Chapter 33 – When the Stars Align
I was so fucking sick of sitting around.
I'd been stuck in a little waiting room for what felt like hours, although the visual display on the wall – a glowing projection of the date and time over a looped video of a meadow full of wildflowers that nodded in the breeze – told me it had only been about twenty minutes.
Still, when Araxis and I had stepped off the shuttle and into the bright and glossy interior of the judiciary ship, we'd both figured it would only be a few days before things wrapped up.
Instead, we'd had three days of preliminary investigation, and then the interview itself had taken three times as long as even Justiciar Tra Fell had told me it would.
Each time I stepped into that stark little room and sat across from the Justiciar's slug-like body, each time I drifted under the control of the drug they used for their 'submersed' interview process, I was aware of just how much sitting I was doing.
Sitting, talking, and recounting for hours and hours and hours.
The worst part had been that, after each day's interview concluded, they escorted me off to the medical suite for evaluation (more sitting), and then I was so exhausted by the end that I fell into bed in the tiny room they'd jammed me in and sat around some more.
It wasn't even like I could move much in the room I'd been given: it was more like a prison cell than a guest suite, smaller even than my room on Creche Thiel's ship.
My cell was still better than what I'd had in the den, though. I'd gotten accustomed to the finer things more quickly than I'd have guessed
So now that I'd finished the interview, and had been back to the medical suite to be evaluated again, I was ready to not be sitting.
So, instead, I was pacing.
I wasn't surprised, when I had stepped into this room, that Araxis wasn't waiting for me, despite what I'd demanded.
Justiciar Tra Fell had said in their flat and irritated tone that Araxis of Creche Thiel had his own schedule, and then he'd implied that I was being a brat – which I was not.
They'd had three days to scoop out of all of my private feelings and dump them onto the silver table between us, every vulnerable moment and secret wound just lying there out in the open for anyone to see, and all I asked was to see Araxis when this was over.
That wasn't being demanding. That was asking for fair recompense for the blood and viscera I'd carved out of myself for their disinterested investigation.
So I paced the length of the waiting room, again and again, rolling my shoulders and massaging all the places where the muscles were tight – which was, to be fair, everywhere.
It turned out that recounting all the worst moments of the past few weeks had felt, to my body, not so different from running for my life inside the arena.
The video of the meadow flickered, and I glared at it as it started up again from the beginning, one shadow in the corner jumping every time the video looped. It was like an itch inside of my brain, and reminded me that time was slipping by and I was still here, waiting.
Out in the hall beyond, a series of footsteps grew louder and louder. I came to a stop, one hand still kneading the muscle at the top of my shoulder as I twisted my neck to get a kink worked out. I sucked in a breath and held it, listening.
The footsteps grew louder and my pulse picked up, and then the door hissed open.
But it wasn't Araxis. Instead, there was another human standing in the doorway.
"Oh, hey!" she – an educated guess – said in English as I stared blankly at her.
She was a bit older than I was, with a round freckled face topped with a messy bun in a violent shade of pink.
She was holding a datapad, and had a jumpsuit on with an unfamiliar logo on one pocket – a series of stars, maybe, arranged in a shape I didn't recognize.
"It's great to meet you, Sashen. I feel like I know you pretty well – I've been helping with the translation – but obviously you don't know shit about me.
I'm Valerie Prior." She stepped in and stuck out one hand.
I studied her outstretched hand for a moment, then took it carefully for a brief handshake. Her grip was firm and confident, stronger than I expected. "I'm Sashen," I said slowly. "But you would know that."
She winced. "I will admit, I feel a bit like a creep.
I know a lot about you; you know nothing about me.
But that's alright – I'm not here to be your friend, unless you're looking for a pen pal.
" She ducked past me and threw herself down on the sofa with a pleased sigh.
"They've had me in a metal chair this whole time, you know.
My ass isn't made for metal chairs. Is anyone's really?
I guess it's fine if you're a justiciar whose body is just slime and muscle. Which did bring me to a question."
