The Outcasts

by Alexa Black

  But was that it? After that whole conversation about shame, Kara wasn’t even going to look at her?

  The horned head snapped up, and the golden eyes fixed on Sue. They brightened, and Sue shivered as Kara’s gaze moved down her body. It lingered on her breasts, her nipples, her hips.

  Sue could guess why. Or could have if her head wasn’t buzzing and her skin wasn’t buzzing with energy. Kara’s nipples were the same color as the rest of her, while Sue’s were a dusky pink against light brown skin.

  And Kara didn’t have hair anywhere.

  But was this just curiosity, or was it something more? Sue lifted a leg and lowered it again, watching Kara watch the movement. Kara didn’t blink, and the corner of her lip turned up in the beginning of a smile.

  Sue didn’t realize until a moment later that it was her scarred leg she’d moved. Apparently Kara didn’t care.

  Come here, dammit. Come here and look at me for real.

  “Did you wish to dress?” Kara pointed down at the clothes.

  “Oh. Right.” Well. Sue must have misread that. Or Kara wasn’t sure what she wanted. Sue slipped off the bed, not bothering to try to look sultry any more, and snatched up her bra and underwear.

  She faced Kara as she put them on. Maybe she wasn’t going to respond to direct provocation, but Sue had seen that look.

  “See?” Sue said. “I’m not ashamed.”

  That little half smile again. “No. You’re not.”

  Sue grinned back and stepped into her pants. She slid the shirt over her head; for a moment, it blocked out the sight of Kara’s brightening eyes.

  She tugged at the fabric to smooth it down over her stomach. Her fingers caught on the scratch Kara had torn in it. She picked at it and looked over at Kara. Kara watched her without blinking, also looking at the mark.

  Sue’s skin underneath had a mark too, where the tip of Kara’s claw had snagged her. The little scrape had already scabbed over, but it still stung when the fabric rubbed against it.

  Sue frowned at it. Kara was still dangerous. These people were still dangerous, if they were anything like her. And Kara had been the nicest. The most welcoming. The most curious.

  Groups were even worse. Sue had seen it. People who’d been nice enough to her and decent to others, going nuts when the right asshole with a bullhorn riled them up.

  She closed her eyes, and a memory blazed against the backs of her eyelids. A young boy, shoved to the asphalt by a hard kick.

  As far as Sue could tell he hadn’t done anything. Just had the wrong color patches from the wrong colonies sewn to his jacket and pants. The wrong color skin. The wrong hairstyle. The wrong accent, when he pleaded with them to let him go.

  Sue had wanted to help. She’d hoped to be a soldier, and that’s what soldiers did. Or what soldiers should do, anyway. Protect the innocent. Defend the vulnerable. But the crowd had already gone crazy, and when hands had reached for her next, she’d panicked and ran.

  As best she could. She still remembered the drag of her leg behind her, the thudding of her heart. They’ll catch me they’ll catch me they’ll catch me they already caught him they’ll catch me anyway so why didn’t I do something?

  Sue blinked the memory away, the boy’s blood on the pavement a red spray behind her eyelids that she couldn’t quite banish.

  Kara wasn’t like that mob. Kara had stopped.

  “So. Unashamed one.”

  Sue’s head snapped up. There was laughter in Kara’s voice. Laughter, and the beginnings of respect. Thank goodness.

  But why? What was Kara seeing in her, right now, with barely-combed hair and torn clothes, trying to shiver away a bad memory that wouldn’t leave?

  Unashamed one. What else was she supposed to be? Intrepid explorer, brave visitor, strange life form from far away. But could Sue play at being those things when wrong moves got you a claw in the belly?

  Do you like humans—do you like me—or did you just not want to see someone get hurt?

  “We were exploring,” Kara said. “Before. When…” She reached out and touched Sue’s shirt, tracing a fingertip over the tear in the fabric. Then she slipped her finger into it and pressed her fingertip against Sue’s skin.

  It was warm, warm like before. Sue shivered under the touch.

  Kara nodded and pulled her hand away. Sue blinked at the loss and swallowed hard. Was that how an Outcast apologized?

