by Amanda Milo
That last word she used translates as a measuring stick for depth. Like so many human words, it makes no sense in the context of this conversation.
But it would seem one thing is clear: Gracie wanted to strengthen whatever relationship that exists between us by touching my hand.
It’s true, what she says, about my taking the anti-bonding measures. But the drugs that her hob is working to refine and further develop don’t prevent a bonding. It only inhibits a Rakhii’s mate-threat-heightened and possessive killing instincts.
Gracie does not have any interest in having me as a mate—no more than I’d want her for one. Thus it would behoove her to keep all contact and ‘enhancing touches’ to herself.
I fit her with a stern look of warning and turn to the other humans. The new ones along with the ones who have been here for some time. Normally, on any given day when the whole herd can be found at my heels, their constant presence irritates me—but I’m suddenly feeling jovial towards all of them, to their entire species, and I even jest with them. “Your species may finally have a use that I approve of, along with those tiny specks you call rocks. But still, you’re slow. Get a move on those rock piles in the center there. The lot of you may have managed to please me now, but you still couldn’t be slower if you were picking up stones with one arm.”
There’s the loudest rush of sucked-in air. The humans, all of them it seems, have gasped.
...Which is odd. I insult them all the time.
Yet all their wide eyes stare at me in disbelief and horror and maybe a little mutiny.
My glare narrows on them.
Rather than cowering, they stand under my baleful scrutiny, beginning to dart looks at…
At the female I worked near today. She’s here! The one I brought the hydration gel to. The one who set down her rock in order to accept the drink offering from me, which only marginally registered in my consciousness. If I had given her a more thorough looking over, as I am now, I’d have seen that the reason she did this was because she had to.
She only has one arm.
CHAPTER 2
ISLA
I’ve heard so much about this Bubashuu alien that it was starting to feel like he was more myth and legend than man… erm, alien. But, uh, turns out everything I’ve heard is true. He seems permanently grumpy, he’s Herculean in strength, he’s jacked like The Rock, and I’m pretty sure he could break Chuck Norris. Heck, he’d probably eat Chuck Norris after beating him. I mean, this alien’s fangs have been bared the whole time we’ve been here because he’s always snarling at us.
Except for when he offered me something to drink.
A warm shiver moves up my back, remembering how surprised I was to have him of all people—aliens, whatever—bring it to me. Scales and other alien-ness aside, he’s a knockout. I literally thought we’d all swallowed our tongues when we came around the side of the wagon and saw the big bad boss man that everyone talks about.
Gracie, our guide-de-jour, hadn’t breathed a word about his hotness. But the sparkle in her eyes and her wicked smile as she’d faced us during the introduction said she knew why we were all stunned and staring.
It was also because the hot alien looked seriously pissed.
Still, when he’d lifted that chunk of mountain, his arms had strained, and his work shirt, which was rolled up at the sleeves, showed him off to perfection. All his visible muscles being gloriously exerted, his veins popping up, standing out pretty despite his scaly skin.
*Mental wolf whistle.*
Then he’d stretched to dump the mountain chunk into the wagon, and his work shirt had ridden up, his rugged work pants sitting just right on his hips to expose the hard-cut V-frame of his lower torso, the midriff of which is filled to almost celestial perfection with a scrub board of abdominal muscles.
Good God. I’m still drooling. Apparently, if a guy is stacked like this one, it does not matter if his stomach has scales.
So we’d stood there like idiots, mouths hanging open and struggling not to wilt under the serious unhappy face he was wilting us with while we came to grips with the knowledge that this super hot alien is the horribly mean taskmaster who everyone is afraid of. Oh, the warnings we’ve heard in regards to this guy. When you get to work don’t speak, don’t stop, don’t argue, do not attempt to throw holy water on him. (It makes him meaner.) He can’t be cured by holy water because he isn’t evil… he’s just a grouch.
