Cycle 229.3 (Vyrra Calendar)

2139 CE (Earth Calendar)

Rotation 5 of the Regency of Ta’n The’kar (Ha’khen Calendar)

Ellumai-II, Second Moon of Second Planet in Koölot System, Disputed Zone

The rains on Ellumai-II are frequent, intense, brief. The earthquakes and eruptions predictable but violent. The soil is poor and flaky, filled with filaments of elemental titanium that cut the hands of the indentures who till the rows with hand tools, observing the old ways in the absence of expensive machinery. This is the last holding of once mighty House Ran — a colony that’s not supposed to exist on a moon that’s not supposed to be habitable, staffed by prisoners who aren’t supposed to still have their heads. This is the widower Ran’vek’s fief. This is where the artist from Earth, Pascale Delvaux, has come for her second chance at something like a life. Here is where the House of Ran sits.

The House of Ran depends on a living eye to appraise its grandeur. To the Thra’ha’khen eye which seeks metaphor and figuration, its buttressed and tiled battlements harken to the old fortresses of Ha’khen. To the densely-packed cones in Kadian eyes, even under the insipid aspect of a red star, the grain of its dark quoins shimmer with alluvial crystal striations representing the entire visible spectrum. And to the human eye, that mercurial instrument, it appears as a black headstone staked into the moon’s gray silt, its many parapets like a hydra’s swarming heads surveying the estate’s orchards. The colors never change — there is no night or day here in the habitable meridian of this tidally-locked moon, only unalloyed twilight where the small red star hangs at constant altitude like a withering drupe. Nor do the shadows cast by the black canopies of the vu’la trees ever shift. Only when a tree dies, or sags from the weight of its harvest.

I’ve been here twenty sleeps now — the only way you can measure time in a place without real days or nights, with nothing but alien timepieces that don’t know or care about Earth and its yellow star.

Lessons with my pupil, Ran’yït, always begin early; before the laborers are in the orchards and fields, before the master of the house has awoken. Even with twenty sleeps of adjustment, the heavier gravity, the thinner atmosphere still make every step from my bedroom to the studio a labor. Even with daily injections to fortify my bone density, I still feel so feeble.

But then there’s Ran’yït waiting for their teacher, their nictitating membranes fluttering over their yellow eyes in what I’ve come to understand is a show of extreme excitement.

“Doş’oö!” they squeal on seeing me enter, addressing me as their teacher. They almost tackle me, but remember and stop themselves short. Only about five Earth years old, but as tall as me and probably twice as heavy—they’d crush me if they embraced me the way they embrace their father’s leg. Like all Thra’ha’khen young pre-differentiation, they lack primary and secondary sexual characteristics, neither a daughter nor a son, simply a child. Instead of the embrace they’d like to lavish on me, they settle for a gentle patting of my shoulders with their six fingers, the talon-like claws retracted into their sheaths. They take after their dead mother instead of Ran’vek, their complexion Tya’lem — mauve brown scales with prominent pebbling around the facial ridges and along the limbs.

“What will we learn this time?” Ran’yït asks me. Their Kadian is rough, a bit garbled, but I understand them fine. I wish I had the time to teach them French — I’m sure they’d learn quickly, just as they’ve absorbed everything I’ve taught them so far. “More holo-meshing, perhaps?”

“We’ll set aside the holo-meshing for now,” I say, taking their wrist and guiding them toward the Earth-style wooden easel in the far corner of the studio. “Today, I’d like to teach you some techniques from traditional Earth art.”

I can’t hear the frequency of the squeal they emit, but I can see their throat ululating. They’re too young to have to wear a face-veil, what the Thra’ha’khen call a Ja’nat (modesty), so when they open their mouth, they reveal their long, double rows of pointed teeth.

Every terrestrial instinct in me says this creature is a predator, but I know better. They’re fragile and sweet, eager to learn, and desperate to make those they love proud. A few sleeps into my stay on this strange horizon, I stopped worrying for my own safety, too concerned for theirs. Here, where the ground is always shaking…

When I turn on the room’s yellow light filter, Ran’yït is dazed at first, used to orange or red suns, but as I explain, Earth painting relies on a yellow light. Later, I promise, we will experiment with applying Earth techniques under a Thra’ha’khen chromatic scale. This excites them even more. It is to no surprise that they quickly study and almost effortlessly copy my techniques — how I hold the brush, how I apply the acrylic to the canvas, even how I plant my feet. Their mother, Çen’yït, was a great artist, one whose sculptures and sandscapes were venerated throughout the Empire and became even more valuable after she died in the Lok’kar Station Disaster. Every waking, I pass the gallery where many of her works are displayed, an impossible legacy to measure up against.

Halfway through the lesson, as Ran’yït is dabbing swirls of green to make terrestrial treetops, they ask me if I miss Earth.

I don’t know if they notice the twitch I feel in my eye. “I miss the color of the sky,” I say. “It’s blue there.”

They make a low, chuffing sound with their throat — the Thra’ha’khen equivalent of laughter — and pick up another brush to dip in the blue divot of their palette.

I can feel a change in the air before I’ve even heard the soft footsteps of bare Kadian toes on the studio’s padded floor.

“I don’t recall the Tin’yee adding acrylic painting to the child’s curriculum.”

Like every other thing that Nins Luthei has ever said to me, the words are like perfect, pellucid shards of glass. I look away from my canvas and see Luthei standing behind us, their gracile curves attired in the spotless white tunic of the house livery, their slender limbs crossed behind their back and their neural locks woven into neat double buns above the hollows of their ears and encased in bright pink protective sheaths. To call a Kadian “beautiful” or “graceful” is always a redundancy, and yet, even by the standards of their species, Luthei exudes these qualities in noxious concentration. Artists are trained to feel beauty as common people feel heat, and as such any room that Luthei stands in becomes oppressive to me.

I bow my head while keeping my shoulders straight, in the Thra’ha’khen fashion, and Luthei reciprocates.

“It’s great fun, Doş’oö-khu,” Ran’yït says, addressing Luthei as “Great Teacher.”

“I thought they’d appreciate it, Luthei,” I add.

Luthei’s face is like a human’s face, only refined of the ugliness that we unconsciously reconcile with humanity. Their eyes are a uniform lime green hue, bisected by slit pupils which widen and narrow like a cat’s but never become round. Their lips are full and painted chrome, and like always these are turned at the corners into a smile.

It was when I went to London to study at the Royal Academy that I met my first Kadians, but it took me many encounters before I learned the important lesson that smiles don’t mean for Kadians what they mean for humans. For a Kadian, a smile can convey a hundred things, but never happiness, kindness, or good humor. More likely a smile means pity, or some flavor of contempt.

“Well, it is your prerogative as art teacher, I suppose,” Luthei says after a very long pause. They speak to Ran’yït now without taking their eyes off me. “It is time for your first meal. Wash the paint from your claws.”

I know something has happened. Something that will hurt me somehow.

#

On our way to see Ran’vek, I try to be pleasant and make conversation.

“Did you sleep well?”

From the twitch in their nose, I can tell I’ve mispronounced something or misplaced a word, but as ever, Luthei is too polite and well-mannered to correct my Kadian grammar.

“It’s considered rude in Thra’ha’khen culture to inquire after another’s sleep.”

“But you’re not— ” I start.

They turn that awful little smile on me. “You’ve been here long enough to adjust to the gravity, but you still don’t understand. What we were before doesn’t matter — we live in the Empire now, we live in Ran’vek’s home. Their culture should be our culture.”

It’s a strange thing for a Kadian to say, when their culture is the default in the known galaxy, and their language (a dumbed-down export version of it, anyway, eschewing complexities like the dozens of different grammatical cases for sarcasm) is the lingua franca for ten trillion sentients.

The corridor stretches interminably ahead of us. Our footsteps echo off the vaulted ceilings. We pass one set of immense guards wielding ceremonial spears and clad in ancient-style scaled armor, then another pair that wards the elevator that leads down to Ran’vek’s personal gallery, a cavernous space the size of a shuttle bay — a veritable art museum.

I want to ask why Tin’yee Ran’vek asked to see me, but I know Luthei won’t give me a straight answer; they never do. We do not speak as the elevator hums, nor after the metallic membrane of the door slithers open. We step out into the gallery and, as with every time I’ve been here, I’m stunned by the scale of it, the wealth it must require to amass such a collection of sculptures, paintings, holoworks, and artifacts. Çen’yït’s works take up a prominent space in the center of the expanse, her hand-molded birthing masks resting on plinths and her sandscapes — elaborate tableaus of thousands of different kinds of sand sourced from across the Empire — standing proud in their resin frames.

But we haven’t come here to look upon the dead mother’s works.

My heart almost stops when I see the unmistakable pattern of terrestrial brickwork from the art gallery in Santiago de Chile — Ran’vek must have bought the physical wall the exhibition was installed in. My exhibition.

“It’s … my work,” I hear myself say, in French, not in Kadian.

