Alliance: An Intersolar Alien Romance, Book 6

07

[Transmission inbound.] “Testing, testing…”

Fásach’s serious tone tickled my ear as he commed me directly, testing a software update to his bionics that gave me native access. I jumped up with a bright smile and waved at him from several stalls away.

“I heard you!” I called.

The corner of his mouth twitched as he put his hands in his pockets, curling his claws away from the fabric. “You can speak normally, you know. As if you have a linguitor.”

His voice was close even if his body was far away. Of course mine should sound the same for him. I’d been overcome with excitement, which suggested I was having trouble regulating my expressive output. My cheeks prickled with heat. Embarrassment? This seemed to suit the emotion I felt. “I’m sorry. Did I yell in your ear?”

“Linguitors adjust volume on their own, so don’t worry about it.” He turned away from me, perusing a display of respirators with perked, fuzzy ears. “Let’s test range. What do you want to talk about?”

Still smiling, I followed his example and turned on the balls of my feet, walking my fingers across a table full of sheathed knives with a contemplative hum. “Thank you for providing my clothing. My core temperature is far more stable now.”

“The palladium you scavenged paid for it, not me.”

“So… I paid for it?”

“Yeah, Roz. You did.” Something about his tone felt softer. Perhaps he was also smiling? I stopped and stared down at my new secondhand boots and thermophobic coveralls covered with oil stains and smooth plasticky patches where the material had melted. It wasn”t perfect by a long shot, but it was mine. “Wow,” I awed, then drew my brows together. “But you said this is too big on me.”

“It is. Hjarna are built very differently from you.”

There was no doubt about that. I pulled out the voluminous hips by the pockets and the fabric tented around my figure, except where it dragged across my chest uncomfortably.

“Is your clothing also tailored for hjarna?” I asked.

“What?”

I tilted my head with curiosity, poking at a myriad collection of gun straps at another vendor’s stall. The tusked merchant gave me a curious four-eyed look, but continued to attend to another customer while I glanced through them.

“Your clothing is also too big,” I clarified, thinking about how his shirt caved around his chest, how the armscyes drooped off his slim shoulders. Even the neck was too large, collapsing under the weight of the loose fur around his collarbones.

“Oh…” Fásach’s tone shifted. “No, they were printed for me when I was predator-fluid.”

“What does that mean?”

“You don’t have files on yiwreni in your databases?”

“No,” I admitted. “Is that what you are? A yee-runny?”

He chuckled. “Yiwreni, plural. Yiwren, singular.”

His laugh was rough but not aggressive, and I stopped my slow march down the market. It was a nice sound that cut through all the digital noise crawling through the air in little staticky ribbons of information. I closed my eyes and drank in his sound until it faded.

“Anyway, yiwreni are predator-prey-fluid. Rapid muscle growth and such when we’re in a role that requires a lot of physical labor. Sensory sensitivity and fine muscle control when we’re caregiving or studying.”

“It’s an adaptive feature.”

“Exactly. Say our hunter gets injured. Instead of risking starvation, another yiwren will take on hunting while they recover. Within a couple weeks, they’ll be able to take down the same game. And becoming prey-fluid also means a slower metabolic rate–”

“Which saves resources like sentinel mode!” I realized out loud.

“Actually, I guess sentinel mode is a lot like yiwreni estivation. The hjarna first came to Byd Farrwell to study our self-induced healing comas.”

“So your shirts are only too big right now,” I deduced.

“That’s right.”

“Because of… the girls?”

He chirped thoughtfully. “They’ve been mine for a while now, and I don’t do the sort of work that kept me predatory anymore… but I’ll need to transition again.”

Fásach grew quiet and I looked back down the road, following the signal of our commlink through the crowds. [Magnify] He stood with his face upturned to the sooty clouds, ears back, expression shuttered with tension. He glanced at his shoes and drew in a breath.

“I’ve never felt more desperate in my life,” he admitted to the ground. The confession skated across my back and my skin pebbled. “You really know how to get to Renata?”

“I do,” I said with absolute conviction. It was written within me like a map carved into the bowl of my skull casing. Fragments of data from my memories of life there pressed against the tendrils of my thoughts as clear as the recordings in my LMem. I might not have been able to display them in the same way, and they might have corrupted during the download from my originator, but I could follow the echoes even in my sleep.

