Two Moons of Sera

by Tyler, Pavarti K.

  What did it mean to be Matched? What was this thing everyone assumed Tor and I shared? I had seen Elle and Sal, the way they looked at each other, the way they touched, and I wondered what it would be like to touch Tor.

  Tentatively, I rested my hand on his chest. His breathing remained steady, and I could feel the heat of him radiating through his clothes. The tight shirt clung to his body, revealing the definition of his muscles, the ones that had shone in the sun as he’d bathed outside the cave. But then, I’d turned away, embarrassed by my desire to look. Now he was asleep, and no one but Elgon would know how the rise of his chest and slope of his neck enticed me.

  I traced along the neckline of his shirt, allowing my fingers to skim his flesh. The roughness of his hands didn’t reflect the natural texture of his skin. He was so soft. As I ran my fingertips along his neck and jaw, the smoothness called to me. Leaning closer I brought my face to his neck, inhaling another distinct fragrance.

  All Erdlanders smelled different, but there was something that connected them, made them the same. Tor had a hint of that, but there was another scent which set him apart. Whatever it was, it spread through the heat of his skin, within me, until its flames licked at my sanity.

  The tingling of my nerves, the allure of his scent, combined with the thrill of all the newness around me, made me bold. Everywhere my body made contact with him felt alive, inflamed. I moved closer, my breasts against his side, my leg draped over his hip.

  With a breath, I banished my insecurity and all the rules I’d been taught, and traced the hair on his face, my eyes transfixed on his shape. He exhaled shakily but didn’t move. Asleep or awake, I no longer cared. I needed more.

  His scent was stronger where his jaw line met his neck, and I leaned in, inhaling. I took as much of his smell into myself as I could.

  A low rumble came from Tor.

  “Sera,” he whispered, pulling me closer.

  Being face to face, with his chest pushed against mine, drove me out of my mind. Nothing about being this close to him made sense. The fever burning inside my body was unsafe.

  My hand was still on his face, and I brought the other to his cheek.

  When his lips touched mine, I forgot to breathe. Every piece of me awoke—my heart, my soul, my body. All it took was Tor’s gentle touch. He knew exactly what I was. Knew the danger of being with me, of even knowing me, and risked it all just to share one tentative kiss.

  Breaking our contact, he stared at me with desire.

  “You are beautiful,” he whispered.

  I looked away, hating the difference in me.

  “Don’t.” He lifted a hand to my chin, pulling my attention back to him. “They’re exquisite.”

  “They’re Fishy,” I admitted, dropping my arms from around his neck.

  This time, when I looked away, he let me go. The reality of what I was proved too much. Even for the man who could start fires, I was too much of a freak for him to hold onto.

  He lay next to me, impossibly close, yet not close enough.

  He watched as my tears tried to fall, but I kept the membrane in place, trapping them. I didn’t want him to see just how different I really was.

  “Sera, it’s okay. You can cry.”

  “It’s not that.” I sniffled.

  “What?”

  “I don’t want you to see.”

  “See what?”

  I turned back to him and took a leap, trusting that maybe we weren’t that different after all. I lifted the membrane covering my eyes, letting him see me without the barrier for the first time. My tears fell as my silver eyes shone free in the morning light.

  18

  Linguistics was located in one of many tall, gray buildings. Row after row filled the sky until the abyss of the camp disoriented me.

  Lock and I rode a platform through a chamber deep below the building. Speeding through space, I had no idea how far we had gone, but the air was cool and moist. It felt so good against my dry skin. I’d never gone this long without being in the water before.

  The chamber ended in a dimly lit hallway, stretching out before us and into blackness. Lock strode forward, silence surrounding him, and I ran my hand along the wall, absorbing any moisture lingering on the surface.

  Lock wasn’t speaking to me. He kept his eyes ahead and maintained a distant demeanor. This morning when Ada came to the pod, Lock had been friendly, his usual self. Then, she asked to speak with him privately. They disappeared into his room and a few moments later she returned alone. Since then he hadn’t been quite the same.

