Chapter 2 Kael #2
"Oh, just that. Just the entire emotional subtext of everything I do. Cool. Very cool."
I do not understand the repetition of "cool" in this context. The shuttle's ambient temperature is standard. I suspect this is an instance of the human communication pattern called sarcasm, where words are used to mean their opposite. It is deeply inefficient. I choose not to engage with it.
"The next gate is four hours away at this speed," she says, returning to the console. "We need fuel. This shuttle wasn't designed for multi-system travel."
"Where will we refuel?"
"There's a free-trade station at the Delmon-Calloway border. Independent operation, not Helix owned. They don't ask questions if you pay in credit."
"Do you have credit?"
She pulls a small chip from her bag. "Emergency fund. It's not much, but it'll buy fuel and maybe food. After that, we need a real plan."
"I can offer protection."
"You can offer conspicuousness. You're eight feet tall and you glow. Every bounty hunter in the Lattice is going to be looking for you."
"The glow can be suppressed. Partially." I dim my markings. The blue light fades to faint threads beneath my skin, still visible but less immediately noticeable. "When a Vorath is calm, the bioluminescence subsides."
"And when you're not calm?"
"I illuminate significantly."
"Illuminate significantly," she repeats, and makes the nose sound again. This time I am more certain it is amusement. "That's one way to describe turning into a nightlight."
I do not know what a nightlight is.
The shuttle hums through empty space. The stars are unfamiliar.
I am far from the Serin system, far from any Vorath territory, in a stolen human vehicle with a human woman who smells like recycled air and adrenaline and who has, through a single act of disobedience, changed the trajectory of both our lives.
The bond settles into my chest like a second heartbeat. It is steady, persistent, undeniable. Where she goes, I go. What threatens her, threatens me. This is not a choice. It is a condition.
But there is something underneath the bond that I do not fully understand.
When she looked at me in the cell and said this cargo was misrouted, the resonance I felt from her was not just determination or fear.
There was something wry in it, sharp-edged, a humor that existed even in crisis.
My people do not use humor in crisis. We use stillness.
We use focus. We do not make observations about invoices while alarms sound.
She is strange. Capable and strange and very small and I find that I do not mind the bond the way I expected to.
"Can I ask you something?" she says.
"Yes."
"The imprinting. You said it happens when a Vorath's life is saved. Does that mean you were going to die?"
"The transport was scheduled for a Helix research facility. No specimen that enters a Helix research facility has been recorded as leaving."
"So yes."
"Yes."
She nods. Her jaw tightens. I feel a pulse of something from her, not fear this time, anger. Directed not at me but at the institution that put me in that cell and would have taken me apart piece by piece in the name of research.
"We need to get to Haven Station," she says quietly.
"I do not know this place."
"It's a refugee station. Edge of known space.
They smuggle people out of Helix's reach.
I found references to it in shipping anomalies, cargo routes that didn't make sense, ships that disappeared from tracking in the same region.
I thought it was piracy at first. Then I realized the pattern was too organized.
Someone was running an underground railroad through the Lattice. "
"And you mapped it."
"I mapped the inconsistencies. I'm a logistics coordinator. Inconsistencies bother me."
She says this like it is a small thing. Like the ability to detect and decode a covert refugee network from shipping data is an ordinary skill. It is not. On my world, a person with such abilities would be elevated to the strategist class. She would be given resources, authority, respect.
Here, she was given a desk and a salary and the expectation that she would not look too closely at the cargo.
"Haven Station is three star systems from here," she continues. "If we're smart about the route, avoid the main gate corridors, stick to independent stations for fuel and supplies, we can make it."
"How long?"
"Weeks. Maybe more."
Weeks. In this shuttle, which is too small for one Vorath, too small for one human and one Vorath, too small for the bond that is even now expanding in my chest, mapping her heartbeat, learning the rhythm of her breath.
"We will need a larger vessel," I say.
"Yeah. We will." She looks at me. "Do you always state the obvious?"
"I state what is true. Whether it is obvious depends on the observer."
The nose sound again. Definitely amusement.
"Okay," she says. "Three systems. No allies. No ship. Helix behind us and not much ahead. I've had worse odds."
"When?"
She pauses. "Never, actually. These are the worst odds I've ever had. I was trying to be encouraging."
"Ah. Was that sarcasm?"
"That was optimism. Different department."
I do not understand the reference to departments, but her intent reads as warmth, brittle and defensive, layered over genuine fear, and I recognize the pattern even if I cannot name it in her language.
She is frightened and she is coping by speaking in ways that mean something other than what the words say.
I let her have this. It seems important.
The stars scroll past the viewport. The shuttle flies on. Behind us, Helix Corp begins to hunt.
I fold all four arms and settle into the too-small space and prepare for the first journey I have taken since my capture where the destination is not a cage.
It is enough.