“I’m entrusting you with my children, Roz. You get that, right?”

Fásach bared his teeth, then rubbed at his shoulders with one thick palm. I scarcely breathed, watching his personal conflict.

He was so different from Master. I was coded for Master to be my father, but he’d had no qualms about entrusting me to clients that were guaranteed to damage my unit. He was an unshakable bastion, full of perfect guidance and instruction. Master’s word was law, and even if I was damaged or decommissioned in the pursuit of his instruction, he had deemed my sacrifice necessary by calculations I couldn’t fathom and had no right to question.

Fásach, though, was so unsure by comparison. His vitals suggested he was nervous, exhausted, on edge… And suddenly, I wished that Master hadn’t been so sure of himself when he dug into my skin and removed my markings. Maybe if I still had them, I would have grown fond of them.

“I will choose a path that will not damage them. I promise.”

I thought of my papi on Earth. He’d been hardworking, with orange grove soil ground so deep into the cracks of his calloused hands that no amount of washing would ever clean them. He’d been sweet and soft spoken like Fásach, but he’d had shortcomings. He’d spoken no English, and instead relied on me to deal with immigration services, taxes, tuition, rent, and bills, even as a teenager. He didn’t know how to cook, either and expected me to clean house like my mom always had before she died.

What he’d given me, though, was unwavering support and unending love. I’d felt it every day, even when we fought about how he was treated at the farm, or how he needed to do his own dishes, or the sores on his feet from cheap boots. Despite all the frustration, we had been enough for each other, just as we were. While Master stood behind me and pushed me forward onto his chessboard, my dad had walked ahead of me, buffeting the wind and rain while the world weathered him in my place. He’d been my shield so I could be the fruit of his labor.

“How are your boots? They okay?” Fásach asked, his tone still rough. Dad’s voice layered over his like slow-burning tobacco.

“Ven aquí, azaharita. ?Te gusta tu nueva chaqueta? ?Es cómodo?”

“Están bien,”I answered.

“What was that?”

I shook my head, rubbing my ears. A venandi merchant held up a round, metal object in his talon to entice me, but all I saw was a dark hand with a pink palm covered in soil. When I drew in a breath, it was the familiar scent of fertilizer and oranges rather than hot sulfur. I shook my head and pulled Fásach’s hood closer around my face.

“Please disregard.” I squeezed my eyes closed so I could focus on separating my LMem files from my sensory input. They were sharing channels, perhaps, commandeering each other as one took priority over another. The confusion made managing digital noise more difficult, halos blurring my vision, encrypted comms muddying my hearing. A cacophony that battered my nerves and rooted me to the spot. I couldn’t—

A warm, thick hand settled on my shoulder. Fásach looked down at me with a frown of concern. “Doesn’t seem like you’re okay.”

I blinked rapidly, then closed my eyes again when my lenses flared with a painful flash of overexposed light. The deluge of input overwhelmed my gyroscopic sensor, and I swayed on my feet as if I were on a ship at sea. “Too much-chuh-chuh-ch– 01101001 0110…”

Panic crashed over me as my language center broke down. I slapped my hands over my mouth to stop myself from speaking in binary, but my tongue and throat continued to ramble even with my lips sealed shut, lagging.

“Roz?” Fásach asked with more concern. I shook my head, shoulders hunched. I was like a boulder, too heavy to move, and getting denser by the moment as each sensation piled up, hammering my brain with the need to be processed and the anxiety of the queue getting too long to handle. I wouldn’t be able to see or speak again until I’d sorted it all. Thousands and thousands of signals. Millions…

Slender velvety arms slowly wrapped around me and pressed my face into something warm and soft. Fásach took a deep breath, held it, then breathed out. In… then out. In… then out. His arms pressed around my shoulders and forearms, my hands still clapped against my mouth, and one of his palms cradled the back of my head.

He breathed in… then out.

When I breathed with him for the first time, his hug drew tighter, applying pressure on my skin and in my chest. He turned my head sideways against him, then pushed his calloused palm against my temple until all I heard was his heartbeat, thick and strong.

