by Zara Zenia
Kay stood in front of another Ra'hom. The stranger was a little taller, with deep scarlet skin and white mackerel stripes. They glared at each other with open hostility. The red Ra'hom offered his arms to Kay for the same intimate greeting Kay had shown everyone else. Kay held stubbornly still, refusing him.
"Come now, old friend," the red Ra'hom said. It was the first time this evening the translator had changed anything any of the guests had said into English, and it caught Jewel off guard. She leaned closer curiously. "Have you been isolated so long that you have forgotten common manners? You cannot pretend you are not touch-starved. Or are the rumors true that you have been taking comfort from your clever new pet?"
Kay's eyes narrowed and his tentacles bristled. Jewel was suddenly quite sure she was about to see a fight break out. Another Ra'hom quickly stepped between the two men, saying something the translator wouldn't catch. The third Ra'hom stroked Kay's arms and patted his cheek, smoothing down his hair. Someone else was doing the same for the red one. The two were separated, and Kay, politely excusing himself, hurried back behind the curtains to where Jewel was hiding. She yelped in surprise as, without a word of greeting, he snatched her up and held her close, burying his face in her hair. She hugged him back, running a hand over his tentacles as the other Ra'hom had done.
"What was that about?" she asked when he seemed to have calmed down and loosened his grip a little.
"You may recall," he said, still nuzzling her throat, "the inciting incident of the war I mentioned?"
"Some guy tried to kill you, you killed him first, and he turned out to be important?"
"Yes," Kay confirmed. "That Ra'hom was the failed assassin's hatch mate."
Jewel vaguely remembered Kay's lessons on Ra'hom biology. Of the hundreds of eggs produced when Ra'hom mated, only two ever made it to maturity. The connection between hatch mates was meant to be unbreakable, something like the way humans regarded twins.
"Oh," she said.
"It was he who goaded his hatch mate into attacking me, knowing he would die and trigger a war, for his own political gain."
"Oh." Jewel was abruptly much less sympathetic.
"I did not expect him to be here," Kay said. "I did not expect him to have ascended to the Peritas when his part in the instigation of the war was known. I should have guessed he would continue to climb. It is all he cares about. But still, to face me here, to gloat after what he caused . . ."
"He's a giant dick hole," Jewel provided.
"Indeed," Kay said with a firm nod.
"So the party looks like it's going well so far," Jewel said after a moment. Kay sighed and began to extricate himself from her long coppery hair.
"It is," he said. "Everyone is most excited for the demonstration."
"Why isn't the translator working on them?" Jewel asked. "I could hear the dick hole guy, but everyone else just sounds like they're speaking Ra'hom."
"The translator is only calibrated to my cultural language group," Kay explained. "Which none of the Peritas speak because—"
"Because no one from your cultural group has ever been elevated. I remember," Jewel said with a nod.
"Although the 'dick hole', which is to say the Perita Occidens, has apparently learned it," Kay said bitterly. "Presumably, the better to mock me. Anyway, the translator could not accurately translate a language as different and as little understood as yours to such a large group of people. I will have to translate for you."
"I guess that makes sense," Jewel admitted, though she didn't like it. "Will I need to do the touching thing too? We didn't go over that during the etiquette training. I'm not sure I want to be cuddling all these people."
"No, of course not." Kay chuckled. He looked like he felt better as he set her down. "I doubt most of them would even allow it. You are not even to touch me if they can see it, understood?"
"Oh," Jewel said, uneasy. "Okay. Understood."
"Then it is time to begin," he said. "Are you ready?"
"I think so," she said, taking a deep breath. He straightened her outfit like a fussy parent, frowning.
"You'll do fine," he assured her, slipping easily back into the calm, aloof persona that seemed to be his default. He stepped through the curtains, and raising a hand, he silenced the crowd. Then he gestured for Jewel to follow him.
Chapter 12
As Jewel stepped out from behind the curtain, she heard an audible gasp run through the guests, followed by a ripple of murmured conversation. She felt their eyes on her, uncomfortably tangible. She felt a cold sweat starting between her shoulder blades.
