The Twisted Vine

by Alyce Caswell

  ‘Mm-hm,’ Fei said, nodding. ‘We did cover this. I think, yes, we definitely did. Wow, I find it really hard to think around you. But your plan — which is totally obvious, by the way — to distract me from discussing this topic isn’t going to work. Just so you know.’

  Kuja smiled. ‘Maybe I should try harder then.’

  They gazed at each other, unmoving for countless moments, then her hand left his, travelling to the hem of his shirt before dipping beneath the fabric and gliding over his stomach.

  Her expression became incredulous. ‘How are you not sweating? I feel like I’ve been swimming inside a swamp!’

  ‘Acclimatised, I guess,’ Kuja suggested. He silently asked the rainforest not to create a protective bubble in the weather patterns around him, not because he wanted to keep Fei from becoming suspicious, but because he rather enjoyed feeling like he had accomplished something and sweat helped with that.

  Fei’s palm skated along the trail of copper-coloured hair that led down from his belly button and towards the crux of his legs. ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  ‘You can ask several.’

  ‘Why are you spending so much time with me?’

  Kuja shivered pleasantly when her fingers slid beneath the edge of his pants and began rubbing gently, back and forth, back and forth, until he wanted to rip the item of clothing off entirely. He fought to keep his voice even. ‘There’s a couple of reasons. One, you seem to be interested in learning about our beliefs and, to be honest, I think that’s something you need to do. I’m not saying you have to pursue Bagara, but you might find some peace in seeing that there is more than one way to worship.’

  Fei’s fingertips, belonging to the hand that was still roaming beneath his shirt, found a nipple and flicked it. Kuja gasped.

  She blinked innocently at him. ‘And what’s the second reason?’

  ‘I think you already know the answer to that.’

  ‘Tell me anyway,’ she said breathlessly.

  ‘I’m hoping all this talking will lead to a lot less talking,’ he told her in a low voice.

  Fei wet her lips once, twice, seemingly incapable of forming a verbal response. There were no words in her mind either; only images. Her imagination certainly was vivid. But then her thoughts jolted back to their previous topic of conversation.

  ‘I really shouldn’t be thinking about Bagara just now,’ Fei said.

  ‘Bagara again?’ Kuja chuckled. ‘I wonder if I should be jealous.’

  Fei made a face at him. ‘I can’t help it. You know that.’

  ‘Don’t even try to stop those thoughts, Fei. I want to hear them all.’

  She fiddled with a tuft of moss beside her knee. ‘Sometimes I feel like a fraud, because I don’t feel connected and grateful like everyone else who worships my god. I keep turning up at the temple, pretending to be one of them, when all I really want to do is work on some code or go home and relax.’

  ‘Bagara prefers his people to speak to him when it best suits them,’ Kuja said, his eyes momentarily tracking a droplet of sweat that was slipping past her collarbone. ‘And if they never acknowledge him, he doesn’t mind. He will still care for them.’

  ‘But don’t they owe Bagara for looking after them? It’s only fair.’

  The growl rumbled low in Kuja’s throat before he could stop it. ‘Fair. There’s nothing fair about making people feel they owe you something, just because you happen to reign over the environment in which they live. They had no choice in their creation. They owe him nothing.’

  ‘But what does Bagara get in return?’ Fei asked, looking confused.

  Kuja blinked a few times, entranced by the amber eyes she’d chosen for today — this colour made her gaze as warm as liquid honey. ‘He gets to watch the people he cares for enjoy their lives. If they want to worship him in return, then that is their choice. He just hopes they will care for others as much as he does.’

  Fei pursed her lips. ‘I see. That doesn’t sound terrible. And you know what, I think I’d be more likely to do something nice for other people if my god wasn’t demanding it of me.’

  ‘It’s easier to love someone when they actually let you exercise your free will,’ Kuja agreed.

  She stared at him.

  ‘Just…an old grievance, with my father,’ Kuja said by way of explanation. ‘I can’t talk about it. I’m sorry, Fei. I would tell you everything…but not that. Not now.’

  ‘That’s alright,’ she said softly. ‘I don’t mind waiting.’