Bit by bit my senses recalibrated, and the clog of data berating my mind broke apart into a river that flowed more freely through me. My fingers relaxed over my mouth, and my shoulders eased. I shuffled in my boots, trying to find better balance, where before my knees had locked and Fásach had taken the brunt of my weight. I melted into his arms, and they tightened again.

“Your data halos and comm echoes are getting to you, right?”

“How did you know?” I croaked.

“It happens to yiwreni pups too.” Fásach’s voice rumbled against my ear and hands where I was pressed against him. “Coming into our symphony can be overwhelming, so we apply pressure to help center ourselves when it gets too loud. Is it helping?”

I stole a furtive glance at the venandi merchant’s talons. He had three just like he should, emerald green rather than rich brown, and they were currently grasping long black boxes above his head. He yelled about the quality of his extended mags as buyers shuffled around us.

I unfurled my arms, which were still trapped with my hands near my mouth, and wrapped them around Fásach’s waist. He was so much thinner than his fur and clothing suggested, even if his shoulders were wide. He wasn’t like Master at all. He was like my dad had been on Earth, shielding his daughters and breaking his body for their futures.

Fásach was shielding me too, even though I was a stranger.

“Yes, I like it. I’ll hug you too, when you feel overwhelmed.”

Fásach cleared his throat and gently unwrapped my arms from around his torso. “My symphony is too quiet these days to need it. But thanks for offering.”

I didn’t have time to ask him what a symphony was, or to say that I would hug him whenever he asked me to, even if he wasn’t overwhelmed by music but by something else, because his holotab buzzed and we both looked down at the notification. The Mummer was due to dock in less than a turn. Fásach’s ears twitched, his flat, wide nose flaring with surprise at the time.

“Right. Time to get the girls,” he said, minimizing his holotab. “Comm Auntie… Hi Aun—” He winced, ears flicking back. “I know. I’m sorry. Yes, we’ll be there soon. We, you heard right. They need to be ready to go in fifteen. Thanks, Auntie. End comm.”

He sent the few things we’d bought to dock three via courier drone. Rations, some ammo and medicine, a few sets of clothing. We wove through the alleyways back to his neighborhood and stuck to the deep corners, eyeing other shadows with suspicion as they waved in the mirages of heat simmering up from the roads.

“Shh,” Fásach told me, wrapping one hand around my elbow as he glanced down the footpath to his home, his ears swiveling like satellite dishes. He locked onto the corrugated sliding door, which was now open, the street littered with the things he’d left behind—a blanket, my disintegrating rags, a plas curtain. The one window had been smashed, scattered glass shards glittering in the yellow emergency light mounted on a neighbor’s stone wall.

Though we heard no movement or voices, Fásach steered clear of the still, dark maw without a backwards glance.

A twist and a turn later, we were standing in front of a home that was one of many set in an ancient lava tube, its blackened roof curving into the walls. The neat row of doors and windows along the tube were akin to hillhouses or blimp hangars with a myriad of protective shielding strung up overhead on tall poles with decades worth of heat resistant materials vying for space like the red jungle canopy of Yaspur.

The neighborhood reminded me of the senior suburbs in Florida, with their astroturf lawns and perfectly square lots, the pastel windowsills and flamingos each dressed for a holiday theme. Only here, the astroturf was a bed of yellow moss, and the pastel windowsills were hand drawn with white chalk on the volcanic rock. Instead of flamingos out front, there were painted sponges strung up on ribbons.

This particular house had been carved with large geometric patterns, circular windows angled up on the curve of the roof rather than looking out at the street. Iridescent fabric sewn into the shapes of flowers draped across the door, their little petals flitting in the scorching breeze.

Fásach brushed his boot soles off on a contraption to the side of the door with two wiry brushes mounted at an angle and stained with layers of tar. He motioned for me to do the same as he pressed a hot pink and yellow button glued to the rock.

“It’s Fás,” he said after the button played a little song inside the home. Several locks clicked and jangled, then Fásach helped pry the door open. It was a good foot above the ground, and based on the curve of its hinges, was heavy to lift with the thick layer of insulation weighing it down on the other side.

