Mutual Trust

by Lea Linnett

  “What is that?” he asked, gesturing toward the black box Marek carried under his arm.

  Marek’s stomach turned. “It is my equipment,” he lied. “We were not only exercising, but taking data on her physical health. I hoped it might explain how her people have survived in this climate for so long. I sent Peris away because I didn’t think Bree would be comfortable with—”

  “Again, you worry yourself with the human’s comfort.”

  “Because I believe it to be necessary.”

  “She is our prisoner, not a pet!”

  Finally, something Marek agreed with. “I told you, I brought her here to aid in my research,” he said quietly, lowering his head. “If we learn how they have survived out there, it may give us a clue as to their location.”

  “Then show me this equipment,” Urek demanded. “Explain its function to me.”

  “There are monitors for her heart rate and body tissue scanners. Equipment for measuring lung capacity,” Marek said, thinking quickly. “All of them are delicate, and I would rather not disturb them.”

  Urek’s already displeased expression soured further. “Open it.”

  But as they stared each other down, a new voice called out. “Sir!”

  They turned as one to see one of the karanaan hovering at the end of the corridor, looking like she wanted to drop through the floor for having interrupted.

  “What is it?” Urek barked.

  “Th-the uh… the project you asked us to work on has hit a snag.”

  “I got your message,” he snapped, and the scientist cringed.

  “It’s urgent,” she said in a small voice, glancing at Marek with wide eyes. He didn’t know her, which meant she must have joined the team in the last six months or so since his last placement upstairs. He stood still under her scrutiny. They all looked at him that way at first, with that mixture of intrigue and horror.

  Urek, meanwhile, looked as if he wanted to strangle her. He looked from her, to Marek, to Bree, before groaning with frustration. “No more excursions,” he snapped. “Peris will not fall for your lies again.”

  “She can’t be in the room with us,” Marek warned. “Her presence affects the human negatively.”

  “Then you’d better have some results to show me soon, little brother, because I am growing impatient.”

  Marek’s lip curled, but he knew he could push no more. He nodded once, and Urek whirled away, ushering the cowering scientist away along the corridor.

  In the silence, Bree turned to him, whispering in English, “Is everything all right?”

  He sighed. Even now, her presence calmed him, but he forced himself to shake the feeling off. “Come. Let me take you back to your room.”

  She nodded, and Marek couldn’t help but take her by the elbow as he led her away, the bow tucked safely into his side.

  12

  Bree’s hands shook as she zipped up the needle-fine catch on the alien bodysuit. Her leathers had been returned to her days ago, clean and smelling strongly of some kind of chemical, but they sat abandoned on the desk. Bree had chosen to blend in. Her human clothes drew eyeballs wherever she went, branding her as the outsider. If she wanted to slip away, she would need to look as much like the other humans here as possible.

  And if it helped convince her captors that she was starting to accept her position here, then that wasn’t such a bad thing.

  Her captors…

  Bree sat down on the edge of the rubbery bed to wait for Peris, her mind wandering.

  It still shocked her, days later, that Marek had come clean. He’d revealed all his secrets, everything about his situation and why he was even here talking to her, and he’d seem genuinely sorry for it.

  Bree had wanted to tell him she was sorry, too, but she couldn’t. She didn’t have the luxury of laying all of her cards out like he did. If he failed, he went back to a life that he hated, but it was still a life. If she failed, she had no idea what would happen to her—and to her people. At best, she would never see her family again, and at worst…

  Her eyes burned, but she blinked the tears away. After so many years trying to avoid her father, Sinead, and her red-headed half-siblings, now she missed them?

  She got up and paced, nervous energy zinging through her.

  Feelings like that had been creeping up on her ever since that day in the gym with Marek. The feel of a bow in her hands, the familiar pull of the draw and the skip of her heart during the release—it was like that taste of her old life had broken open a trove of emotions she’d been desperately trying to keep shut.