  Kuja couldn’t stand the melancholy now choking his thoughts and starting to infect hers, so he hooked his arms beneath Fei and hoisted her up from the ground. When she demanded to know if he was going to do what she thought he was planning on doing, Kuja gave her a wink and tossed her into the water, making sure she landed in the deepest section.

  ‘It’s cold!’ Fei exclaimed, bobbing there with an indignant look on her face, her bright red hair puddling around her.

  ‘Don’t take that into account for your simulations either?’ Kuja teased.

  Fei poked her tongue out at him. ‘Actually, I do. Because some plants don’t like cold water and some don’t even need water and some find water poisonous — so there!’

  Kuja drank in the sight of Fei. He desperately wanted to watch her face slacken with pleasure as he moved his fingers around inside her, the way he had been taught to do on Enoc. She would be lost in the sensations he could give her, so far removed from the pain that had driven her to this world…

  Kuja threw himself into the water, the cool blast of it against his skin a refreshing distraction. He swam over to Fei who splashed him when he got too close. Kuja arched an eyebrow at her, drew a breath, then dove out of sight and barrelled towards her. She darted aside at the last moment. When he resurfaced, their faces were a hand’s width apart and Fei’s amber eyes were glistening with mischief.

  Oh Father, I so want to kiss her, Kuja thought. But he couldn’t see if she was ready; her mind was in such disarray. He should ask her, an innocent offer that she could easily refuse —

  Fei kissed him.

  It was gentle, a peck, a knock at the door, and over far too soon. Kuja responded with a brief kiss of his own, though his landed lopsided, on her cheek. Laughing, Fei took his head between her hands and guided him back to her lips.

  She tasted of salt and sweetness. He stored this away for future reference, relieved that kissing didn’t do to him what it seemed to do to mortals. Some of them were struck by a sudden revelation of love or other such nonsense when they locked lips with someone, but it seemed he was immune.

  Sandsa wasn’t immune, a traitorous voice inside his head reminded him.

  Kuja quickly back-pedalled and began swimming towards to the rocky shore. Fei crashed through the water after him, unusually silent, her thoughts blank and unable to provide any fuel for her voice. By the time they were walking towards the village, the sky was dark above them and Fei was smiling vacantly, her mind preoccupied with memories of what they had done together at the waterfall.

  Kuja wondered when he would stop thinking about those kisses. Soon, he hoped.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Fei regretted leaving her communicator on such a high volume when her mother’s voice blasted across the square in the centre of Bagath. Hunching down as several villagers glanced over at her, she clipped the offending device onto the collar of her yellow shirt so that she could keep her hands free. Today she was helping to wind dried vines into baskets. Her attempts, unfortunately, resembled stringy blobs beside the tightly-wound ones her companion, Lilliean, was making. The baskets were supposed to contain recently harvested produce, though Fei seriously doubted hers would even hold a single nectarino.

  ‘Fei, honey, are you still alive?’ Berale Neron demanded. ‘Or have the savages cooked you into some awful and grotesque feast?’

  Lilliean lifted her eyebrows.

  Fei winced. ‘Mum. These people are the furthest thing from savages. I’m fine.
Really.’

  ‘I’m surprised the call even connected!’ Berale exclaimed. ‘The savages must have a Web relay station in orbit.’

  ‘I wish they didn’t,’ Fei muttered.

  A small smile flitted along Lilliean’s lips as she returned to her work. She was a patient teacher and didn’t seem at all bothered whenever Fei interrupted her to ask for assistance. Kuja had vanished yet again and Fei had been desperate for something to do that didn’t involve stewing about what he might be doing and who with. Not that it was any of her business. He was just a fling, a bit of fun to help her move on. He knew that. She’d mentioned it. Several times.

  It was only thing she’d regretted saying to him.

  ‘How am I supposed to know if you’re alive if you won’t call me?’ Berale beseeched. ‘You were a lot better at this when you were busy with work and that’s saying something!’

  Fei snorted. ‘Well, it’s not like I have any code to compile here so I don’t have as much idle time on my hands.’

  ‘You only call me when you’re bored? Oh, that’s lovely.’

