Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Scar
The seam on level nineteen hundred runs clean.
The crystals embedded within the walls that are ready to be extracted, gleam in the darkness.
I work through the tunnel, steady, looking for anything that could cause trouble.
The crew’s noise comes and goes around me the way it always has and the way it always will, until the day I cannot physically do this work and must retire.
It’s good to be back in the rock with my crew. My brothers.
Last night, I lay in my bunk in my private bedroom at the compound after I came home from Mara’s quarters and I did not sleep well.
Every time I closed my eyes, I could visualize an intriguing small human, the sound of her voice, and the lovely smile on her beautiful features.
I went over, again and again, every word she said to me, cataloguing it like something I never wanted to let go or lose.
And I remembered every single story I told her about myself, things I’ve never told anyone else.
Why?
Cannibal sets a charge two galleries over.
Claws argues with Heavy about something, their voices booming and folding down the tunnel.
Rook tells a story to Chief, which I’ve heard four times already and it’s gotten better each time.
It’s an ordinary shift.
And then Hook stomps off the lift. He’s always the last to arrive because he checks in with a new miner he’s mentoring on another level.
“I’ve got news,” he shouts.
Everyone pauses in what they are doing and moves toward him, interested to hear what he has to say.
“Scar,” he yells out, delighted, loud enough for the whole crew, “was up on the human female’s floor last night.”
A frown spreads across my face.
“Leah and I saw him leave,” Hook continues. “Twenty-two hundred. From Mara Wilson’s quarters. Walked right past our door like he owned the hall.”
“Twenty-two hundred?” Chief repeats. He’s leaning on a support strut, arms crossed, and he’s looking at me with the slow interest of a male fitting two things together. “That’s late for a work meeting.”
I say nothing.
“You weren’t at the compound for the evening meal. I asked where you were. You said it was a work meeting.”
“I was working.”
“Working.” Chief’s mouth does something. “With the two new humans? The Wilson female and her brother?”
“No.” I set the cutter down. “Just Mara.”
I hear it the moment it’s out of my mouth. I hear it the way they must hear it.
Just Mara.
Six heads turn. Nobody says anything for a beat.
“You spent hours alone in Mara Wilson’s quarters last night,” Trunk questions, “spoke to her about work and then stayed because…?”
“We had dinner together. She made human food for us.”
They continue to stare at me.
Then Cannibal says, around a mouthful of ration bar, not even bothering to look up, “Is she your mate?”
“No. I scented her,” I admit. “We’re not compatible.”
And that does close it, mostly. That’s the thing about the scenting, it isn’t an opinion. You don’t argue with a male’s nose. The crew makes the sounds beings make, half disappointed and half relieved on my behalf.
“Sorry about that Scar,” Rook says. “She was starting to sound perfect for you.”
Everyone returns to work. Chief pushes off the strut, and the shift starts to fold back into the same routine.
Except Trunk hasn’t moved. He comes and stands beside me, close.
“At first, I thought Ines wasn’t mine, too.
I scented her a dozen times and got nothing.
I told myself I’d read it wrong and then I told myself I hadn’t, and I was ready to let her go, because the nose doesn’t lie.
” He keeps his voice even. “And then she was in the med lab for her injuries and they also fixed something that was causing infertility and I walked in to see her afterwards and suddenly her scent was compatible.”
“Heh.”
“I’m only saying, a negative isn’t always a no. Sometimes it’s a not yet. Sometimes there’s a reason a female reads blocked.”
I nod, thinking he has a point, which is what kept me up all night. And I cannot tell my brother that there is a second life growing in that female. But yes, there is the distinct possibility that this is why I do not get a positive scent from her.
Or…it could simply still be the fact that we will never be compatible. “Or we’re just friends,” I say. “Coworkers.”
“Well.” Trunk looks at me for a long moment, “That too.” He picks up his own cutter. “It’s only that normally, you don’t like anyone.”
He’s got a good point.
Mara Wilson arrives at my office after lunch and brings her brother.
Andrew is her partner. They work the grid as a pair, and it makes sense that she’d bring him to look at the records with us.
Mara’s brother is tall for a human, with short, dark hair and similar blue eyes.
It is obvious that they are siblings. He does seem to treat her well and I’ve heard no complaints about his work while on the mine. So, I allow him to enter my space.
“Come in.” I pull the archive up on the wall screens. The old grid unfolds across them in layers, forty years of it, load histories and failure logs and the survey maps stacked three deep.
Mara squeaks with happiness. “Show me the fault progression on the eastern relays. Cayzor, is this the full set or is there more behind it?”
Cayzor.
She says it easily, without thinking, the way she’s said it since the second time we spoke. I watch Andrew’s head come up half an inch.
“There’s more behind it,” I say. “The load histories go back another twenty years. I’ll bring them forward.”
“God, yes, bring it all forward, I want to swim in it.”
And we work.
In front of Andrew Wilson, I speak only of the grid. I do not mention the murder, my parents, or House Vaszneth. There is a stranger in the room and eight years of instinct will not let me set the whole of it on a table in front of a being I haven’t cleared.
And I notice Mara does the same thing.
We never spoke of this ahead of time. She never told me she would keep my secrets.
I never asked her to because it didn’t occur to me to ask, I forgot to, it should have been the first thing I said to her this morning and I said nothing.
And it doesn’t matter, because she’s doing it anyway.
Every time the conversation drifts near the edge, she steers it back to the grid, smooth and easy, without once glancing at me to check.
She carries the worst secret of my life past her own brother like it’s hers to protect and it never occurred to her to do anything else.
This small human guards the thing that has been killing me for eight years, unasked, from the being she loves most in the Four Sectors.
I understand that I trust her.