  Emotions that would only complicate her plan. Already, she caught herself looking forward to her conversations with Marek each day, as mundane as they were. She even caught herself thinking of how he’d looked with the bow in his hands: relaxed, smiling, captivating.

  Groaning with frustration, she kicked at the table leg and immediately regretted it when the sharp edge sent pain blooming along her toes.

  She was supposed to be using him. The bow meant nothing to her, she didn’t enjoy his company, and they weren’t friends.

  Somehow, the words felt hollower than usual.

  The swish of the door opening rescued Bree from her thoughts, and she spun around to find Peris in the doorway. The female leveled her with a glare as she stepped forward, pointing wordlessly at the door.

  Time to go…

  Bree hesitated, testing her sore foot on the metal before she moved to obey. Apparently, that wasn’t fast enough, since Peris made an irritated sound and grabbed at her, her sharp claws rasping across Bree’s skin through the bodysuit.

  “Ow!” Bree yelped, and she knocked the levekk’s hand away without thinking. “I’m going!”

  Peris’ green eyes sharpened. “Lisira ve, yumin shekra.”

  “I said, I’m going!”

  She held the female’s gaze, her anger simmering in her veins. Peris had been a constant presence whenever she wasn’t locked inside a room during the past week, and every day, Bree disliked her a little more. Bree was rarely able to get from one place to the other without being pushed or prodded by the female, and she was getting sick of it.

  The levekk’s lip curled, and she pushed Bree ahead of her. They made their way through the corridors quickly, as if Peris wanted to be rid of her as much as Bree did Peris.

  Bree’s stomach did a familiar lurch as the observation room came into view. Marek waited by the door, his muscular arms crossed, and the way his face lit up at the sight of her made Bree’s heart skip.

  But he soon frowned, noticing the tension crackling the air. “You are well today?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” Bree said, sidling away from Peris as soon as she could. The door to the observation room opened before her, but Bree hesitated, watching it apprehensively.

  “What is wrong?”

  “Nothing. Just… not really looking forward to being cooped up inside these walls again,” she admitted with a shrug. She started forward, but Marek’s gentle hand on her arm stopped her, and he searched her face, almost as if he were deliberating something.

  He turned to Peris, and whatever he suggested made the female’s already stormy look worsen.

  But after a moment of silence, Peris scoffed and rolled her eyes, gesturing at the corridor. It almost seemed like…

  “Come,” Marek said, nudging Bree away from the observation room.

  She looked between the two levekk, her pulse fluttering. “What’s going on?”

  “Today, we go for a walk.”

  He said it easily, but Bree remembered the venom with which Urek had yelled after he caught them at the gym. She had been able to tell from his body language alone that the male hadn’t been pleased with their outing, and her lack of freedom since only confirmed it. “I thought we couldn’t…” she said, as the click of Peris’ claws on the metal floor followed them down the corridor.

  Marek shrugged. “You have felt constricted lately, yes? Peris is the same. She is as bored with st
anding outside that room all day as we are.”

  “Oh.” She risked a glance back at Peris, who threw her a dirty look in reply. “I guess that makes sense.”

  “Would you tell me more of your people’s medicine?” Marek asked. “Yesterday, we did not finish.”

  “Sure, but like I said, my half-sister, Rowan, is the one who’s been training with our healer. I know nothing compared to her.”

  “She must have great skill, then, because I found your own knowledge fascinating.”

  Bree rolled her eyes, nudging him playfully, until she remembered Peris hovering behind them.

  This time, they kept to the upstairs while they talked, and not for the first time Bree was struck by how quiet it was. It had seemed to hum with activity when she’d first charged through the corridors in her initial attempt at escape. There had been aliens everywhere, so many that her mind could barely register them all. But now that she’d seen the torrent of sub-species living and working below the surface, the upper part of the mine felt empty and disused by comparison.

