Chapter 5 – Deep Space Spectres #2
I'd already familiarized myself with the physiological basics – I'd done that on the second day Araxis had shown up in the den, just in case – so I knew they were a species without multiple sexes.
Everyone was the same. I was still having a hard time wrapping my head around how their genders were the important signifier and pronouns were more or less a flourish; Araxis wasn't a man, he was…
whatever it was he had said. Sinnenthi. Egnax wasn't a woman; she was irenek. Evreni was zarravon.
I wasn't a man, to them. I was virra.
I was usually pretty good at squeezing my brain into different shapes when it came to understanding alien cultures, at least on the surface.
This one was going to take a bit of time.
The way I thought about gender, even though it was clearly a hell of a lot more expansive than what I'd learned on Seraphim, felt deep and intrinsic.
Learning to think so differently was like expecting my eyes to blink a couple times and then see in infrared.
After I was jittery from so much sitting and reading, I headed out again to the kitchen and ate more soup, before trundling down to the training room to burn off some of the restlessness starting to hum in the sinews of my body.
I warmed myself up, taking it slow, stretching, then going through the slowest iterations of the sequences that I could.
Sometimes I liked to do that, to make sure I got every move perfect.
Of course, perfect for me didn't mean that it was accurate to the way I'd been taught. It meant that each movement looked good. Each shift of weight, each spin and thrust, had to be pretty.
I was a passable sword-dancer, but I was really good at making movement look nice.
I whittled away a few hours there in the training room, barely even working up a sweat because of the languorous pace I settled into, before convincing myself that I should really go check in on Araxis to make sure he didn't need help.
Maybe someone else on the ship might speak to me, which would be thrilling: so far, it felt like Araxis had maybe hallucinated half of the creche, because they were nowhere to be seen.
I hadn't even seen any traces of them. I knew there were three nosy kids on board: why couldn't I hear them running around and causing mayhem?
I drifted out of the training room and thought about tapping out a cute message, but settled instead for an old fashioned search. The ship was small and I had time to kill.
For a moment, I was struck by how incredibly stupid it was to be killing time when I was hurtling toward the likely end of my life. Shouldn't I be, I don't know, squeezing the joy from every moment?
Since I didn't know how to do that, I went and ate a package of spicy crackers I found in the kitchen, and I laughed to myself, grim, as I carefully licked every crumb from the pack.
Yeah, I knew how to live it up.
When I did track Araxis down, he was partially wedged behind a panel in an auxiliary room off the bridge; Egnax was sitting cross-legged on the ground, muttering furiously in abayan while she fiddled with what looked like an immensely complicated piece of circuitry.
I could see Araxis's legs and an elbow while he struggled with something half-hidden behind a tarnished metal panel.
I poked my head in. "How's it going?" I asked.
Araxis jerked, something thudding behind the panel as he hissed something under his breath. Egnax looked up at me from the floor; she had a pair of goggles on that whirred and clicked as they tried to focus on my face. Her mouth hooked in a sharp smile and she said something in bright-toned abayan.
When Araxis shoved himself out from behind the panel, he was flushed silver. "Sashen," he said, pushing himself to a seated position. He had a streak of grease across one cheek and looked wonderfully rumpled. "Did you need something?"
"No. Just checking in." I didn't step into the small space, just leaned in and smiled. "You sure you don't need help?"
"Yes," said Araxis. "You are kind to offer."
Egnax craned her neck as she stared down at the panel in her lap again, muttering something else I couldn't understand. I was sure though that I heard the word virra, and the look Araxis shot her was absolutely withering. He cast a furtive glance at me, and the flush turned pink.
"We are nearly done," said Egnax around the fiddly tool she'd stuck between her sharp teeth as she held several pieces of the panel together. "We will never be done if you stay and keep distracting our Araxis."
"Well, I have been described that way before," I admitted, delighted to watch the interplay. It felt like the most normal thing I'd seen since stepping off the shuttle. "Some have gone so far as calling me quite disruptive."