"Say hello," Kay prompted her.
"Um, good evening, everyone," she said, wondering why she was bothering when they wouldn't be able to understand her anyway. Kay said something, presumably translating, and the crowd answered with the high rolling noise she'd come to recognize from Kay as laughter. She frowned.
"We will begin with basic math," Kay said to her, then he said something in another Ra'homi dialect to the crowd.
He'd set up a screen on the stage with a handful of basic math problems. Two plus two equals four sorts of things. The only difficulty for Jewel was that she'd had to learn the Ra'homi numbering system, which was in base eight and used different symbols from the ones she was used to.
Doing the problems with Earth-standard numbers would have been meaningless to the observing Perita. She might as well have been scribbling gibberish for all they knew. So she'd spent a month learning a whole new numbering system. Or trying to anyway. She licked her lips, staring up at the screen and trying to remember which symbol meant which number.
"Kay," she muttered. "I can't remember what four looks like."
He didn't answer, watching the crowd. Of course not. He couldn't look like he was helping her. Jewel frowned, feeling like an idiot, and wrote down what she thought was the right answer. Laughter erupted from the crowd as she stepped aside, and she felt her face turn red with embarrassment.
Kay cleared his throat and gestured to the number she'd written. Holding his hands behind his back where the crowd couldn't see them, he held up two fingers. Jewel, cringing at her own stupidity, quickly erased the wrong number and wrote in the correct one. The crowd applauded, still giggling at her mistake.
"It is fine," Kay said, smiling at the crowd rather than her. "Let us try again."
He summoned the next problem onto the board and Jewel faced it down with growing worry. They were supposed to ascend in difficulty with each one. With each one, she struggled more. She was nearly in tears by the fifth problem.
"I don't know," she whispered to Kay, her hands shaking. "I can't remember what any of the symbols mean. I'm sorry."
"Just write something down," Kay muttered. "Anything."
Jewel, frustrated and upset, wrote a big fat sixty-nine in human numbers. She was the only one in this galaxy who would get the joke, but the crowd laughed anyway.
"Let us move on to language," Kay said, repeating the same in Ra'homi.
"I can't, Kay," Jewel begged. "I'm still—God, I need a minute, okay?"
She was too flustered from the math, her face red and her temper hot under the surface.
"We do not have a minute," Kay told her sternly. "We have gone over this every day for weeks. You can do it. Now, the Ballad of Red Hill."
Jewel took a deep breath and tried to remember the Ra'homi words to the poem Kay had taught her. The syllables were nearly impossible to pronounce for a human mouth. She couldn't purr or chirp the way he could. She did her best, rolling r's in place of purrs and whistling for the chirps, but by the time she was a few words in, the Peritas were laughing again. By the end of the first few lines, they were practically rolling in their seats. She was a talking parrot reciting mangled Shakespeare. Her recitation petered out among the peals of alien laughter.
"Kay, I want to stop," she said, shoulders shaking with suppressed anger and humiliation.
"Nonsense," Kay said without looking at her, waving to the guests. "You'
re doing fine. We keep going."
He brought out the skill tests, Hanoi's tower and simple puzzles, and set them up in front of her and the audience, ignoring her glares and her stiff, unhappy posture. She fought the urge to flip the table into the audience.
"Begin," he said, stepping away from the puzzles.
"Kay," Jewel warned him. Her hands were shaking and her vision was blurred with tears.
"We are almost done," Kay said. "It is just this and the dance. Then we can go for a run. You like those."
"Kay, they're laughing at me." Jewel stared at him, pleading with him to understand.
"It is good," Kay insisted. "They are having a good time. Just relax and get it over with."
Jewel gritted her teeth, took a deep breath, and started solving puzzles. These, at least, she knew how to do. She didn't have to learn a new language or solve math problems with alien symbols instead of numbers. Hanoi's tower was the same in any language. Except she was struggling to focus, her hands shaking, and every time her hand slipped, the audience would snicker in amusement, like it was all part of some hilarious show. She couldn't seem to remember the right steps to the tower, her thoughts fuzzy.
