Chapter 10
CHAPTER
TEN
CHRYS
I have makeup on to hide the lingering shadow of the bruise on my cheek and a light long sleeve on to hide some of the others. Mary knows how I got here, so I’m not too worried about her. Other people though…
“You promise you have something else to do?” I ask Arc as he opens the car’s bubble top for me.
“I do.”
“If you sit in the parking lot waiting for me and going out of your mind, I will be so mad at you.”
“I’m going to drive over to that empty park and sit in the car and enjoy the silence of no one’s thoughts for a while. Would that be okay?”
I hate how easy it is for me to forget that the world is louder for him.
“Hey,” He cups my cheek gently and kisses me. “It’s not your job to remember. Now go, have fun with Mary.”
I kiss him back and hope he finds that quiet he wants. “I’ll let you know when I’m done.”
The cafe’s front is shaped like a large zurgle, painted lavender with pale green tiger stripes. When I open the door and step inside, I’m met by dozens of eyes and a chorus of chirps and purrs.
As the door closes behind me and my new curious audience starts to make their way forward, I can think of seven different friends from back home who would probably strangle someone to be in this room right now.
“Hi!” Mary gets up from a table toward the back and comes over to hug me. “I still can’t believe you’re here.”
“Me either!”
It’s a two-person table, and even though she can’t read minds, she notices the question on my face. “Wren is doing something with her sponsor today. Last-minute plans.”
“Oh, that’s okay. I’m here to see you, after all.”
When we sit, a turquoise zurgle with a tortoiseshell pattern jumps onto the table between us.
“Now this is what I was expecting when I was told about zurgles.” The cat-like alien creature in front of me is the size of what I’d call a normal house cat.
Mary laughs as the waitress comes over to us. “I hope you don’t mind. I ordered you a cinnamon macchiato.”
“You remembered.” The cup has a lid, and when the zurgle in front of me sniffs at it—nose to plastic—I can guess why.
“I tried it after you told me it was your favorite.” She winces and admits, “I didn’t like it.”
“That’s okay.” When the waitress puts our drinks down, I peek at her name tag to be polite. Curiosity gets the better of me, and I ask, “Who’s your biggest, Paisley?”
“Sampson.” She turns and points at a large yellow striped zurgle who pauses in licking his paw when his name is said.
“Even that I would have expected.”
“I didn’t know they had a zurgle,” Mary says.
“It’s new, and he’s huge.”
“How big?” The waitress asks, brows pinched.
I hesitate, because the question was almost hostile. “He’s basically the size of a small lion.”
Her eyes go wide and then narrow. Her lips purse. “Do you know how old he is?”
“Um… no?” I get an uneasy feeling when she scowls. “What’s wrong?”
“Zurgles can choose how big they get. If yours is the size of a lion… there’s a reason.
Usually, it’s to protect themselves.” She glances at Sampson and kind of dips her head as if to say “although…” but rather she says, “Someone told Sampson he was a ‘handsome big boy,’ and he decided that was the highest praise, so he gets a little bigger each time she comes in.”
“Kissu’s first Sisan was a woman. Maybe it was something similar?”
Paisley flinches, and I realize I used the word Kissu uses… not Sian.
But she doesn’t mention it and I can almost see her doing the math.
The waitress stares at me for a long moment. “Would you be willing to bring him in?”
Something about the request makes me want to say “no” outright and unequivocally, but instead, I say, “He’s not mine, but I’ll ask.”
She’s not satisfied with it, but she leaves and I wrap my hand around my cup, wondering if I said too much to a complete stranger.
Taking a deep breath, I look at Mary who is now whispering sweet words to a darling calico zurgle.
“What are we doing with marketing toward zurgle-based future career paths?”
“What?” Mary looks up at me with her brows pinched.
“You definitely aren’t keeping zurgles a secret, but I think letting people know about the ways they can interact with them both in and out of their homes…
Oh! Do you have on-planet zurgle artists?
Because I bet there are women on Earth who would die to not only have the chance to bang an alien, but also to get to make a living by drawing these cuties. ”
We could probably convince someone with a photo background to come over and try to figure out why they can’t be digitally captured, either.
Mary laughs at me, but it’s not unkind. “We can put that on the list of possible campaigns.”
“Good. I also think you need to push the health benefits more than you are.”
She scritches the calico’s chin for a moment before she turns to face me. “We want people to come for their mates, not for universal health care.”