  Sue cleared her throat and straightened up again. “Yeah. We were exploring.”

  “We could go back out now. If you wish. If you do not—”

  “Well, I can’t go home. Not yet. Unless there’s something you aren’t telling me.”

  “The rifts come and go with the storms. There will be another, sometime. Perhaps a week, at the earliest. You can return home when one appears.” The light in her eyes flickered, and the streaks of gold at her neck and shoulders dimmed. “If you wish to.”

  You don’t want me to leave, do you?

  If nothing else, it would be worth finding out why. Sue knew what wrong moves might get her. But what about the right ones? She took a step closer to Kara and willed herself to ignore how Kara towered over her.

  Unashamed one. Why the hell not?

  She reached out and laid a hand on Kara’s shoulder, like she had once before. As before, Kara twitched under her hand. But this time, Kara stilled, and her lips parted in the first hint of a glowing smile.

  “We were exploring,” Sue said again. “Let’s do some more of it.”

  Chapter Five

  “Follow.”

  Sue scowled at Kara’s back. Kara had said yes to exploring. Had seemed to welcome it. And now she was ordering Sue around. Like Sue was a pet dog or something. Some stray creature she’d picked up somewhere.

  Sue shivered. Kara had been kind. But what if Sue was exactly that to her? A cute, lost straggler to take care of for a while, and nothing else.

  She wouldn’t have thought it, cold as Kara was sometimes. But then Kara had taken a swipe at her.

  But Kara had admitted she’d done wrong. She hadn’t apologized, not quite. But Sue still didn’t know what an apology looked like on this world. Maybe that was as much of an apology as she was going to get.

  And Sue still didn’t know what she’d done wrong. What she’d said that upset Kara so much. These people had been banished here, and whoever had done it had seen nothing wrong with mangling their backs to punish them. What kind of memory had that stirred up?

  The lights and sounds grew louder as the tunnels widened. Sue noticed fewer and fewer windows looking down on the storms and the angry planet below.

  This was a place of exile. Maybe they wanted to forget.

  Bright neon signs announced—what? Sue couldn’t read the glyphs, and she hadn’t tried. But these were clearly shops, hawking everything from furniture to new videoscreens to bowls and bottles full of liquid that Sue guessed passed for food and water.

  And maybe for booze. There were restaurants, too, or something like them, and one had tables and seats set up in front of it, with people sitting at them drinking the liquids.

  She watched a noisy group pass a bowl of something orange between them, laughing with brightly lit mouths. Shadows danced around them in a riot of patterns. One of them held up a clawed hand and hissed, striking out at air, and the others laughed. One of his companions clapped him on the shoulder, grinning, careful not to hit the scar on his back.

  Sue looked at Kara, at the clawed hand at her side. If this was how they played, Kara lashing out at her might not be all that surprising.

  Who are these people, and why were they sent away?

  You know already, a part of her whispered. And on the heels of that thought, a chilling feeling.

  “Are we going to get anything to eat? Er, drink?” She wasn’t sure she wanted to sit near the rowdy aliens, but her stomach rumbled at the sight of food. Even weird alien food she wouldn’t have a chance to chew. Her soupy dinner last night, and her breakfast this morni
ng, had both tasted good, cool and bracing. And just drinking them had made her feel refreshed.

  She had a feeling those were the alien equivalent of health food. What did the good stuff taste like? And if the health food made you feel comfortable right away, what would decadent treats do? Sue’s mouth watered.

  And she hadn’t seen Kara drink anything, and now that she knew the aliens ate the same stuff Kara had given her, she felt worried.

  Worried and protective. Kara had protected her. Fretting in return was the least she could do. Even if she had no idea how to take care of a gorgeous naked giant alien who knew far more about what was going on than she did.

  Kara frowned. “You have no need for other food right now. The drink I gave you was the best thing we have to restore your strength, Sue.”

  I don’t need anything else? I’m a visitor, not a child.

  But there were other things to see, and Sue might as well have been a child, wide as her eyes got.

