CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
XEL
Moving slowly and cautiously, I reached through the door of the storage room, wrapping my fingers around the handle of a shovel.
I picked it up carefully, so as not to make too much noise…
though it was an iron-clad guarantee that the person hiding in the corner knew I was here.
If they were planning on attacking me, though, I could only hope to arm myself before they decided to move.
A shovel wasn’t a grand sort of weapon, but it would be better than nothing.
With the tool in hand, I stepped back, letting more of the natural light shine into the room. With the shovel held up in front of me, I couldn’t keep my comm light focused on the crates where the person was hiding.
Steeling myself for a dozen different possibilities, I said loudly, “Come out. I know you’re there.” It was possible that this person was just looking for food or shelter and had no intention of harming me, but it was better to be safe than sorry.
Nothing moved inside the storage room. “Come out,” I called again, putting a little more impatience into my tone. If they thought they could bluff their way out of this, they would soon realise they were wrong.
Then another thought occurred to me. What if the person behind the crates wasn’t so much a person as a body? Had they been injured and crawled in there looking for a safe place to shelter, and then died from their injuries?
At the same time as I was trying to sort through all the possible scenarios, another question occurred to me.
The foot I’d seen was clearly a light blue, perhaps a shade or two darker than my own.
But the problem there was that I could only think of two intelligent species in the known galaxy that had blue colouring.
One was the Halagals, and the other was the Vangravians.
And the foot I’d seen was too large to belong to a Halagal.
But I couldn’t think of any reason another dimari would be hiding in our barn. Dimari didn’t leave their masters, and if someone’s master died – as mine had done – they were almost certainly going to cling onto anything familiar, rather than go traipsing alone across the countryside.
No matter which way I thought about it, I couldn’t come up with any reasonable explanation for the blue foot sticking out of our storage room.
“If you don’t come out, I’ll go and fetch one of the dogs. And then they can drag you out of there.” It was an empty threat – I would never allow a dog to deliberately injure anyone – but the person in the storage room didn’t know that.
Another moment passed in silence… and then I heard a faint rustle and a muted clang as whoever it was moved a couple of the tools out of their way.
I took another step back, hoping I didn’t end up in a fight with the person – partly because I didn’t want to get hurt, and partly because I didn’t want to hurt them.
A bipedal figure rose from the shadows behind the crate and edged cautiously towards the door.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” a light, high-pitched voice said.
“I was just looking for a safe place to spend the…” The person stopped in their tracks as they stepped out of the doorway and got a good look at me.
Then they let out a shriek of rage. “You! No! What the hell are you doing here? Slavery is illegal here. Who bought you? No, better yet, what hell-baked planet did that degenerate smuggler strand me on? This must be some colossal fucking joke!”
Most of my mind was scrambling to understand the implications of what they’d just said, while my ingrained observation skills were taking in all the details of the creature in front of me.
I’d never seen anything like them. They were about a foot shorter than me – very much medium height, when compared to galactic norms. Their skin was blue all over, and their eyes were a very pale blue with a hint of violet.
Their torso looked much like mine or my master’s, covered with a loose, sea-green shirt.
But their hips were much wider, bulging out to about double the size of mine, covered in a sandy-coloured skirt that was torn around the lower hem. And their feet were bare and dirty.
I’d never seen anything like them, so I angled my comm in their direction and managed to activate a visual scan without letting go of my shovel. Whoever this was, they were plenty angry about… well, something, though I hadn’t quite figured out what yet.
A moment later, my comm beeped and a brief response flashed up on the display. Vangravian. Female.
I stared at the woman in shock. I’d never seen a female Vangravian before, not even in pictures or videos. As far as I was aware, they all lived on Vangal, the Vangravian homeworld, and never ever left the planet.
So what in the blazing heavens was one doing here?
“What planet am I on?” she demanded again, and I took another step back in the face of her fiery anger.
“Rendol 4,” I told her, while I continued trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
“But that’s inside Alliance space, right?” she said, sounding more confused than angry now. “You’re a part of the Denzogal Alliance?”
