knew for certain that you cared about me the way I care about you.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he shook his head. “You won't care about me anymore.”
“Markathus, I'm not going anywhere. I'm yours. I just want to know this you, not the man that I thought you were in California. I want to know you, and what makes you Fiori. I still don't understand that yet.”
He stood up on top of the bunk and jumped down onto the floor. Then he met my eyes. He shrunk immediately, and the bones in his arm started to reverse while his mouth and nose grew together forming a black snout. Then he hunched over and his skin started sprouting baby blue hairs that soon covered his body.
When he stopped, he jumped back with a sharp exhale of air while I looked him over carefully. He reminded me of a primate with a pronounced sense of dignity. He walked upright and his eye was set higher on his face. It was a deep, dark blue vortex spiral at the center of his face. When he trained it on me, I shivered, just like I did when I first met him. We stopped talking and looked at one another like we wanted to kiss each other.
We both knew what the other person wanted when that happened, but with him a look meant so much more. He had his eye squinted with the upper lid trembling, which told me he was afraid. When I got up to come closer and he widened it, it told me that he was worried.
“Don't look at me.” He said. His voice was completely unchanged.
“Why not?” I moved forward and reached my hand out.
“I lied to you about who I was.”
I rested my hand on his cheek and knelt down. “I love you.” I closed my eyes, reached in and kissed him while his fur changed once more to skin. When I opened my eyes he was human again, naked and standing me up with his arm around my waist.
“Come here.” I took him by the hand and led him to the bunk where I laid down and let him straddle me on both sides with his knees resting around my waist. He dipped in and kissed me while he let his tongue move through my mouth.
Then he pulled back and moved down my neck. Each kiss brought with it a burning sensation that moved down my body, past my chest and over my stomach. Then it settled just below my gut where it started building up.
He lifted himself up, distracting me with a view of his perfectly defined physique while he lifted my white shirt, pulling me back and tearing it off my head. The cold air came as a shock, but when contrasted with a warm taste of his lips, it was divine.
He moved like fire, lapping at my nipples like sparks flying off a camp fire. That heat became a powerful force when he looked up, met my eyes and pinched my nipple.
“Ah,” I cried.
“You like that?” He asked while circling his thumb around my areola.
“Yes.”
He clamped down on my other nipple and I lost it. I started throbbing to the rhythm of his kisses, which kept piercing deeper. It wasn't enough, not his mouth on mine, or his hands cupping my breasts. I’d denied him the love he deserved, and I wanted him to experience me fully.
My body was begging for him too—throbbing, pulsing and opening. His fingers were moving lower, down my stomach, and over my lips. He pinched my clit and exhaled sharply.
“You want it?”
“Yes.”
He rubbed his thumb along my clit while he stood up to reveal his long, hard cock. The heat growing inside me became a fire that sat in between my thighs. Every time his hand pulled his foreskin up, the flames licked at my lips and threatened to erupt.
He stroked my cheek with a warm smile. Then he ducked down to whisper. “I love you.” I felt the head of his cock press against my lips. He pushed it in just past the surface while he pressed against my clit with his thumb and forefinger.
The fire inside me became a volcano as he drove further and further deeper until he was up against the perfect spot, and I could barely take it any longer. His true, passionate nature came out when he started moving faster and faster, grunting softly while his cock slipped through me. He filled me up, pushed me to my limits and started moving faster.
Every time he pulled back, he brought with him the momentum of a volcano. The man was powerful, and the force of his movements was going to bring on an eruption. It was so overwhelming that the only thing I could do was lean back, cry out and take every bit of it while he slipped through, pressing me closer to that point.
The sound of our skin smacking together combined with the blissful sen
sation, and the heat between us shot a spark that spread throughout my entire body. When I erupted I met eyes with him. Then the world split open and the second wave hit. It threw me back along with the fountain of heat spewing out of him, and rolled over me until I lost myself and everything around me in his arms.
Chapter 14
Lainey
I stretched out my arm that evening without even thinking about it, hoping in my drowsy state that I might be able to scoot over and wrap my arm around Markathus, but when I reached out, nothing was there.
I opened my eyes, and looked around. A small rectangular window had been built into the wall near the bed. It let in enough light for me to see the room. He was gone, and that bothered me. What was he doing late at night? Was it something he didn't want me to see? There was always that uncertainty with him. Our experience was intimate and powerful, but it could never be completely sincere, because ultimately I didn't know this man, or anything about him.
I stood up, completely exposed to the cold air and put on my shift. It didn't offer much comfort, but it helped keep me from shivering and gave me the push I needed to press my hand against the door. It opened slowly and stopped when I pulled my hand away, leaving it open just enough for me to peek my head out.
The sound of something, Fiori perhaps, hissing stopped me. I didn't recognize the voice, but when it stopped, I heard Markathus replying. I didn't know how I knew it was him, I'd only heard his true voice once, but the tone was unmistakable.
I moved back, closed the door and pressed my ear against it to listen to what was happening.
He was keeping something from me. Why else would he be sneaking around at night with a strange Fiori? Was it Madge? I'd never seen her shift before, but she took human form which meant that she was also a shifter.
The voices were coming closer. Every time their bare feet smacked against the floor, I felt a jolt of lightning crack into me. Why were they there, talking like that? What was he keeping from me? I could still be in danger. There was no way of knowing whether or not Markathus was lying. These creatures were capable of things I could barely manage.