As we approach the exhibition, the three layers of holomesh come alive, forming a triple barrier of tapestries made of opaque light to hide the final, inmost piece that hides within. Even now I remember well every little stitch of the light needle; I can recall the hundreds of hours of work that went into this, my most ambitious and difficult piece, created in the aftermath of my fiancé’s death. How strange, this is the first time I’ve even thought about Axel in what feels like weeks.

An unwelcome reminder as a wave of shame and unearthed grief falls on me.

“Well? What do you think?”

The voice that booms behind us could not be mistaken for any other. If Luthei’s words are glass, Tin’yee Ran’vek’s words are like smooth, heavy stones, the sort one finds in river beds.

Luthei bows their head as Ran’vek strides toward us, his immense shadow soon swallowing me. He stands well over two meters tall, and on Earth would likely weigh an ungodly mass (never mind what he weighs here), and yet for his mass he moves always with a raptor’s grace. As is his privilege, he goes unshod, and his foot talons clink upon the marble floor as he walks around me. Unlike his child, his hide is Mri’lem phenotype: fine, gray-green scales, no pebbling. His eyes — brilliant electrum foil — are framed in bold strokes of purple and gold, while the smooth ridges of his face are etched with dark patterns something like henna. His tunic is made from white and gold silk woven from lamba tree roots, and all the teeth in his mouth lurk behind an opulently patterned modesty made from fine Ha’khen leather. With half his face always hidden, I can only augur his moods and desires through the narrow apertures of his eyes, and through his tones.

“I did not lie when I told you back on Earth how much your exhibition moved me,” Ran’vek says. “Was I not beside myself, Luthei?”

“You were incoherent with enthusiasm, master,” Luthei says, their eyelids closed to slits, which is how Kadians actually convey happiness and pleasure.

“Quite so.” He stops pacing to loom beside me, and I can feel the weight of his presence, the warmth of his body heat in this proximity. He is looking at the outmost tapestry, the one depicting the red streak of a shuttlecraft burning up in reentry over the blue fireball of the Earth. Axel’s fatal crash during the return from a routine trip to Luna Beta colony.

“It always astounds me what is born from our most devastating tragedies,” Ran’vek says to me. The low vibrations of his throat as he speaks are like the warning growl of a crocodile, and they exert a strange power over me. “Well? Say something. I believe among humans it is customary to offer verbal thanks when one is given a gift.”

I try to speak, but my throat becomes clogged with phlegm. I can feel the heat in my eyes before the salt stings them.

Ran’vek sniffs the air. “What is that? What’s she doing?”

I feel Luthei leaning toward me to get a better look. “She is crying, master. Likely from a powerful overflow of gratitude.”

I feel the low rumble of pleasure coming from Ran’vek’s throat. “To be overcome, that is art’s greatest gift. Or so Çen’yït always said. To be overcome in the presence of that small measure of divinity that we mortals may hold like a mote of fire from the burning firmament.”

#

It was impossible not to notice him when he came to the first showing of my exhibition in Santiago de Chile at the renowned Oscar Caranza Gallery.

I’d seen Thra’ha’khen before, of course. In London, you’d see one on every other street, and even in Bruxelles you’d sometimes glimpse a small throng of them taking in the sights of the Grand Place as tourists. But these Thra’ha’khen were always dressed in terrestrial clothes in an almost comical attempt to fit in, like watching polar bears bumble among seals with fake flippers over their paws. Ran’vek was different. He dressed as a noble, and carried himself as a noble. He wore his modesty even when no one in a thousand miles would have cared.

And besides all that, he was beautiful. I thought so the moment I saw him. Not beautiful for a Thra’ha’khen, as some would put it. No, simply gorgeous on his own terms. I think part of it was the way he carried himself with grace, his wide frame speaking to impossible physical power, but mostly it was his eyes, how they found me through the crowd, how he seemed to know in an instant that I was the artist. How they didn’t blink as he approached me. That unwavering stare, those metallic irises even more brilliant under the pale earthly light.

He introduced himself as “Marquis Ran’vek,” as the word Marquis was the closest word in French for his nobiliary title, Tin’yee.

He asked me for a tour of the piece, and I agreed, almost breathless.

The exhibition consisted of four parts. The first three were holo-meshes, a triplicate arcade of light tapestries. The first I’ve already described. On this, Ran’vek had little to say, but I could tell he was, if nothing else, appreciative of the contrasts in the wobbling shimmer of Earth’s reflected light and the solid, unmoving plume of Axel’s erupting shuttle. We passed through this outmost layer, and I showed him to the second screen, and this was where I could feel his excitement grow.

The second holo-mesh was not a mere canvas of light but a deeper weave approximating a three-dimensional space — that space being the apartment that Axel and I shared, and its disorder after his death and my resulting rampage. The holes I punched into the cheap plaster walls, the soiled underwear, the boneyard of empty takeout boxes, the smashed easel, the smeared paints all over the floor, and the unfinished canvas — Axel’s final entry in a series of pieces depicting the stark regolith outside Luna Beta — singed in places where I’d half-heartedly attempted to burn it with a pastry torch: all of this physical detritus, that objective correlative of a soul whelmed with grief, on display forever for the eyes of strangers.

“Such detail,” Ran’vek said. “This must have taken ages.”

“You can accomplish quite a lot when you give up on sleeping,” I said.

We moved on into the third and final mesh. This was less ambitious, another flat screen without any depth to dunk your face into. It was also more abstract and less representational than the prior two layers.

Many others had asked me about the strange, dark, vaguely arachnoid silhouette with its many crooked limbs that loomed behind the storm of luminous fractals I’d sewn with my light-needle. Not everyone even noticed it, but those who did couldn’t unsee it once they had.

Unsettling, creepy, ominous — those were the adjectives of choice for those who noticed it.

“Is the spider grief?” an older man had asked me earlier in the night after his tour.

“It’s not a spider,” I told him. “It’s the crooked angel.”

That was the name of the entire exhibition: Mon Ange Tordu. My Crooked Angel.

Perhaps I only imagined it, but when Ran’vek became aware of the shadow lurking behind the blizzard of light, his eyes seemed to soften in recognition. He said nothing of it at the time.

I led him then through that final screen, to the heart of the piece. Some critics would call the “sculpture” a sort of homage to Davinci’s Vitruvian Man, and I suppose I could see the resemblance. Like in that illustration, the sculpture that formed my exhibition’s physical core depicted a naked human form with limbs splayed to make a circular wingspan. Only in my creation, the wingspan was not a perfect circle but a crooked, broken oval, the supernumerary limbs skewed and bent and twisted at unnatural angles so that they formed a crimped mandala of arms and legs. The sculpture was a man, warped into something Other, pinned like a dead moth upon the corkboard of the universe.

Most people were stunned by the gold leaf coating the nude body and barely noticed the intricate details of the face. Ran’vek was not so undiscerning.

I explained to him that the eyelashes framing the wide open eyes — cast from resin and backed with mirrors to offer the living shimmer, and made articulate with servos to periodically swivel and track the movements of onlookers — were Axel’s actual eyelashes, which I’d collected painstakingly from our apartment’s floor and from our shared bathroom and then dipped individually in gold, silver, and copper and sewn into the polymer that formed the figure’s eyelids.

I think it was somewhere around then that he must have decided I was the artist he was looking for.

I didn’t hesitate about the offer — what was left for me on Earth? And besides, I was already partway in love with him.

We left the exhibition together and rejoined the crowd, but it felt like we were alone, or rather like we were the only real people there, all the rest simple assemblages, talking, taking up space, but not really alive; not like we were. Not even living in the way Axel was alive.

After coming to Ellumai-II, I kept waiting to feel that way around him again. To feel special; like I was more than just another piece in his gallery.

When I left Earth to travel the two-hundred-fifteen lightyears to the Koölot System, I took almost nothing with me. Toiletries, cosmetics, clothes, and a few souvenirs, like the chocolates from Gallard Chocolatier on Rue Nothomb in Etterbeek. For Ran’vek and Ran’yït, who had heard of but never tried chocolate, it was quite a good gift at first, at least until Ran’vek — and thank God it was him and not his son — ate a noir truffle filled with raspberry liqueur. Maybe a milliliter of alcohol — that’s all it was. I’d forgotten too much from my xenobiology courses in secondary school, notably just how toxic even trace amounts of alcohol are to the Thra’ha’khen circulatory system.

When the blood started to gush through Ran’vek’s modesty, I feared I’d murdered my new employer by mistake. There was me and Ran’yït both shrieking, but Ran’vek, once he’d vomited out the last of the chocolate and stopped the hemorrhaging, calmly waved us both silent, then gestured for a servant to clean up the mess.

“That was a lovely complex of flavors, before the poison set in,” he said to me. So gently, so kindly. And I was sure then that what I’d felt back in Santiago had not been false.

