Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
Mara
Something’s wrong with Cayzor this morning.
He’s been off since yesterday, quiet in a different way than his usual quiet, wound so tight I can see it in his shoulders. He did Lucas’s bottle without a word. He’s checked the door twice.
I’ve decided it’s the union. He’s been the head of the Miners’ Union for eleven diurnals and he’s got eleven thousand beings looking at him and he doesn’t sleep anyway, so of course he’s like this.
“You can say no to the tunnel-safety thing,” I tell him, hunting for my other boot. “You’re allowed to say no.”
“Mara.”
“Mm?”
I turn around.
And Cayzor of Eighteen is on one knee in the middle of our front room.
My first thought is that he’s hurt.
I’m serious. That’s genuinely where my brain goes, because a seven-foot Margol Xylan does not kneel, it’s not a thing they do, and the sight of him folded down onto the floor of our apartment with one knee under him makes something in my chest lurch. I’m already moving toward him.
“What happened, is it your back?”
“I’m not injured.”
“Then why are you on the floor?
“Leah told me this is how humans propose.”
And I stop dead in the middle of my own front room with one boot on.
“Mara Wilson.” His voice is absolutely level and his hands are not. “I’m asking you to perform the hand-clasping ceremony with me.”
The apartment goes very quiet. And what comes up in me isn’t joy.
It’s something hot and awful and I don’t even see it coming.
“Don’t do that.” My eyes are stinging. “That’s not funny, and I know you don’t do funny, so it isn’t a joke, which means it’s pity, and I would honestly rather you’d hit me. ”
He doesn’t move.
“You scented me.” My voice cracks straight down the middle of it.
“In that kitchen. Nine months ago, you stood right there and you told me, and I believed you, and do you have any idea what it has cost me to make my peace with that? Every day lying next to you, desperately wishing we could kiss and have hot sex and yet knowing it’s never going to happen.
But at the same time we love each other, so I stay.
And now you want to put me through a ceremony we both know comes back negative so I can be humiliated in front of your entire family? ”
“Your scent changed.”
“What?”
“Yesterday.” He’s still on one knee. “In the kitchen. You went past me for the plates.”
I did. I remember it. I brushed his arm reaching for the top shelf and thought nothing at all about it, because I’ve done it four hundred times.
“You’re my mate.”
The room tips.
I have to put a hand on the table.
“You were always my mate,” he says. “The child was blocking it. It’s the same thing that happened with Trunk and Ines — he scented her negative for two rotations and then the med lab corrected her infertility and it hit him so hard he had to sit down on the floor.
Her body was in the way of the reading.” A pause.
“Yours was too. And then you had Lucas, and you healed, and your fertility came back, and yesterday I walked into my own kitchen and my mate was standing in it.”
“That was yesterday, Cayzor, that was a whole diurnal ago.”
“I had to be certain. I have told you one thing that was wrong once already.” His jaw works.
“I was not going to do it twice. So I waited, and I checked again this morning before you woke, and I stood in that doorway for some time.” He looks up at me.
“It’s positive. It’s been positive since your body finished what it was doing. You are my Bride.”
I get down on the floor with him because my legs won’t hold me.
He’s got something in his hand. I hadn’t noticed. He opens it and it’s a band — plain, dark metal, the kind of thing a male who works rock with his hands would make out of something he found in it, and it’s far too big for my finger and I can tell he knows that and did it anyway.
“Leah said you put it on the hand,” he says. “She said the fourth finger. She was very specific. I’ve made it wrong.”
“You’ve made it perfect.”
“It doesn’t fit.”
“Cayzor.” I take his enormous face in both my gloved hands. “It doesn’t have to fit.”
“Before you answer,” he says.
He pulls back. Not far. But enough that I know what’s coming is the part he’s been dreading, and he does what he always does, which is give me the whole readout in order without softening any of it.
“You have to hear all of it,” he says. “Not the part you want. All of it.”
“Okay.”
“There’s no undoing a clasp. There’s no divorce among the Xylan — it isn’t a legal difficulty, it’s a biological one.
If you clasped my hand and then left me, it would kill me.
Not as an expression. My body would stop.
” He says it like a load figure. “So you would be choosing to live on this rock, with me, for the rest of your life.”
“I know.”
“And you’d be pregnant immediately.”
