Crux: A Sci-Fi Romance (The Jekh Saga Book 2)

by H. E. Trent

  “Yes. I’ll meet you inside in a moment.”

  The meet-shop was a store and gathering space where people in the small community connected and stocked up on necessities. The merchandise was heavily skewed toward the Terran populace with specialty goods tucked away for the Jekhans who tried to stay out of sight. Little Gitano hadn’t been conquered by the Terrans, like so many other places distant from the metropolitan areas, but had simply “had its curtains changed,” as Courtney tended to say.

  During the initial surge of Terran paratroopers, some deserters that had been working in Buinet fled to faraway Little Gitano. The townspeople took them in and, in turn, those soldiers and their few family members took over stewardship of the village. At first glance, they appeared to run the place. Their good acting jobs kept the Jekhans who lived in and around town safe. Many of the deserters had integrated into member households of the Jekhan Alliance rebel group, or operated farms like Trigrian’s that offered employment and shelter to anyone willing to put in the work. Everyone in the community was invested in keeping the secret.

  Too bad it has to be one.

  Headron took a moment to enjoy the sights of the main street, so bucolic compared to the artifice of Buinet. He then made his way through the racks of merchandise. He paused to fondle a soft-bristled brush with a smooth wooden handle. Erin had been using his brush, and he didn’t mind at all. He would have allowed her anything. She’d complained, however, that his brush didn’t do a good enough job of smoothing her hair. The bristles were too far apart. The criticism likely hadn’t been meant for him to hear, but he always listened when she talked, whether she whispered or shouted. He thought someone should.

  He left the brush on the display for further thought and walked to the back, left corner of the shop where the bulletin boards were mounted.

  The last time he’d been at the meet-shop, he’d seen an offer for matchmaking services. Such services weren’t unheard of on Jekh before the Terran invasion, but Headron never expected he’d needed to avail himself of one. If push came to shove and he absolutely needed to find either a male or female lover, he would have asked some family member to make a suitable introduction to a potential partner. Back in Buinet, he’d thought he’d had all the time in the world. The state of his hormones wasn’t nearly as chaotic as some older men he knew. He didn’t have the telltale signs of constant petty sicknesses. But, given Erin’s requirements for their union, he’d become sufficiently motivated to find an unattached man who’d suit both Headron’s exacting preferences, and who was also aggressive enough for a woman like Erin.

  “A needle in a haystack, as Owen might say,” he muttered.

  He scanned the multitude of fliers on the board, quickly dismissing irrelevant postings, and jerking at the shopkeeper Allan’s shout.

  “Headron Jiro, I know you didn’t come here without bread.”

  Damn.

  Headron yanked down an ad that looked promising and called back, “I’ve got some for you out in the truck. Cooled loaves and also some leavened dough that’s ready to be baked tonight.”

  “I’ll put out the sign, then, and let folks know it’s here. Whatever you’ve got’ll be gone in an hour, tops.”

  “I brought all I could. We’re still working on adding another oven at the farm. Because of the intermittent power outages there, I’ve only been able to fire up the larger one every other day. Perhaps the next time I come into town, I’ll have more for you.”

  “Damn sure hope so. I get tired of these folks asking why I’m holding out on them, when the truth is there just ain’t enough to go around. Hey!” At the sound of a commotion at the entryway, Allan hurried with his trusty shotgun to the shop doors.

  Due to past disturbances, Headron already knew the drill. He got down and out of sight.

  Owen rounded the perimeter of the store to Headron and peered out the side window.

  “Anything?” Headron asked.

  “I don’t think you need to worry. Looks like another fist fight between Terrans.”

  “Do you recognize both of the combatants?”

  Owen grunted and pulled his head back in. “Yeah, I recognize them, but not by name, you know? I know one for sure has been in Little Gitano for at least the decade. I think the other’s new.”

  “A refugee from the riots?”

