by Lea Linnett
Lena spoke Levekk Trade with the same staccato intensity that most humans tended to mangle it with, and as she grew more excited, her speech quickened further. Where usually the accent would set his teeth on edge, suddenly it simply sounded… lively. Endearing even.
A bizarre warmth curled in his chest as he watched her speak, providing an appropriate nod or query whenever she paused for breath.
Before he knew it, the sun had set, and the forest began to darken around them.
As the light dimmed, they came across a shallow stream, and decided to stop for the day. Kormak wanted to push on, but when Lena pointed out that they could do with the water for the night, he relented.
“You want me to try this campfire thing?” Lena asked after picking out a flat bit of ground a few feet from the water and dropping her bag there.
Kormak wondered about the likelihood of anyone following them and seeing the smoke. They hadn’t seen anyone in a day or so. No Sweepers. And they were pretty far from the road…
“Sure.”
“Alright then. You fill up these guys while I sort out the fire,” she said, and handed him the four now-empty water bottles.
He did as he was told, glancing over his shoulder every now and then to watch Lena as she cleared all the leaves away from the flat patch and gathered together a few different kinds of wood and bracken.
She glanced up at him, almost looking apologetic. “You like digging?”
Kormak’s brow-plate dipped. “Not particularly.” But as Lena turned to frown at the ground in consternation, he found himself standing and moving over to her anyway. He touched the ground experimentally. The soil wasn’t soft, but it had enough yield that it would only take seconds to do what she asked.
So he dug his fingers in and scooped out a hunk of dirt, and in no time, they were looking at a shallow pit. Lena reached forward, tamping down the sides so they wouldn’t cave in so much. She made an impressed sound. “You made that look like butter. I would’ve been stuck here for half an hour if I was by myself.” She glanced up at him. “Thanks.”
“No problem.” He crossed over to the stream again, washing the dirt from his fingertips and getting back to filling up the remaining bottles.
He returned to find Lena assembling a complicated-looking set of instruments, and biting into the end of a stick. The miniature pair of scissors that she’d taken from the house lay abandoned beside her.
He blinked down at her. “What are you doing?”
She glanced up at him, the stick still in her mouth and her cheeks reddening. “I need to whittle back the end of this,” she said, removing the stick. “The scissors weren’t sharp enough for cutting through wood. I’m trying not to get the end too wet.”
“Right.” He sat down across from her, placing the water bottles back in their bag. He turned back to see her pulling a strip off the stick with her teeth, revealing the creamy white of the wood grain beneath.
Seeming satisfied, she wiped the end of the stick with a corner of her jumpsuit and placed it beside her. “So this,” she said, gesturing at it, “has to go into this.” She pointed at the lump of wood between them, and grabbed up the pair of scissors again. “So I need to make a notch in this one.” She pulled the lump of wood closer, taking one deep breath before plunging the closed scissors into the grain. A small dent opened up in the wood, but when she drew the scissors back, the blades were bent and blunted.
Lena scowled at the tool, swearing under her breath.
“Need help with that?” Kormak found himself asking. He leaned forward, examining the thickness of the wood. He held up one keratinous fingertip. “I can do it.”
Lena’s eyes lit up, but her nod was subdued, as if she feared she might scare him off if she showed too much excitement. “Sure. Make it just big enough to fit the stick into but tight enough for friction.”
He picked up the wood, digging his fingertip in and parting the grain. It felt a little strange, using his body for a practical task that didn’t involve maiming someone, but he didn’t mind it. Lena busied herself with piling wood into the fire pit, covering it with dry leaves and other flammable items.
She then began unlacing one of her shoes, and Kormak looked on with interest. Once the shoelace was free, she tied it around both ends of another stick she had lying next to her, creating what looked like an archer’s bow.
When Kormak finished whittling a hole into the larger piece of wood, she took it from him, twisting her de-gloved stick into the now-taut shoelace and fitting the stripped end into the hole. “Could you pass me that rock?” she said, pointing behind him. She also packed some light, dry tinder around the hole.
With all the pieces put together—one hand on the strange, bow-like instrument and the other pressing the rock down onto the whittled stick—she began to twist. It was a repetitive motion, but as he watched, Kormak began to understand how it was meant to work. The bow-string twisted the whittled stick, which pressed down into the larger hunk of wood and lit up the tinder, which she could then move to the fire pit.
“Where the hell did you learn how to do this?” he asked.
“My dad taught me,” she said, shoulders shrugging even as she worked.
“It’s so complicated.”
She chuckled. “He said it was the easiest way to do it when you didn’t have any equipment. Sure, you could use a magnifying glass or flint or something, but what happens in an emergency when you don’t have that stuff? He made me practice this so many times…” She rolled her eyes at the memory, smiling, and Kormak looked away.
He watched her work in silence, and after a few minutes, a small lick of flame took to the kindling, burning brightly and letting off a tiny stream of smoke. Looking around, he realized it was almost dark, the last rays of sunlight having well and truly slipped behind the trees.
The flame was small, and only gave off a sliver of heat, but he found himself thankful for the light all the same.