#

At the Royal Academy, I learned among many other things the different proportions for sketching Kadians, Thra’ha’khen, and other exosentients. I was taught to forget human conventions when sketching alien figures, to remember the rule of eight-and-three with Thra’ha’khen males: that their height is always eight times the length of their skulls and their shoulders are always three times the width of their hips. Females meanwhile observe a seven-four rule, and their arms are always the same length as their legs, unlike males where the ratio is 8/9. With Kadians, I learned the maxim that their neural-locks were always the same uniform circumference as their thumbs.

More advanced lessons with holographic models taught me the finer details of their musculatures, their bone structures. But these lessons taught me nothing of what you might call the soul. I could only ever sketch the surface.

#

Today, I decide to take Ran’yït on a field trip. We leave very early, when the fields and orchards are empty except for the sentry patrolling the grounds.

We’re going to paint the hills rising to the south of the manor. Ran’yït hops around me while I struggle with just the weight of a portable easel. They are rarely ever allowed outside so this is a special treat. I asked Ran’vek for permission at last supper, and he agreed provided we didn’t go past the fences that mark the boundary between the plantation and the wilderness.

We walk for about half a kilometer until the orchard gives way to low dunes of silt sprinkled with coarse stalks of native black grass. Ahead, the hills beckon. They remind me of karst formations I saw once on a trip to China — tall, narrow, sudden projections from the ground, much paler than the surrounding landscape.

As we set up our easels, I tell Ran’yït we are going to practice a Bn-Janite technique, glogsh-daubing, using prai sticks and the viscous, glutinous glogsh paint the artists of Bn-Jan use.

“Father says Bn-Janites smell like humans if you left them in the rain too long,” Ran’yït says, making that coughing sound that I’ve come to recognize as giggling.

I warn them not to mix their glogsh too soon, as it hardens very quickly, especially in an atmosphere like this, and that they need to plan their vision before they put stick to canvas.

I’m wasting my breath, not because they’re not listening, but because they already understand without my needing to say it. I watch them sketch a shallow outline of the landscape with the sharp tip of one of their talons into the composite of the canvas, then they set to mixing their first batches of glogsh: purple and black. Watching them at work, then looking past our easels at the silent, dolorous hills beneath the unblinking red eye, I start to feel like maybe I truly can make a life here, for at least as long as my hosts will have me.

Maybe it’s because we’re out of the house, but I feel bold. I ask Ran’yït about the other teachers — the art teachers who came before me. I know I am far from the first.

They don’t answer at first. They are focused on their work. I am ready to drop it entirely, but then they speak up, “There was nothing wrong with any of them. You’re my favorite, but they were all nice. Especially the sculptor from Yel’nv, Pa’net’ki, and the Kadian watercolorist, Wlnis. Wlnis used to sing me to sleep; it’s too bad they got sick and had to go home.”

Two thoughts: first, that Wlnis probably got along much better with Luthei, and second, since when do Kadians ever get sick? Between their natural immune systems and bioregulatory implants, they’re essentially impervious to pathogens.

“That’s a shame. How many art teachers have you had in these last couple rotations?”

Before they can answer, the ground shakes.

The first tremor is gentle, subtle. Such a slight shifting of the ground under our feet that I barely notice it. The second tremor is so violent that I lose my footing and fall on my face just as the easels collapse.

“Doş’oö!” Ran’yït is quick to my side, helping me up with that youthful enthusiasm, forgetting their strength; I feel like they might rip my arm out of its socket.

The ground breaks open beneath us. A small fissure, but I know worse is coming. Under my shoes, an intense heat builds up, now radiating through the ground.

“We must get inside now!” I shout, in French, before repeating in a likely incoherent attempt at Kadian.

We leave the easels and other supplies. There’s no time. I can feel Ran’yït’s fear in how their claws dig into my skin, how their fingers compress my hand almost to crush it. We run.

One, two, three, four paces — that’s all before the split in the ground widens and the dark smog vents out, herald of the deadlier invisible gases to come.

So this is it, this is how you die, Pascale. An idiot Earther who forgot what sort of moon you were on.

“I can’t see!” Ran’yït cries out, and my hand slips out of theirs as I trip and fall on my face again. My bones feel heavier by the second, my lungs begin to heave as a foul sulfurous smell smothers me. I push up off the ground, the soil burns my palms. The usually temperate air becomes hellish and the smoke thickens. Through the darkness, a bright ribbon of white heat appears in one of the wider fissures before quickly cooling and becoming black, and yet even though it no longer glows, lava is lava.

Something is tugging at me. I am coughing, something wet on my lip, my own blood perhaps. Something is lifting me, without much success. For as strong as Ran’yït is by human standards, I can feel them weakening. The heat rises. My skin starts to blister.

So this is it.

When a larger set of hands — hard-tipped and impossibly strong — gather me up by my armpits and haul me from the ground, I think for a second it’s Ran’vek himself who’s come to rescue me and his child. I’m blind, my eyes stung shut by the fumes and heat, but my ears work well enough, and I know by the grunts of our rescuer that it isn’t the Tin’yee. Too raspy; a female’s voice.

She mutters something in Kesh’tir. I know almost none of that tongue, but I can recognize when someone is calling me an idiot in just about any language. She lays me down onto soft, fine grass and I know we’re back on the grounds where subsurface stabilizers prevent ruptures. We’re safe. It takes a few minutes for my eyes to open, and when they do, my vision is blurred with tears, but I make out the broad, handsome face of my rescuer. Handsome despite — or perhaps because of — its many scars. She is one of the field laborers, and I’ve seen her before. A large, robust worker with a broad back and blisters on one side of her face that speaks to military service and having been on the wrong side of a purge-rifle’s flame.

Ran’yït lies beside me, panting loudly, feeling their body as if astounded that all is accounted for.

“You good-like? Not too dead-like?” the woman asks, her Kadian rough but serviceable.

I nod and make a strange sound that comes from my diaphragm — it might be a laugh.

She cocks her head. Her modesty is a simple square of cloth — I can see the contours of her jaw, her powerful teeth behind it. “Humans strange-like,” she says. “If I so soft-like was, I stay inside would.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you so much. For me, and for Ran’yït.”

The woman says something in Kesh’tir to Ran’yït. Her tone is low and respectful. Ran’yït replies in kind — I hear my name amid a stream of alien consonants and rasps. The woman’s nictitating membranes flutter over her black eyes. A Thra’ha’khen smile. “Pas’kal,” she says, pointing to me. She offers me her hand, I grip her wrist — it’s like holding a steel rod, she might be even stronger than Ran’vek — and she helps me sit up.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Vut’kn’nyiss,” she answers. “Friends call me Kn.” She pronounces it as “Cune.”

Her three names mean she was born from the lowest of classes in the Empire: Hz’vak, the egg-born. Thra’ha’khen birth live young just like mammals when they want to, but when they don’t particularly care if their progeny lives or dies, they can excrete the egg while it’s still forming. Apart from being looked down on, egg-born also tend to be nutrient-deficient and predisposed to deformities. Cune looks healthy enough, though.

I ask her if I am a friend and could call her by that name. Another flutter of her nictitating lid. “After I save you? Friends-like we had better be.”

I like her immensely.

Behind Cune’s head, the manor looms in the background. I catch a flutter of movement on the terraced balcony. A glimpse of a small, pale face. Luthei. It’s only there a moment, and yet I know with an awful certainty that they have seen me, that very likely they have seen all of this misadventure. And with that glimpse, whatever relief I’ve been feeling evaporates, and I’m in Hell again.

I almost got Ran’vek’s child killed.

#

A few hours later, after a good long shower, I receive a ping on my comm. It’s from Luthei — they want to see me in their quarters. My stomach makes knots as I march full of shame to what I’m certain is going to be at the very least a reprimand. Probably worse.

Luthei’s door is like any other in the manor, except for the fact that it is etched with Vyrran script, a proverb in Standard Kadian that loosely translates to “Be Here and Be at Home in Your Skin.”

I haven’t even knocked when I hear them call to me. “Come in.” Entrer. They say it in French — somehow this chills me.

I have never seen Luthei’s room before now. When I step inside, the smell is pleasant, a warm, citrusy, floral aroma, and the lighting is a soft, gentle pink like the color of morning light on their birth planet, Zalnynii. The interior is stark white and minimalistic except for a number of mirrors that cover one wall, so that as I enter, I am looking at a dozen of my own face.

Luthei sits on a round, soft foam chair, their legs crossed in something like a lotus pose, their feet bare, their hands on their knees. They wear a thin blouse of sorts made of a diaphanous fabric under which their androgynous body appears as a dark, graceful silhouette. Their neural locks are down and loose, splayed wild like corkscrewed snakes over their shoulders and down their neck. A factoid from xenobiology class comes back to me: that the Kadians refer to their electromagnetic sense conferred by their locks as “ulanidai,” which roughly translates to “sense of the divine presence,” and that each neural lock possesses as many as 16,000 nerve fibers, compared to 10,000 in the human clitoris.

I sit across from Luthei, a low glass table between us.

They are not smiling, and that’s cause for some relief, at least.

