01
Three sols prior.
Music shook the porous walls of Xenoden, thumping against Fásach’s fur and visibly vibrating each follicle. The club was steaming, condensation from bodies and breath mingling with the underground volcanic temperatures of the Volcage. Dancers ground their hips and jaws against each other, rubbing fistfuls of ice over bare skin, licking rivulets of water from whatever body was nearest.
The movers were an easy eyesore to spot in the mosh pit that verged on an orgy. Their eyes were sharp and watchful, scanning the throng for potential clients. This one looked like they were fixing for a sniff of daz. That one knocked back gob shots like they wanted to get lost in a warp pill. The venandi women at the bar might have flashed their swollen groin plates if someone offered them a sheet of lick-wish.
The drunk on the edge of the bar looked like she might pass out from the crushing heat.
Fásach pressed his way through the crowd, a hand on the auto-zip of his thermophobic jacket to keep wandering hands from finding his supply. Unlike every other mover in the club, he didn’t deal in recreationals. Instead, he dished out the most sought after drug on Huajile.
“You need another shiver if you’re going to stay,” he yelled into the drunk’s ear. She was a yog with silver caps on her protruding fangs, visible as she turned her head sideways on the bartop. Her pupils were abnormally wide, and by the state of her clothing, she’d enjoyed a lick-wish, a guess Fásach confirmed from the glowing dye on her tongue as she licked her cracked lips. She brushed her hand down his bare forearm as he withdrew the sticker that would affix to her wrist and cool her down for the next few hours.
“You’re so small,” she giggled, hooking her long nails into the pocket of his pants and swaying him side to side.
“Amazing. You’re so observant,” he mumbled, picking up her limp arm. He pressed on the divot beneath her second wrist bone and her holotab flashed on.
“You’d make a dainty pet,” she purred as he readied the transaction and held it up for her to see. She made eyes at him, watery and unfocused in the blue glow of her tab, and completely ignored the screen hovering inches from her face, even when he shook her hand. Instead, her painted claws pricked his hip bone, traipsing up his diminished adonis belt and abdominal wall, inspecting him as a potential playmate.
His ear twitched, annoyed but unfazed. He was used to people pawing him now, but he’d never get used to the simpering tone and the wandering hands. Catching her wrist, he leaned into her tympanum to make sure she heard him.
“Do you accept the transaction, or should I call security to bounce you?”
“Fine. You’re no fun, puppy.”
The yog accepted and he stuck the sticker on the inside of her wrist. She instantly sighed with relief, and he removed her hand from the waistband of his pants, retreating to the closest vantage point away from the dance floor.
Fásach sought out the other movers posted around Xenoden with a wary stare. Sure enough, a trio of yogs loitered against the wall near the DJ dais, where the zambandi shock jock named Impulz played mixes of his own throat-singing and trap beats. They leaned their heads together as they stared him down, and Turj, the nastiest bastard of the three, smirked with a little jerk of his head in greeting.
Scocite.
Fásach checked the time with an aggravated snap of his teeth. It wasn’t even halfway through the night and already he’d need to watch his back. Even though his own guild, Gaul, was top dog on Huajile, Xenoden was neutral turf. The club had an ironclad no Family business policy, so any scrap that happened on its premises was strictly personal beef only. If Turj and his little troop of popper pushers got the jump on him, there was no calling for backup, and they knew it.
A fancy guildmate all by their lonesome with top-shelf product? An irresistible target.
Especially since Fásach had lost so much bulk in recent months. To anyone but another yiwren, he probably looked sick because, until a year ago, he’d been predator-fluid. His frame had been filled out with thick muscle beneath his amber and silver coat, fangs longer and sharper than the average yiwren.
He’d been an enforcer for the guild, busting up territorial fights, raiding gang operations that pushed Huajile just a hair too far over the dangerous edge of lawlessness. Novak Gaul, the guild’s krol, had used him and his partner liberally to ensure the residential neighborhoods remained safe enough for families.
Everything changed a year ago though when Quiopha died.
A tendril snapped right in front of his nose, and he yipped a string of curses, his ears twitching as he ran his tongue over his canines.
“Fás! What a coincidence,” the bane of his krol’s existence blocked Turj and his cronies from view, a wide sneer plastered on her face. Siat Xata waved her lavender tendrils at him, the gold striped pupils set in her mahogany eyes dilated and glinting with her signature “Eat Shit” attitude. The shilpakaari covert elite extended her wrist as if he’d just give her a shiver for free and be happy about it.