  Fei winced; she could practically see her mother grinding her teeth.

  ‘But it doesn’t matter,’ Berale went on. ‘I need to discuss something with you.’

  Lilliean made a gentle tut-tutting sound.

  Fei ripped her eyes away from empty space and mouthed at her companion, I am paying attention to her, I swear!

  Lilliean gave Fei a pointed look, her fingers continuing to weave the basket in front of her. Fei realised that apart from the greeting the woman had given her earlier, Lilliean had not uttered a single word, choosing to instruct her student through demonstration alone.

  They would have been working in complete silence if not for the nearby villagers discussing how best to display their stone statue of Bagara, recently removed from storage, so as to please the god when he arrived the next day. Inesh had already shouted himself hoarse over the position he deemed most suitable, but the village headman had insisted that Bagara was more interested in looking after his people than he was in where an image depicting him happened to be.

  Fei found all this commotion a lot more comfortable than the tense energy of the tight-lipped scientists back at the shelters. Gerns, the only one of them Fei could stand, had been too busy with her plants to spare any time for chatting that morning and Dr Lorena Hackett had been particularly hostile towards Fei at breakfast, which made her wonder what she’d done to upset the woman.

  ‘Are you even listening?’ Berale demanded.

  ‘No,’ Fei blurted.

  Static screeched out of the communicator; Berale had unleashed a long-suffering sigh. ‘I thought so. Honey, if you’re still this bad at focusing, you should get a doctor to give you those injections I told you about.’

  ‘Look, Mum, you really need to stop believing everything that medical app tells you,’ Fei said, managing to scrub some of the annoyance from her words. ‘I’ve seen programmers lose their edge when they rely on the stuff in hyponeedles to concentrate. It can make them too rigid in their thinking, which I guess is handy depending on what they’re doing, but I kind of need to be able to think my way out of corners. Anyway, I just drink some tea and I’m fine. I don’t need anything stronger, okay?’

  ‘Honey, I didn’t call you to argue about this again.’

  ‘Then why did you call me?’

  No sound escaped the communicator for several long seconds. Fei was beginning to wonder if the connection had died by the time her mother’s voice resurfaced. ‘Your father requested a meeting.’

  Lilliean’s touch darted over, not to fix the vines Fei had just snapped, but to still the trembles racing along the ridges on the backs of Fei’s hands. Fei sucked in a large gulp of air, but it compressed inside her chest, refusing to fill her lungs.

  ‘Fei, please say something,’ her mother said. ‘Are still you there?’

  ‘Yes,’ Fei managed in a rasp. ‘What did that fucker want?’

  ‘Language!’

  ‘I’ll use what ever language I starking well want to, especially if it means people are more likely to listen…!’ Fei cut off her ranting and forced a smile, hoping it would make her sound less confrontational. ‘Mother. If you would be so kind, please furnish my knowledge on this matter.’

  ‘There’s no need for that kind of language either.’

  ‘Mum!’

  A ticking noise emanated from the communicator; sometimes her mother made sounds with her tongue when she was choosing her words. Fei wondered if she should do something similar so she wouldn’t keep blurting out whatever was on her mind. But Kuja doesn’t care…

  She set aside the broken vines and took the new ones that Lilliean held out for her.

  ‘Mum.’ Fei softened her tone. ‘Please tell me what happened.’

  ‘Well, it seems he regrets leaving us all that time ago, which was lovely to hear.’ Fei rolled her eyes, but didn’t interrupt. ‘Anyway, he was wondering if he could live in my townhouse for a bit. His superiors assigned him a new room in the temple but it’s very small and very cold.’

  Fei waggled her tongue between her teeth but it was nowhere near as satisfying as unleashing her thoughts, so she said, ‘Oh, the poor man has to live in a tiny room! He could have combined his salary with yours years ago to get himself something nice outside the temple. But no. He abandoned us.’

  ‘Does that mean we should abandon him in return?’ Berale asked, her voice firming. ‘The Creator God would expect us to assist one of his agents. And your father says that even if a better room becomes available he’ll still stay with me…’

  ‘Oh sure, sure he will! And in the meantime, I’ll have to put up with him every time I visit you!’ Another vine snapped in Fei’s hands. Lilliean leaned over and rescued the mess from Fei’s lap, deftly finishing the basket out of arm’s reach.