“You had quite a morning,” they say, still speaking French. “I’m glad you and Ran’yït weren’t hurt.”

“Only my pride,” I say, affecting a weak laugh.

Luthei rises from their squat with a single, easy motion and walks over to a transparent resin cabinet containing a few glass cylinders filled with bluish and amber liquids. Kadian liquors — I recognize the blue stuff as junasz, a liquor distilled from the spinal fluid of a fishlike creature from the oceans of Vyrra. Upperclassmen at the Royal Academy used to guzzle the stuff, but I could never stand it. Luthei sets the junasz down in front of me, then slides a crystal glass toward me.

It seems then we are observing Kadian etiquette, where the guest always serves themselves. So much for living by Thra’ha’khen rules. I pour as much junasz as politeness demands, then take a tiny sip. It tastes a bit like pine needles and numbs my gums instantly.

“I regret that I’ve been less friendly than I could be,” Luthei says.

I can’t suffer the tension anymore. “Please, Luthei — I know I made a mistake.”

Luthei touches my hand. Their fingers are clammy and velvet soft. “What do you think this is? Do you think I’ve called you in here to berate you?”

“Yes?”

They laugh. At least in that regard, Kadians and humans are the same — a laugh is often just a laugh, although for both species it can convey many feelings beyond amusement or mirth. They gesture to the glass again. “Drink, please.”

I take the glass and tip it back. More pine needles, more numbness, pleasant in its own way, but as the liquor goes down I can feel that numbness spreading into the whole of my body, relaxing my muscles, along with the ordinary burn you’d expect from any alcohol.

I can feel them studying me behind the placid mask they wear. Searching for something, weakness perhaps? As the silence builds between us, I can feel the room shrink around me, it’s almost like the air is chewing me.

“Will Ran’vek send me away for this?” I ask.

“I would hope not,” Luthei says. “Go on, drink a little more. It’ll do you good.”

“Please, Luthei, you don’t have to do this.”

A catlike tilt of their head. Their pupils narrow into dangerous slits. “Do what?”

“Pretend you like me.”

Their silver lips twist into an expression I don’t recognize. Their eyes are appraising. “The truth is, I feel somewhat responsible for you. That might be why I can be overbearing.”

I say nothing. Now it is my time to study them. Their mask of impenetrable beauty surrenders nothing. I once read about “Hyrklx Syndrome,” a condition where certain humans who take Kadian partners become unable to perceive other humans as attractive or consider them as viable mates.

“Did Ran’vek ever tell you that I discovered you?”

I try to keep a neutral face, but surely I fail, because their pupils narrow into bladelike slits.

“You were an artistic prodigy on Earth — 14 years old and admitted to the Royal Academy in London. Your first gallery exhibition at age 11. And you’re still so young — and still grieving, aren’t you? Your partner, he was an artist of sorts too, wasn’t he?”

I hide behind the glass of junasz and drain the rest of the liquid. My regret, instantaneous with how it both stings and numbs me and makes me cough.

Luthei is quick to dab my mouth with a handkerchief. They are smiling now, and it makes me queasy. “Easy, don’t overdo it.”

I want to slap their hand away. “Will Ran’vek send me away for this?” I ask again between coughs.

“No,” they say. And there’s that terrible little smile of theirs. “You’re very much safe. From termination, that is.”

“Thank you for the drink.” I stand up, faster than I should. The rush of blood to my head is dizzying and my vision blurs, but even through the blur I can make out that smile. Pity, contempt, disgust — whatever it is, I despise it.

#

We eat supper in the traditional Kesh’tir way, kneeling around a low circular bar counter with a large open bed of hot coals upon which we cook our meat with long skewers. Thra’ha’khen like their meat ultra-rare, raw in the middle but with a black seared crust.

I kneel across from Ran’vek, who is dressed in a white-and-silver evening robe, while Ran’yït is beside him and Luthei sits off to the side, not kneeling (not good for Kadian knees) but in the same lotus pose as before. The commander of the manor’s guards is also present, but is not eating. He stands behind Ran’vek, and the two converse without ever looking at each other.

Ran’vek’s mood is stormy, and I am terrified at first, but I realize from context that his mood has nothing to do with me. A few words keep emerging amid the stream — Ya’tan, The’kar. I piece it together: Ran’vek’s petition to Regent The’kar for the return of his family’s holdings, currently held by Grand General Ya’tan, has been denied. Again.

Then there is no more talk, and Ran’vek dismisses the commander and focuses on his meal. As he slurps the long, charred strips of fatty meat from under his modesty, I keep waiting for Ran’vek to give some indication that he knows his only child was nearly killed today by my carelessness. When he does at last speak, he asks Ran’yit, in Kadian — which means it’s for my benefit — what we did today in our studies of the galaxy’s art.

Ran’yït, perfect angel that they are, only speaks of the difficulty of working with glogsh, how quickly it hardens once you mix it. Ran’vek wipes char from his claws with a cloth and remarks that his beloved wife experimented with glogsh painting once, but gave up on it for the very same reason.

I wonder if he really doesn’t know. If, somehow, no one bothered to tell him.

Ran’vek’s metallic eyes fix on me, and in an instant I’m certain he knows. What is it in those eyes? Is it anger? Perhaps. But something else too.

He looks to his child and asks something in Kesh’tir. Ran’yït answers. I hear the name Cune among the syllables.

Ran’vek’s nictitating membranes flutter. “I shall remove a rotation from her indentureship.” He lets out a chuff. “Do you know who that laborer is? The one called Cune?”

I realize he is speaking to me. I shake my head.

“Ask her sometime,” is all he says. Then he wipes his claws again, and rises up.

We all rise with him, as is custom.

“Luthei, take the child to their chambers,” Ran’vek says, before giving Ran’yït a fond scritch on their scalp with his claws. “Pascale, you will walk with me.”

I follow, full of fear and trembling. What will I even do if he sends me away? I can’t go back to Earth, not now—-

#

We are in the gallery, standing before Çen’yït’s works again.

Ran’vek stands with his arms clasped behind his back and his head bowed, a posture referred to as “Yhak,” and associated with poise and mastery of one’s emotions. The posture of generals and philosophers.

I stand beside him, working up the courage to speak. Waiting for him to speak first, to rescue me from my own mouth. But it’s no use.

“I did something stupid today,” I say. “I could have gotten Ran’yït killed.”

Ran’vek does not look at me. His eyes are fixed upon the self-portrait of his dead wife. Painted with mool, a clay-based medium, its muted, gloomy palette is typical of Thra’ha’khen art owing to the orange light of Ha’khen’s star. But the image of the woman is striking despite that gloominess. I see Ran’yït in their mother, only the mother was far more severe, her gaunt face, narrow eyes, and long nostrils suggestive of a bird of prey. In the portrait, she wears a golden birthing robe, the kind pregnant females don before going into self-induced labor.

“I’m sorry,” I say, thinking perhaps he didn’t hear me.

“When I was the child’s age, Çen’yït and I were both ‘guests’ in the care of Ya’sek — Grand General Ya’tan’s father. We were prisoners in all but name, fed scraps, beaten or starved if we dared to question our host’s generosity. We were each other’s only support; our joining was like fate, something worthy of the old epics.”

He looks at me now. His eyes, despite their metallic sheen, are much more human than Luthei’s. Much more vulnerable.

“I…I can’t imagine,” I say.

“But you can imagine hardship. Pain. Loss. Love. I know you can.”

“Yes.”

“My mother had suzerainty over fifty systems. Twenty billion retainers and tenants. And then there is me, with just this single pathetic moon, served by indentures who despise me. Çen’yït’s family had only Lok’kar Station left, but you know how that ended. Still — I’m proud my child can grow up safe and happy.”

My stomach drops and I’m certain his deferred fury is coming. Instead, he reaches out and touches his dead wife’s painted visage, tracing with one claw the glossy ridges of lacquer-like clay that form her cheekbone.

“I don’t have to scold you, Pascale,” he says. “I know you’ve already learned your lesson. You care deeply for Ran’yït, don’t you?”

“I do. They’re…they’re very sweet.”

Ran’vek’s nictitating lids blink rapidly. “You know, she would have liked you.”

I follow his stare to the severe red eye of Çen’yït, which even now seems to glare through me. “Really?”

A loud chuff. “Oh, stars no. You’d threaten her, I think. She hated other artists.”

“I can’t imagine threatening her,” I say, gesturing to the painting.

“She was more delicate than her portrait shows. Like me, I am also delicate.”

“You don’t seem delicate to me.”

He twirls a hand toward the painting. “Why don’t you touch her?”

“Oh no, I’d rather not.”

“I insist. It would be a gesture of respect between artists — you can feel Çen’yït’s thumbprints in some of the texturing.”

Half sure it’s a test, I do as asked. The clay is smooth, glossy, cool, almost like glass. I am tracing the pebbling on Çen’yït’s forehead, enjoying the rougher texture — almost like the real scales — when Ran’vek’s enormous hand lays over mine.

