Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Scar
“Would you mind if I made us human food?”
I cannot believe I am having dinner in Mara’s quarters and not with my crew and extended family in the compound.
This has never occurred, unless I’m on a stakeout of some sort, and then, I’m always alone.
Instead, I’ve told Mara Wilson that I would like to spend additional time alone with her, eating the evening meal.
And I am highly pleased at this outcome.
“Yes. I would like human food, this sounds quite enjoyable.”
“Warning, I’m not an amazing cook like Jana. But, I’m really good at customizing a food dispenser to make human food that tastes very real. Have you ever had lasagna?”
My ridge furrows. “Luh-zahn-yuh? No, I’ve never heard of that.”
“Oh perfect,” she claps her hands. “I just customized the food dispenser to be able to make that. You’ll like it. I love the idea of you never having had that before.”
“Can I help you with the meal? I’d rather help than just sit here.”
She stands and heads for the kitchen. “Oh sure. It won’t take long to make. All I literally have to do is program the dispenser. But I’d appreciate it if you could tidy up the table and set down the plates and utensils.”
Mara hasn’t been provided a cleaning bot for this unit, therefore I end up at the kitchen sink, grabbing a wet cloth to wipe down the table.
“Watch out, I’m behind you,” she says.
Then Mara brushes past me as she reaches for another plate. This causes her body to come within a hand’s width of mine, her shoulder passing under my arm. She reaches up over my head for the shelf, and her scent slides into me the way water enters a crack in a stone.
No, I was not planning on scenting her, checking if she was my bride.
I have been in this apartment with her for two hours already and we have remained far enough apart from each other that her scent did not float into my lungs.
Yes, I’ve been curious about the fact that I enjoy her company.
Curious about why my crystal heats up when she’s near.
I enjoy her drive, determination and fierce intelligence.
And I consider her to be the most beautiful human, or female of any species for that matter, that I’ve ever encountered.
Her skin is exquisite and her eyes sparkle and I love the shine of that hair.
I find myself wanting her hair sliding in my claws.
But I still did not plan on analyzing her scent. I fully expected that we wouldn’t be compatible for the simple fact that a female of this worth will be mated someday to a male much more impressive than me.
But her scent enters my lungs unbidden, and I cannot help how my body filters and registers, similar to how I’ve secretly scented so many other times with all the other unmated females on this planet.
First, I detect not only her scent, but a secondary scent, which lets me know she’s with child. I pause and blink with surprise.
Mara Wilson is pregnant.
How is this possible? She wears the gloves of the unmated.
And then I also register that her scent is negative therefore she is not compatible.
I do my best to remain impassive at this double shock.
I glance over. Does she have a secret mate?
“Scar, can I ask you something?”
“Cayzor, call me Cayzor. Scar is my crew name.”
“Oh okay, Cayzor…Um, is mating here exactly the same as it is on Chronos? I’ve been to Chronos many times, to work on facilities there so I’m used to wearing these gloves and the Xylan mating practices have been fully explained to me.
But all the Xylan in this outpost are so far from Chronos.
Do you follow all the same practices as the home planet, or do you do things differently out here? ”
I finish cleaning the table and start arranging the place settings.
“We do most things the same as on Chronos. But we are looser about having a Manager of a line and formally using the Xylan Mating Database to find mates to perform the clasping ceremony with, and also, when we do the actual claiming ceremony, it doesn’t need to be in an ancient Xylan forest to be considered legal and binding.
All the Xylan on Timbur were given a special dispensation for mating practices. ”
“Oh, that’s interesting.”
“The Fever Brothers can scent their brides.”
“What?”
I pause to repeat what I said. It is only right that she knows what I did and the outcome.
I don’t usually tell this to females, but then I don’t spend time with these females afterwards.
Scenting is usually an accident and then they’re gone, out of my life or very distant again.
But Mara and I will continue working together.
I am not going to mention the pregnancy, because she wants to keep that to herself for now, for reasons that I will respect.
