Mine, Safe, Tended
Three days.
That was how long it took me to piece together that I was living inside the plot of a terrible romance novel.
The translator Keth had given me – he'd left it tucked into the small depression in the wall beside the water cup when he went – turned out to work on text as well as speech.
So when he brought me a datapad the next morning (morning?
I was guessing; there were no windows), I could read it.
Slowly, haltingly, squinting at words the device rendered as approximate synonyms and hoping I was getting the gist.
The gist was not encouraging.
"So let me make sure I understand this," I said, on what I was calling day three because I had to call it something.
Keth was crouched in the doorway again. He always crouched when he came in, folding himself down to my level as if he was trying not to loom.
It didn't entirely work. "Your species has a, a biological caste system. Alphas, betas, omegas."
"Yes."
"And the omegas are the ones who–" I checked the datapad. "Who 'carry' and 'produce.' Which I'm assuming means pregnancy and something else. The translation's not clear."
His tail swept once. Slow. That meant calm, I'd worked out. Or at least not agitated.
"Produce," he said. "Your language does not have–" The translator crackled.
"Lactation. For feeding. But also, not only for feeding.
It is–" Another pause. He breathed in slowly, and I wondered if he was searching for scent-words, concepts his language had that mine didn't. "Sacred.
An omega who produces is the highest gift. "
"You said that before."
"It remains true."
I looked down at the datapad. The screen showed a dense block of text I'd been working through for the last hour, some kind of historical document about the Claiming Serum. The translation was rough, full of gaps and guesses, but the broad strokes were clear enough.
The Khorreth were dying.
It wasn't quick, and it wasn't dramatic. But their omega population had been falling for generations, and about fifty years ago they'd hit some kind of critical threshold. Too few omegas, too few births. A species looking at its own extinction and scrambling for a way out.
The Claiming Serum was the way out.
"You developed this," I said, tapping the screen, "because your own omegas are nearly extinct."
"Yes."
"And it works on what? Any species?"
"Compatible species." He shifted, his hooves clicking against the floor. "Not all. The serum requires a biological foundation. Certain hormonal structures. Certain..." He trailed off, searching. "Receptiveness."
"And humans are compatible."
"Some Peritans. Not all." His eyes found mine. "You are."
"Because you smelled me in a dataset."
"Your scent signature indicated compatibility. I confirmed it when I–" He stopped. His tail flicked, quick and sharp, and went still. "When I took you. Your response to my scent. The way your body–"
"Went weird," I finished. "Yeah. I noticed."
I'd been trying not to think about that.
The strange calm that had washed over me in the cargo bay.
The way my shoulders had dropped, my jaw unclenched, my whole nervous system apparently deciding we were safe before my brain had any input.
I'd told myself it was shock. A fear response gone sideways.
But I'd been on the ship three days now, and every time he came into the cell, the same thing happened. That low warmth in my belly. The loosening in my chest. My body easing towards him, the way it had started to no matter how I fought it.
It was bloody irritating.
"The Claiming Serum," I said, dragging my attention back to the datapad. "It does what, exactly? Turns me into one of your omegas?"
"It restructures your biology to be fully receptive." He said it carefully, as if reciting something he'd memorised. "Heat cycles. Scent bonding. Physical compatibility. The ability to produce."
"Lactation."
"Yes."
"And pregnancy, presumably."
Something in him warmed.
"Yes."
I stared at the screen. The text blurred in front of me, the translation flickering as the device struggled with a concept it couldn't quite render.
Heat cycles. I knew what that meant. I'd read enough terrible fiction in my life. The uncontrollable biological need, the fever, the–
I put the datapad down.
"No," I said.
Keth tilted his head. "No?"
"I'm not taking your serum. I'm not restructuring my biology. I'm not becoming your omega, or whatever it is you're expecting."
"You don't understand–"
"I understand fine." I stood. The cell was too small for pacing, but I paced anyway, three steps to the wall and three steps back. "You want to turn me into a – a breeding machine. A producer. A sacred gift." I spat the last words. "I'm not interested."
He was quiet. His tail lay still against his leg, and his eyes tracked me as I moved, back and forth, back and forth.
"Mara," he said. The translator rendered my name strangely, the vowels too long. "I will not force you."
"You already forced me. You kidnapped me."
"I brought you here. Yes." He didn't flinch from it, didn't make excuses. "But the serum, I will not give you unless you choose it."
I stopped pacing. "What?"
"The serum must be chosen. It does not–" He searched for the word. "It does not work properly without choice. The body must accept it. Resistance creates complications."
"So you need my consent."
"I need your choice."
"That's the same thing."
He tilted his head again. He went quiet a moment, and I had the uncomfortable sense that he was reading something in my scent, some signal I was broadcasting without knowing it.
"Is it?" he said.
I found the nav display on day four.
Keth had started leaving the hatch unsealed during the day.
Not open; I couldn't have reached the control to open it anyway, it sat at his eye level.
But unlocked, so that when I pressed my palm to the panel, it slid aside.
He'd shown me how to work it, patient and slow, his huge hand guiding mine to the right spot on the smooth metal.
"You may move through the ship," he'd said. "This level. The lower holds are sealed, but you would not want to go there anyway. It is cold."
"You're letting me wander around."
"You are not a prisoner."
"I'm definitely a prisoner."