His palm is soft, almost as soft as a human’s. My breathing becomes erratic. The syncopated beat of Ran’vek’s two hearts thrums through his hand into mine.

“Tin’yee?” I say. My voice sounds small, far away.

The warmth and vast presence of his body looms behind mine, a finger’s width of open air between his chest and the back of my head.

“Çen’yït had a theory about artists.” His voice rumbles through my body, deep, resonant, penetrating. He has switched to French — I didn’t know he could speak more than a few phrases. “She believed there were Lesser and Greater Artists among mortalkind. What she considered herself depended on her mood. Which are you?”

“I…”

He continues, before I can get anything out. “But all mortal artists were limited, in her view. Even the greatest artists could only ever hope to imitate the divine force of creation, that power which weaves time and space and energy as we might spin fibers. Thra’naax’kaa. Do you know that word?”

I shake my head. He has barely touched me, and I can feel an intoxicating heat spread through my body, between my thighs, in my breasts, in the fluttering moth of my breath caught somewhere in my throat.

“Oh, but you know what They are,” he says.

His claw hooks into the band that ties my hair back behind my head. He pulls it free and my hair springs loose over my shoulders.

“I don’t…”

“You’ve seen them,” he whispers, his powerful breath ruffling my hair. “You know them.”

I try to say no, to shake my head. But as I close my eyes, I can see Them. I see their crooked, irregular limbs like great scythes unfurling around their carpaced bodies, the many spinnerets flexing and twitching along their thoraxes, filaments of errant starlight flicking like webbing from those jagged appendages. I see their eyes, black and uncompromising, clustered in uneven patterns and odd-numbered sets, eyes that look in every direction and perceive not just the crude wavelengths of light but the pattern of time itself, the warp and weft of space.

The Crooked Angels.

He must feel my spasm. The orgasm that jolts through me, like an electric wire connecting my mouth to my nipples to my cunt.

I wait for Ran’vek to touch me again. Instead, he lifts his hand from mine and brushes his knuckle against my ear — the gesture somehow chaste. But he knows what he’s doing to me — he must.

I reach for him and grasp empty air. He is walking away, hands clasped behind his back, full of poise and proper restraint.

He takes the elevator first. My legs are buckling.

#

Thra’ha’khen skin is always shedding. When a Thra’ha’khen touches something, they leave a barely perceptible patina of microscales, like fine dust. This patina is on my hand now, on my fingers. Ran’vek is on me. And it pleases me, as I lay in my bed and push my fingers deep, to know that something of him is inside me now.

I am careful when accessing the exonet. Even here, far from the borders of Global Alliance space, my access ID is the same as it was on Earth, and if I spend too long browsing for information, the wrong sort of people might notice. I lie in bed sometimes, scrolling through random infochunks about Earth news or cultural events. Sometimes I’m flicking through the screens so rapidly my eyeballs get tired from rolling around in their sockets.

But after the encounter in the gallery with Ran’vek, I am possessed with curiosity about Çen’yït. She is the shadow that trails behind everything and everyone here, like another person lurking in every room, eavesdropping on every conversation from beyond the veil of whatever waits after.

There is of course ample information on her. Her life, her works, her illustrious family tree. But of her death, I can find nothing. Mentions of Lok’kar Station seem to evaporate beyond a certain date. The disaster that destroyed Lok’kar Station is only sparsely documented, despite its death toll being listed at well over 12,000 lives. In fairness, the Empire is hardly a bastion of free information, but this goes beyond the usual imperial info-scrub. Most of the sources I can access are written in Kesh’tir, with no reliable translations available.

I stop myself from searching more. Curiosity is a luxury that a fugitive can’t afford.

#

It’s been a few sleeps now, and I’m ready to take Ran’yït outside again, though we won’t leave the grounds this time. There are plenty enough subjects in the fields and orchards.

When Ran’yït asks me if it’s all right to include the workers in the landscape of the orchard they’re sketching, I don’t even consider why they’d ask the question, nor why they’d hesitate to depict figures which were part of the composition as much as the trees or the furrows of the land.

I worry I’ve made another mistake. While my student busily sketches, I find my stylus heavy. I scrap what I’m working on, uncomfortable with the landscape format which reduces living, thinking beings into mere objects. When I agreed to the job, I wanted off Earth and I didn’t know that the “colony” I would be living in would be little more than a plantation. I knew a little about Imperial indenture laws — convict labor, little different from what humans have done for millennia, except more vigorously regulated.

I watch Ran’yït work, and I realize that the foremost figure they are sketching is the one called Cune. I see her there, currently pulling down a withered branch from one of the vu’la trees so as to lop it with a crude set of bladed clippers. I start to sketch. Not what she’s doing now, but what I see in my mind’s eye, what I remember from when she saved us.

I sketch her from the perspective of one she stands over, her enormous hands laid over her knees, her eyes narrowed with kindness, her broad shoulders flared and pumped from the exertion of rescuing a stupid human from certain death.

Ran’yït is humming to themselves. I think we are both proud of our work.

#

I understand now why Ran’yït was hesitant to sketch the workers.

We are inside now, in the foyer. I have brought Ran’yït to Luthei in time for their lesson on nonstandard wave physics, and I have just told Luthei what we sketched.

Luthei takes me aside, away from Ran’yït’s ears. “You should erase those sketches,” they say. “It’s not proper.”

I tell them I don’t understand. That damned smile tugs the corners of their perfect little mouth.

“It’s rather disrespectful to…immortalize these people in the state they’re in.”

I repeat that I don’t understand.

“Do you pity them?”

“Maybe I do,” I admit. “Their lives seem…”

“Their lives are what they are,” Luthei snaps. There is some uncharacteristic heat in their words. It surprises me. They soften their tone, but their eyes remain severe. “They would neither understand nor appreciate your pity. This work is a means of atonement for them, of restoring their forfeit standing in society. But this is only temporary, and they will gladly forget it when it’s over.”

“I didn’t realize…”

“I know you didn’t. But if you really do respect the workers, you’ll erase the drawings. Yours and Ran’yït’s.”

I consider the pad in my hand. The screen lights up as my eyeline crosses it, and I see Cune’s stoic countenance staring back at me. I don’t want to disrespect her, do I?

Erasing my art is one thing. Luthei explains to Ran’yït what they explained to me, and the child seems to understand, but I can see their palpable dismay in how their throat swells and how they shift their feet rapidly.

“This is one of my best works yet,” Ran’yït says.

“Then perhaps you can merely erase the figures of the workers,” Luthei suggests. They put a hand on the child’s arm and give them a little squeeze.

Ran’yït considers the suggestion. But then they delete the entire drawing. “It was not proper,” they say, eyes down. “It was cruel of me to mock their shame by drawing it.”

Luthei’s voice is so soft and tender. “You’re a very good child, Ran’yït. Your mother would be proud.”

Luthei sends Ran’yït along, promising to catch up soon. Then they turn to me and ask, in such a polite little voice, if I’m making all these mistakes on purpose. Their face blurs through my tears.

#

I want to get out of the manor. To clear my head. I walk through the orchard rows, amid the gray, twisting trunks and their black foliage, their crescent moon-shaped leaves. I search for Cune.

When I find her, she seems to be on some kind of rest break, sitting against the trunk of a tree, chewing on a hard square of meat — what Thra’ha’khen call yant, a substance like jerky but much harder and even saltier — too hard for human teeth to chew.

Not noticing me at first, her modesty is up and I get a glimpse of her impressive teeth. She pulls it down quickly as a twig breaks under my foot.

“Kee?” she says, then, seeing who I am, relaxes. “Oh, you,” she says, switching to Kadian. She holds out the block of yant — it’s black as anthracite and has a similar lumpy texture. “You want some?”

I start talking. I can barely follow what I’m saying, so she must be even more confused. I think I’m apologizing. Yes, that’s what I’m doing.

She shakes her head. “Nothing wrong done,” she says. She thumps her chest and makes a hollow sound, striking the hollow swell where she’d keep her eggs if she had any fertilized. “You draw me? So bad-like is that? Shame, yes, but shame needs seeing. Shame is mine to suffer.”

We are both silent. She looks at me intently, and I know she knows I want to ask what she did to get here.

“Ran’vek said he would remove a rotation from your indenture,” I say.

She chuffs so forcefully that her modesty ruffles over her mouth. “One rotation. Funny.”

“He seemed very grateful you rescued his child…”

“Four hundred rotations,” she says. “That is my indenture.”

I do the rough math in my head — a Ha’khen rotation is about nine Earth months. A Thra’ha’khen lifespan tops out at around 150 years.

She touches the shriveled flesh around her eye. “Burn wound,” she says. “Got it in the war. Olth’kaa.”

Olth’kaa. The Great Purge. When The’kar the Monstrous, the father of the current regent, rose up against Empress Ko’mem and nearly wiped out all the great houses and the entire imperial bloodline. When Ran’vek lost his entire family.