  Even so, they still attracted stares. Less now that she wore the same skintight bodysuits as everyone else, but enough to put her on edge. Except, they weren’t really looking at her. Some did, no doubt curious about her armed levekk escort, but now she noticed just how many gazes slipped past her to stare at Marek. They looked at him with curiosity and confusion, but mostly disgust—especially the levekk—and Bree realized that he really was an outsider here, not unlike herself.

  “It’s kind of crazy to me,” she said, as Marek directed her down an empty corridor with a soft touch at her elbow. His fingertips were warm, a strange contrast to Peris’ cold claws, and she wondered if it was his human blood that caused it. “That my people and yours can even…”

  He glanced down at her, and the intensity in his gaze made her flush. “That we are compatible?”

  “Um. Yeah.” She gulped down a bundle of nerves and pushed on. “I mean. The levekk are from halfway across the galaxy, right? That’s… a long way away.”

  “It surprised my levekk ancestors as well,” Marek said thoughtfully. “No other sub-species had ever shown compatibility before. When hybrid children began appearing, the Guides who brought our people here panicked. They isolated CL-32 for almost a century.”

  “Really?”

  “That is why it is dangerous to be born with mixed blood here. And why humans are still uncommon in much of the Constellation.”

  A frown pulled at Bree’s face. “Is it still dangerous for you?”

  “Perhaps,” Marek said, his gaze dropping to the floor. “As always, I escape notice thanks to the power my family holds. It was Urek who arranged my passage onto this planet. Without his help, I would have been turned away before I ever set foot on the planet’s surface. If they found me now… I do not know what would happen.”

  “You think they’d kill you?”

  “This is unlikely. I think they would banish me or lock me away so I could not embarrass anyone. But I am safe here,” he added. “No one concerns themselves with this place. It is too far north, and Urek ensures my safety here.”

  “He can do that?”

  Marek nodded, but that didn’t ease the cold creep of dread in Bree’s stomach. Urek was the only thing standing between Marek and danger? Urek, who looked at sub-species like they were less than the dirt he scraped out from under his claws?

  “Why would you even come here, to this planet, if things are that bad?” she demanded, unable to wrap her head around it.

  “Urek is my family,” he said. “I have no one else. I have nowhere else.”

  His words hit Bree square in the gut. Suddenly, she thought of her father again, standing there in the snow while she stomped away from the Barracks. She thought of her half-siblings—of little Ciaran, who’d drawn a smiley face in her porridge with enough honey to make her sick the last time she visited. Her insides twisted further, though, when she thought of them all sitting around the table, bright like candles with their fiery hair, while she stood in the shadows.

  “You have a family?” Marek asked, his voice soft. She glanced up to find him watching her. They hadn’t really talked about this before, and her heart thundered.

  “Yeah. My dad.” She paused, biting the inside of her lip. “I have… half-siblings as well. Like with you and Urek.”

  “I am sure they are more agreeable than Urek.”

  She chuffed out a laugh. “Half of them are little kids, so they’re about the same as him once they start throwing a tantrum. But they’re sweet, really.”

  “This is good. It is good to be close with family.”

  “We’re not close,” she said. “My dad… he and my mom weren’t all that happy together. They fought a lot. About me. About going near the mine. My dad never approved, and when mom went missing… He was sad, of course, but less than a year later he married this woman called Sinead, and then they had my sister, Rowan, and then another and another.” She gulped, fighting back the lump in her throat. “It was like he’d forgotten her, y’know?”

  “I am sorry,” Marek said, his heavy brow furrowing. “This must have been difficult.”

  Bree shrugged. “It was, but… I think only because I made it so.”

  They turned into a large room that was almost blindingly bright. Floor-to-ceiling windows lined one wall, allowing white light to reflect off the snow outside, and the space was filled with tables arranged in neat rows. Bree recognized the room as one that Marek had shown her on her tour: the cafeteria.

  It was empty now. Once a week, when the levekk had their communal meal, it would apparently fill to bursting, but in the meantime no one would use it, not even sub-species. The levekk didn’t eat as often as humans due to their metabolism, and the sub-species preferred to eat amongst their own kin.