  “Maybe so. Came from one of the other cities. What’s it called—the one that starts with L?”

  “Laho? That far west?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. I’m not sure what started the chaos there. Probably Terrans from Buinet stirring shit up.”

  “That would make sense.”

  “I’m hearing lots of stories about folks having a hard time getting with the program here. They expect things to be like they were in Buinet or wherever the hell they came from. They step out of line here with those bad habits they picked up, and the locals have to put them back in check.”

  “If they want to stay.”

  “Exactly.”

  Allan was extra incentivized to break up any commotions so that the parties who were just passing through town didn’t become suspicious about the nature of the hostilities they were witnessing. They couldn’t protect themselves from outsiders if they were so busy infighting.

  Headron let out a breath and folded the advertisement into his pocket. “I wish I could say that I’ll be glad when things have returned to normal, but it’s been so long since anyone of my age has seen normal, we likely wouldn’t recognize the condition.”

  Owen clapped his back and moved toward the hardware section where he’d come from. “That’s what you’re fighting for, isn’t it? To have something normal?”

  “Better than normal. The status quo needed improvement as well. We had much to learn from Terrans. Much to gain from kindling a relationship.”

  “Yeah, and there are plenty of things you should actively try not to learn from us.”

  Headron shrugged in concession and backtracked to the door.

  The fracas had been quieted and the crowd dispersed, but Headron pulled his hood up all the same as he approached the parked truck. Owen may have had more than a passing familiarity of all the faces in town, but Headron didn’t. For the time being, he preferred blending into the background of scenes—to go unnoticed.

  He unloaded boxes of fresh bread and pastries in the Jekhan styles that were universally tolerated, and also some Terran kinds he’d been experimenting with. He relied on Erin’s opinions on whether the latter were any good. Most Jekhans couldn’t easily digest wheat, and so he was, in a way, baking blind. He assumed the offerings were fine, given the way Erin was always waiting at the kitchen door with a cup of coffee every time he slid a tray of them into the oven.

  He loved seeing her standing there, smiling and so eager to sample. She was so respectful of what he could do. Not everyone was.

  As he pulled several crates of leavened dough out of the truck, he chuckled. He loved watching Erin eat. Her lack of inhibition with trying new foods and her appetite in general energized him. No matter how tired he was, when he watched her eat, he always wanted to get up and make something else—to ask, “How do you like this one, then?”

  His uncle had always told him to keep the first lover he could find who had a belly for unrefined things. Erin wasn’t a lover—yet—and she certainly wouldn’t be the first to tolerate his bread, but none had ever made him feel like a god for knowing how to leaven dough.

  He returned to the meet-shop with Allan on his heels.

  The other man had his gun propped against his shoulder, and was whistling a jaunty tune. “Ooh. Hold some of that bread aside for my wife, will ya? She always has a way of finding out that you were in town and I didn’t get any. She wears higher collars on her dresses if I don’t, and that ain’t right.”

  Headron laughed. “Are you sure she’s Jekhan? That sounds like Terran sass.”

  “Yep. Jekhan the last I checked, but around here, it’s hard to say who acts like whom. We�
��ve been squashed together for so long that nobody acts right. Let me go put out the sign. If you wait around a little while until the bread’s gone, I can get your credits tallied up today and you can take your crates home with you.”

  “That’s fine. Would you mind so much if I used your COM? The connection at the farm is still erratic. I’d like to see if my uncle has picked up any of my messages.”

  “Nope. Not at all. Pretty sure the booth’s unoccupied right now. Connection is open, so you shouldn’t have to queue a message. Instant in and out, thanks to those subversive little tweaks Mr. McGarry made for us.”

  “Yes, Owen has a knack for those sorts of repairs.”

  “I hardly know what to do with myself with the machine working all the time. I’ve actually got time on my hands.”

  “Isn’t time delicious?”

  “Hell yeah, it is. My kids don’t know what to do with me at home, either. They look at me like I’m a damn ghost if I’m home before seven.”