Tales are told that he makes girls cry. Hot guys should not make girls cry. Hot guys at this level of attractive belong in the mythical category (his differences to humannoid-ness matter not in the face of the way his hip bones fit under his Apollo’s belt like he’s been sculpted with interlocking parts), which means he’s basically a unicorn.
Unicorns aren’t supposed to make girls cry. It should be a rule. (Then again, he has two horns. Maybe bi-horns do make girls cry and that’s why there are no legends of bi-horns, no matter how hot they look.) But his words apparently do more cutting than a deli counter meat slicer.
So why hasn’t anyone hauled his ass out of here and put a nice boss in his place? Why the heck are the women coming back day after day and putting up with his mean word-slicing-ness? I can’t say for sure, but I think this is a case of the strange and wonderful power of attraction.
Nobody is going to tell a man this beautiful to leave. Everyone is hot and bothered yet terrified at the same time.
But anyway, the objective he nonverbally required of us was simple: ogle while you work. So that’s what I did. I kept my head down—mostly. I chastised my eyes when they would sneak peeks every time they heard a masculine grunt of effort. The alien did me no favors by lifting heavy things and sometimes throwing heavy things.
Despite this, I did good. I didn’t fuck up and lick him even when he moved into my space. I was having quite the you-behave-damn-it discussion when we’d reached for the same general area.
I knew I’d screwed up though when his hand froze, his fingers—and thereby all his killing-claws—had spread, his arm extended, muscles leaping like he was about to rake his sharp points over me for not getting myself out of his space even though technically he’d been the one to encroach on mine.
I’d done what prey do in the face of a vicious predator: I retreated. Fast. (P.S., watching him from the back is a real fine view too.)
Therefore, I’d been stunned when he brought me the drink.
He didn’t have to do that. So far as I could tell, I was the only one he’d brought anything for. Past experience set me up for guessing he’d noticed my one-arm status and felt compelled to do something.
I would have stopped and gotten something myself, but all anyone can talk about is how serious this guy is about working. And I get it. He’s the boss. If you want to be the best, you have to earn your way, and it’s clear he’s done that. He’s head honcho, and he doesn’t slow down.
I didn’t slow down either, because I can’t afford to. I figure it’ll take me twice as long to collect the same amount of rocks as someone with two hands, therefore, I better hustle twice as hard. And that’s fine. I’m no stranger to stepping up my pace in order to break even.
But everything stops when Bash makes his cripple joke.
Even Bash stops. Actually, Bash looks stunned.
...I don’t think he knew. I don’t think he noticed—which is not as unbelievable as it sounds. Just putting it out there for the record, I have almost an arm-and-a-half.
(That would be between both sides, not like one extra-long arm on one side. Just to clarify.)
Although it doesn’t fill an entire shirt sleeve, people not noticing that I only have ‘one arm’ happened to me on Earth too, especially when I wore hoodies or bulky sweaters, where a partially empty sleeve didn’t look empty or limp, just maybe a little stiff. Your brain expects two arms, so you see two arms.
And now Bubashuu, who insults and talks down to the weak humans so much that he’s famous (or make that infamous) for it has dropped a Ba
sh-ism, a thing everyone warned us he’d do. But he must not attack us personally—because there is not one person or alien here who isn’t suddenly staring at him in shocked disapproval.
All the girls are giving Bash some serious ‘you’re an asshole’ glares, which warms my heart. Because hey, they’re protecting me! This means they like me! But the males here, the other aliens, they’re giving Bash killing looks. This makes me a little uncomfortable. Although I appreciate that there are aliens who will stand up for me if I need it, no one needs to die just because Bash didn’t notice one human was not like the others. Actually, I’m pretty darn happy the great Bubashuu didn’t see a reason to complain. It’s obvious he didn’t know I literally have one arm, which means I must have been doing as good as everyone else.
That’s all I want. I just want to be seen as a person, judged on the merits of my works, not defined by the number of limbs I do or don’t have.