He studied the girl as she rooted around in her backpack for food. The firelight flickered orange over her skin, giving it a softer glow than the harsh fluorescents of Kharon or the desert sun. It bleached her gold, Dust-ridden fingertips of their sheen, leaving her skin unmarked.
“Could I…?” He paused, not sure what he was asking, but finding his arm already reaching out towards her. Lena looked up at him with big eyes, keeping herself out of reach, and Kormak blinked. “…Could I see your hand?” he finished, remembering himself.
Lena looked nervous, but after a moment’s hesitation she shuffled closer, offering one hand.
Kormak brought it close to his face, eyes sharpening in on her skin. He could just see it, the faint, blotchy dusting of gold speckles that encased her fingers from the final knuckle all the way to the tip. This close, the marks caught the light ever so slightly when he turned her hand, and Kormak couldn’t help but think they looked strangely beautiful.
“Do you hide these?” he asked, voice soft.
Lena looked up at him, her eyes wide and her mouth parted. “Couldn’t in prison. And at home? No point.”
He drew one bony claw down the pad of her finger, marveling at how the soft skin moved beneath the blunted point. “Good,” he murmured, barely even aware of it.
“Good?” Lena asked, her voice cracking slightly. The noise brought Kormak back to himself and he let go of her hand, his eyes wide.
They both leaned back slightly, blinking at each other.
“Yeah,” he finally managed. “It’s a part of you.”
“Like your scar?” she asked, and clamped her lips together. She seemed to have a habit of blurting out questions.
But Kormak found that he didn’t mind. He reached up, itching gently at the scar tissue that adorned his left cheek. “It was a farewell present. From my father.”
Lena’s brow furrowed, the strange little shafts of hair drawing closer in dismay. “Y-your father did that?”
He met her gaze, and her blue eyes looked fathomless in the firelight.
“He had a lot of expectations for me. I refused to meet them, so he disowned me.”
He could remember it vividly even now: his father standing in the front hall of their house, his hand raising, the shocking pain when claws split his cheek open like paper.
“What expectations?” Lena asked fiercely, and Kormak blinked up at her in surprise.
“My father’s a Kerfaan—it’s like a general—in Earth’s branch of the military. My family has generations of service to the Constellation built up, and no child of his was going to mar that glowing reputation.” He frowned as he said the words, echoing almost verbatim from his father’s mouth.
Lena blinked at him curiously, her jaw falling open.
“What?”
Her mouth snapped shut. “I, uh… Sorry. You called it ‘Earth’. I thought only humans did that.”
Kormak hesitated, unsure how to reply. “Must have picked it up at Kharon.”
More like you picked it up from Malcolm.
Kormak’s lips thinned.
“So your father wanted you to be a soldier?”
He nodded, relieved to be freed from his thoughts. “Yeah. He groomed me and my sister from an early age for military life, but I hated it. I told him I wouldn’t be joining a few days before I was scheduled to be shipped off for training. That was the last time I saw him. Or my sister.”
“You have a sister?” Lena asked, voice hushed.
“Yeah…” When she leaned forward, obviously interested, he forced himself to continue. “She was better at toeing the line than me. Went on to have an illustrious career from what I heard.”
Lena’s eyes softened. “At least she’s safe. Have you spoken to her since you left?”
“Just once.” He was content to leave it there, but the little human’s eyes were wide and sympathetic. “She sent me mail a few weeks after I was thrown into Kharon.”
“What did she say?”
He heaved a breath. “That she was sorry she hadn’t reached out sooner. She seemed to think she could have helped.” He paused, the image of that callused, human hand reaching down and pulling him from the gutter rising unbidden in his mind. “She couldn’t have.”
A hand suddenly found his, squeezing his fingers tightly. He gazed up at Lena with wide eyes but she didn’t let go. She was staring, her face the picture of human sympathy, but somehow the look didn’t make him feel small, or pitied. It washed over him gently, and her hand warmed him as if he were cradling a small flame in his fingers.
He cleared his throat, looking down at the fire. “My point, I think, was that my father gave me this scar as a punishment. He thought it would mark me as something wrong—like how he saw me.” He turned his gaze to hers. “But he was wrong. This scar”—he tapped it lightly—“is proof that shitty stuff has happened to me, sure. But it’s also proof that I survived it.”
He turned his hand in hers, squeezing it briefly. “Those marks don’t mean you’re stuck in a box. They don’t have to get bigger. They mean you worked your ass off.”
He gazed at her for one long moment while she stared back at him, stunned. After a while, he dropped her hand, feeling suddenly self-conscious.
“Thank you,” Lena finally murmured. She was inspecting her fingers, watching the light play over them with a pensive expression.
They didn’t talk any more that night, both content to sit by the fire and let the quiet of the forest wash over them.
9
Lena woke early the next day, just before dawn. The fire had long since stopped glowing, and the chill had well and truly set in.
She grit her teeth against it, resisting the urge to hunker down and shut her eyes again. Instead, she rose quietly, stretching her hands up towards the sky and letting them fall lank at her side.