She jabs a sharp thumb against her chest. “Me. My mistake. My shame. I served in Olth’kaa, but not an empire soldier. Served as soldier under The’kar. Old The’kar, not young The’kar. I killed many children. Broke their heads under boot, cruel-like. Cut their little throats. Burned some too.” She puts a hand on my shoulder. Merely through its passive weight I feel her power, and I know she could crush me as easily as any child’s body. She looks up past the trees above us, toward the dour prominence of Ran Manor. “My bones will feed these trees. I am here. We are what we do, and I am what I am and what I am is here.”

She offers me the block of dry meat again. It smells of ammonia. “Sure-like you don’t want any, Pas’kal?”

#

When Luthei calls me in to see them, I expect the worst. This time, they ask to see me in the reception room, what humans would probably call a “sitting room,” except there are no chairs — Thra’ha’khen knees don’t bend the right way for something like a chair to be useful.

I mirror Luthei’s lotus pose and sit across from them on one of the low, soft cushions arranged in a circle around the floor.

Luthei has a glass mug of muddy green liquid — green hassa, a coffee-like stimulant except always served ice-cold. Its piquant flavor profile is a bit like mustard.

“I wanted to speak about earlier,” Luthei says. “It seems Ran’yït is upset now.”

What do they want me to say? I keep my mouth shut, deciding to volunteer nothing until I can see their tack.

“They’re a very good student, aren’t they?”

I have no choice but to agree, nodding. I recall that for Kadians, a nod is a gesture that signifies confusion, but they don’t seem bothered by the gesture.

“You have something in common with them, don’t you?”

I brace myself for whatever barb they’re preparing.

“You both lost a parent at a young age. Although in your case it was both parents. I imagine that helps you understand them.”

“What is it you’re trying to tell me, Luthei?”

“My parents aren’t dead,” Luthei says, sipping their hassa. “Only imprisoned. For the worst crime a Kadian can commit: defaulting on a debt.”

I watch them, carefully. There is something off about the way they hold themself. Not so commanding as I’m used to, not so certain.

“A message came for you, from Earth.”

I swallow.

Because I don’t speak, they continue. “Would you like to see it? It was forwarded to us by the embassy on Ha’khen — seems your cousin didn’t know where you were, only that you’d relocated to somewhere in the empire.”

My cousin. I have many cousins, but only one who’d go through the trouble of sending a message to the Earth embassy on Ha’khen: Yael, who last I heard was living in Beijing with her new wife. A disturbing thought dawns on me — the embassy knows where I am. If they know where I am, then so would the powers that be on Earth. I try not to let my anxiety show, not to Luthei. I must give them nothing.

“May I have the message?” I say.

Luthei taps their ring, and my own comm-ring lights up. When I close my eyes, I see the message — a scan of a handwritten page. Yael is older than me, but perhaps because I was so precocious, she’s always looked up to me. I was her “genius” cousin. The letter is brief — Uncle Ruud’s cancer is back, and this time it may be inoperable. Beijing is lovely and she is making many new friends. The anti-Xeno protestors built some roadblocks and set off fires the other day.

At the end of the message, she asks why I left so suddenly. She says if I need to talk to someone, she is willing to pay for the costs of an FTL uplink.

I blink the letter back into storage and look at Luthei. I have no doubts they read it as well.

“No one ever writes me,” Luthei says. “But who would write to a failure?”

I smile at them, an appropriate expression of pity. Or maybe contempt. And then I stand up.

“Wait,” they say, holding up a hand. “Has Ran’vek spoken to you about his wife yet?”

Maybe my face betrays the truth. And it’s a strange question too.

They sigh. “Oh well. I suppose it was inevitable. Be careful, Pascale. You may not believe me, but I like you, and I care about you. Someone has to.”

Luthei is right — I don’t believe them. “Thank you for passing on the letter,” is all I’ll give them.

At supper, Ran’vek is absent. He is in his private study. I surmise from the way the staff and guards are moving as quietly as possible that he is receiving some kind of terrible news, the sort that might drive him to rage.

I have never seen Ran’vek angry. The mere abstract idea of his rage frightens me. I think of Axel — how quick he was to anger, how often he let it metabolize into kinetic energy: smashing plates, breaking furniture, punching the wall next to my head. But Ran’vek — imagining him furious is another terror altogether.

We eat beneath a portrait of the new regent, Ta’n The’kar, son of the infamous The’kar who murdered Ran’vek’s family. The regent is a misshapen and scarred behemoth, a victim of numerous injuries and a congenital condition similar to gigantism. Even in this flattering holoportrait, the distension of his jawbone is obvious (not helped by the fact that a Ta’n is not bound to wear a modesty), while the mismatched eyes — one bulging and lidless, the other narrow and squinty — are the only things to draw attention away from his slumped posture and humped back.

I wonder if Ran’vek is speaking with The’kar or one of his underlings now. I find my eye wandering back to the regent’s scowling portrait, and a thought slips out, unbidden: They would love him, as They love all things marred and crooked. The thought chills me.

“Are you all right?” Luthei asks, breaking the membrane of silence. “You look flushed.”

“I’m fine,” I lie. When I blink, I see a burning image of vast, uneven hook-like limbs unfolding, a crooked arachnoid mandala. I feel watched from some vantage outside time and space.

A heavy hand settles on my shoulder and I jump a bit. It’s Ran’yït. They are sniffing the air.

“You smell like you smelled after we almost died,” they say, in that guileless way universal to children of just about any species.

I’ve eaten almost nothing. The skewer I’ve put over the coals has begun to smoke, and when I pull it up, it is crusted with a carbonized spiral of what used to be meat.

Ran’vek never comes to dinner.

#

I know it’s a dream, and that he can’t hurt me. I know it’s a dream because there’s no way Axel could be here on Ellumai-II, in my bedroom in Ran’vek’s house.

I know it’s a dream, and yet it all feels so real, and now as I will myself to wake, I’m not waking up, and there’s Axel, a slender figure upright in the doorway, framed by the low light of the hall. He is as I remember, which is to say, he is holding a bottle and staggering as he approaches. I can smell the liquor on him. His body is lean with a rangy, wiry sort of strength, his blond hair shaggy, the bangs obscuring one eye. His beard looks wild, the result of plenty of grooming to cultivate an appropriately uncultivated look.

“Have you already moved on, Pascale?” he asks.

I am pinching myself, flexing my toes, squeezing my tongue between my teeth. Nothing works. He is coming closer, taller every second, looming now, much bigger than he ever was alive.

“Nothing to say, little girl?”

“No,” I answer.

Wake up, damn it.

“You could talk to me anytime, but you haven’t — do you prefer the company of aliens?”

He stands over the bed, his shadow long and crooked. Half his face is shifting, the skin melting, the bones warping like hot plastic. One leg, impossibly long and crimped in three places, drags behind him, while the opposite arm refracts, no longer neatly coupling with its shoulder, as if I am seeing it through the intervention of water. As the face melts, the new eyes — black as the cosmos, numerous as the stars — begin to emerge through the fissures. The all-seeing eyes of a Greater Artist. Of a Crooked Angel.

I am sitting up in bed. The air is cold and yet the sheets are glued to me by sweat. Axel no longer looms, and instead it’s a much broader silhouette that now fills the frame of the door.

Ran’vek’s eyes shine even in the low light, and he is wearing a loose evening robe, the kind Thra’ha’khen wear to bed. I breathe heavily. I stink of sweat and panic.

“You were screaming,” he says. His voice sounds slow, slurred. From a distance I can smell the sweet, spicy aroma of losh tea on him — the narcotic of choice for most Thra’ha’khen, brewed from kosh milk and leaves of the lokk tree.

Slowly, instinctively, I move an arm to cover my bare chest. It seems a silly gesture, more habit than anything else. He takes a small step forward. There’s a slight stagger in the step, and my dream flashes back to me. My heart beats faster.

Ran’vek holds his head and groans through his nostrils. “I drank too much,” he says.

Silence holds between us. I am afraid to speak — afraid of what my voice might do. But am I afraid it will make him come closer, or more afraid it will dispel him like another dream?

“You’re not asking why,” he says. “I appreciate that.” Another groan through his nostrils. A shudder passes through him, rippling the muscle beneath his robe. Thra’ha’khen have such graceful bodies, their powerful V-shaped sweep, the broad chests where their mighty lungs and hearts work, the tapered abdomens, their thick legs full of fast-twitch muscle fiber ideal for short bursts of murderous physicality, though less suited to endurance.

For what feels like forever, but is probably only a few breaths, he holds still. Then, quite suddenly, the mattress is shifting as he plants the weight of one knee on its edge. He looks down on me, and like a jolt of electricity I realize his face is naked — no modesty.

“Çen’yït used to wake up screaming when They touched her dreams,” he says. With one flick of his wrist, he pulls the bedsheet off of me and flings it aside.

I am naked except for my panties. My skin, exposed to the cold air and still damp with sweat, horripilates.