  Headron cleared out of the front of the shop before the masses could start piling in and snatching bread off the display. Given he was the only professional baker in the area, he preferred that people didn’t know when he was in town. There was a certain art to Jekhan bread most cooks didn’t have the skill for, but Headron had been practicing making it under his uncle’s tutelage since the age of seven. He could have certainly given out his recipes, but so much of the success of the product was in the handling of the dough, and the baker’s ability to discern changes to the sheen, the resiliency, the smell once the leaveners had completely activated.

  His uncle had always said that baking was about patience and experience, and few people possessed both. That was why Headron’s parents had given him to his uncle to raise. They’d been too young—a trio that wasn’t meant to last. They lacked patience and experience, and Uncle had wanted Headron to remain a Jiro. After all, someone had to make bread, and that was what Jiros did.

  Even functioning at its best, the meet-shop’s geriatric communications device was basically a collection of technological odds and ends that had been added onto since before the Terran insurgence on Jekh. Owen called the system at the farm “bootleg,” but the device at the meet-shop had to be a step backward from that—a functional pile of junk.

  Various wires and antennas jutted at haphazard angles from the back of the booth, and Owen had tacked up several hand-printed signs reading, “COM is calibrated. Please do not touch components.”

  Owen kept threatening to build a new one from scratch, but as he’d need to dismantle the existing device to reverse engineer it, Allan wasn’t ready to commit. Being able to acquire news from Buinet was too critical a need. They couldn’t have the most powerful piece of communications equipment in the area be out of order for days on end.

  Headron closed himself into the booth, rubbed his tired eyes, and then said a prayer as he tapped in his recipient code. He hadn’t had many messages in six months, but every time he got into town, he held out hope there’d be something for him from his uncle. They’d gotten separated and Uncle had never arrived at their rendezvous spot. Headron wasn’t ready to believe his dear uncle had perished.

  “One message,” the device said. “One week old. Text-only. View or transfer?”

  Headron sat up straighter and said, “View,” hopeful, only to sigh and slump when he read the message’s metadata. The missive had been sent as a mass communication to everyone in his second father’s family, many of which weren’t close relatives at all. Jekhan COM recipient codes were by default easy to predict as they all had similar structures. Even if a person didn’t know an exact address, computers could make a pretty good guess. If someone had been trying to get a message to Headron and had addressed it to his other family names—Headron Markel or Headron Kelrinth rather than Headron Jiro—he likely would have still gotten the message.

  He skimmed the words. The note was mostly directed to members of his second father’s family who lived on the southern continent. Useless to him. He did, though, highlight a section about a recent sighting of the Tyneali, and transferred just that part to his wrist computer, figuring Owen or Courtney might know what to do with such information.

  The Tyneali didn’t generally return often to the planets they seeded, but their Jekh experiment had been so unsuccessful that their ethics apparently compelled them to make allowances.

  Headron deleted the message from the server, pondered sending out one more message to his uncle, and then brushed the idea into his mental dustbin. If his uncle hadn’t responded to any of his previous messages, chances were slim he’d receive yet another. Headron needed to either think of something else or just give up, but he didn’t want to give up. Most Jekhans were far too eager to do just that, and he didn’t want to be like them. He wanted to be like Murk and Trigrian. They were men he could admire. They were men Erin admired.

  Given her wealth of options, he needed any advantage he could get.

  He returned to the front of the store and found Owen leaning against the wall at the end of the hallway, shaking his head.

  “What’s wrong?” Headron asked.

  “Bread’s gone. Your pastries almost caused another brawl.”

  “I’m not sure if being proud of such a thing is dignified, but I am proud.”

  “Maybe you should raise your prices.”

  “Oh, no. People have to have basic bread, at the very least. If people didn’t have cheap bread, they’d riot, and we certainly don’t need any new triggers for that.”