"You are my mate," he said. "Mates do not imprison each other."
"Mates also don't kidnap each other," I'd pointed out.
He hadn't had a response to that.
The ship was bigger than I'd expected. The corridor outside my cell, containment space, whatever, stretched in both directions, curving gently.
Everything was built to Khorreth scale, which meant the ceiling was high enough that I couldn't have touched it with a running jump, and the doorways were wide enough that I could have lain down across one.
I felt like a child in a giant's house. Every handle was too high, every step too deep.
I had to haul myself up onto the raised threshold of each doorway as if I were climbing onto a bed.
The nav display was in what I assumed was the cockpit, though it was hard to tell.
The room was dominated by a wide curved viewport showing the black of space and the faint smear of distant stars, and a bank of controls along one wall that I couldn't begin to interpret.
But the nav display was clear enough: a three-dimensional map projection floating above a raised platform, with a blinking dot that had to be us and a larger shape that had to be our destination.
I stared at it for a long time.
"Not long now," Keth said, behind me.
I didn't jump. I'd heard him coming, his hooves on the deck plating, near-silent but not quite. He'd let me hear him.
"Until what?"
"Until we arrive." He came to stand beside me, and his presence was a wall of warmth at my shoulder, that scent rolling off him in waves. Warm hide and green growing flora and the thing underneath them I still couldn't name. "Khorreth. My world."
"And then what?"
He didn't answer straight away. His tail swept, slow, and I watched it at the edge of my vision, reading it the way I'd started to read all of him. Calm. Thoughtful.
"Then we go to my dwelling," he said. "My home. You will be safe there."
"Safe from what?"
Again the hesitation. I caught him glancing down at me, the first time he'd done that, actually looked down rather than crouching to meet my eyes.
"What happens," I said slowly, "to an unclaimed human female on Khorreth?"
He went very still.
"Keth."
"There are no unclaimed Peritan females on Khorreth." His voice was flat and careful. "All who have come have been claimed."
"But if there were. If I arrived without your claim, without the serum. What would happen?"
He was quiet for so long I thought he wasn't going to answer. The nav display turned slowly in front of us, that blinking dot inching towards the larger shape of his world.
"You would be taken," he said at last. "By whoever was strongest. Your scent–" He breathed it in. "Even now, unchanged, you smell notable. Compatible. On Khorreth, surrounded by alphas who have not found mates, you would be–"
He stopped.
"Fought over," I finished.
"Yes."
"And whoever won would what? Force the serum on me? Force the rest?"
His tail lashed once, sharp and fast, and went still. When he spoke, his voice was lower than usual, more felt than heard.
"Some would ask. Some would not. There is no legal protection for an unbonded omega. No recourse. No law that says you cannot be taken."
I looked at the nav display. Three days until we arrived on a planet full of beings like him, all of them bigger than me, all of them wanting what I apparently represented.
"But with the serum," I said. "With your claim."
"With my claim, you are protected. No one may touch you. No one may challenge me for you unless they are of higher rank, and I would–" His jaw set. "I would not permit it. Regardless of law."
"You'd fight for me."
"I would kill for you." He said it plainly. A fact. "Anyone who touched you. Anyone who tried. I would kill them and feel no remorse."
I should have been frightened by that. Maybe I was, a little. But mostly I was thinking about the other alphas he'd described. The ones who wouldn't ask. The ones who would just take.
"What would I be," I said. "With the serum. With your claim. What would that make me?"
He turned to face me, and I had to tip my head back to meet his eyes. He was so tall. So big. One of his hands could splay across the small of my back; he could cradle my head like an egg. And he looked at me with those huge dark eyes, and there was no hunger in them at all.
"Mine," he said. "Safe. Tended."
Three words.
They landed in my chest and sat there, heavy and warm, and I hated it.
I hated that they meant something. I hated that tended was the one that stuck, the one that lodged under my ribs and wouldn't shake loose.
I'd spent nine years on relay stations tending to myself.
Feeding myself. Keeping myself warm and working and alive through sheer bloody stubbornness, because no one else was going to do it.
And here was this alien, this creature who'd taken me from my home and carried me across the stars, offering to tend me as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
I hated that a worn-out part of me wanted it.
"Fine," I said.
He blinked. "Fine?"
"Give me the serum."
The serum was cold.
He administered it himself, a small injection at the base of my neck.
His hand cradled my head to hold me steady, and I let him, because what else was I going to do?
His palm was warm against my skull, his fingers curving around to brush my temple, and that scent was everywhere, wrapping around me like a blanket.
"You will sleep," he said. "Your body needs rest to accept the changes."
"How long?"
"A day. Perhaps two." He withdrew the injector and set it aside, but his hand stayed where it was, cradling my head. "I will be here when you wake."
"Lucky me."
His tail swept. I was starting to think that was his version of a smile.
"Sleep," he said again, and I felt it, the heaviness creeping into my limbs, the softening at the edges of my vision. The serum working fast, or maybe just exhaustion finally catching up with me. Three days of fear and confusion and too little sleep, and now my body was giving up the fight.
I let my eyes close.
His scent followed me down, that warm earthy musk that had started all of this. But it wasn't unpleasant anymore. Somewhere in the last three days it had become familiar. Interesting.
Almost like comfort.
I decided I'd deal with that later.