Chapter 5
Rook
Hallie sets up the board like she’s done it ten thousand times.
I’m loving the idea that the female I’ve scented might possibly enjoy gaming as much as I do. How did I get so lucky?
The front room is perfectly quiet. With the crew gone to the mine and Lila and the offspring tucked away in the sunny room at the far end of the house, the compound has gone soft and still around us.
Daylight slants through the window, catching the dust in the air, falling across the low table and the old worn board between us.
Somewhere far off I can hear a muffled shriek of laughter and Lila’s voice answering.
Out the window the jungle presses close and green, still dripping from last night’s storm, a red flower nodding heavy against the glass. The fire’s banked low in the hearth. It’s warm and peaceful. And most importantly, Hallie sits across from me. I have never in my life been this aware of a room.
I watch her smalls hands move, quick and sure, the gloves of the unmated hiding fingers I’m trying very hard not to think about, placing each piece on its square without hesitation.
She called them names of royalty. King. Queen.
The little corner piece she calls a rook, just like my crew name.
She doesn’t fumble once and doesn’t ask me where anything goes.
My female just builds the starting position out of muscle memory.
My brothers tease me for my life-long love of this game.
Everyone on Timbur knows Karrec exists, but none of my brothers has ever wanted to play.
I learned to play alone, against myself, then against the males at the gaming hall who tolerated me hanging around their tables.
Nowadays, I’m the top player on the entire colony.
And now there’s a small, sharp-eyed human female across the board from me, the one the universe made to match me, setting up the pieces like she was born to it.
I want to ask her to formally clasp hands with me and start the claiming, the chase.
I’d love nothing more than to learn how to kiss and mate with this female, filling her with our offspring.
But as I told her earlier, now is not the time.
She barely knows me or understands what being mated to a Xylan miner would mean.
And there’s of course the whole reason she’s here… for safety. And I will keep her safe.
“All right,” she says, sitting back, flexing her fingers. “Same rules, you said? Mostly?”
“Mostly.” I lean in. “Show me where they’re different.”
They’re not very different, as it turns out.
The pieces move the way Karrec pieces move. Her queen is our Mother Lode, her bishop is our drifts and the piece she considers a knight is a jumper. We spend the first little while comparing, delighted, both of us talking over each other.
“Wait, your piece only moves in straight lines? Same. And the…what did you call it, the bishop, only move in diagonals?”
“Diagonals, yes.”
“It’s the same game, Maxon, it’s just wearing a different coat.” She’s grinning now, and it changes her whole face, causing her beauty to shine even more brilliantly. “What about castling? When the king and the rook trade places to get the king to safety?”
“We call that walling the Core. But yes. Same move.”
“Walling the Core…I like yours better. Ours just sounds like a tax dodge.”
I laugh, and it surprises me, the size of it. I can’t remember the last time I laughed like that over this board.
We play.
And here is the thing I learn in the first six moves, she is very, very good.
Not good the way the old males at the hall are good, with memorized openings and patience.
She’s good the way someone with skill and speed is good.
She comes at me fast and crooked, sets a trap two moves before I see it’s a trap, gives up a pawn like it costs her nothing and then makes me pay three times over for taking it.
I have to actually think and I haven’t had to actually think across this board in rotations.
“You hesitated,” she says, when I do.
“I did not.”
“You did. Right there. You saw the fork coming and you didn’t like it.” She moves her jumper—her knight—and yes, there’s the fork, exactly where I didn’t want it. “It’s okay. Most people don’t see it that early. You did. You just didn’t want to believe I’d actually do it.”
She’s reading me through my actions on the board.
It should bother me that she’s this good but it doesn’t. Instead, I find myself liking her more. I feel I understand her better. And of course, my respect for this female has increased tenfold.
I take her pawn anyway and pay for it, exactly like she said I would.
The longer we play, the more I learn about her through the game.
I read rock and crystals for a living. On my watch I also read danger.
I’m good at understanding what a thing is going to do before it does it.
And across this board, move by move, I read Hallie too.
She’s aggressive but never reckless. She thinks far ahead, further than me, sometimes.