  I was desperate to ask so many things, but my mind swirled with the threat of discovery. Tor and Elgon had gone with Ada to Agro. Ada said they wouldn’t return until dinner—much later than other assignments—because it was his first day, and he needed to be trained. I didn’t like being without him. I was just getting to know him. Together, we were safer.

  The lights above us flickered as we walked.

  “Sera,” Lock said under his breath.

  I nodded, not looking at him and keeping the appearance of disinterest. Inside, I was shaking. Waiting had never been a strong suit for me. I never liked waiting for Mother to return from her adventures, for my food to cook, for anything. It seemed my whole life was based on having to wait for the next thing to happen, and I hated it. Mother had always told me stillness was the fastest way to get to where you were going. I still had no idea what she meant.

  “I told Ada you were fluent in Sualwet. That’s correct, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t be surprised if that gets you attention. Not many of us are fluent. It’s a clumsy language, and we tend to stumble. But I figured it was easier for you to be good at it already than to feign ignorance.”

  “Thank you.” I inhaled sharply and bit my tongue. I listened to his broken, guttural words as he insulted my native language. Clumsy! The Sualwets didn’t do anything clumsily! They wouldn’t know how.

  “Today you’ll be tested,” he said. “Tomorrow you’ll be assigned a project, and then you’ll get to work.”

  “Tested?”

  “Don’t worry. It’ll just be on your comprehension and language skills. This isn’t Medical. Try not to get everything right.” Eyes on the next patch of light, he hedged before saying, “I am right about you, aren’t I?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to know,” I answered, unsure if I could utter the words out loud. How would I phrase it? I’m half one of you and half your enemy? That seventeen years ago, someone in a basement just like this one had tortured and experimented on my mother? And I was the result?

  “No, I guess I don’t.”

  “What about you? Where will you be?”

  “Me?” Lock’s pace slowed for a moment before he responded. “I’ll be here for another week, helping you get settled, and then I’m being transferred.”

  “What? Where?” My voice was high and squeaked in my attempt to remain quiet. The sound bounced off the walls, reminding me that everything we said had the potential to be overheard. The panic of being alone built higher, threatening to crest the dam of my courage.

  “Shhh. I’m going to Life Services, like Ada. I guess they finally gave up on finding me a Match.”

  “Why? You could Match. Even if they don’t find you one, right? A natural Match?”

  “But I don’t want to. Even with the meds I didn’t want to, and since I’ve stopped taking them....” Lock’s eyes remained trained on the expanse ahead of us, but I couldn’t look away from his face. It was well masked, but the lines of pain were as clear as the hardness of his jaw.

  “I don’t understand. What do the meds do?”

  “You really have no idea, do you?”

  “No. Why don’t you take them? Why did you say Tor and I shouldn’t?”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” he spat under his breath before shaking his head and glancing over to
me at last. “I’m sorry. You have someone. It was even natural. That’s a good thing. I’m just not destined to have that. I don’t even want to, really. I guess I knew this was coming, I’d just hoped—”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. The door up on the right is Testing. Come on.”

  Past the next patch of darkness, Lock stopped and faced a blank wall. After placing his palm on the surface, he pushed his fingers into it. They sank and grabbed the circle that had appeared where his hand was. He twisted and turned it to the right. When he reached a quarter turn, he stopped and gave me a weak smile, his features softening, before he pushed in farther. A section slid back and to the side, revealing a brightly lit white room.

  The glare blinded me as I adjusted to the contrast from the hall. The room we entered was small and had only a couch along one wall.

  “Sera, you sit there. Someone will be here to take you in soon.”

  “What?” I blinked and turned to Lock. “You’re leaving?”

  “I have to get to my station. I still have work to do.” His eyes had gone cold, drained of their kindness.

  “You can’t just leave me alone in here.”