I raised my eyebrows as I watched this stranger playact at making herself at home. I hadn't exactly had great experiences lately with other humans, and I was skeptical this would be any different.
"You said you've more or less fucked your way through the galaxy," Valerie said. "So, I mean, look, I've just been wondering – Have you ever fucked one of them?"
I blinked. And, look, someone else might feel off-balance when blindsided about whether they'd ever fucked a xul before, but it was par for the course for me. "Yes."
She chortled, clapping her hands together. "That's amazing. I knew you wouldn't let me down. But how? They don't even have genitals!"
"It was a lot of hand stuff," I said, flat.
"And some of the filthiest dirty talk I've ever heard.
Are you here to learn more about my professional experience?
Want to take a look at my CV?" I cast my eye over her, appraising.
She didn't look like she was from Seraphim.
She definitely didn't talk like someone from Seraphim.
Had she escaped too? Had she been scooped up for a different type of work?
Valerie Prior watched me watching her – my brain was too mushy to try for subtlety at the moment – and smiled up at me again.
She pulled a small device out of her pocket and pressed a series of buttons, and then the space around us went oddly quiet.
I was reminded all at once of being in the Tournament village with Silver Sea, and the strange underwater quality the room had taken on when she'd had the cameras and mics cut.
Valerie put the square device on the low table, nudging it to the centre.
"I thought it might be a good idea for us to have a chat, human to human.
If you're game." She added something in a language I didn't understand while I stared at her, bewildered, and then she slapped a hand to her forehead.
"Right, sorry, English only with you folks.
I keep forgetting. It's so old timey. I keep reaching for words that you won't know. Sorry."
I didn't want to sit, so instead I let myself lean against the arm of one chair, an uncomfortable pressure pushing against my eardrums because of the barrier she'd slapped in place.
It was a little like the acoustic dampeners that we used at the den, except I suspected that whatever she'd done didn't just quiet sounds; it killed them.
Like an atmoshield for private conversations.
"Where are you from?" I asked, decidedly suspicious of her easy smile and cheerfulness.
"I'm from home," said Valerie,
"Home as in…" I prompted, waiting.
"Home as in home. Earth. Well, close enough. Sol.
That was so stupid it didn’t even warrant a response.
Apparently unbothered, Valerie folded the sleeves of her jumpsuit, pushing the cuffs up to her elbows.
Her forearms looked stronger than I'd expected; she gave the impression of being soft, and there was a softness to her body, but it was clear she was physically capable too.
That some of this presentation of hers was artifice. It had to be.
More startling, though, was the profusion of lines and colours etched into her skin. I'd seen tattoos on ketaari and voltaari, but had always assumed that etching with ink only worked on species with harder skin. Not –
"Check this one out," she said, catching me staring. She rotated to show me her forearm, near her elbow, where there was a doodle of a woman making out with an amphibious-looking alien from a species that definitely didn't exist and who had, impossibly, tits. "Nice, right?"
She had to be full of shit; I didn’t know what game she was playing at, but I didn’t like it. "You can't be from home. You'd need a generation ship to get here. No one's going to drag humans through the Maelstrom."
Her brown eyes gleamed with mischief as she raised one dark eyebrow. "Yes, you'd think that. This is why I wanted to be the one to debrief you about the findings from the judiciary's investigation. Because – well. It leads us to another conversation. If you want to chat?"
"As you can see," I said, gesturing at the empty room, "my social calendar is pretty full."
"Yeah, I noticed." She set the datapad carefully on the table between us and propped her elbows on her knees, leaning forward.
"So they've found, as you would expect, that there isn't a way for Araxis or anyone to mind control you, which is good.
It's physiologically impossible. There's no mind meld, no secret pheromones, no, like, cosmic soulmate shit.
They haven't finalized the report yet, but yeah – you're in the clear.
You both are. Here, I thought you might want to take a look for yourself. " She nudged the datapad toward me.