She’ll spend her pawns cold, sacrifice them without a flicker, trade anything on the board for position.
But she guards her king like the whole world is coming for it.
Tucks it in a corner early, walls it in, never once leaves it exposed, not even when leaving it exposed would win her the game faster.
Every move she makes bends back, eventually, to keeping that one piece safe.
Of course she plays like someone who’s spent years staying three moves ahead of beings who wanted her dead.
She spends the small pieces without crying over them, because she’s learned what it costs.
And she guards the king, by herself, like there’s no one in the universe who’ll do it for her. Because for years there wasn’t.
I see the whole shape of her in how she moves these pieces. The brilliance and the wariness and the bone-deep loneliness of a female who’s never once been allowed to set the board down and trust someone else to watch it.
I want to be the one who watches her board so she doesn’t have to. I want it so much I have to look down at the pieces to keep these feelings off my face.
“You’re staring,” she says, not looking up.
“I’m strategizing.”
“You’re losing, is what you’re doing.” She isn’t, technically, winning…but she’s making me bleed for every square. “Strategize faster.”
Another chuckle rumbles in my chest at Hallie’s bold demeanor. She’s sharp, a bit prickly and take-no-prisoners. A perfect Karrec partner.
And yet she’s so small. A male my size could close one hand around her whole forearm.
Her colorless skin is surprisingly charming.
There’s a scatter of freckles across her nose and cheeks that I find myself wanting to count.
Her hair has dried in loose dark-red waves around her face, and where the daylight hits it, it goes the color of banked coals, deep red shot through with fire.
And her eyes, when she finally lifts them from the board to glare at me for staring, are a special shade of blue.
Not the cold blue of deep ice, but the blue of the sky over Timbur on the clearest day of the dry season.
I lose a full move just looking at her and have to drag my attention back to the board.
Humans look so breakable, like something you’d find under a leaf and have to cup in your claws so it doesn’t blow away.
And then she opens her mouth, or she moves a piece, and I remember that this delicate-looking little creature has a mind made of steel.
Through her work, she discovered that House Versznath was creating a plan to decimate Margol Xylans on Timbur and take the production of Ilibrium over only for Royal Pigment.
She’s not even Xylan, has no need to even care about what happens on Timbur, a place she’d never been, and yet she knew it was wrong.
She felt it was so wrong she risked her life to come here and alert us to the danger.
She walked out of the most powerful House on Chronos with their darkest secret folded behind her ribs, crossed the whole of the Four Sectors alone, and is currently dismantling the best Karrec player on the colony with a borrowed set she learned three hours ago.
Delicate on the outside.
Forged on the inside.
“There,” she says, sliding her jumper into place with a small, vicious smile. “Now you can stare.”
Somewhere in the second game my stomach growls loud enough that she laughs at me, and I realize the light’s moved across the floor, that it’s gone past midday.
“Oh no, we were playing so long we missed lunch, didn’t we?”
“I’ll get food,” I say, half-rising.
“Don’t you dare reset that board.”
“I would never.”
“You would absolutely. You’re down a drift and you know it.” But she’s smiling, and she doesn’t move to leave either. That’s how we end up leaving together to go get some food and drink and we bring our simple lunch back to the low table, so we can continue with our games.
We eat with plates balanced on our knees. Hallie picks at her food with one hand and studies the board. I could spend every remaining day of my life exactly like this and count myself the luckiest male in the Four Sectors.
It’s a dangerous thought, but I’ve had a lot of those today.
Hallie is brave and beautiful and the best opponent I’ve ever sat across from.
Does she even want to stay on Timbur, a remote mining colony at the edge of the Four Sectors?
Does she want to become a mother? Could she live out her days here, so far from the planet that gave her this game and a grandfather to learn it from?
I don’t know. And I can’t clasp her hand and bind her to all of it without knowing. I can’t light that fire and start that chase when she might want a different life entirely, one that doesn’t have me in it. And she came here running for her life. Not looking for a mate.
So I don’t reach across the board, trying to talk her into remaining with me. It’s much too soon. I move my drift instead.