He leans forward and the whole bed rocks just under the weight of his knee, and I wonder if my bed can even stand up to his full weight. I feel like a feather, a dry leaf, a film of soap, mere gossamer measured against him. I see his teeth now, the vicious fangs of an apex predator bared, slick with slather. And I see the long, flexible tongue lurking behind those teeth. He takes one of my legs between his thumb and forefinger, the way I’d pick up a stick, and he gently moves it aside. A thought rushes through me — what did he mean by Them?

Does he know?

Sharp taloned fingers carefully reach under my back and he lifts me by my trunk with a single hand and pulls me against him. I throw my arms around him, barely able to grasp his chest like he’s one of those ancient trees whose trunk you need a friend’s arms to girdle. His body is scorching hot, like a furnace. I know Thra’ha’khen skin is softer than it looks, and yet I am shocked at how smooth it feels against me, how the harder ridges over his ribs tickle me. My face burrowing into his warmth, I breathe him in — under the accents of the losh he’s drunk and the fragrance he wears, there’s the earthy musk of an aroused male, a smell like petrichor and ozone. I could drown in it.

He carries me out of my room, and at first, I think he’s taking me to his private quarters, but when he bears me into the elevator — there are no guards watching it at this hour — I know where we’re going, and it thrills me. He tongues my mouth, the tip snaking past my teeth and grazing my palate, which confirms what I already suspected, that I am not his first human, as Thra’ha’khen with all their oral taboos hold no concept of kissing.

The gallery lights flash on, and from my perch slung over his shoulder, I can see the upside-down countenance of Çen’yït watching us through her portrait. This should bother me, but in the moment, I find it impossible to feel any way but triumphant. The wall is cold and hard behind my back. He is very gentle, very careful — he has no choice but to be. If he forgets himself for even a second, it could kill me.

Then kill me, I think. Sex should dance on the edge of death’s blade.

I’ve ruined everything. I’m so sure of it, waking up in the vast expanse of Ran’vek’s bed. Thra’ha’khen beds are stuffed with sand, and it feels like I’m lying on a boulder. At least the aching isn’t as severe as I expected.

Ran’vek sits on the edge of the bed, his broad back turned to me. The sharp black quills protruding from his spine are erect and twitching, a clear sign of stress and apprehension.

He regrets it. Of course he regrets it. A Tin’yee doesn’t pollute himself with a servant, let alone a human.

I shouldn’t have encouraged him — I should have been more professional, more careful.

Artificial orange sunlight — simulating a morning on Ha’khen — shines down from the false windows and radiates off the pondering giant’s hunched body, etching deep shadows on every rippling fiber of muscle.

I want to cover myself, my pale, naked shame, but Thra’ha’khen don’t use bedsheets.

The bedroom door opens and I let out a gasp, sitting up and covering my chest with my arms. Ran’vek glances at me, head tilted, and I can’t see his face against the glare of the artificial sunrise.

In strides Luthei, already fully dressed and holding a glass mug of hassa. “Good morning, Tin’yee,” they say, bright and chipper.

I try to crawl behind Ran’vek so they won’t see me, but it’s too late.

“Oh, Pascale,” they say, not even blinking. “How are you?”

Neither Ran’vek’s nudity nor mine seems to even register with them. Not that Ran’vek has much to show now that his organs have retracted back into their seam.

Ran’vek grunts. “Could you give us a moment?”

“Of course.” Luthei bows at the waist on their way out of the room.

Once they’re gone, Ran’vek turns around and touches the holodial on the wall, dimming the lights. His nictitating lid is half-raised. Seeing that, I unclench.

“You were exquisite,” he purrs.

My shoulders and spine relax and I settle back down. I enjoy the way he is looking at me now, full of admiration and latent desire.

“I felt like I was riding on a thundercloud,” I say. It’s an inane combination of words, and I’m not even sure it’s proper Kadian, but it slips out.

He chuffs. “No need to flatter me, I’m already ensnared.”

I laugh like a delirious idiot.

After I leave his room swathed in a ridiculously oversized gown that I suspect belonged to Çen’yït, I don’t see him for the rest of the day.

#

Two sleeps come and go without sign of Ran’vek, and the fear returns. I’m barely functioning during lessons and even Ran’yït notices. I repeat myself, I forget how to conjugate certain verbs, and I find my mind wandering when I should be focusing on correcting my student’s technique.

The first evening, Luthei informs me that Ran’vek is holding remote conferences with certain dignitaries.

The second evening, when Ran’vek again doesn’t show for supper, Luthei admits that they don’t know what Ran’vek is doing.

“But it isn’t our place to question him,” they say, oh so primly.

Once Ran’yït is excused and a servant takes them to wash up before sleep, Luthei turns to me, almost conspiratorially. Their voice is low. “Ran’vek is receiving an eminent visitor soon.”

“What sort of visitor?”

“Yal’mak, an Imperial Auditor, 1st Class.”

The food in my stomach feels like it might come up. Auditors are a bit like inquisitors: free-roaming, self-directed bureaucrats with wide-ranging authority. Of the five trillion thinking beings who comprise the Thra’ha’khen Empire, only fourteen can override a 1st Class Auditor: Regent The’kar, Grand Vizier Shak’xur, and the twelve Viziers and Grand Generals. A Tin’yee like Ran’vek sits one rung below in the Imperial hierarchy.

Servants come to clear the counter of skewers, scraps, and platters. Luthei takes my platter for me as I’m too distracted to offer mine up.

“I should stay out of the way,” I say.

Luthei touches their forehead, the Kadian equivalent of a headshake. “I’m afraid not. Yal’mak will insist on inspecting all the staff and indentures, including you.”

“What interest could an auditor have in me?” I ask.

I am picking at a scab on my arm, incurred from being pricked by one of Ran’vek’s elbow spines. Luthei has noticed. Their lips turn in a half-smile.

“If nothing else, you’re a living curio. You should be warned: Yal’mak is Ran’vek’s enemy.”

“Why are they enemies?”

Luthei sucks their teeth, which means the same thing for Kadians as it does for humans. “His son was on Lok’kar Station when the disaster happened.”

“But what does that have to do with Ran’vek?”

“He blames Ran’vek for the disaster.”

I open my mouth but then swallow the follow-up question — though surely Luthei can guess what I meant to ask.

Is there any truth to that?

“Yal’mak will search for any possible leverage he can. I trust you understand my meaning?”

The scab comes off under my fingernail and fresh blood wells up. I nod my head.

“Pretend to be a clueless human, that’s my advice. Yal’mak is shrewd, but he’s also a typical chauvinistic imperial bureaucrat. You only exist to him insofar as you might offer him something — and if he thinks you’re just an alien artist who can’t even speak a word of Kesh’tir — ”

“I can’t speak a word of Kesh’tir.”

“Good, then you’re halfway there.”

I’m not sure what my face is doing, but I must be making some kind of face at them.

“Cheer up, it’s not as if you’ve any real reason to be worried.” A short pause. A smile — one that, were they human, I’d call wry. “Do you?”

#

The next day, Ran’vek assembles the entire household staff and informs them of the Auditor’s impending arrival. After the cooks, cleaners, and valets return to their duties, he asks for a private word with me.

One quick, bruising fuck later, I catch my breath on the hard bed while Ran’vek licks the tears fresh from my ducts. Thra’ha’khen don’t cry — my tears are a wonder to him.

“You need to be careful,” he says. “If Yal’mak finds reason to harm you, I won’t be able to protect you.”

I say I understand, but I can’t hide my terror.

He enfolds me, his thick arms gentle, his warmth encompassing. I want to ask about Yal’mak and his son, about Lok’kar Station and what happened to Çen’yït. Maybe I’m afraid that he might tell me the truth.

Maybe he’s never asked me about what happened before I left Earth because he’s afraid, just like me, that I might tell him the whole story. Or maybe he already knows.

Are we both touched by the same crooked appendages?

“I don’t want to lose you,” he says. A shudder passes from him to me. “You’re so precious. You see and feel what no one else can.”

And when he says that, I know that he knows.

#

When Yal’mak arrives, his personal shuttle lands in the gray veldt beyond the bounds of the plantation, kicking up silt and blowing clouds of dust over the furrows and orchards. I am with Ran’vek on the balcony garden when this happens.

“I gave him permission to dock at the starport, and this is his answer,” Ran’vek says. I’m not sure what fear sounds like in a Thra’ha’khen voice, but maybe I have just heard it in the tremor under his words.

#

It is as Luthei warned. We are all lined up like soldiers at inspection. I stand next to Luthei at the end of the row of household staff including the cooks and valets, behind the guards and in front of the cleaners and menials. Yal’mak has arrived with only two bodyguards, a show of his potency and the aegis of his station.

His golden cloak bears the old seal of the House of Ko, not the new seal of the regent. He cuts a striking figure, nearly as tall as Ran’vek but not quite so broad. His eyes are crimson and have two pupils each, an uncommon but not unheard-of mutation among Thra’ha’khen of the Yu’sev phenotype: blue-gray scales of a fine grain, heavy brow ridges, leathery frills on the head and neck. Those head frills are hidden under a ridiculous-looking pyramidal black cap with a rounded top. The scales around his eyes and jawline are thickening from senescence.