  Some people looked back at her, their eyes bright pinpricks of flame. Most were wide with what Sue assumed was curiosity, but some burned under slanted, angry brows. The penumbral auras around them whirled and danced with their agitation.

  One, a slim female with skin almost as dark as Kara’s, broad curling horns, and skin-cracks the orange of a warm fire, growled as Sue passed. Her voice had the same hollow echo as Kara’s, but the snarl overlaid it, a bestial noise, almost like she had two voices.

  Sue huddled closer to Kara, and her head lowered. No. I’m stuck here. I can’t show them weakness.

  She raised her head, high and proud, the kind of posture she’d always imagined a starfighter pilot would stand in. She straightened up, evening her stride, forcing her bad leg to limp as little as possible by sheer force of will alone. These people might have been Outcasts, but she was the outsider, and determined not to show it made her weak.

  Besides, this was supposed to be an adventure, and if she let it terrify her, she’d miss everything there was to see.

  A group of musicians gathered around another of the corridors. They hummed, a haunting lilt, and Sue closed her eyes and stopped walking. Their voices echoed, like Kara’s, but it fit the eerie music. Could all the aliens sing like that?

  Then someone began to play an instrument.

  Sue had always liked imagining to music, always found it easy. The reverberations of the music and the singer’s melancholy tone wove through her mind. And the images came like she didn’t even have to try to picture it at all. Tall mountains, sunlight gilding them.

  The bright orange-red of a sunrise or a sunset. She could feel its warmth. The coarseness of sand under her feet. She could feel that too, a roughness between her toes.

  She’d never actually seen mountains, only pictures of them. Or been in open space like that. In the colonies, everyone lived and moved in crowds.

  Was this really her imagination, or was she seeing what the singers wanted her to?

  People walked down from the foot of the mountains. They were tall like the aliens, but instead of stony gray skin, theirs shone in warm pinks and browns, gilded by the orange light of the sun. Almost but not quite metallic, without bright cracks in their skin either. The horns were gone too, only a pair of faint ridges in their foreheads testifying to where they’d been.

  They had no hair. Or at least, Sue couldn’t tell if they did. Light radiated out from behind their heads in glowing coronas. She couldn’t tell what color it was either. It shone so bright all that registered was light, all color seared away by its brightness. She guessed its tone was warm, but it was too much for her eyes.

  For human eyes, she guessed.

  I’m only human.

  Maybe the beings in this—vision?—weren’t aliens at all. Maybe Sue really was just imagining things, mixing up the new world she’d found with the old world she’d left behind.

  And was starting to miss, if she really thought about it. The singer wailed another note and Sue felt it, a melancholy chill. These people weren’t real, weren’t hers, and she was far from home.

  The people opened their eyes, and their eyes were almost human: deep, rich browns, verdant greens, piercing blues, pale grays. But they glowed with the same inner light as the aliens’ bodies. The insides of their mouths glowed too. Not the furnace-reds and flame-golds of the aliens, but a warm, inviting white.

  The white wrapped around them too, curled up around their backs in a bright halo. It shimmered, feather-gossamer. The singers wailed in loss: a rumbling bass that made Sue fear the ground in her vision might split, a piercing soprano that stung her ears.

  Then the people in Sue’s vision unfurled spans of light behind them.

  They moved, smooth as cloth. And they glowed, so bright a white that Sue couldn’t quite focus on them. They rose behind their owners, feathery coronas of light. They moved, up and down, and the people hovered just above the ground, dust and sand curling below them.

  “Wings,” Sue said out loud, shattering the illusion. The vision dissolved, leaving her facing a group of people with stone skin, holding musical instruments in their hands, light peeking through cracks in their flesh.

  She looked over at Kara’s back, at the two misshapen stumps at her shoulders and the bright, noxious gleam of the scars. Shadows swirled around her, a faint remembrance of something that had once been there.

  “Wings,” Sue said again. “You used to have wings.”

  Chapter Six

  Sue shrank from Kara in fear. Twisted stumps where wings had been. Claws. Horns. Eerie light glowing through the cracks in stony skin.