“Yes, that’s correct,” I said, feeling thoroughly confused myself.
“So… why are you here?”
I didn’t understand the question. “Why shouldn’t I be here?”
“Because slavery is illegal in the Alliance. No one is allowed to buy a dimari. That’s the whole reason I came here! But if they’re buying slaves like everyone else, then I’m…” She looked around at the walls of the barn, a growing panic on her face.
“My master didn’t buy me,” I said, mostly as a way to placate her.
“My original master died, and I was transferred to his nephew. He chose to take me in and look after me.” But my previous master had bought me, and he’d lived on Rendol 4…
Oh! Aiden had said something about my master breaking the law.
And perhaps I understood what he meant now.
My first master shouldn’t have bought me, since it was illegal to have a…
I cut the train of thought off, focusing back on the woman in front of me. “You’re a Vangravian female,” I said to her, as I schooled my expression into a scowl. It was more an attempt to control the situation than anything. “Why are you here? Females don’t leave the homeworld.”
“No, they don’t,” she said, glancing around again, and this time, I recognised it as an attempt to find an escape route. She was planning on making a run for it.
“There’s nowhere for you to go,” I told her. “You would do better to tell me why you’re here.”
She turned her attention back to me, folding her arms stubbornly. Though she had no weapon, she seemed blissfully unconcerned about the shovel in my hands. “You’re the last person in the galaxy I want to be talking to. I came here to avoid the dimari, not to jump straight into another mess.”
She was smaller than me, and lighter, and though I had nothing in particular to base my opinion on, she seemed young.
Too young to have developed such a brazen disregard for her own safety.
“How old are you?” I asked her. She didn’t look much older than me – though perhaps females aged differently from males.
“Twenty-one,” she said, sounding unhappy about it. “Everyone on Vangal thinks I’m still too young and stupid to know what I want to do with my life, but…”
She glanced down at her hips, and a look of cold determination settled on her face. “I know perfectly well what I want. And what I need. So that’s why I came here.”
“And what do you need?” I prompted her, when she didn’t continue.
“I’m not talking to you,” she said flatly. “You’re a dimari. You have no power here, no control, no wealth. There’s nothing you can do to help me.”
“What about my master?” I asked. I was very much in two minds about getting him involved.
On one hand, I didn’t want to cause trouble for him, and a Vangravian female who had apparently run away from Vangal was going to be a whole mountain of trouble.
But on the other hand, he was very good at rescuing strays who needed help – and as he’d shown with me, his generosity wasn’t just limited to animals.
The woman thought about that for a moment. “What about your master?” she asked, sounding tentatively hopeful.
“This is the South Hon Animal Sanctuary,” I said, hoping to keep the explanation short.
“We care for and rehome animals whose owners can’t look after them anymore.
My master is a human. That’s one of the species in the Alliance.
He has connections to other people who might be able to help you.
” The one real connection he had was Aiden, and I was making the bold assumption that given that he was in the military, Aiden would have connections to plenty more people.
“I can call him for you, but before I do that, I want to know why you’re here. ”
The woman scowled. “I’m seeking political asylum,” she replied. “I had a disagreement with the Vangravian Council, and if they find out where I’ve gone, they’ll send a bounty hunter to kill me.”
“Did you do anything illegal?” I asked. A ‘disagreement’ could mean a multitude of things.
She folded her arms again belligerently.
“According to Vangravian law, yes. But if I did the same thing in Alliance space, then as far as I’ve been able to figure out, no, it wouldn’t have been illegal.
You have different standards and expectations, and…
” She sighed and shook her head. “I suppose I’m looking for someone who can understand that there’s a difference between illegal and immoral. ”
“What did you do?” I asked again.
“I’m done talking to you,” she said firmly. “So you can either call your master, or you can let me go. And put down the fucking shovel. We both know you’re not going to hurt me.”
I sighed and set the shovel aside, letting it fall to the floor with a thud. “I’ll call him,” I told her, activating my comm. “But if you harm him in any way-”