"Shit!" she swore as the largest disk slipped out of her fingers and rolled off the edge of the table and away into the audience. She hid her face in her hands as the assembled Ra'hom laughed and scrambled to catch the disc for a souvenir.
"Just move on to the next one," Kay said. "It is fine. Just keep going."
She lunged for him suddenly, grabbing him by the front of his robes and dragging him down to face her. She bared her teeth at him as her anger flared, wanting to hit him, to scream, to do anything but stand here solving these stupid puzzles in front of these horrible people a minute longer.
"I want," she said through gritted teeth, "to stop."
The audience had fallen silent with a gasp. Even Kay seemed momentarily surprised, then angry. She could see the flicker of feral challenge in his eyes that was always there when they sparred during and after their runs. He showed his teeth as well, larger and sharper than hers, and pushed his face closer, eye to eye with her, forcing her back. A dominance display, she realized, for the benefit of the crowd. It made her want to hit him more.
"We will move on to the dance," he said, surprising her. "It is almost over. Just hold it together a little longer. Do you trust me or not?"
She held on for a moment more, wanting so much to fight, but finally, she snarled and let him go. He rolled the table with the puzzles out of the way while the audience murmured in confusion. Jewel stood in the center of the stage, taking deep breaths. She could do this. It was almost over. She trusted Kay. He came out to stand beside her. He gave no explanation to the crowd and the sound of surprised whispers echoed through the room as he took her by the shoulder, turning her to face him, and cued the computer to begin playing the music.
It was pitched as low as all other Ra'homi music but it was far more percussion heavy. Sharp-edged and martial, almost tribal. The low drums vibrated on her skin and in the soles of her feet, the beat of a racing heart, then suddenly crashing like thunder. But the music wasn't what she was paying attention to. The steps she’d learned weren't set to it, but to Kay's motions. He moved toward her and she mirrored him, following the steps he'd taught her. She was still breathing heavily, keenly aware of the eyes watching her.
"Ignore them," Kay ordered. "Look at me. Look only at me."
She still wanted to hit him. She narrowed her eyes and did as he said, focusing on him, on her slowly simmering anger. Her steps were too sharp, sliding back and toward him not with the grace and romance they'd had during practice, but with claws out, like barely restrained blows. He moved to match her. What had once been gentle touches, gliding strokes just an inch above her skin, were now dodged blows. They weren't dancing but sparring, shadowboxing each other with practiced strikes that slid past one another but never landed.
Jewel's heart accelerated to match the beat of the drums. She wanted the blow to land. She didn't care if it was hers or his. She wanted contact, to pull him down in a grapple, to feel his teeth in her skin, to hold back nothing. She could see the fire in his eyes, the feral hunger, the same she saw when he pinned her to the ground after a successful hunt. The same honest need she saw when they were alone at night. He wanted to end this, to carry her off the stage and tear into her. But instead, they circled one another to the sound of the drums, almost touching, almost loving, almost fighting, before the eyes of the watching Peritas.
The murmuring had fallen silent as they danced, the people watching enraptured as the Ra'hom and his alien moved in perfect sync, with grace and with rage. They hunted one another across the stage, trading places, predator and prey, rivals in combat, until Jewel stepped wrong, moving back when she should have moved left, and Kay lunged, teeth bared, his arms around her. She bent back away from his teeth, her eyes wide, her skin flushed, her heart racing, as he stopped bare centimeters from her. He'd broken the inch of distance they were meant to maintain.
Though he still wasn't touching her, he was so close she could feel the heat of his skin, his breath against her throat where his teeth so nearly rested. All at once, her anger left her. He'd beaten her. Now she wanted her reward. He moved, and she moved with him, stepping back as he moved forward, back into the dance, her movements softened now, yielding to him as he moved her. She'd forgotten the crowd entirely. There was only him and how much she wanted him, wanted his touch. Nothing else mattered. As the dance ended, she caught his hands where they hovered an inch above her and pushed them closer, bringing them down to her skin. She saw his eyes light with desire. She leaned up to kiss him, but his hand on her shoulder stopped her.
