Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
QUIN
The room assigned to me on the fifth level of the palace was larger than my apartment back in Yuma.
Pale stone curved into graceful walls, polished smooth as marble but shot through with veins of deep blue that caught the afternoon light spilling through the floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the city.
Intricately designed metal sconces lined the walls at regular intervals, each one cradling a strange rock.
The floors were covered in a coarsely woven mat, warm and yielding beneath the soles of my boots.
A large bed dominated one side of the room, layered with thick woven blankets.
After weeks of sleeping on the floor of the ship with nothing between me and the deck plating but a salvaged blanket, I couldn’t wait to crawl under those covers and sleep for a year.
A bedside table of pale wood sat beside it, matching the wardrobe in grain and color. Near the window, a small table and a single chair occupied the corner, the kind of arrangement that invited someone to sit and look out at the city below.
The wardrobe resembled furniture you'd see on Earth, its smooth-grained surface catching the last light of the twin suns through the floor-length window in long, warm lines.
Both doors stood open the way Marie had left them, and the clothes inside were arranged with a care that made my throat tighten unexpectedly.
Kilt-dresses. Half a dozen of them, hanging in a neat row.
Each one made from the same fine-woven fabric as the kilts the Valosian males wore.
Silvery blues and soft grays, the threads catching the light the way water does, shifting between colors depending on the angle.
The ties at the shoulders were hand-sewn with the kind of small, tight stitching that took time and patience.
I ran my fingers along the fabric of the nearest one. Lighter than I'd expected. Smooth, almost like silk but not. Something I had no Earth reference for. A belt hung on a hook beside each dress, and there were pockets. Actual pockets.
I pulled open the small drawer at the base of the wardrobe.
Inside, folded in a neat stack, were panties.
Simple. Clearly handmade, the seams uneven in the way of something sewn by hand rather than machine.
But the shape was unmistakable. I stood there for a moment with my hand resting on the stack.
The last time I'd worn any was before I had woken up in a cage.
I'd been living in the same loose-fitting top and pants for longer than I wanted to think about.
The alien dry-cleaning unit on Vala's ship had been damaged in the crash and done what it could, which wasn't much, and the air-mist showers even less.
Fabric had a memory, and eight weeks on the anomaly planet had left its mark on the only set of garments I owned. I was done with them. Done.
I lifted one of the kilt-dresses from its hook and held it up.
The length would hit just above my knee.
I lay it across the foot of the bed, left the bio-analyzer on the bedside table, and started pulling off my clothes without ceremony, dropping them in a pile on the floor, and crossed naked to the adjoining washroom that Marie had called a sanitate system.
I turned the handle and stepped beneath the loodfall with a sigh.
The Valosians didn't have water; they had lood, slightly more viscous than Earth water but still colorless and tasteless.
Warm lood rained over my shoulders in a steady curtain, and after weeks of relying on the air-mist unit aboard Vala's ship that had barely qualified as a rinse, this felt heavenly.
As I worked the cleanser over my skin, my gaze dropped to my knee. Only a faint pink line remained where I’d fallen and where I'd scraped it on the anomaly planet. I traced the nearly vanished scar with my fingertips, remembering Vennox kneeling before me after I'd finished treating his wounds.
It had seemed like such a small moment then. Now, standing beneath the lood, it felt as though a lifetime had passed since the quiet warrior had first cared for me with such gentle determination.
Lood cascaded over my shoulders as my thoughts lingered on him.
It seemed impossible that the quiet warrior who had patiently cleaned and bandaged my knee on that hostile world now carried a piece of my spirit within him.
Across the faint thread joining us, I sensed a steady contentment where there had so often been uncertainty.
He was home. Safe. And somehow, knowing that settled something deep inside me as well.
And then I thought about Earth. Of Yuma in September, when the desert finally exhaled the worst of the heat, and the sky went that blue you only got in the Southwest. Of the field truck with the cracked dashboard and the broken AC that I'd been meaning to report to the Terra Vitae motor pool for two years.
