Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Scar
Iwake before the suns, the way I always do, and for a moment I don’t move.
She’s asleep beside me. On her left side, because that’s the only side she can manage now, with the good pillow wedged under her belly and the bad pillow between her knees and a third one she stole from me some weeks ago and has never given back.
Her hair’s across her face. One gloved hand is curled up near her mouth.
The other one is on my arm.
She does that in her sleep and has no idea it’s happening. I’ve stopped moving away.
Six moon cycles I’ve been in this apartment. I came here with a canvas bag and slept sitting up on a couch built for a being half my size, with my feet hanging off the end and my back against the arm and my face toward the door, and I did that for eleven diurnals.
And then one night she had a dream about her brother and woke shouting. I was through that door before I was properly awake, and afterward she didn’t ask me to go back out to the couch. She just moved over.
Neither of us has said one word about it since.
I get up and get the food started, because she can’t face a morning without something in her and can’t stand to be near the dispenser while it’s working.
The apartment doesn’t look the same as when I first arrived.
Everything’s been moved down—the cups, pans, anything she’d need, all of it is off the high shelves, because a Xylan kitchen is built for beings like me and she’s got no business climbing on a crate at full term. Her due date is next week.
I have lived in a compound my entire life, in a house full of my own blood. And now I live in a small apartment three floors up in employee housing, twelve minutes’ walk from the mine, with a female in it who leaves her tools in exact rows on the table and talks to grid schematics under her breath.
And Hook lives across the hall.
That’s the other thing I didn’t expect. Six moon cycles ago I’d have called it a punishment — the loudest of my brothers within shouting distance, the male who reported my movements to the whole crew for sport.
And now he turns up at my door at odd hours with two cups of traq, and we stand out on the corridor balcony where the jungle comes right up against the building, and we don’t talk about anything at all.
I know my brother better now than I did in the twenty rotations we lived in the same house. That’s a strange thing to learn at thirty-one.
And Leah and Mara have become best friends. They’re in and out of each other’s doors constantly.
Argyl comes over and sits on my feet, which I permit.
I still go to the compound. That hasn’t changed. I take Mara out there for every rest day and every courtyard night and she sits in the middle of that family like she was born into it, and then we come home, back here, to this.
Home. I notice myself using the word and I don’t take it back.
“Don’t,” she says from the bedroom doorway. “Don’t say it.”
“I haven’t said anything.”
“You’re thinking it.” She comes out sideways — she goes through doorways sideways now, which she finds humiliating and I find something I will not name — and lowers herself into the chair in stages.
“You’re thinking you shouldn’t be up, and I’ll have you know I was up because your child was performing gymnastics on my bladder at oh-five-hundred, so it’s not my fault. ”
Your child.
She’s been saying that for months now and I think she’s basically unaware. I have noticed every single time.
“Sit,” I say. “I’ll do your boots.”
“I can do my boots.”
“Mara.”
“I can,” she says, and then makes a serious attempt at it, and gets about halfway down before her whole body informs her otherwise, and she sits back up with her face red and says, “Fine. Do my boots.”
So I kneel on the floor and use my gloved hands to put on her boots.
Here is my situation.
I’m going to lay it out plainly, because I’ve stopped pretending it’s anything other than what it is. I am in love with Mara Wilson.
I do not know when that started. I’ve tried to find the diurnal and there isn’t one — there’s a gallery on level four hundred where a small human crossed a room to speak to me and didn’t flinch at my face, and there’s everything after, and somewhere in there it happened without my consent or my noticing.
I want her as my bride. Not as a companion, not as a female I live beside. I want to clasp her hand and have it read true and take her into an ancient forest, or a corridor, or this apartment, and claim her for the rest of my life.
But my body is dormant and my scent continues to read negative.
It has always been dormant. That’s how we’re made, a Margol male doesn’t wake until his bare claw meets his mate’s bare skin and the reading comes back true, and mine has never woken for anything, not once, not in thirty-one rotations.
Not for her. I lie beside that female every night with her gloved hand on my clothed arm and there is nothing in me that stirs, because there’s nothing to stir.
The door is locked from a side I can’t reach.
And I know why.
I scented her in this kitchen six moon cycles ago, in a doorway, when she brushed past me reaching for the plates.
Not compatible.
So this is where I live now. In love with a female I cannot have, in a body that might never awaken for her, in an apartment I’ve come to think of as home, doing a mate’s work every diurnal with no right to the word.
It’s a very odd situation.
I would not trade it for anything in the Four Sectors.
The good news is that she still wants me. That’s the part that undoes me, and I’ve never said a word about it and never will.
I scent her arousal constantly. In the mornings when I put her boots on and she has to hold my shoulder for balance. At night when I massage her feet. When I come in off shift and she looks up from the table. It’s been there this whole time and has never once faded.
A female wants me. Me. And she has said nothing, because I originally told her that we’re not compatible, and she believed me.
And I can do nothing.
We both still wear the gloves.
I could settle it. That’s the thing I turn over some nights while she sleeps. I could take her bare hand in my mine right now and have an answer inside a heartbeat — a real one, a true one, not a scent through a doorway.
I won’t.
Because a clasp isn’t a question, it’s an event that takes a male’s body apart and puts it back together in about four seconds.
I have watched seven of my brothers go through it and there is nothing controlled.
Mara is heavily pregnant and I refuse to harm her in any way if our clasp proves positive.
So the answer sits there. Available every hour of every diurnal, one glove away, and I don’t touch it.
I’d rather not know than risk her.
“Okay,” she says over breakfast, “so I’ve been thinking about the sleeping situation.”