  “I still think you should raise your prices, but I’m not gonna argue with ya. You run your business your way, and I’ll just go fuck off.”

  Headron chuckled and moved to the counter to confirm Allan’s credits tally, the matchmaker flier crinkling in his pocket as he went.

  The vexing sound made his grin fall away.

  That chore was one of the reasons he’d visited town. He could have left a message for the matchmaker while he’d been at the COM, and he could even ask Owen to wait a few minutes while he returned.

  He wasn’t ready to, though.

  He didn’t want to share Erin. Not yet. He’d barely had her.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The way Erin bounded out of the main house to meet the returning truck made Esteben sick to his stomach.

  So he returns.

  Esteben let the curtain fall and retreated to the shadowy corner of his cottage so he didn’t have to watch her smiling at that mawkish baker.

  He pulled a comb through his knotted hair a few times, and then flung the damned tool across the room. “No one gives a damn.”

  If he scraped back what was left of the hair he’d shorn during one of his blackouts in Buinet, he might have been able to wear a braided knot as was traditional for Jekhan males. He doubted anyone really cared if he did, though. Still, growing his hair back had been a given. He respected his culture, in spite of its occasionally antiquated traditions. Jekhan men always grew long hair to attract mates. He simply no longer saw the point of keeping his mane so tidily maintained when there were only a few scant inches.

  “And for whom?” he muttered into the dark. “Certainly not Erin. She’s not Jekhan.”

  Nor did she seem to observe such things, when she bothered looking at him at all.

  He stared at the ceiling for a few idle minutes, wondering what interesting meal Courtney would deliver to him. He hoped she’d bring Kerry and let the child stay for a while.

  He snorted. “Doubtful.”

  He could read another book from the Terran database or perhaps study the trade conditions in Little Gitano—anything to be productive—but he couldn’t find the drive. Perhaps he was afflicted with holdover distractibility from the hormonal nosedive he’d been in for much of the previous decade. He didn’t know, but he couldn’t do anything until he cleared the roadblock out of his head.

  “Fuck.”

  He put on his shoes, tugged a clean tunic over his head, and left the cottage before he
could change his mind. As much as he preferred living on the fringes of the activity on the farm, he wasn’t going to sit idly by and watch that classless baker monopolize Erin’s time when she had better options.

  Esteben ignored Murk’s speculative look as he passed through the front door of the main house and scanned the gathering room for Erin.

  Most Jekhan country houses had similar configurations, and all had auditorium-style gathering spaces built to accommodate multi-generation families—men and children, mostly. Their women didn’t tend to lounge in shared spaces…but Erin wasn’t one of their women.

  She was seated on one of the low tier sofas with Courtney. Kerry sat between them, chewing a fist, looking from one woman to the other as they bantered, and the human woman Brenna leaned over the back of the seat, occasionally interjecting.

  There were other people in the space, but they were inconsequential and unworthy of itemization.

  Joining Esteben near the door, Murk cleared his throat. “If you’re wondering where your dinner is, the meal will be late tonight. Today was a market day. Headron needed the smaller oven earlier to finish up his batch.”

  The spoken name drew a long, sharp hiss through Esteben’s clenched teeth.

  Murk put himself between his brother and the rest of the room and folded his arms over his chest. “That was a very interesting reaction, and one I haven’t seen or heard since Mother mused about leaving our fathers for a younger man. Do you perhaps need another dose of Marscadrel? The drug is hard to come by in this province, but I could make some inquiries. Perhaps the doctor has means of acquiring an extra batch.”

  Esteben dragged his tongue across his dry lips and closed his eyes against the commotion in the room. Erin was, at most, ten steps away from him. He could be next to her, touching her, holding her—reminding her of the promise she’d made with that fruit earlier.

  “Esteben,” Murk whispered.

  “What?”

  “Are you well?”

  “Of course.”

  “Are you quite certain? You haven’t stepped foot into this house except by force in six months.”