Chapter Six
IZU
Sadie’s scent would not leave my skin. It clung, subcutaneous, even after I dialed the shower to maximum and stood in the sonic spray until my muscles jittered.
I cleaned myself three times, out of protocol and out of something like awe, but the aroma persisted—salt, electricity, the faint iron bite of her sweat.
When I closed my eyes, I could see her face: the way her mouth opened, unshy, to swallow my hunger, the shock of her laugh when she realized there was no pretense, only what we brought into the world with our joined bodies.
The memory of her touch was so acute that my skin twitched, recalling where she’d marked me, claimed me, bruised the length of my jaw with human teeth.
I traced the line with my finger, hoping the bruise would last, but knowing it would not.
Bozad tissue healed too fast, banishing pleasure’s evidence in hours.
I had not planned for this outcome.
I reviewed our encounter, the way humans replay trauma or intimate victory in the safety of their private cortex.
My mind mapped each second in excruciating detail, every nuance of her flesh and breath, the way she yielded only to surge back, to claim the initiative with every new sensation.
I stood, hands braced against the mirror, and forced myself to catalog the chemical havoc she’d caused.
The urge to see her again was overwhelming.
Not merely to touch her, but to be near her, to observe the microexpressions that came and went like light through a fracture: the sideways twist of her mouth when she doubted, the arch of eyebrow as she prepared to launch a verbal attack, her throat moving as she swallowed words as if they might explode if released.
It was intoxicating, the way she moved in the world, never quite in step with the expectations of her species or mine.
I needed to see her. The idea of waiting another full cycle was intolerable.
I sifted through possibilities, eliminating the obvious—inviting her back to my quarters so soon would either be gauche or a declaration of intent I was not yet ready to make.
I reviewed human rituals of pursuit. Flowers: insufficient, and also unavailable on station.
Food: the previous date had satisfied nutritional exchange with overclocked efficiency.
I required something that would make her laugh, or failing that, momentarily destabilize her response protocols.
I considered station recreation: an indoor skydiving tube, the sensorial maze, an ancient Terran arcade neglected behind the admin blocks.
I weighed each against her tastes, her culture of brash sincerity and hunger for novelty.
The answer, when it appeared, was so obvious I nearly missed it.
Sadie loved puzzles. Practically vibrated when forced to break a code or defeat an unfamiliar system.
I remembered our first negotiation, the way her eyes sharpened, that exultation in her posture when a new challenge presented itself.
There was a human tradition for such moments—one of courtship, and paradoxically, engineering.
I sent a coded message to her comm, encrypted at a juvenile level, just enough to alert her curiosity but not so much as to frustrate. The message was simple, a set of coordinates. A time, set to align with her next off-duty shift. No explanation, no signature.
And then I waited, which was agony.
Time cycled at local pace. I recalibrated my patience every five minutes and failed at every interval.
In an effort to ablate the disquiet, I stalked the less-patrolled byways of the station.
My feet took me past the hydroponics decks, where the air shimmered with humidity.
I circled through the med block, drifted after a class of younglings as they created chaos in the learning pods, their frenetic energy reminding me of Sadie’s nervous system set to high frequency.
I deviated to the arcade, where a half-glass wall separated the noise of bleeps and simulated warfare from the concourse.
It was astonishingly empty. The lights pinged off in sequence as proximity sensors failed to register any user.
I loitered there, tuning my biology down to silent mode, and scanned the ambient for any sign of her.
I told myself I was measuring my patience. In truth, I was giving her every possible angle to surprise me, to force my hand. A test of sorts.
There was only a brief, barely perceptible blip in the ozone of the air before Sadie found me.
She came in at a half jog, hair still damp from a shower, eyes sparking with a predatory focus I recognized as competitive anticipation.
She ignored the entrance protocol, ducked under the float-rope, and skipped the arc of the floor to land directly in front of me.
“You’re even worse at waiting than I am,” she said, hands on hips.