Blinking, she realized the music had stopped. The audience was applauding.
She stepped away from him and together, they faced the crowd.
Kay said something in Ra'hom and the applause increased. He stepped down off the stage into the crowd and offered her a hand to follow him. Jewel's instinct was to leave immediately, but she took his hand anyway, stepping down next to him. As the applause stopped, the audience began to shower Kay with questions. At first, they'd left a wide ring around Kay and Jewel, but as he began answering questions, they moved in closer. One group of three edged closer than the rest. Two seemed to be egging the third one on. Jewel watched them suspiciously until the third stepped closer and slowly stretched out its arm toward Jewel.
She frowned, then winced as it patted her quickly and a little too roughly on the head. It withdrew its arm quickly, as though afraid she would bite, then laughed, exhilarated, raising its tentacles in a preening gesture in front of its impressed friends. The others came closer next, and Jewel held awkwardly still as they touched her hair, these strangers crowding her personal space with their inappropriately intimate gestures. She glanced at Kay, but he wasn't looking at her, busy answering questions. One of them grabbed her hand, feeling the skin of her arm curiously as though puzzled by the texture. They patted her head and shoulders, laughing, towering over her. Jewel felt her anxiety rising.
"Kay," she called as nonchalantly as she could manage.
"Let them explore," Kay said casually. "This is a good opportunity for them to learn about you."
One of them took her jaw, turning her head to look at her ears, and she jerked away, offended. They laughed. One was crouched to examine her legs, fingers grazing the back of her knee. She flinched, trying to back away from the touch.
"Kay," she said again with a nervous laugh. "Seriously. I think some of these guys are getting the wrong idea."
"Don't be silly," Kay said, still not looking. "It's not as though you're Ra'hom."
Jewel froze. She heard Ra'hom, but the telepathic doubling translated the words as 'a person'.
One of the Ra'hom was pushing up her dress to look beneath it. The brittle material of Jewel's tolerance abruptly snapped.
"STOP!" she shouted and slapped the offending hand. The Ra'hom scram
bled backward as though she'd bitten him, shocked, and to Jewel's surprise, afraid. The other Ra'hom backed away as well, looking at her like she was a wild animal. Which was all she was to them, she was beginning to realize. And all she'd ever been to Kay either.
She ran, the crowd parting before her like the Red Sea. Kay shouted after her, but she didn't listen, and he didn't follow.
Chapter 13
She ran all the way back to the Earth habitat, across the meadow to the house Kay had built for her. A dollhouse in a zoo exhibit. A dog house for a favored pet. She still had the branch she’d broken off one of the trees that first day, leaning against the wall near the front door. She grabbed it as she stormed inside, slamming the door so hard the glass panes cracked.
She snatched a vase off the table and hurled it at the floor, watching it shatter into a thousand beautiful blue and white pieces amid the water and the ruin of the flowers that it had once contained. She swung the branch at the rest of the dishes in the cabinet, at anything breakable, wishing she could tear this whole damn place down. She stepped on a shard of glass and swore, stumbling back against the table to remove it from her foot. She threw it angrily, to be stepped on again later, but the urge to smash things had passed.
She didn't want to lie in the bed she'd shared with him. She didn't even want to look at it. She sat under the kitchen table instead, feeling all the more like the family dog.
She hadn't cried since that first awful day here, but she did now, messy, inelegant sobbing, her nose running and her face blotched. She'd never felt so humiliated in her life. And Kay . . . Kay, whom she cared about, Kay, whom she thought she had maybe even loved, thought she wasn't a person.
She mostly cried herself out by the time she heard a knock on the door. She curled up tighter, assuming it was Kay and determined to ignore him. If he wanted to scold her for making a scene, even if he wanted to apologize, he would just have to wait until tomorrow.