I clear my throat to gain the attention of the invisible-pitchfork-wielding crowd and turn my palm up in a whaddya gonna do gesture. I appreciate that they’re all coming to my defense, but it’s cool. He didn’t know. “What do you call a Jedi with one arm?”
In the stillness, I sense everyone’s disbelief. But a couple of girls must’ve heard this one. They swivel around to me, looking like startled owls.
I smile. “Hand Solo!”
At first, nobody makes a sound.
Understandably, the aliens mostly look confused. Except for Beth’s alien. Beth has five mates, and they love movies. I’ve heard we have them to thank for film entertainment being available in the great black: they visited Earth and downloaded like all the movies. And it’s Beth’s craziest mate with her today, the fun-loving one that seems to drive everyone nuts. Ekan is his name. But I like him fine, and I like him even more when he peels Beth’s hand off of his mouth and shouts, “Star Wars!”
Beth’s biting her lips, her eyes on me, but she’s nodding to show she agrees with him. In a Captain America voice-impression, she says, “I understood that reference.”
I try another one. “Where does a one-armed girl shop for clothes?” When nobody pipes up, I clap my leg. “A secondhand store.”
“Hahaa…” someone chuckles weakly. Karen, I think is her name, and she still looks like a startled owl. They all do, but they’ve stopped death-glaring at Bubashuu. Everyone’s looking at me now.
“It’s okay to laugh,” I encourage. “I was born like this, I didn’t have to use one to pay for college or anything.”
Ripples of something on the route to laughter lap against the tension. I take a breath for another joke.
“Enough.”
All eyes swing to the head of our group, to Bubashuu himself, whose eyes are fixed square on me. He’s got a deep furrow between his scaly brows.
For those of you who haven’t seen a Rakhii yet, let me fill you in on what they look like. Bash is much like most of them—except he’s got even more muscles. But let’s start with the horns. Rakhii have two of them, big wavy-sweepy things that look like they could knock you out and stab out your eyes if you’re standing too close and they swing them too fast. Crowding around the bases of their horns where humans have hair, Rakhii have what they call ‘quills,’ but they’re more leathery-spikes than pokey-spears. They lift up and down with their moods and reactions—same for the long things trailing down their backs which actually are pokey-spears. These they call dorsal spines. Get a Rakhii angry enough and I’ve been warned that the spines will drip some kind of don’t-touch-it stuff. On their heads, they’ve got long expressive ears that taper at the tips. They mostly carry them so that they rest all folded against their heads and necks. Most of the time you never know they’re there. And Rakhii bodies are covered with rough-textured dragon-like scales. Face, hands—even down to their tails. Their tails are long and whip-like towards the end, where they’ve got a fanned set of blades that they can snap closed or open, or operate independently. And finally, like a dragon, a Rakhii can breathe fire.
Oh, and they have magic spit that can heal injuries.
Nifty creatures. Intriguing for sure.
Their styles of dress are just as interesting as their skin-deep appearance. I’ve seen gladiator skirts and metal plating on some of them, and plain pants and shirts on others. (With slits in the back for their dorsal spines and tails, of course.)
All the quarry workers seem to pretty much go shirtless. I bet Bash in particular makes it a real good look, but sadly, he’s in full workday-dress. His shirt is alien-chambray and his pants are a sturdy cargo-carpenter type deal, like all the males here. They might have started out life as a light shade of fabric like white or khaki but it doesn’t matter what they used to be, because everything that steps into the quarry quickly turns pink-purplish-red.
Everything here is eggplant to blood red because the stones are a gradient comprised of those colors and everything, everything here is coated in rock dust. Depending on what section of rock you work and what color layers it’s comprised of, you could be coated in a solid dusting of one color, or all of them for an almost orange, burnt sienna effect. Even Rakhii, who come in a rainbow of colors, their scales opalescent and shiny, turn a dull rock dust-color when they’re in this place.
I eye Bash, not-so-idly wondering what his natural color is. Right now, he’s sort of mulberry.
He eyes me too, but like he’s trying to read my emotions, not my color under all the sweat and rock-grime. “I apologize.”