“What do you want?” Fásach bit out, grabbing her hand more roughly than necessary.
“Ooo, careful. You never know when a lady might enjoy that sort of treatment.”
The problem was that she did and he knew it. Not intimately, but because Xata prowled Xenoden every time she was on their cursed moon. The yiwreni mover glared up at her, pressing a shiver into her wrist. As the name suggested, she shuddered with the instant bite of cold.
“Ah, so much better.”
Fásach sighed as she settled in beside him, catching eyes left and right. She was a stunning woman and she leaned into that fact, dripping with pheromones that drove other shilpakaari crazy. Several of the shils on the dance floor were facing her now, inviting her to choose them with unnatural fervor.
“I’m not your private mover, Xata, so spill.”
“I heard you met Vin’s new little hrum-piece.”
Fásach smiled with bitter amusement. “Jealous?”
“Curious,” she corrected, twisting her mane over itself in a sensual dance. “Novak’s convinced those humans are honorable,” she mocked with an unconvinced gesture, “whatever that means.”
Fásach gave up on looking for customers, hitting the back of his head against the lava-rock walls. He shrugged his shoulders, scratching the itch in his hackles against the wall as he looked at her. “And you don’t?”
“A thousand refugees get tossed into space,” Xata theorized, looking at him pointedly. “Who are they gonna trust when shit hits the fan, their guards or their own?”
Fásach turned away, staring longingly at the exit. She wasn’t asking to annoy him. She’d sought him out on purpose, and the realization made his gums taste like iron.
The yiwreni homeworld, Byd Farrwell began to die when Fásach was a child. By the time he entered his teen years, the forests had decayed into black swamps of plant rot, and its biodiversity had completely unraveled. His people had agreed to relocate off-world on massive colony builders made for tens of thousands of residents, each destined for different planets, while the hjarna spent the next century reconstructing the planet. That was how Fásach and his late mother had arrived on Huajile. On one of the last boats off Byd Farrwell, a tiny commuter puttering towards the volcanic colony, the only place with any space left.
The cost to the yiwreni was so much higher than they’d anticipated. Families and communities split apart. Gods forgotten. Their entire way of life dissolved the instant they left their planet and entrusted their survival to the Intersolar Union. The riots, vitriol, and treachery that defined the next two decades were the blackest in yiwreni history.
No one could understand the humans trapped on Yaspur better than a yiwren.
“I don’t know,” he said sincerely over the thudding bass of Impulz’s music, a crease in his brow. He stuffed his claws in his pockets and pressed down on them with his knuckles. “Depends on the person.”
“Imani James,” she reminded him deadpan.
Fásach grimaced, then licked his fang back into his mouth after snagging it on his wide lip. “Imani is a hardened pistol. She’ll choose her people.”
Xata cursed at the floor, hands on her hips.
“I told Novak–”
“As in her people. The people that earn her trust. Imani is ride or die.”
Xata stopped, eyeing him. “You like her? You trust her…”
“Why does my opinion matter?” Fásach huffed, thoroughly convinced the rest of the night was a waste. It wasn’t worth the ringing in his ears to stay any longer, so he pushed off the wall. “I’m not close with the krol, and I’ve only met one human. Ever.”
Xata grabbed his forearm and spun him back around. Her grip was strong and steady, her eyes no longer that of a femme fatale teasing her next meal, but a commander. A hardened woman making hard decisions. “What does your symphony tell you then?”
Fásach’s fur stood on end, his ears flattening against his skull. He pulled his arm away with an incredulous huff. “What?”
“Imani is about to walk into a dollhouse surrounded by a bunch of human fucktoys with no way to save them. Novak thinks she’s going to stick it through, but I’m not so sure. Is she going to trust us that they’re not real? Or will she fall for the dolly act and compromise the operation?”
Scrubbing his ears to make them stand straight, Fásach bought himself some time to think.
Aural magnetism, the sense that ensured all yiwreni knew magnetic north from birth, had been the driving force behind not just the great winter migrations but also one’s path through life. It had evolved beyond a knack for geomagnetic fields, and as a result, was ascribed a sort of mysticism or godly touch. It was a direct connection between their consciousness and their gut instinct. They were like living lie detectors, sniffing out the sour chords of deception and foreboding or the sweet harmonies of love and trust.
But after the death of Byd Farrwell, most yiwreni just felt… directionless. Their senses weren’t yet attuned to their new homes, and their symphonies were unpredictable at best.