"I am not distracted," Araxis huffed, reaching to grab another of the tools I didn't recognize from the floor near Egnax's knee.
He twisted himself and contorted his body so that he could fit back behind the panel.
I stayed for a few more seconds, admiring how his jumpsuit had rucked up around his hips and given me what could only be described as a delectable view of his ass, and then I headed off, humming under my breath.
Yeah, he definitely wanted to kiss me, and he was absolutely going to before I headed off to Thenat-6. I figured, given the state of everything, I deserved that much.
The ship was on its way later that evening; the air seemed to shift, a gentle rumble filling the empty spaces if you stopped long enough to listen.
I'd kept my door open so that I could see if Araxis went by – I hoped I could lure him into a conversation or a game on my wristband, or maybe we could head down to the training room and I could show him some of the first forms – but instead I watched as an unfamiliar creche member drifted up the hallway, late in the evening.
I squinted at the flash of dark in the hall: they moved quickly and silently, like drifting smoke.
And I swear I wasn't trying to eavesdrop.
It wasn't like it would do me much good anyway, given that I couldn't understand any abayan at all.
But a decade's worth of training in keeping an ear open for interesting information in the den, little tidbits we could relay to Alet Trident for a nice bonus in our accounts, had left me finely in tune with tone of voice in a way that generally served me well.
So when I began catching snippets of a rapid-fire conversation in abayan from the helm, I could tell it was quickly becoming an argument.
I heard Araxis's voice sharpen, bright with anger, and it was that more than anything else that drew me to my feet.
The other speaker, the abaya who had moved silently and was wreathed in voluminous black fabric, had a higher, pointedly even tone.
But in that evenness there was something sharp, like a knife held firmly against a throat: unwavering, incisive, unemotional.
I edged closer to the doorway, listening.
It probably seems stupid – again, I cannot stress the extent to which I knew no abayan, beyond the few words for genders I'd been obsessively thinking about – but there was something about the interaction that prickled at me, like an itch I couldn't scratch.
It turns out that I had at least one good instinct, a hunch that might have helped me if I had been clever enough to actually follow it.
Instead, I just stood there, listening to words I didn't understand.
And then I heard two words I did know – the other abaya said, quite clearly, virra, and I heard Araxis say my name in a way that was anything but sweet, edged in frustration.
A sharp fluting sound echoed down the hallway, and the higher voice was precise and vicious as it rattled on for quite some time, before both fell to silence – the end of an argument, the final word being said – and then I heard footfalls.
I didn't have time to move back to the bed to make it less obvious that I'd been eavesdropping, so my instinct was instead to run headlong in the other direction, metaphorically speaking. I reached out and grabbed the ladder leading to the door as if I'd been on my way out of my room.
It worked. A moment later, the smoky figure reappeared, face a white smear above their gauzy robes. They stopped and tilted their head, peering down at me.
Ah, I knew that face from Araxis's files. This was Vivith.
"Hi," I said, palms tightening around the rungs of the ladder.
And then because it was incredibly obvious that I'd heard their argument, and because Vivith's chest was clearly heaving beneath their dark robes, and because I was obviously on my way out of my room and into the hallway beyond to scope things out, I asked, mild, "Everything okay? "
Their mouth narrowed and a thin sound whistled from their nose. "I gather that the children were rude to you last night. My apologies. It will not happen again. They should not go poking around where they are not needed."
"Oh," I said. Well, that was pointed. Something about Vivith's posture – hunched and curled but strangely predatory – made my skin go cold.
But I forced a smile to my face and pulled myself up the ladder so that I was standing just a few steps away, as if the proximity didn't make my skin crawl just a little. "It's alright. I'm not bothered."
Vivith's dark eyes narrowed, their stare sweeping over me with what felt decidedly like disdain.
"Hm. How fortunate that you are so agreeable, Sashen Solar.
It will make you an easy travelling companion.
" Something about the way they said that felt like an insult, although I didn't understand why.
"Rest well tonight." They inclined their head and then swept away as if they couldn't stand to be around me for another moment.