Chapter 12
KENRON
Idon’t have to tell him.
Father sees it in my posture. In the way I move through the kitchen like the floor might break beneath me. Vakutan warriors don’t talk about their wounds. We wear them. Scar tissue and silence in equal measure.
So I don’t say a word.
I just work.
Longer than usual.
Earlier than usual.
The others start to notice. Kiv throws me glances when she thinks I’m not looking, her crest flickering with worry. One of the fry cooks—Brimm—asks if we’re prepping for a festival. I give him a look sharp enough to stop him mid-sentence.
Hours pass and my claws bleed from over-sharpening the knives. I don’t feel it until I see rust-red smears on the garlic board. I wash it off before anyone can comment. Switch stations. Try to shake the weight in my chest through sheer motion.
I perfect everything. That’s the only plan I have.
Broths simmer longer.
Spices toast deeper.
Every heat coil on the line is used at full capacity.
If the world outside wants to crush us with laws and bureaucrats and smiling serpents in suits, then let them try. Let them choke on our excellence. Let them taste what they’re erasing.
But tonight, even that isn’t enough.
Nothing is.
The broths come out too bitter. The spices burn too hot. I taste and retaste and everything is wrong. I smash a mortar with my fist when the third blend comes out harsh and metallic. The crack is loud enough to draw Kiv over.
“You okay, chef?” she asks, voice low.
I want to scream.
But all that comes out is, “It’s off.”
She doesn’t press. Vakutan don’t pry when the wound is still bleeding. She grabs a fresh mortar and moves on.
The dining room fills like it always does—bustling, loud, alive. But tonight, the laughter grates on me, like sand in the gears. The clink of glasses sounds like shrapnel. The hum of conversation buzzes against my temples like static.
And over it all—her name haunts the air like smoke.
Kristi.
I haven’t said it out loud since the night she told me what she’d done.
But I taste the syllables every time I swallow.
I hear her voice in the steam rising off the broth. I see her eyes reflected in the gleam of knife steel. Everything reminds me. Everything burns.
Late dinner rush. I’m plating a fireroot lamb dish—seared, sliced thin, drizzled with a reduction that took six hours to perfect—when I hear someone say her name from the corner table.
The patron’s voice is light, curious, unaware she’s just stuck her hand inside a trap.
“She used to come here, didn’t she?” the woman asks.
I look up.
She’s half-Human, half-Voreni—four-fingered hands, star-blue eyes, hair braided in a style common in the lower districts. She’s been coming here for years. Tips well. Brings her friends. I’ve always liked her.
“Kristi?” she says again, turning toward the table of coworkers around her. “I saw her in the news. Didn’t she—”
The growl is out of my throat before I register it.
“Enough.”
The room goes quiet.
The table freezes.
Kiv’s head snaps up.
The woman blinks, startled. “I—I didn’t mean—”
“She doesn’t eat here anymore.”
It comes out tight. Controlled. But hot enough to scorch.
There’s no yelling. No thrown plates. No spectacle.
Just the sound of a door slamming shut.
The table falls silent.
I turn back to the lamb. My claws tremble slightly as I slide the knife through the meat. Not from anger.
From something worse.
Shame.
Father watches me from the end of the line. Says nothing. But his eyes—deep as war trenches—narrow.
His voice reaches me later, when the rush has thinned and the staff is moving through their closing routines.
“That wasn’t like you.”
“It was,” I say.
He studies me. The room hums with candlelight and the fading echo of laughter. Someone’s playing that old human jazz on the stereo—a slow sax line that makes everything feel dim and crowded.
“It hurt,” he says simply.
I don’t answer.
He’s not wrong. But saying it out loud feels like a betrayal of something primal. A warrior doesn’t name the blade once it’s in his chest. He fights until he drops.
But gods… some wounds don’t bleed out. They just keep slicing.
“I trusted her,” I say finally. The words scrape my throat raw.
He nods once.
“Trust is sacred.”
“Was.”
He narrows his gaze.
“No. Still is. You just have to decide if she’s lost hers forever.”
I grit my teeth.
The image of her face flickers in my head—eyes full of something pained, mouth trembling when she said it. She knew. She knew what it would do.
But she didn’t speak. Didn’t stop it.
I shake my head, jaw set. “Doesn’t matter.”
Father doesn’t argue. He just says, “Spices taste different when the heart is off balance. Fix the heart, fix the dish.”
I huff out a bitter laugh. “That a proverb?”
He shrugs. “It is now.”
We work in silence after that. Cleaning. Resetting. Tending to coils and burners. The familiar motions of our craft. A part of me aches for the comfort these routines used to bring.
But tonight? Beneath everything?
There’s a hollow space where something warm used to live.
And I feel it. All the way to the bone.
When the last light goes out and the staff filters out into the night, I stand alone in the kitchen. I press my hand flat to the steel of the prep table.
It’s cold.
Like her chair.