She keeps my secrets and I keep hers, not telling a single being, including her brother, about the pregnancy. I will only start to say something when I can visually confirm that she is beginning to tell others and then I will follow her lead. For now, I say nothing, not even to her.
Mara leans in over my shoulder to read a figure, and her arm is a hand’s width from mine.
Her hair has come loose at the temple. I continue to love the sound of her voice.
She works through her thoughts out loud, low, half to herself, and I could stand here and listen to her reason through a fault progression until the suns burn out.
My personal crystal continues to enjoy Mara too, warming in her presence.
She looks up from the screen and catches me watching her and doesn’t look away. Mara smiles at me, causing her features to become impossibly brighter.
Her scent shifts in the air between us.
That arousal is still there. Again. In my own office, with her brother three steps away bent over the other screen.
Her body tells me plainly what her face is trying to avoid.
And there is nothing — nothing — that I can do with this knowledge.
My body doesn’t stir. It can’t. I am physically unable to become enflamed until the moment my bare claw touches her bare skin and the claiming reads positive.
I wish I could perform that ceremony and have it come out true with this female.
I would be proud to have her as my mate.
And I think that she’ll only grow more beautiful the further along she gets in her pregnancy.
In a few moons she’ll have a large, swollen belly and she’ll be lovelier than she is now.
She’s going to be a wonderful mother.
It’s not my child and Mara is not my female.
My own scent told me so, plainly, in a kitchen last night.
I believe my own scent, because a male who can’t believe his own nose has nothing left to stand on.
And yet, I find myself wishing that I could have not only this female as mine, but the child she carries too.
“Cayzor.” Her voice has gone slightly rough. She clears it. “The screen has gone dark. Can you fix it please?”
“Yes.”
She turns back to the screen.
Her ears have gone pink.
We work the old records for another hour, and while the two humans trace the eastern relays between them, my mind goes where it’s been going all afternoon.
The rosters.
The thing Mara handed me today that I’d been too busy hunting killers to see.
The maintenance schedules, which include who was supposed to have their hands in the grid.
I pulled the archive last night, after I left her quarters, because I wasn’t going to sleep anyway, and now I’ve been through the most boring document in the mine.
I’ve marked the beings who were down in the guts of that system on the days that matter.
Most of them are dead now, or off-world, but there’s one name I marked twice.
Ordek of Six.
He’s still here on Timbur, retired now and living in the comfortable seniors housing.
He was facilities his entire working life and spent forty years in the tunnels of the mine and in the conduit and crawlspaces, in the parts of the grid nobody thinks about until they fail.
He was on the schedule the fortnight before the first cascade.
And he was on it again, two moons ago, before the second. And then he retired soon after.
I’ve known Ordek since I was a boy. He’s one of those beings who’ve simply always been here, part of the rock, gruff and slow and decent, who’d cuff a young miner around the ears for running in the shafts and then slip him a sweet from his pocket when the foreman wasn’t looking.
He taught half this mine how not to die in it.
And he was kind to us.
In the worst years after our parents’ death, when we were demoted, and Daxon was banished.
We were shamed and sent to the compound at the dead end of the road, when the whole colony decided the Fever Brothers were a stain they’d rather not look at — half the beings who’d smiled at our father crossed the gallery to avoid his sons.
During this time, Ordek treated us exactly the way he always had.
He’d nod at me in the lift and ask after Trunk’s shoulder and complain about his knees, like nothing had changed, like we were still just the loud sons of a male he’d worked beside for thirty years.
You don’t forget the ones who stayed the same when everyone else looked away.
He’s old now and may have seen nothing, or seen it and thought nothing of it, or seen it and forgotten it a decade back. But he was in the walls on both the days that matter, and he’s the only being left who was, and he was always decent to us.
I’m going to go talk to Ordek.
The first live lead in two moons that doesn’t dead-end at a locked door on Chronos.
A good old male who might hold a piece of this without even knowing he’s holding it.
I’ll bring him something from Jana’s kitchen — he always liked Jana’s cooking.
I’ll sit with him and let him complain about his knees and work my way around to it slow, the way you have to with the old ones.
Soon. This week.
I say none of it out loud, because a lead is a fragile thing. And while I fully trust Mara, I still haven’t learned whether Andrew can be trusted the same.
“Cayzor?” Mara’s looking at me. “You went somewhere.”
“I’m here.”
Before I can fully decide if I want to mention Ordek in front of Andrew…Roxy knocks on the door of my office and pokes her head inside.
“Oh good, you’re all in here.” She’s still in her lab coat, Illibrium dust on one sleeve. Her smile lands on Mara, warm and easy. The two of them have become friendly in the halls of the mine.
“We’re doing a proper dinner at the compound tonight,” Roxy says. “The whole family wants to actually meet the humans who are fixing our grid, instead of just hearing about you.” Her eyes flick to me for half a second, bright with something she doesn’t say. “It’s time.”
And I am surprised.
I shouldn’t be surprised, the family closes around its own, and two humans have gotten close to one of us, and the brides in particular will want to see this for themselves. This is exactly the kind of thing my family does. I should have seen it coming.
I am pleased at this outcome because I get to eat with her again tonight.
I get to eat with her again tonight. Another meal.
Across another table. The same as last night.
And something in me that has been dormant for eight years, that has nothing to do with my body and everything to do with the rest of me, lifts a little at the thought, and I keep my face perfectly still and let it.
“We’d love that,” Mara says, lighting up. “Andrew, right? You’ll come?”
“Wouldn’t miss it.” Andrew grins at Roxy, easy and warm, already charming.
Roxy grins back, perfectly friendly. “Good. Nineteen hundred. We’ll see you tonight.” And she’s gone, back down the corridor toward the labs.