It had been four days since they escaped Kharon. Which meant more than four days since she’d last got to see the inside of a cleansing unit. She could feel her jumpsuit clinging in all the wrong places as she moved, could feel the oiliness in her hair when she reached up to run a hand through it. She grimaced. The idea of walking for however-many-more days in this condition made her cringe.
So she crept away from the makeshift camp. As she walked, Kormak’s words from the night before came back to her, and she glanced down at her fingers. The forest was still quite dark, and it masked the golden speckles that adorned the tips.
Despite the anguish the marks caused her, she’d never felt the need to hide them. She hadn’t left the Manufacturing District since before her parents died, after all, and any humans around her usually sported the same or worse. They became unusual in prison, but by then it was too late—everyone knew the ‘Duster Girl’. She’d always seen the marks as something that damned her—an inescapable symbol of her situation—and she’d learned to live with that symbol. Working in Manufacturing was her life. Even now, she was simply trying to get back to it.
But she couldn’t go back to it, could she? She’d known that already, but after speaking with Kormak, the idea was finally starting to sink in. She was an escaped criminal now. Enforcers would be knocking down her door in no time if they got wind of her, and there were plenty of neighbors and ex-colleagues who wouldn’t hesitate to turn her in for extra credits. She would have to pass through her old home—picking up Ellie was non-negotiable—but once they were together again, what would her future hold?
She could go absolutely anywhere, and everywhere she went, people would know she was a Duster. She brushed her fingers down her jumpsuit, as if she could wipe the golden stains away.
Those marks don’t mean you’re stuck in a box…
Lena bit her lip. Could Kormak be right? Could she make a life outside of the Manufacturing District?
Shaking her head, she set out into the early morning gloom again. It was too much to think about at the moment.
She moved a short distance downriver until she found a slight bend in the stream. A couple of large rocks lay where the river met the bank, shielding the waters beyond from the campsite. After that, the stream widened out, creating a deeper section in the center.
She shivered, body already anticipating the shock of the cold water, but she blew out a steadying breath, her brow furrowing. Before she could second-guess herself further, she slipped off her sneakers—one of which almost fell off thanks to its shoelace being surrendered as a fire-making tool the night before—and unbuttoned her jumpsuit. She let it pool around her feet, her jaw setting with discomfort as she stripped. Fending off her embarrassment, she unhooked the plain, cloth bra that had been standard-issue from Kharon and slipped it off, her panties following suit.
Standing naked in the middle of the forest, she felt a thrill of nervousness. But then she looked at the water again, and thought about what it would feel like to be clean again, and stepped forward into the stream with newfound determination.
She hissed as she made contact with the freezing cold water. It bit into her ankles, icy claws grasping their way up her legs as she stepped further into the stream.
It was deeper here, but not by much. Even in the middle of the river, the water only reached just above her knee. But it was enough.
She crouched, whimpering slightly as more of her body was enveloped in cold. She couldn’t relax for long. Even though the prickly pain plateaued after a certain point, it was still uncomfortable, and she forced herself to start washing, wishing fleetingly for the industrial cleansing units back at Kharon.
But then she frowned at herself, remembering the way the strange chem-showers left her skin feeling sticky and dry. Maybe the river was better after all.
Dipping her hands into the water, she rubbed them back and forth over the skin of her legs and feet. Moving up her body, she washed her stomach, back, arms and all the nooks and crannies on the way.
She hadn’t bathed since before she went into Iso. The thought pained her, but not as much as the realization that she’d have to dunk her head into the stream at some point, and it was going to suck.
> As she bathed, she felt thankful for the layer of darkness still covering the world. Even with the forest seemingly empty, the idea of being nude and on display made her antsy. She hoped the darkness would be enough to hide her, giving her a few extra moments to duck out of view if anyone did happen to pass by.
Except Kormak, maybe. When they’d spoken two nights earlier, after the first day of walking, he’d had no trouble picking her out in the dark. Lena couldn’t see more than two paces in front of her, but up close, she could tell from his mannerisms and the way his eyes glinted in the moonlight that he could see a hell of a lot better than she could at night.
She gulped. He could potentially round the corner at any minute and see everything she had on display. Her cheeks flushed and she cursed herself under her breath.
It was stupid to think about that. The alien had made no effort to disguise his hatred for humans. One glance at her body would be enough to make him turn away, hissing with disgust. She knew she wasn’t ugly, but what draw could she possibly have for a levekk when they were hard-wired to appreciate the tough, toned bodies of their own females?
But he’d held her hand.
Well, inspected it. She still wasn’t sure why she’d accepted his request. It had come out of nowhere. But as he held her hand in his hard fingers, scraping his claw down the center, Lena had found it hard to breathe. Some of it was the fear—it was hard to feel entirely at ease when a huge alien had you in its grasp—but there was something else. His touch had been delicate, almost like a caress, and once that thought intruded into her head, she’d barely been able to think of anything else.
He couldn’t be interested, though. Even if he was, she knew the consequences that could rain down on them if they did anything about it. Workers in the Manufacturing District didn’t exactly get an education in law, but everyone knew that levekk weren’t meant to fraternize with sub-species.