“Daria,” he said, biting down hard on the anger that threatened to warm itself up in his belly. “A female should never be made—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” she said curtly. “Being a female is nothing special here on Earth. A century or two ago, it was common practice to bury us alive as babies all over the damn planet because feeding us was such a nuisance. Fifty years ago, it wasn’t a crime to rape us. Twenty years ago, a guy couldn’t be prosecuted for beating his wife unconscious. We are still being stoned to death in some parts of the world for wanting to pick out our own clothes, so don’t try to tell me I’ve got some gender-inceptive right to respect from everyone I meet. I’m really happy for you that chivalry isn’t dead on your perfect planet, but the bitch is good and buried here so I don’t want to hear about it!”

He couldn’t have heard that. The words ran themselves through his mind again and he broke open each one in search for some secondary context, shock freezing him a little harder as each maintained its meaning.

They killed their females? No. The humans he knew were obsessed with their own offspring, with keeping and caring for them, with bonding to their sires, with—

They killed their infant females?!

“All I had to do was flash the guy,” Daria was saying. “I let my pride be more important than catching a killer and he got away. If even one person died today, it’ll be because I made it happen. And you’re trying to cheer me up like it doesn’t even matter, and it matters, damn it.” She sat with her hands in her lap, staring at the guidance wheel of the car. Water from her eyes dripped from her chin. She whispered, “It matters.”

Tagen sat with her in the dark, in the parking bay of the hotel, neither one speaking, neither one touching. He sat and thought very carefully of the best way to put his words, came to the ultimate conclusion that there was no diplomatic way to say what he was about to say, and said it anyway.

“You are acting like a fool.”

She started crying harder.

Tagen sighed and rubbed at the bridge of his nose restlessly. All right, there probably was a slightly more tactful way than that. He tried again. “It is understandable that you should be acting like a fool. I can see that you are exhausted. You look terrible.”

Through her tears came first a groan, and then a giggle. She raised her head from her hands and rolled her eyes again, this time at the heavens instead of him. Then she wiped the back of her hand across her face again, muttering, “One of these days, you are really going to have to learn just to say, ‘It’ll be all right’, and let it go, spaceman.”

“It will be all right,” he said.

She finally looked at him, still worn through and without hope, but at least with some phantom trace of humor. “If I asked you to go back to that stupid hotel and knock that lecherous little jerk around for me, you’d do it, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh yes.”

Her small smile twitched wider. “That makes you either a really great guy, or a really bad one, I can’t decide.” She sighed and looked away at the hotel. “And it’s a moot point, anyway, I guess. I’ll go get us a room.”

She opened her door and closed it behind her, and Grendel came slinking out of the rear of the car to try Tagen’s lap again. Daria crossed half the lot under the artificial light of the hotel’s lettering, but then paused and turned around. She came back to Tagen’s side of the vehicle, opened his door, and leaned in to press her lips to his cheek.

“You’re a really great guy,” she whispered. She drew back, smiled faintly, and shut his door.

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Thirty-Four

Kane dreamed of the ship and of himself, a boy barely old enough for breeches, waking suddenly in his dark room. The Yevoa Null’s engines were a comforting heartbeat in his ears; the stars, a familiar curtain drawing endlessly back beside his window. He rose, his boy’s body dropping with an ungainly thud from the high bed, and shivered in the temperate air.

He did not know what woke him, but there was a prickling in him. It was neither fear nor nervousness, but something insistent all the same. Some danger, unknown but very close to him. He couldn’t face it alone.

He left the comfort of his quarters and crept across the sitting room to his father’s bedroom door, reaching up on tiptoes to push at the locking pad. The inner room, lit by the same slowly-scrolling stars, was quiet. The only disturbance came in the low form of Urak’s sleeping breaths.

Kane crept to the bedside where his father lay naked, his huge, scarred hand resting on the back of his latest slave. The smell of mating was in the air and Kane hesitated, afraid to intrude, unwilling to retreat.

The sounds of sleep stopped all at once. Urak stirred, opening one red-dimmed eye, and looked at him. “What is it, boy?”

“I don’t know.”

Urak grunted and pushed at the slave until it roused and crawled to the floor, making room for Kane on the bed. He climbed up gratefully and curled against the warmth and reality of his father’s body, filling all his senses. The beating of the great heart, the firmness of the hard muscle, the scent of his sweat, the look of the loose strands of his father’s hair interrupting the vast plain of his chest—this was all there was, this was truth again.

“I think I dreamed you died,” he said, his voice muffled by his father’s comforting mass.

“Someday, I will.” Urak’s hand slipped up and patted Kane’s back with idle reassurance. “So will you and every other living thing. And that’s fine. Life is pleasant and death is peaceful. The transition can be a pain in the ass,” he remarked, yawning. “But you’ll find all that out for yourself. Sooner rather than later if you let that yellow-haired bitch have her way.”

“What yellow-haired bitch?” he asked, but dread had drawn every muscle in his boy’s frame tight. Some part of him, the part that made him cling like a squawler to his father’s living body, already knew and didn’t want to be reminded.

“You’ll remember when you wake up,” Urak said indifferently. “For now, just listen. She wants your mark on her, boy. She’s taking some hefty risks to win it, and that’s fine, but she’s making you take them too, and that’s not. You need to be smarter than you’re being, boy. You’re not alone on Earth.”

They weren’t on Earth. They were on the ship, his father’s ship, the ship that would be his someday. He was a boy just into breeches and it would be six years yet before he first saw Earth, before he first saw his father’s hands—the ones that combed his hair straight in the early-shift and lifted him into bed at late-shift’s end—dip into a human’s hair and crack the skull away. Kane pressed his face tighter against Urak’s chest, feeling the breath lifting and dropping him, feeling the steady thump-thud of the heart most Jotan would not believe he had. This was the ship and this was his father and this was all there was.

“Don’t go, boy,” Urak said firmly. “When she shows you the sign, don’t follow. You know well enough how to hunt without her help.”

“I don’t understand,” Kane said, but that sick feeling was swimming in his gut again. He was too young for hunts, six years too young to feel his father’s hands on his shoulders, facing him relentlessly into the bloody heap of dead humans as he was told that this was death, this was what his father dealt in. He was barely out of his pissers, he had seen only the live humans in the hold and those passing fancies his father sometimes tried to keep. But some part of him surely knew what Urak was saying because it clenched on him with cold dread.

Urak’s hand, rough as old leather, rubbed calm into Kane’s small body. Kane relaxed slowly, feeling the strength in those hands, the immortality. “You’ve done all right by yourself,” his father murmured. “You’ll be fine without me. And you’re right, boy. I do like her. I like her a lot.”