There are hobs ringing us, alien men who have worked for him for a while from Gracie’s explaining of things. Hearing their boss utter these two little words to me? These guys look like they’re just about ready to topple over.
Hobs are almost human-looking, so close to us they can pass for human and did when they visited Earth. I wasn’t on this planet or with any of these people when that visit happened, but I’m told they basically only had to hide their wings, and that was it. They have freaking claws and fangs but I guess they led everyone on Earth to believe they were members of a movie cast, and Earthens bought the story.
Then again, why wouldn’t we? Who expects aliens to look like super tall bewinged vampire supermodels? Shoot, did they even have to try hiding? If they’d whipped out signs that said they were there to enslave Earth, everyone would have just been like ‘Sign me up, hot stuff!’
And not only are they supernaturally pretty, of all the aliens I’ve met, hobs are really nice guys. All of them. Every last one of them is so polite, and they have a superbly sweet appreciation for women. They’re adorably protective of anything with XX chromosomes. The moment Bash made the one-armed reference, they closed in like he’d finally pushed it too far. There was a sizzle in the air like there was about to be a massive hob-revolt and the mean quarry master was going down.
But with Bash’s apology, every last one of the hobs has reeled back in clear shock, like the man (yeah, yeah: alien) has never ever uttered an I’m sorry.
I shrug big to show there’s no hard feelings. “Hey, if this means I’m no slower than anyone else, I’ll take it.”
“To the contrary,” Bash intones low and unconsciously sexy, eyes still too trained on me, searching me. “You aren’t slower. And you impressed me when you kept working today.” His gaze finally releases mine, his attention moving to my empty sleeve. “I meant no offense to you personally.”
I beam a bright it’s-all-good smile. “Apology totally accepted. So as far as your speech was going, you’re saying we’re all slow-asses? No discrimination based on gender, creed, or limbs—just our dratted little human-ness?”
Bash doesn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
I clap my leg. “All righty! Then I guess we better get back to work.”
Bash’s ridged brows go up again. So do his quills as he very sincerely enunciates, “I might like you, human.”
D’awww. All the sparkly warm fuzzies.
CHAPTER 3
BASH
After suffering the simmering outrage
from the hobs, my fellow Rakhii, and the humans, I wait a prudent amount of time, letting them settle before I make my way to the area that the hard-working human is clearing.
Now that I’m giving her more than the most cursory of looks, I can clearly see she has a full limb, and a not-full limb. She’s wearing a long loose-sleeved white upper blouse, or rather, it began its life as white. The dust in a quarry is a pervasive, silently choking entity. It’s accumulated as a significant coating on what was (likely) formerly pristine fabric in the short time she’s been here, giving her a sheen of reddish-violet yellow, just like everything in this craggy, earth-carved place. The bottom half of her is fitted with dark rugged-materialed pants that show dusty smears primarily on the half of her body where she has five fingers. Her smock is a sturdy sort like every other female’s, and its original color looks like it started out as a dark blue. Brown leather smock-straps rest over her shoulders and disappear under a great amount of hair, which is tied in a bundle at the back of her head. Her hair doesn’t have the polished look of a Gryfala’s. In fact, nothing much about her looks polished at all. If one looked at humans a certain way, they’d appear like distant cousins of a princess. Ones raised in the wild and possibly with less spoiling.
This one certainly lets no spoiling slow her down if she has any. She works efficiently, sparing no wasted movements as she scoops up rocks that fit her hand, tucking them against her front, and carrying them to the cart before returning to the pile.
Without a word, I take up a place beside her and begin collecting the boulders she cannot tackle—the ones no human can, and also the smaller ones that the other humans aren’t going to take because many seem to be intent on giving this human space. I wonder if humans are like some species of herding animals who tend to naturally shun those of their kind who are different. That would be a shameful instinct. And if they didn’t know before, they know now that this female is different. Because I thoughtlessly pointed it out before the Creator and everyone.