Her jumpsuit was zipped to mid-sternum, the top half of her body a proclamation of skin, pale brown with a dancing line of damp hair at the nape.
I would have found her in any crowd. “Your lure was too easy,” she added, and punctuated with a finger to my chest. “I solved the cypher on the way here.”
I bowed my head, exaggerated. “I hoped to intrigue, not frustrate.”
She grinned, then rolled her eyes at the flicker and hiss of the deserted game cabinets.
“So what, now you’re going to beat me at old Earth Firezone?”
I shrugged, but I was already reaching for the nearest console, powered up and waiting. “I intend to lose spectacularly.”
“Liar,” she said, but her hands flowed to the stick and button array, a grace in motion I envied.
She glanced sideways at me, waiting to see if I’d power up my own machine.
I did, keying in the basic commands, letting her see the casualness in my movement that was as deliberate as any predator’s patience.
She tugged the sleeves of her suit up, revealing narrow wrists, each adorned with a technet tattoo and today, a new bruise that looked suspiciously like it matched the curve of my own grip from the night before.
I watched her flex, a human tic, and tuned my interface to the game’s neural jacks.
We started in companionable silence, screens flashing riot-bright in the recycled night.
She picked an avatar with a musclebound chassis and a mohawk; I defaulted to a blue-skinned fighter with improbable reach.
I understood the biology of the game-system—predictable lag, error correction, even the way the buttons synced with the dopamine loop in the human brain.
None of it gave me the edge I needed. She catapulted from round to round with relentless focus, fingers blurring over the input, each move more daring than the last. I tried to keep up, but her strategies were improvisational, gleefully reckless.
She baited me into traps, then feigned chaos to mask the emerging pattern. I was mesmerized.
After she had dominated the first match, I found myself laughing out loud—an undignified, authentic sound, resonating in the empty arcade.
The sensation was startling and addictive.
Sadie shot me a sideways glance, mouth open in a victorious howl, and I realized I adored her ability to taunt and delight in the same breath.
“You going to let me win, Karel?”
“Never,” I said, letting her see the honest edge of my competitiveness, the Bozad unwillingness to surrender even the frivolous.
The next round, I pressed her, mirrored her aggression, but she was unpredictable.
She sacrificed pieces of herself for the long play, tanked a perfect shot only to reverse it in the next.
I lost again, this time not by a slim margin but in the calamitous, spectacular way humans revered.
She spun away from the machine, arms over her head in a silent cheer.
“You had me for a second there,” she said, angling close enough that I could see the fine fuzz of hair on her cheek, the lingering flush of blood under her skin, the quickness of her breath. “Good effort. But I play dirty.”
“I noticed,” I said, and caught the challenge in her gaze. She regarded me, head tilted, waiting to see if I would escalate. I was learning the escalation was the point. The pattern was to bait, then strike, then claim the reward.
She closed the gap, fingers at my wrist. She was so much smaller, but her touch was certain. “Walk me home?”
I let her take my hand and lead me out from the empty hellscape of the arcade, down a side corridor that stank of disinfectant.
She pressed her shoulder to mine, and for a while we just walked, past the grav lifts, through the blue-lit causeways of the upper decks where the light never pretended to be anything but artificial.
Sadie kept her step light, a half-skip in her stride, as if she was delighted at the prospect of making me chase her.
There was silence for twenty meters, a companionable lull in which my own pulse was the loudest thing in the chamber.
At the intersection to the maintenance wing, she slowed.
Her hand tightened on mine, fingers flexing, and then she broke left—toward the dark, the access tunnels, the crew quarters that reeked of lubricant and the sweet rot of sealed air.
She walked with purpose, trailing me behind like I belonged to the loop of her grip.
I was so attuned to her that I nearly missed our arrival at a narrow, unmarked hatch tucked under a burnt-out indicator.
A click, a palm-code, and the door irised open. The metal lip caught me at shin height.