That one I hadn’t fully braced for.
“The claiming is a breeding ritual. That’s what it’s for.
There is no version of it where you don’t conceive, and it isn’t chance, it happens.
” He holds my eyes. “Lucas is three moon cycles old. You have not slept properly since he was born. And this would be a half-Xylan pregnancy, which is a different thing than the one you had, and a harder birth, and every female in that compound will tell you so. And there’s the claiming itself.
” Something in his face closes. “I’ll chase you.
I’ll take you to the ground. Your job is to fight me and mine is to overpower you and that is genuinely how it is done, and you are human, Mara.
You weigh nothing. I have spent nine months learning exactly how easy it would be to break you by accident, and I do not know with certainty that I can hold myself back once it starts.
That frightens me more than anything else I’ve ever done. ”
He stops. “So,” he says. “Decide with all of it in front of you.”
“Yes,” I say.
His whole body sags.
“Also,” I add, “I want it on the record that I’m going to be extremely bad at the fighting part.”
“You won’t be.”
“Cayzor, I’ve never hit anybody in my life.”
“You’ll be fine,” he says, with a certainty I find deeply suspicious.
Then he tells me it’s already arranged.
All of it. The holosuite is booked and programmed. Leah has Lucas — she’s had the whole rotation set since yesterday, days of it, Hallie’s spreadsheet redone to cover us. Jana’s cooking. The compound’s ready.
“You booked a holosuite?”
“A positive clasp means the claiming happens immediately.” He shrugs one enormous shoulder. “There isn’t time to arrange anything afterward. So I arranged it before.”
“Before I said yes.”
“On the possibility that you would.”
“So the entire family has known since yesterday.”
“Yes.”
“Leah has known since yesterday.”
“Yes.”
I put my face in my hands. “She looked me right in the eye at the lift this morning and asked me how I slept.”
They’re all there when we come up the road.
Every one of them. The whole compound, out in front of the house at the dead end of the road at the edge of the jungle, seven brothers and six brides and a heap of children and Grytel standing slightly apart in the good coat he wears when he doesn’t know what to do with himself.
Jana’s crying already. Hook is grinning so hard it looks painful.
I don’t have anyone.
That’s the thought that hits me on the path, and it hits harder than I expect.
There’s no line to consult and no manager to negotiate and no family to stand up for me.
On Chronos this ceremony takes two Houses and a priest and a thousand rotations of stone.
I’ve got a dead mother and a dead father and one brother in a cell on Arkell-Seven.
And then Roxy takes my left arm and Leah takes my right, and Ines steps in front of me and straightens my collar with the same expression she uses on a document, and Lila says “you’re not doing this on your own, don’t be ridiculous,” and I understand that I have thirteen people.
“Ready?” Chief says.
“No,” I say.
“Good. Nobody is.”
The gloves come off.
That’s the part I’ll remember. Not the rest of it — the gloves.
I’ve worn them since the diurnal I stepped off that transporter disk. Nine months. I’ve slept beside that male in them. I’ve had my hands in a grid with them on. I put them on before I open my own front door.
And I peel them off, right there in front of the compound, and hand them to Leah, and my hands are bare in the warm wet air for the first time on this planet.
Cayzor takes his off too. His claws are enormous and dark and scarred all over the knuckles the way every miner’s are, and I have never once seen them.
“You don’t have to say anything,” he says. “There’s no chant here. We’re not that kind of family.”
“Good, because I can’t remember anything.”
“Just take my hand.”
So I take his hand.
It’s like touching a live seam.
That’s the only way I can describe it and I’m an engineer, so I’ve thought about it a great deal since. My palm goes into his and there’s a half-second where I have time to think oh, his skin is so hot —
And then it detonates.
There’s a point of contact where his hand meets mine and it goes from warm to burning to something else entirely, and the heat drives up my arm like a current finding ground, straight through my shoulder and down my spine and pooling low and hard in my belly.
My knees give out. He catches me without letting go.
Every hair on my body stands up. My heart is going like something coming apart and I can feel his, both of them, hammering through the joined palms.
It’s not cold. It’s not stone. It’s the opposite of every horror story I’ve ever been told about a negative clasp.
It’s like being plugged into the planet.
And it feels like home, which is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever thought and also completely true.
And Cayzor changes.