But I will tell her about how I have learned that we are not compatible.
“The Fever Brothers have the rare ability to scent their brides before clasping,” I continue.
“As far as I know we are the only Xylan with this ability in this generation. This means we can tell if a female is compatible or not by simply inhaling their pheromones. We don’t need to bother with useless hand clasping ceremonies to learn that we have found our mate. ”
She is gazing at me from across the room, her mouth open in surprise. I am certain she is replaying that moment when she brushed past me.
“Yes, when you moved close to me in the kitchen I accidentally inhaled your scent and my body and mind filtered a response.”
“Um, which was…?”
I shake my head. “We are not compatible.”
She continues to gaze at me. Do I see a flicker of disappointment? Or am I mistaken? And then it’s gone. She turns her back, fussing with the buttons on the dispenser.
“Humans don’t work that way,” I comment, trying to change the subject slightly. “The way you find compatible mates is very different.”
“Gods, no.” She laughs. “No. We’re a disaster.
We fall in love with the wrong people, we fall out of it, we do it again, we have arrangements.
Situationships. We get it wrong constantly and then we write songs about it, especially when it’s very messy and there’s been a great deal of crying.
But we can also have life-long mating commitments too. We are all over the place.”
“And you have offspring together, without a mating bond?”
She pauses. “Sure. All the time. Plenty of people raise kids on their own. Or the father’s around, or he’s not, or he sends money and shows up at holidays. Or…the parents are a life-long couple who raise the child together.”
“There’s no one waiting for you back on New Earth. You are truly unmated?”
“No, there’s no one,” she says. “Well, there was someone who was a partial boyfriend. We broke up prior to me leaving to come on this job. It’s just me.”
It’s just me.
Why am I pleased to learn that this female does not have a mate?
Mara talks about her brother.
It comes out easily, over the last of the lasagna.
“He had a rough few years,” she says. “Couldn’t hold anything down, he had three different jobs in two years, and it was always somebody else’s fault when he was fired, and after a while I just…
stopped asking why. I know how that sounds, but there’s only two of us left in our family, you know?
And I could either interrogate him about it and lose him, or I could do something useful. ”
“So you hired him.”
“Yes.” She smiles. “I made him my assistant. Steady work, steady pay, and I get to drag my brother across the Four Sectors with me, which, honestly, it’s the best decision I ever made.
He’s good, Cayzor. He’s better with beings than I will ever be and everybody loves him.
Doors open, crews trust us, contracts come through him half the time.
He makes me better at this.” She shakes her head, fond.
“Eight years now. He hasn’t missed a day. ”
“Heh.” A male who could not hold work. A history of instability and failure, of other beings always being at fault. And then, all at once, steadiness, beginning the moment he attached himself to a female with security credentials and access to restricted systems in every sector he’d care to reach.
I put it away. And I sit across a table from a human female who loves her brother, and I let her go on being proud of him, and say nothing at all.
“Cayzor, can I ask about your face?”
I lean back, somehow ready to speak about this subject. In fact, I’m ready to tell her the flat-out truth. “It happened the night my parents were murdered.”
“Oh, jeez, I’m sorry, and now I feel like such a jerk for asking. I thought it was a work accident. I…”
“No, it’s alright. I want to tell you.” And then I keep talking. “Trunk and I came home first from our shift because we were still in training. It was full dark by the time we came up the road. And the front door was standing open.”
“Oh no.”
“My mother never left the front door open because you don’t want anything that lives in the jungle wandering into your domicile.”
“So you knew something was wrong.”
“Yes. We approached the house and Trunk was behind me.” I stop.
Start again. “Which is why he’s alive. There was blood in the hallway and on the floor, coming out of the passage to their room.
I remember noting that it was cooling, the edges of it had gone tacky and the middle hadn’t.
That’s what my mind did. Standing in my own house, in my parents’ blood, my mind did arithmetic. It told me how long it had been.”
“Did you discover how long?”