Disappearing at worst.
Fásach didn’t like talking about his symphony—a few reedy notes centered around two little girls and nothing else.
It had once been so strong, a constant, comforting hum that oriented him to his life’s path. Now it was little more than a phantom that rattled its chains in the halls of his mind. Soft wisps that he could barely grasp hold of. It was as if his spirit was made of lead and he’d fallen too far from grace to hear the music anymore.
But even if he felt like he was fading, the motions of day-to-day life were important for Quiopha’s daughters. He would save up money, get them enough for the first term’s tuition at a boarding school on Aescipoli, and find their clan so they could be raised by family. It was what his partner was owed. What her children deserved.
And making sure that Vin’s vira was going to watch his back is what his old friend deserved.
Fás thought back to meeting Imani James, to the notes of her voice and the baseline chime of his symphony. Did any of the notes turn sour? Did that telltale dissonance ever ghost across her tone?
No, he was certain. When she’d spoken, her conviction had been strong and melodic. The smooth cadence of her voice had been peppered with rare notes of harmony, even. Trust, he decided. Not the sweeping chords of love, but a mutual, practical respect that had the potential to grow.
Being prey-fluid might have made Fásach thin and narrow, but he was still tall and stood up straight to look down at Xata with indignation. “Like I said. Imani chooses her people. She’ll make the choice that protects them.”
“That protects Vin, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“Thank fuck they converged then.” Xata nodded once, satisfied, then adjusted his collar, her gritty sharkskin fingers brushing against his jaw. “Now, I’ve got a chain-skip to catch. Care to loosen me up before I have to deal with Vin’s bubblegum ankle shark?”
“You mean Pom Pom?”
“That’s the one.”
“No.”
Xata gave him an insincere pout. “Pity.”
Now that he’d opened himself up to his symphony, Fásach knew that the single word had been meant to reinforce everyone’s view of the shilpakaari commander: a cold-hearted bitch that enjoyed being put on that tempestuous pedestal, stirring up shit in the water below her perch.
Whether it was sincere, he couldn’t say, but the tone soured in his ear as she disappeared into the crush of dancing bodies, drawing a couple of shils into her wake.
It was then that Fásach’s eyes slid back to the DJ dais. Turj was gone, a strobe drone now filling the space with pulses of red and orange light.
“Fuck,” he snarled.
His attention snapped to the exits.
Clear.
He broke for the main entrance rather than one of the side doors, hoping the bouncers would keep the other movers from jumping him. It was the safest, albeit exposed path, and as he walked, he readied a comm with the guild operator, Zivi, in case he needed to ask for backup out on the street.
But two sets of hands gripped his thermophobic coat by the crux of his elbow while he was looking down at the tab’s interface, and the heavy music drowned out his yelp of surprise. His head hit a wall as he lost balance in the struggle. One of those hands lifted his head by the ear, then slammed it down again.
“Hot shit turns soft and look at you now. The Beast of Gaul is a fuckin’ baby!” Turj guffawed, kicking Fásach in the ribs. He curled over himself with his knees up and coughed. “My little sister could kick the tar outta you now, boy. Hold him up, Mez?a!”
The hand holding his head to the ground gripped the nape of his neck and dragged Fás to his knees while he breathed through the pain of a concussion and at least one broken rib, maybe a fractured cheekbone... It hurt, but he’d been roughed up worse.
Fásach was prey-fluid, yes, but he was neither a quivering coward nor an inexperienced pup. He knew how to wait for an opening. And like many predatory mammals, his skin was loose around his neck, detached from the muscle tissue below.So when Mez?a grabbed him by the scruff like a pup, Fásach twisted beneath the yog’s hand, stretched his maw open, and clamped his jaws down on Mez?a’s wrist.
The crunch was immediate and satisfying as bones crumbled like dry crackers. The mover tried to pull away, but once in a yiwren’s jaws, there was no getting out. Fásach snarled, aggressive creases forming along the top of his wide nose, hoping the others would run.
He couldn’t fight three yogs while prey-fluid.
But he sure as fuck could take down one.
“My hand! My hand! Get him off me!” Mez?a wailed, viscous blood smearing across Fásach’s mouth.
“Fuck this shit, I’m out!” the other yelled, scampering into the crowd.
But Turj wasn’t cowed. He raised the butt end of his hand cannon, fixated on the bulge of shiver stickers strapped to Fásach’s chest beneath his jacket.
The firearm fell like a hammer.
And Fásach knew no more.