“I’m not saying you lead with it, but I do think that a few people who might have been on the fence before would sign the last of those documents if they knew about the dental work I got for free during my checkup…” I whistle, thinking about the cost of it on Earth.
“Why are we talking about work?” Mary picks up her cup and blows on it before putting the lid back on to take a drink. “I haven’t seen any bonding paperwork come across my desk for you.”
“I’m sorry, is that not talking about work?”
“Hush.” She laughs and I do too. “But you’re still living with them… which one are you going to bond to?”
I bite my lip and look down at my coffee. “I want all three of them.”
“Oh.” There’s no surprise in her voice, no pity. Just… a reset of expectations.
That gives me hope. “Is it possible?”
“With two? Yes. With three?” She shrugs. “The other mismatched woman living with me just moved out because she wound up bonded to… two members of the brotherhood on the other side of the caldera, in fact.”
“How?”
“She told me that she decided to let fate decide and…” Mary makes a motion with both of her hands, swooping them together and then pushing up.
I blink at her. “Are you trying to mime DVP?”
Mary actually blushes.
“We work in an industry built on sex. How are you embarrassed right now?”
“I don’t know, okay!” Still, she covers her face with her hands. “But yes. They played bonding roulette and both chambers were loaded.”
“How is that any better?”
“Well, I didn’t have time to think of a medical way to say it!”
“So you just,” I make the same hand motion she did and she goes red all over again.
“Stop it!”
Paisley leans over the counter and glances at us warily.
“Sorry.” I give her a little wave and then turn back to Mary. “Sorry.”
She uses a napkin to wipe the tears away from her eyes. “But that’s why I don’t think it would work… physically or logistically, I don’t know how you’d get it all in there.”
“I mean… I’ve seen the logistics for how it could be done—they send a lot of porn to Earth—but you’re right… Physically it would be a stretch.”
She groans and covers her eyes with one hand. “I wish Wren was here. Not because I think she’d make you stop, but then at least there would be someone else you could poke fun at.”
“Next time make sure she comes.”
“I will.” She claps her hands together, “Now. I know you haven’t been here long, but have they taken you anywhere fun yet?”
“Not yet. We’re going somewhere after this, but Arc hasn’t told me where yet.”
“Well we’ve got everything you could possibly want to do here, and if we don’t, it’s a very short trip to Kaveter. So, you tell them and they can make it happen. And if they don’t, you call me and I’ll make it happen.”
“Deal.”
SHOCK
Risk is off doing something down stairs. Kissu is sleeping on Chrys’ cat tree, and I have a call to make.
Noa answers before the second tone and he looks at me with a wide smile. “Mister Shock. I did not expect to hear from you again.”
“I don’t think anyone has ever called me that before.”
He laughs and shrugs. “It’s one of those Earth things that always made me chuckle. What can I do for you today?”
The room behind him is too informal to be an office at his company so he must be at home… I feel a little guilty interrupting him, but he answered, so…
“I’d hoped you could tell me what you found out about the crash.”
“I have had this conversation with Drift… I was under the impression he was the one in charge up there.”
“He is. But I have questions.”
“I probably won’t be able to answer them.”
“So you can’t divulge who the ship belonged to?”
“Unfortunately, I can’t tell you, no.”
The stress he put on “tell” makes me wonder. “Can you tell me why?”
He looks regretful as he shakes his head. “No.”
But he doesn’t try to hang up, he wants to tell me something.
“Can you tell me if it’s proprietary company information or if it’s related to CSS restrictions?”
“It’s the latter.” A small zurgle with green fur so light it might as well be white hops up on his desk, and he pets it without acknowledging it at all. “Are you familiar with my company?”
“Only so far as to know that you build spaceships.”
“Among other things.” He chuckles and picks the zurgle up with one hand, whispering something about Earth fruit to it before putting it back down on the floor.
“I started this company back before… well, before. And when we were all looking for answers to all sorts of problems, I made a handful—as the humans say—of ships that were meant to bypass some regulations and get us places we needed to be quicker than we should have gotten there.”
“And this was one of those ships?”
“Yes. I had been under the impression that they were all destroyed.” He winces. “Getting to Earth without letting certain other species know where it is has only been possible by two methods. The one we use now… and one that punches holes in cosmic fabrics we should not mess with.”
“How many were there?”