  He turned and stepped back out into the hall, the door sliding into place behind him.

  The room was small, too small to be without windows. I was frantic as I turned around, trying to understand where he’d left me. Now that the door was closed, I could no longer tell where it had been. The wall was seamless. Everything was so white, I soon lost track of where the walls ended and the floor began. It all blended together until I was trapped within a pearl of emptiness with no way to escape.

  Waiting and more waiting.

  Panic rose, closing in as the lack of color expanded into infinity. I ran my fingers along the smooth walls and found no indication of the door. There were no shadows, nothing to delineate the space, so when I found a corner, it was a surprise. It seemed like it should just continue forever.

  The only defining object in the room was the couch. Inhaling deep, measured breaths, I sat, hoping to calm myself with its solidity. As soon as I lowered my weight, its soft cushions pulled me into it like the couch was trying to envelope me, swallow me.

  I jumped, irrationally worried that the piece of furniture was carnivorous. There were animals in the sea which masqueraded as rocks to lull unsuspecting prey to come near, and I preferred to support my own bones, anyway.

  A deep breath calmed my heart and expanded my senses, pulling on my ability to perceive space underwater and “see” beyond the space that trapped me. The molecules in the room bounced about, finding nothing beyond the walls and man-eating couch to displace their movement. Beyond the walls I was blind. My sense of sound and perception couldn’t penetrate them.

  Sitting on the floor, I crossed my shod feet beneath me. The pants Ada had brought fit perfectly, and the shirt I’d chosen was long-sleeved. The fit was snug, but I would have liked the sleeves to be longer, so I could hide as much of myself as possible from Erdlander eyes. My hands did not announce my difference, but the less of me they saw, the safer I felt.

  The Erdlander clothes Mother and I had worn were so different from what I was issued here. I was used to the flowing dresses of the women who rode on ships and lived in the cities. The camp appeared completely separate from those people. How had they gotten here? It struck me that I hadn’t seen any children or elderly. Instead, everyone I had met was about my age, and those who were older were in Life Services, like Ada. What exactly was this place?

  Time slid by until I couldn’t count back the moments, until the air began to swim before me.

  I jumped up when, next to the couch, a panel slid open to reveal a small man in a brown suit. Despite being desperate for my time in purgatory to end, his appearance jolted me. Short brown hair with streaks of gray hung limp across his forehead, and he was broad in the shoulders. He wore the kind of shoes I had expected Erdlanders to wear, not the boots Tor and Lock had. This man was not from the camp, or at least he didn’t live here. I wondered if he had a small home somewhere, with a small wife and even smaller children. Although he was only two or three inches shorter than me, something about his stature made him seem much less threatening than I’d anticipated. Whoever he was, he had me alone and at his mercy.

  ~Greetings,~ he said in Sualwet, with the throaty accent of an Erdlander.

  ~Many tides,~ I replied, bowing my head in acknowledgement, the traditional Sualwet show of respect.

  “My, you are fluent, aren’t you!” The small man switched back to Erdlander and beamed at me as if my fluency somehow reflected on him.

  I nodded and held my hands together in front of my body, waiting for whatever would happen next. The man had no sense of the danger I feared or the panic I had experienced while locked in this room. My mind spun with new experiences, and I couldn’t think of anything to do but stand still and wait.

  “Come with me,” he announced. “We have to test you out. See how much you understand.”

  The small man walked into the light beyond the open panel.

  I followed, fearful of being locked in my prison forever. Once I was through the opening, I found myself in an equally bright hallway. Here the floor was gray, however, leading a trail through the white. It made me think of riptides and the stories my mother would tell about swimming along the current: All you have to do is stay in its path.

  It was impossible to know where I was in relation to the world above ground. Was I even still beneath the Linguistics building, or had we traveled so far I was somewhere else entirely?