Of the predator population data sitting in a server somewhere back home that nobody else could interpret the way I could because I was the one who'd collected it.
I'd be as happy as Vennox, too, when I got back there.
The thought arrived with a hollow ache underneath it that I hadn't expected. Not grief exactly, but close to it. The weight of knowing that getting what I wanted would cost me what I had never expected to value.
I shut off the loodfall and reached for the drying cloth left folded on the shelf.
Back in the main room, the kilt-dress went on easily enough.
The ties at the shoulders worked on a simple loop-and-cross principle, like a halter, and the belt cinched the waist into something that fit better than I'd expected.
The skirt fell just above my knee, which was either very practical or completely impractical depending on what I ended up doing in it, but either way, it was clean and wasn't the same clothes I'd been surviving in.
I stopped in front of the reflective surface mounted beside the wardrobe. The woman staring back at me was unmistakably me... and yet she wasn't.
My hair, still damp from the loodfall, spilled over my shoulders in dark waves.
Against my skin, the shawra glowed beneath my collarbone, its intricate silver lines pulsing softly with an almost living light.
I pressed my fingertips against it. Heat spread beneath my touch, and something deep inside my chest answered with an ache I couldn't name.
Home.
The thought should have filled me with relief. Instead, all I could think about was how I was going to hide the shawra until it faded after I got back to Earth. My hand lingered over the mark.
Why did the thought of it fading away make my chest tighten?
I forced myself to step away from my reflection and searched through the wardrobe until I found a long strip of soft silver fabric, wide enough to serve as a shawl.
It would have to do. I draped it across my shoulders, crossed it over my chest, and tucked the ends neatly into the dress's neckline, concealing the glowing mark.
The moment it disappeared beneath the fabric. A sharp pang of guilt settled in my stomach. It felt wrong. As though it were a betrayal to Vennox to cover it up?
Fresh boots next. They fit well enough. Whoever had left them here had guessed well.
I picked up the bio-analyzer from the bedside table where I'd set it, turned it over once in my hands, and set it back down.
Eight weeks of clipping it to my belt every morning before I'd even put my boots on.
I didn't need it here. The dome saw to that.
I left it on the table and stood for a moment at the window.
The city spread below me in the last of the twin suns' light. The fountain caught the dying rays and scattered it, the arcing streams of lood scattering the dusk light into shifting, fractured brilliance before the suns slipped further down and everything faded back to silver.
The pathways between the outbuildings were filling with movement, small figures, warriors and women alike, the ordinary end-of-day traffic of a city going about its evening.
I pressed my palm to the glass and scanned the silver-haired males milling below.
There, on the path to the palace, was Mara. Brunnex's arm draped across her shoulders, hers looped around his waist, the two of them moving in that careful, listing way of someone being kept upright by sheer stubbornness and the person beside them.
Nullar followed close behind.
A group of males near the fountain, dressed in the same fur pants, came forward to walk with the injured Jurigon warrior as he and Mara entered the palace.
A handful of Trisess males in breechcloths meandered down a far-off pathway. Many Huren warriors in kilts moved between the outbuildings with the purposefulness of males who lived here and had somewhere to be.
None were Vennox.
I stood at the window longer than I should have, scanning the city’s pathways, and found nothing. Or rather, not him. He was somewhere inside this city.
Abruptly, I stepped back from the window.
I didn't need protecting anymore, or this weird tether I hadn't asked for to a male who made it very easy to forget I'd never needed anyone.
Vennox was home. He belonged here, in this beautiful city under this translucent dome, with his people. This was his world, not mine, and the sooner I remembered that the better for both of us.
I turned away from the window and the city and the conspicuous absence of a seven-foot silver warrior in the crowd below.
The lift was at the end of the corridor.
Marie had said the cookery was on the ground floor.
The other women would be there. There would be food, real food, hot food, anything that wasn't a field ration packet or whatever bizarre Yulineon cuisine the ship's replicator produced.
There would be familiar voices and probably a great deal of talking at once, which was its own form of comfort.
And maybe, just maybe, he'd be there.