“What sleeping situation?”
“The baby’s.” She waves her fork. “We still haven’t fully decided yet where to put him.”
“He’ll be in the bedroom with us.”
“See, that’s what I thought, but then Lila says…” She stops. “Wait. ‘With us?’”
I look at her.
She looks back. “Right. Anyway. So he’ll be in with us, and I’ve learned that Trunk built Vela’s crib.
Ines showed me. It’s beautiful. It’s got the little carved bit along the top.
” She’s off again, fast and happy, and I let the moment go past because chasing it would only frighten it.
“So I’m going to ask him, except I feel weird asking and I’m basically a stranger. ”
“He’ll say yes.”
“You think?”
“He’ll say yes before you finish the question. He’s been waiting for someone to ask.”
That’s the other thing. It’s a male child. We talk about him all the time. We behave like a pair of beings who are going to raise him together.
She says your child when she’s tired. I say he’ll be in with us. And we both simply walk past it every single time.
“He’s going to be the only human,” she says, quietly, one night, out of nothing.
I look up from the manifests.
“In the family,” she explains. “I mean, Lia and Zora and Rux and Argyl and Vela and Bay and Dax, they’re all half.
They’re going to be enormous, Cayzor. Have you seen Rux?
He’s two and he’s the size of a four-year-old human and he’s got the little ridges coming in on his forehead already.
And mine’s going to be going to be small in comparison.
I keep thinking about him being ten and Rux being ten… what that’s going to feel like.”
I set the tablet down. “My father was the smallest male in his crew. By a considerable amount. Yes, because he was Xylan he was large by human standards, but among his own he was small, a hand shorter than his own brothers and half the width of my mother’s father, who never let him forget it.
He couldn’t read properly because he came up in the bad rotations, before they’d put schooling in the outpost. My father could work a manifest and nothing else, and he was ashamed of it his whole life and hid it from everyone but us.
And in forty rotations under this rock, not one being ever suggested to his face that he wasn’t the equal of anybody. Not one.”
She’s very quiet.
“The Illibrium doesn’t care how big you are. It cares whether you’re steady, and whether you’ll go in first. And your son is going to be raised in a house with eight Margol males who will teach him exactly one thing about himself, which is that he belongs there.”
“Okay,” she says in a small voice, and reaches over and takes my gloved hand in her gloved hand. “What are we calling him?”
She’s been at this for weeks. It’s become a whole business.
I chuckle. “You’ve refused four hundred names.”
“I have not refused four hundred names, I have considered and declined four hundred names.” She’s got her feet in my lap. “Let’s do another serious attempt. Human names first, because he’s human. My dad’s name was Tomas.”
“That’s an interesting name, Tomas.”
“Yeah.” She turns it over. “Tomas Wilson. It’s fine. I really should name him after my father.”
“You don’t want it?”
She frowns at the ceiling. “He was a good dad. He worked too much and he died before he could retire and he’d have been insufferable about this baby, in a good way. I just…say it out loud and it feels like naming him after somebody who’s gone, and I don’t want our son to be a memorial.”
“Then not Tomas.”
“No.” She’s quiet. “There was my older brother, too. Benjamin. He died when I was fifteen.”
I didn’t know that. No, I did know that, she said it once, months ago, at a table full of schematics, one sentence and then straight past it. I let it go by then because she wanted it let go. “Benjamin.”
“No, I can’t name him for one brother without thinking about the other one. He doesn’t get anything of this.”
“No,” I agree.
“So not Benjamin either.” She rubs her face. “Great. Two down, infinity to go. What about your side?”
“My side.”
“Xylan names. You’ve got, Cayzor, Bayzon, Zayzon, Ruxon, Saxon, Texon, Maxon, Gorzan, Daxon.” She ticks them off. “There’s clearly a system. Nine sons and every single one rhymes. What’s the actual rule?”
“There isn’t a rule. My mother liked the sound.”
She laughs. “How does the naming actually work? Because it’s not just the name. Everybody’s of something. Cayzor of Eighteen. Ordek of Six. What’s the number?”
“It’s the line. The number is the House line, where your blood sits. It’s given at birth and it’s on every record you’ll ever have. A male without a number isn’t a male without a name. He’s a male without a place.”
“Oh no, our son won’t have one. Because he’s human, and I’m human, and he’s not of anything.”
“He’s yours. That’s not nothing.”
“That’s not what I mean and you know it.” She looks at me, and her eyes are wet. “He’s going to grow up in that house, Cayzor. He’s going to be at that table for every meal of his life with seven cousins who all have a number and a line, and he’s going to be the one who doesn’t have a line.”
She stops.
Because we’ve both arrived at the same place at the same time, and neither of us is going to say it out loud.
A male can give a child his line. It’s not a favor and it’s not a kindness, it’s a legal act, and it changes a being’s name and his records and where he stands in the Four Sectors forever, and there is exactly one circumstance under which a Margol male may do it.
He must be that child’s father, or that child’s mother’s mate.
And I am neither, and I never will be, because I scented her in that doorway and the answer was no.
“Anyway,” Mara says, too brightly. “So not Tomas and not Benjamin. I’ve got a list of other names, do you want to see?”
“Show me the list.”
She shows me the list. There are eleven names and two of them are perfectly good. She refuses both.
And at some point, late, my beautiful, pregnant Mara falls asleep with her feet still in my lap. I sit in the dark in an apartment I’ve come to think of as home, holding a small human female’s swollen ankle in one enormous hand.
And I think about a number I cannot give a child who isn’t mine.