  We are outcasts, Kara had said.

  Yes, I’m sure you were.

  Sue stumbled backward, panic building, her throat beginning to tighten and her leg throbbing like it had finally remembered to hurt. Kara was looking at her, golden eyes wide, but she couldn’t think of that, couldn’t focus, couldn’t go to her, not when—

  “Interesting. Is this some kind of pet?”

  Sue’s head snapped up. She didn’t like the sound of that, especially not in Weird Alien Intonation. But Kara sounded like that too. And however ominous the reverberations might sound, the tone was mocking, not threatening. Dismissive.

  Another Outcast was looking at her, his skin ash pale, his streaks of light a fiery red. He looked slimmer than Kara and some of the others around them. Young, maybe? His lips were curled in a sneer and he blinked down at Sue as if surprised by what he saw.

  “I’m not a pet,” Sue blurted. Part of her still wanted to hide behind Kara, but that would only make this worse. And if Kara really was what she suspected, Kara might not be all that safe either.

  “This human is mine for the moment, Dehek,” Kara spat back.

  “Did you get it from down below?” He leaned down to sniff at her. “Down on the dunes? In one of the flame pits? She doesn’t smell like either of them.”

  Down below? Sue tensed. Kara had said that only the oldest Outcast would know about humans.

  “That is none of your concern.” Kara’s tone, even colder and more sepulchral than usual, pulled Sue from her thoughts.

  Dehek’s shadows drew in tighter around him. Then he smirked. “But, Kara, you shouldn’t be adopting strays.” His nostrils flared. A red light flickered in them. “Every human on the surface is there for a reason. But she’s not from the surface, is she? She smells too fresh for that.”

  Every human on the surface.

  There are humans down there. And everybody knows about them.

  The musicians turned toward Sue. Their eyes glowed with obvious interest, and the streaks on their skin pulsed. Sue winced.

  Kara snarled, a rumbling sound that didn’t fit the stately, glowing body Sue saw in front of her. She shuddered, imagining fur and fangs and wild things with wide snouts stained in blood.

  Was that another vision or something else these…beings could do?

  “I’m not from down there!” Sue cried.

  She stood straighter, trying to look
confident. If she was going to get in the middle of this, she might as well go all the way.

  “I’m not from your planet,” she finished. “Or from your Rings, or whatever you call them. I’m from one of Earth’s colonies, and—” She snapped her mouth shut. I’m from one of Earth’s colonies was too much information already.

  “Of course you are.” Dehek sneered. “You’d never make it up here if you weren’t lost.”

  Kara’s eyes glowed, and her lips curled back. “Leave the human alone.”

  “Why, Kara, it sounds almost like you don’t want her to know where she is.”

  Kara snarled again. She dropped into a crouch and held her clawed hands out, ready to attack or to defend.

  Sue shivered thinking of the rioting back home. They’d almost knocked her down once, with her bad leg slowing her down. And that young boy, the one she couldn’t help. In her memory, his eyes went wide, he sobbed and pleaded.

  And she had to run away or she’d be next.

  She closed her eyes and could see the hands reaching for her. “Really, guys. I’m not worth all this.”

  Kara ignored her. “Who exactly do you think you are? I was there in the beginning. Were you?”

  “There in the beginning,” Dehek answered. He crouched down too, a lazy movement, laced with scorn. “Do you think that makes you special?”

  “I think it makes me more than you, little warrior,” Kara said and lunged.

  Her claws flashed out and bit deep into Dehek’s skin. Sue saw it flake away from the wound. Maybe they really are made of stone, Sue thought, and shuddered.

  She couldn’t peel her eyes away. She’d felt like this once before, watching someone shove a young boy to the ground. The punches, the kicks, the blood—

  But now there was no blood. Only a small ooze of clear, thick ichor and the red light that his skin covered, now exposed. Like one of the streaks, only bigger and angrier and obviously painful.

  He lashed back at Kara, aiming at her belly, but she twisted away and the claws just grazed her. Sue saw faint lines of gold appear against her dark skin and winced.