A mottled fleshy-pink person of a species I didn’t have in my database lifted their head out of the door, looking between us with round black eyes set more where a human’s temples were. They had no mouth or nose, but a porous, sensitive pad that looked like fuzzy yellow tire tread that made up the majority of the bottom half of their face, with a drooping soft mass at the back of their head. Two pliant feelers tested the air from the corners of their chin.

“This is the ‘we’?” she said, nodding to me.

Fásach licked at one of his fangs. “Yes. Auntie, this is Roz.”

I smiled and dipped my head in greeting. “Hello, I’m Roz.”

“He said that already.” Auntie’s feelers brushed over the tread of her face. “Fine. Come in.”

Then she disappeared like a gopher into the ground. Fásach motioned for me to head down first, holding the door above his head. I descended the steep staircase to a soft blue carpet.

“Boots off!” Auntie called, walking away. Her neck was as long as the height of her head, sloping into thin shoulders and a very slight waist. She wore a bright patterned dress in lime green, pink, and yellow, with a wide blue sash that matched her carpet. Each of her impossibly long arms was adorned with several bangles, all of which glowed with coolant as she used them to help her walk with the back of flat, thick knuckles.

“Auntie is a krkyrn,” Fásach said, jumping down next to me. “If you don’t know what a yiwren is, you definitely don’t know them.”

“Wow, she’s amazing. All of this is amazing,” I said, awed by the colorful interior and woman, shiny baubles and ribbons hanging from all over the ceiling. Most were blue, but some sparkled with green or purple.

“Krkyrn like rain,” Fásach explained. “Auntie misses it.”

“Fás’s girls strung it all up for me,” she said, waving one of her bracelets in front of a shelf full of things I couldn’t identify. Shiny and plastic, as bright as rainbows. One was an atomic clock. I could tell that much. That same song from the front door played, and the shelf slid sideways. Inside was a bright yellow and orange room with lights hung from the ceilings and the same blue carpet.

And in the middle of that carpet? Two grey and blue venandi girls, one flying her doll around on a ship model, the other bent over her holotab with a studious expression. The smaller of the two saw us first, gasped, and threw her doll and ship into the air.

“Para!” she yelled, scrambling to her feet.

“No talons in the carpet!” Auntie scolded as the girl ran across the floor and suctioned onto Fásach’s leg with an audible thud. He laughed, ears perked, a glint in his amber eyes. The other girl joined them, more careful of the carpet than the other, and he knelt with his arms around them, swaying from side to side.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” the older one said, pressing her little mandibles into his shoulder.

“I’m glad you are too,” he sighed. “We need to talk.”

The older one smacked his chest. “Yeah, don’t do that again!”

“Who are you?”

The smaller daughter saw me standing with Auntie and they both turned, the elation dropping off their childlike plates. I dipped my head, said “Hello, I’m Roz-02,” then blinked, heat rising through my cheeks. “I-I mean, just Roz.”

“This is a friend of mine,” Fásach said, sitting on the ground. “Go ahead and introduce yourselves.”

The taller one squeezed her sister”s hand, then stepped forward. “I’m Safia.” Her plates were mostly a silvery grey with a blue crown of nubby spires and mandibles.

“I’m Misila.” Her little sister was a brighter, more solid sky blue. According to my database, they were so vibrant because of their youth, and would likely darken to gunmetal grey and navy in adulthood.

“You’re both so beautiful,” I said with a big smile. I glanced between Auntie and Fásach. “I didn’t know children were so beautiful.”

Auntie grunted thoughtfully.

“Are you human like Imani?” Misila asked. She squinted at my hands and face, peering into the thermophobic hood I still wore tightly around my ears. “You don’t look the same at all.”

My eyes grew wide. “You’ve met Imani? Imani James?”

“That’s enough for now,” Fásach said, ending our conversation. My heart raced, but I bit my lip as he turned them back around with a serious expression. “I need you both to listen very closely. Okay?”

They nodded. “Okay, Para.” Safia grabbed Misila’s little hand.

“We’re not going back home. Instead, Roz is going to take us to a new one.”

“Were you hurt?” Safia asked, squeezing her sister’s hand harder. “Did something happen to our house?”