  That meant that there was no one to stare at her as she made a beeline for the huge windows except for Peris, and Bree was sick of caring about Peris.

  Outside, the world was still and white, the storm that landed her here long since moved on. No animals scurried about. It was as if the world was asleep beneath a thick, white blanket.

  “You should not blame yourself,” Marek said, coming to stand at her side. “It is hard to lose a parent.”

  “It is. But I let it eat at me, y’know? I was always gone, even as a kid, exploring the wilderness. I became a cadet earlier than most, and went to live with the other soldiers away from my family. Then, as an adult, there was always an excuse to avoid going home. Hunting, training, watching the mine.” She sighed, her eyes flicking to a tree as a clump of snow fell to the ground from its branches. “I couldn’t understand how my dad could just move on so easily. Especially to someone like Sinead.”

  Marek frowned. “She was unkind to you?”

  “No,” she said quickly. “Well, only when I started it. We butted heads a lot. She was just so different. My mom went on adventures and had encounters with bears and came back with stories that turned my world upside down. Sinead spent all her time cooking and looking after her oodles of children. She didn’t approve of me going away all the time, she’s painfully beautiful, and I just…”

  She drew in a deep breath, hating this next part but feeling the need to say it just as much.

  “I don’t look much like my father. The dark hair, dark eyes—it’s all my mom. And Sinead’s kids look like her.” She leaned forward, resting her head against the glass. It was warm, heated from within like everything else in this place. “Sometimes,” she admitted, her gut twisting, “I would walk into the room and see her and all those carbon copies of her and—and it’s silly, I know, because they don’t treat me any different for it—but I just feel like… like I don’t belong. Like an outsider.”

  She hated admitting to it. It was all in her head, nothing but a child’s irrational fear of being replaced, but it clawed through her whenever she walked into her father’s home, putting an inescapable pall over everything.

  “It’s
stupid,” she said, rolling her forehead against the glass. “I know it’s nothing compared to what you’ve been through.”

  “It is not nothing,” Marek murmured, and Bree jerked to attention as a pair of knuckles brushed gently down her arm. She stared up at the hybrid, and found his pupils had turned circular in that way she didn’t quite understand yet. “It is how you feel.”

  Bree couldn’t even formulate a reply. The touch was light, barely there and hidden by the angle of their bodies from Peris’ watchful eye, but with how thin her bodysuit was they might as well have been touching skin-to-skin. It lingered, growing more and more intense as Bree’s pulse sped up.

  “Salak laira kehr ka?”

  The touch vanished as Peris’ clawed feet clicked closer, and Bree shuddered. Beside her, Marek glared at the female and said, “Yumin mureira.”

  “Tass, mimak saranaar en citeirana,” Peris scoffed, and Marek’s face fell.

  “I am sorry, Bree. I think our time is up,” he murmured in English, and Bree’s heart sank.

  “Already?” She turned back to the window, watching it wistfully. “I don’t think I’ve ever been inside for this long, barring the occasional blizzard.”

  Marek considered the snow with unease, his lips set in a dubious line that almost brightened Bree’s mood.

  “Have you ever been outside?” she asked, suddenly curious.

  “Once. I was tasked with checking on one of the outer mine shafts. I had no heatsuit. It was… unpleasant.”

  “That’s a shame. I love it out there. It’s where I feel the most like myself, out in the snow with a bow in hand. In here, I think too much.”

  Marek frowned, glancing over at her, and she hesitantly met his eye. It was a long shot, but… she had to ask.

  “Do you think I could go outside? Just for a little while. I feel like I’m going crazy in here.”

  “I—”

  “Please, Marek.”

  The hybrid looked over his shoulder at Peris, who was leaning against a nearby table with her eyes narrowed to slits. “I do not think this is possible,” he said. “Peris would not agree.”