  I missed tracking the passage of time by the movement of the sun and the soft ebb and flow of the tide. Things from nature were predictable, dependable. This artificial world of the Erdlanders did not inspire the same confidence.

  “I’m Dr. Vaughn,” the man introduced himself as we walked.

  I trailed behind him a little but heard every word.

  “I run the Decryption Team. When Ada told me we had a new team member who was fluent, I made sure to test you myself. We have piles of documents and recordings we simply cannot figure out. With the war, it’s more important than ever to have the best intel. I imagine you came from Dr. Rhine’s training program?”

  Vaughn’s voice was low, and he spoke fast, forcing my mind to work to distinguish each word from the next.

  “I—”

  “Dr. Rhine is the only one who ever gets those kinds of results,” he interrupted, continuing to lead me through the vibrant hallway. “Makes sense, since he’s the only one who ever studied with a real Sualwet.”

  “Is that so?” I said, hoping to keep him talking. Perhaps Rhine had known my mother. Perhaps he had been kind to her or helped her escape. My mind drifted to the dreams children might have, but I knew if Rhine had known my mother, he had not been a prince.

  We turned left then right and continued walking through the glowing emptiness.

  “I’d have loved to have been there when they caught it,” Vaughn said. “How they got it to talk and teach them Sualwet, I’ll never know. But now we have students like you! Maybe one day we’ll even be able to mimic their accent. Now that would be a success! Sending out messages to lure them in and catch them like the Fish they are, one by one....”

  Vaughn laughed before stopping and facing me. His dark brown eyes peered up at me from beneath his brow. “Ready?” he asked.

  Before I could reply, he slid his hand over the wall and revealed a panel. His fingers moved across it with ease as he typed something, and another door, larger than the last, slid open to reveal the testing room.

  19

  “Reveal,” Vaughn said in Erdlander, and I responded in Sualwet. Instead of translating the exact word, I would tell him another, similar word like show. We did this over and over.

  The small testing room had a high ceiling, which kept it from feeling too claustrophobic. The floor was bright white, while the walls were a pale gray, making them appear to evaporate. It gave the room a s
ense of great space, but I still couldn’t lose the awareness that I was trapped deep underground.

  Dr. Vaughn was delighted at my translations, but what he didn’t know was that I was learning more about him than he was about me. This was the head of the Decryption Team? His Sualwet sounded clunky and thick, as if he had eaten jellyfish tentacles and his tongue had swollen. No Sualwet would speak as he did. His words were difficult to decipher, and I found it easier to understand him when he spoke in Erdlander.

  We sat at a table in the middle of the room. Between us was nothing but two glasses of water and a withering flower. It seemed cruel to bring a flower down here and deny it sun, but I guess it was dead as soon as someone picked it, so what difference did it really make?

  Recording devices and screens surrounded us, hanging from the walls and attached to panels. Vaughn would turn them on and make me watch someone give a speech in a mangled accent and then summarize for him. Or he would force me to listen to sample recordings of Sualwets speaking underwater.

  “Swim,” he recited.

  ~Float,~ I translated, only to see the excited spark in his eye as he concluded how fluent I was.

  I watched as he wrote on a flexible screen, typing out his observations and conclusions about me. I curled my toes inside my shoes, bored, terrified, and anxious all at once. The contradicting emotions exhausted me, and I needed to move or walk or do something to keep my sanity. Instead I took another sip of water, finishing my glass. His untouched glass sat, mocking me. My tongue was dry, and my face hurt from so many forced smiles.

  “Your fluency is remarkable,” Vaughn said, setting down his screen and folding it up into the small black item it had originally seemed to be. “There are a number of translations that are not as specific as they could be, but they’re not inaccurate, per se. Regardless, you are one of the best Linguistics workers we’ve had here in a long time.”

  “Thank you.” I tried to smile, but the most I managed was a grimace.

  The small man leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. The buttons of his jacket strained across his chest, his broad physique not intended for such confining clothing. “So, where do you think you’d fit in here best?”