  ‘You don’t visit at all now.’ A sniffle escaped the communicator. ‘What difference would it make?’

  ‘Creator God, why are your followers so unlikeable?’ Fei wondered out loud.

  ‘Don’t blame our god for this,’ Berale chided her. ‘He gives us free will so that we might live our own lives. We cannot blame him for the actions of those who abuse it.’

  ‘So you admit my father abuses it.’

  ‘Fei…’

  ‘Mum, don’t let him do this to you, not again,’ Fei said, burying her eyes in her palms. ‘The Creator God and his…his minions have done nothing but hurt us. Everyone tells me to just accept it, but I won’t. I don’t have to. There are plenty of other gods.’

  ‘Fei!’ her mother repeated, a good deal more sternly this time. ‘You should come to Gerasnin immediately. It sounds like those temples on Enoc are not very good for you.’

  ‘I’m on Bagaran, remember, there are no temples here and I love that,’ Fei said, nodding at Lilliean who shrugged, apparently unfazed by the compliment Fei had paid her planet. ‘Maybe there are some nice people at your local temple, Mum, but the Creator God worshippers I keep running into say it’s my fault I can’t trust a god who tells people to abandon me, a god who ignores me — and no one really knows what the Creator God wants because he barely speaks to any of us!’

  ‘Honey, if you would just — ’

  Fei slammed her palm against the communicator, cutting the connection. She stewed for a time, passing the device between both her hands, then turned to Lilliean. ‘Am I bad daughter?’

  Lilliean shook her head. ‘Seeking a path that diverges from what you were shown does not make you a bad daughter. But make sure you are not pursuing Bagara just because this path takes you the furthest from you mother’s.’

  ‘It’s not about her,’ Fei insisted. ‘It’s about what’s best for me.’

  Lilliean looked sceptical.

  Fei scowled. ‘I can make my own decisions!’

  ‘Hurt makes us do things we regret,’ Lilliean advised her, nodding at the broken vines littering the ground around Fei. ‘No matter which god yo
u choose, if you choose one at all, don’t destroy what you have with your mother. She will need you when that rotten father of yours abandons her again.’

  Fei threw up her hands in frustration. ‘Okay, no more basket weaving for me. And sure, I’ll be there for my mother when she needs me, since she’s always been there for me. But I don’t have to talk to her for a bit.’

  Lilliean’s lips twitched but she made no comment.

  ‘Lilliean, why aren’t you telling me off for being so strange and talkative?’ Fei asked.

  ‘You’re not quite as strange as you think,’ Lilliean replied. ‘And Kuja’s a good boy, so I’ll not chase off the only one worthy of him. Don’t worry; that Dr Hackett never caught his eye the way you have.’ With a brief nod of farewell, Lilliean gathered up the intact baskets and left.

  Fei’s bottom lip bobbed up and down like a piece of flotsam bouncing on the purple waves of Enoc. Well, that explained why Dr Hackett was being so cold to her, though Fei wished she hadn’t felt such a thrill at hearing Lilliean’s words.

  Fei stood up, grimacing when she felt the wet mud clinging to her backside. Brushing it off only made the gunk stick to her fingers which she then had to wipe on the front of her pants. There was no point in changing into fresh clothes since they wouldn’t stay clean very long — a discovery Fei had made by her second day on Bagaran — so she did her best to ignore the mess and walked over to Inesh who was beaming, pleased that he had won the argument about the statue. When she drew nearer and used his name, he stiffened. His attitude towards her hadn’t quite softened, but he seemed to be able to tolerate her presence now.

  ‘Where does Kuja go when he’s not in the village?’ Fei asked him.

  Inesh spat on the ground. ‘Sometimes he helps your lot. I try to talk him out of it. Idiot thinks everyone’s worth listening to.’

  ‘His best and most baffling feature,’ Fei said with a small smile. ‘I actually came here today because Kuja didn’t visit me at the shelters this morning and I…I wanted to see him.’