Fásach took a deep breath and nodded. “Yeah, I was hurt. And the house isn’t safe anymore. But we got some of your clothes, and I saved your mara’s iden-archive, so we’ve got everything that’s important.”

Auntie poked me with a wide, veiny hand. “You, come with me,” she said, gliding gracefully on her knuckles. I followed her into the yellow room while Fásach spoke with his children. “They have some things here. If you’re leaving, they’ll want them.”

“Of course, tia.”

“What?”

“It means auntie in my native language.” My brow drew together. “At least, I think it does.”

The elderly krkyrn snorted, and some of the yellow fuzz clinging to the soft pads of her face billowed into the air like pollen. “You’re programmed with Hja Erle. You don’t have a native language.”

I kept my smile intact but stared down at the blue carpet. Her words stung, but the colorful home was comforting in a nostalgic way. After my day with Fásach, I had forgotten that I was ever anyone but my originator. We were one and the same. I let the carpet carry me into memories of cyan Caribbean waters and summer rain, thick white clouds coasting through bright cerulean skies…

Auntie filled a bag with dolls and food, then held it out to me.

“Did Fásach steal you?”

I blinked, hugging the bag to my chest. “Why would he steal me?”

“I’ve heard the talk. Human dolls are priceless. And that nursery Hauwuh’s second parthenogenitor worked at was destroyed last night. Poor woman’s beside herself. He was on shift—”

“The nursery is gone?” I interjected with wide eyes.

Was Master gone as well? Were all units of my model destroyed except for this one?

“Never mind the nursery. If Fásach didn’t steal you, he certainly didn’t buy you. So who is getting what from him?”

“Who–what, nothing!” I dropped the bag, hands open in surrender. “We bumped into each other on the road–”

“You were left unattended on a road? What idiot owns you that would leave you in the slums by yourself?”

I took a deep breath, held it, then let it tumble from my lungs like Fásach had done in the market. Picking up the bag and hugging it once more, I met Auntie’s eyes.

“I own myself,” I said proudly, fishing into my oversized pockets. I withdrew one of the little lumps of palladium I’d been able to scavenge from the Pulpit. “See? I bought my own clothes with this.”

Auntie paused and looked me in the eye for the first time. [Inspection] I stood with my chin up and held out the palladium. Her bracelets clacked up and down her long forearm as she picked it up.

“Then you escap–”

“The guild bought her,” Fásach said, glancing between us. He stood in the door, two small bags slung over one shoulder. When our eyes met, he looked away first. “She’s a caregiving model. Novak’s planning on taking in more orphans from the lab.”

Auntie snatched her hand away, slipping the palladium into her pocket.

“Human dolls aren’t on the market yet.”

Fás shrugged, his ears sloping to the sides with disinterest. “Novak has connections. And since I’m also a mammal, he thought I was a good cosigner.”

The krkyrn snorted, spewing pollen into the air once more with suspicion. I opened my mouth to speak, but Fásach shot me a glare. I recognized commanding looks very well, so I pressed my lips together and waited with my eyes on the carpet.

“I’ll have to tell Hauwuh over tea,” Auntie decided.

Fásach winced. “When is that?”

“Tomorrow, of course. I have the girls today, don’t I?”

My partner sighed, a lopsided smile growing across his mouth, exposing one of his thick, pearly fangs. “Alright, Auntie. You can tell her tomorrow.”

The elderly woman nodded once as if she’d made up her mind and no amount of begging could sway her, but when Fásach rubbed his forehead against her cheek and chirruped, the feelers on her chin curled up.

Then she batted him away. “Enough.”

“What will you do without us?” Fásach teased.

“Return home,” she murmured with affection. “My rest is long, long overdue.”

Auntie sighed, looking through me as if I didn’t exist, imagining something wistful and precious.

I wished I knew what was precious to her. Such an exacting woman must have found only the most perfect memories to be worthy of that soft expression.

I craved moments like that. Moments that were mine rather than Rosy’s. I had decades of life within me, but no one believed that life was mine to lay claim on.

Embarrassment sizzled under my skin. Not until just then, when she’d looked through me as if I were no different from a lamp, did I realize… From Auntie’s point of view, we hadn’t been having a real conversation.

Because I wasn’t real to begin with.