Like the space she left behind.
I imagine her walking through the door again, shoulders tight, eyes too soft for someone raised on politics. I imagine her taking the first step toward me.
I imagine turning my back.
It makes something in my chest splinter.
Sixty days.
That’s how long we’ve got before the purge.
Not that anyone calls it that. No, they’ve dressed it up nice—district realignment for human-centric zoning harmony. As if harmony can be forced. As if the scent of our spices and the cadence of our tongues are somehow pollution.
Sixty days.
After that, a hundred alien-run establishments in Novaria Prime—markets, diners, bathhouses, studios—either disappear or drown in fees so convoluted and punitive they might as well be bullets.
I see the collapse coming like a stormfront. Red sky. Wind sharp enough to flay.
And I do nothing.
Not because I don’t care.
Because I’m tired of being the only one who does.
They keep coming, though. The other owners. The ones who’ve weathered five years of cultural audits and ten years of rent hikes. The ones who remember when this district was a symphony of species, not a sanitized showroom for human comfort.
They show up after hours, quiet and uncertain, looking at me like I’m the answer.
Marek from the Talgari tea house brings charts. “We could petition for a heritage status exemption. If we show historical value—”
I nod, say I’ll read it. I don’t.
Yulla, the Daltari chocolatier, brings gifts. “Something to sweeten the mood,” she jokes, setting a box on the prep table. Her smile breaks when I don’t return it.
Then there’s Faren, gruff and blunt. “You led us through the blockade riots. You can lead us now.”
But I don’t have anything left to lead with. Whatever part of me used to believe in fixing things got carved out the night Kristi looked me in the eye and betrayed me with a vote.
I don’t say that.
I just scrub dishes that are already clean and pretend I’m listening.
Kiv finds me one night scrubbing the steel oven floor with industrial solvent, shirt soaked, claws bleeding again.
“Chef,” she says carefully, “this isn’t working.”
I keep scrubbing.
“We’re all watching you fall apart and no one knows how to help. We need you.”
I sit back on my heels, breathing hard. The floor gleams like a mirror.
“I’m not the one you need,” I mutter.
She crouches beside me. Her crest flutters, anxious.
“Don’t let her kill your fire.”
I look at her. Really look.
Then stand.
Go upstairs.
Take a shower that scalds the skin clean off my spine.
Collapse into bed without drying off.
That night, I dream of the restaurant on fire. I’m inside, still plating dishes. The walls melt around me, and I don’t move. I just keep cooking.
The message comes on a Thursday.
Encrypted, flagged, routed through five internal systems.
Sender: Kristi Montana
Subject: Please.
No other text preview.
Just the word.
I stare at it for a long time.
The pulse in my jaw starts to tick.
I could open it. Just read it. No harm in reading, right?
I hover over the icon.
Click.
Delete.
Gone.
Because it’s not just harm I’m afraid of.
It’s what might survive it.
What I might let survive it.
I know myself too well. The way my body reacted to her voice. The way my hands remembered her before my mind did. If she walks through that door again with those eyes, I don’t know if I’ll scream or kneel.
And I can’t afford either.
Trust is sacred. In my culture. In my blood. You guard it like flame. You don’t hand it to someone who’d spit on your hearth and call it compromise.
So I kill the message.
I bury it with all the others.
The night after that, I stand in the alley behind the restaurant, smoke curling from my nostrils like old war breath. The dumpsters buzz with night-bugs. The streetlamps hum. I light a stick of crushed emberroot, hold it between my teeth, and breathe until the world fuzzes at the edges.
I can smell it coming. The erasure. The way they’ll smile while they do it. How they’ll say it’s not about race. Not about culture. Just about compliance.
Bullshit.
This isn’t regulation.
This is extermination by paper.
I think about the old days—when we stood shoulder to shoulder in the market during the height of the embargo. When human loyalists threw molotovs and we threw back pots of scalding stew. When we made barricades from overturned carts and sang freedom songs in three dialects.
Back then, I believed in unity. In resistance.
Now?
Now I just believe in closing the door before the next blade hits.
The emberroot burns to ash.
I flick it into the street and watch it crumble.
Back inside, the kitchen is empty. Quiet. I run my claws over the prep table—my temple, my altar, my battlefield. I light the old incense Kiv gave me, the one that smells like Vakutar pine and deep saltwater.
I cook.
Not for customers.
For the ghosts.
A stew from my grandfather’s region. Rich, muddy, bitter in a way that demands respect. I stir slowly, like time might stop if I move wrong. The broth clings to the ladle like memory.
I think of her.
Her hands, soft against my jaw the night of the festival.
Her voice, quiet and cracking when she whispered my name.
Her silence when it mattered.
It guts me, still.
And that’s the problem.
Not that she betrayed me.
That she still has the power to make it feel fresh.
I dip a spoon into the stew.
Taste.
Too much salt.
I don’t fix it.