He says something in Kesh’tir first. His voice is raspy, higher pitched than I’m used to from Thra’ha’khen males.

He then switches to Kadian, “I will question each of you in turn. Your master insists he is innocent of certain charges I in my capacity as a servant of the Empire have levied against him. I will ask you questions, you will be honest. The potential punishment for perjuring oneself to one of my station is entirely up to my discretion — and my imagination. Comport yourselves accordingly.”

He points to Luthei. “I shall begin with you, Kadian.”

I can’t help but admire how calmly they step forward, safe behind their mask of unblemished beauty, their pupils hair-thin slits.

#

A few hours later, it’s finally my turn. The guards show me into Ran’vek’s personal study, where Yal’mak has installed himself. Right now, this is not Ran’vek’s home.

It’s strange that I’ve never been in this room before now, even since becoming intimate with Ran’vek. There are scrolls of poetry arranged along the walls, some of them quite ancient, or at least made to look that way.

The air is hot and dry the way Thra’ha’khen like it. I am almost immediately thirsty.

Yal’mak kneels on a plush cushion at the room’s center. His cloak is neatly folded beside him, while he has shed his outermost robe. His inner robes are a pale pinkish color, the kind only aging Thra’ha’khen wear to represent the onset of dotage. He does not strike me as a man nearing retirement, age aside.

His eyes follow my attention to the scrolls on the wall, and then to the large sandscape framed behind his head — another of Çen’yït’s works.

“Ku’n’khu,” I say, addressing him by his rank. I bow my head and hold the position.

He does not acknowledge the greeting, and I must hold my head low, even as my lower back muscles begin to protest. At last, he waves his hand. I straighten up.

“Do you suppose he’s ever read these?” he asks, in perfect French. Pensez-vous qu’il a déjà lu ça?

I can’t conceal my surprise.

Yal’mak cranes his head and fingers one of the frills beneath his chin, as a human might stroke his beard. “These pieces, they aren’t in sequence. They belong to disparate epics; some of them aren’t even epics but profane, latter-day verses. To a layman, nothing would appear out of order, but to anyone with a modicum of classical education, this amounts to grotesque misappropriation of the works of sages.”

All this in French, fluent, fluid, sophisticated.

He gestures to the sandscape behind him. “I am given to understand you are an artist of some merit. Would you humor me and tell me what you see in this work here?”

I swallow a dry lump in my throat and crane my neck to get a better look. The composition is interesting, though I can barely focus on it with the Auditor leering at me. Çen’yït used at least thirteen different varieties of sand that I can identify from a glance, creating a chaotic swirl of different textures and colors, but beneath that surface appeal to senseless sprawl, a pattern emerges. And beneath that pattern, something else, something only I would notice.

Çen’yït hid something in this painting, and I doubt Yal’mak would see it if he stared for a thousand years. Beneath the gradients, a figure lurks darkly, comprised of heavy black grains woven under the more vibrant swirls — the crooked, uneven limbs of an angel.

“What do you see?” he asks again.

“Obsession,” I reply. Then I let out the breath I’ve been holding in.

He nods his head; apparently my answer is satisfactory. “Pascale Delvaux. Do you believe your master to be a good man?” Before I can answer, he continues, “Of course you do. He’s charmed you, hasn’t he?”

I hesitate, waiting to see if he’ll keep talking, but now he seems to await my answer.

“I can only say — ”

“Stop,” he holds up a withered claw, its dull talons curling in on themselves. “You were about to perjure yourself, however trivially. I’d advise you to choose your words carefully, for I will smell your deception. I lived on Earth for several years as an ambassador and developed an appreciation for certain things. To wit, French symbolist poetry, Ethiopian cuisine, and the peculiar pheromones your species emit when you deceive. They’re so volatile you’re not even aware they exist, but I can smell them. Now please, tell me: has he charmed you?”

Sweat drips down my lip and I lick the salt. I nod my head. “Yes. He has charmed me.”

“And you are physically intimate with him?”

There are two meters between us, and yet I feel as if he is breathing on me. I nod again.

Yal’mak leans slightly away. His nostrils cant away from each other. “How shameful, and yet hardly surprising. The station of a Tin’yee is not what it was.”

He uses the French equivalent here — Marquis.

My head swims; the heat is unbearable. I want to beg him to just ask the real damn questions he’d like to ask and be done with me, but I’m not as stupid as that. Times like these, this performance of mine becomes so difficult to maintain.

When he speaks next, his voice is softer. “Understand, I do not blame you. Ran’vek has always been charming. My son was charmed by him too, he and his wife, the artist.”

Yal’mak’s ring lights up, and so does mine, and against my will I’m flooded with an image of a young Thra’ha’khen male with blue-gray skin and striking copper eyes, dressed in the gray robe of a Factotum, the lowest of the upper bureaucratic ranks. Then I see that same male standing on the observation deck of a cavernous space station with a bright yellow gas giant in the background. Ran’vek and a tall female — Çen’yït — flank him, their arms hooked around his, the body language between the three open, intimate.

Yal’mak sighs through his nostrils as the images dissolve. “My retirement should have come last rotation, and my son would have been a 3rd or even 2nd class Auditor by now. Your charming master and his wife stole all this from me.”

I can hear my breathing become more ragged by the second. The longer I stand, the longer I feel his eyes on me, his anger suffusing the air —

“Have you had any contact with Earth lately?”

I shake my head. “No, Auditor.”

He sniffs. “Deception.” Tromperie is the word he uses. “For every mistake must come an accounting — mind that. Do you know what happened to your former partner and cohabitor, Axel Bramard?”

Axel. My heart jumps. Why is he asking about Axel?

“Well, as you likely know, he died in an accident during reentry with his shuttle.”

Another sniff. He leans forward. “Deception. No more lies!”

Thra’ha’khen possess enormous lungs, which among other things allows them to shout at ear-splitting volumes. My ears are already ringing and my whole body trembles. I shrink back.

The Auditor’s shoulders slump and he sighs again. He waves his hand. “I am misplacing my anger. I have nothing against you personally, you must understand. Still, let us speak more plainly — let us understand what the other knows.”

Another flash on his ring, and the data flows through me. I see copies of reports — written in English and French, translated into Kadian. Police reports. Diplomatic communiques. And a warrant for my arrest, posted two weeks after I left Earth by a public safety inspector based in Bruxelles.

Suspicion of foul play — the words sear through me even as the documents dissolve back into the datastream.

“Of course, you should know, I don’t need any of this to leverage you,” Yal’mak says. “That you’re potentially a murderer is of no concern to me, just as I care nothing for your government’s lobbying for your extradition. Human justice belongs to humans, but as long as you are within our borders, you are subject to Imperial justice — my justice.”

I can’t stand anymore. I collapse onto my side, panting like a beaten dog. My tears are flowing freely now. Something changes in the Auditor. His body relaxes, the hard lines around his eyes soften.

He mutters something in Kesh’tir. It has the cadence of classic verse.

I wipe my eyes on my arm. My breathing comes in as a sniffle. I must look pathetic to him.

“How much has your master told you about his wife, how she died, and what happened on Lok’kar?”

I sniffle again, trying not to let my nose run. My ears are burning. “Almost nothing, Auditor.”

His face is placid. “Çen’yït died along with the rest of the station’s residents when the atmosphere was vented in every module. It was an emergency purge order, caused by a catastrophic malfunction in the station’s central computer. That is the official report, anyway.”

His ring flashes, the only warning I get before I’m bombarded with a stream of images. What I see: bodies, twisted into unnatural configurations, carcasses with their heads deflated, their limbs elongated and braided, their ribcages torn open, their hides flayed from the flesh, their eyes replaced with dark gems. I see gestalts of what appear to have been three, four, even five different people melted together into unseemly tangles.

“These were all recorded by the crew of a freighter which answered a distress call from Lok’kar Station. Many of those spacers have since been committed to intensive psychiatric care. Tell me, have you ever seen such subversions of the natural order? Such despoilment of the body?” he asks me.

“No, Auditor.”

He shifts away. No shouting this time, rather a whisper. “Deception.”

New images flash under my eyelids when I blink. These I have seen before, however I might have tried to forget them. I see my parents as I found them the day after my eleventh birthday, the day I became an orphan. My father lays across the living room, reduced to a flat, dimensionless semblance of himself, like a canvas print of a man, while my mother hangs from the wall, her body stretched and twisted into a broken spiral of human flesh.

“Please. Please no more.”

The images dissolve, and all I see when I open my eyes is Yal’mak’s grim countenance, assessing me, judging me.

“Your local authorities ruled it a ritualistic killing, ascribed it to some sort of serial killer. Do you think that’s what it was?”

I am mute. My head feels like it’s inflating dangerously, on the verge of bursting.

“Do you?”

“No.”

“Your honesty does you credit. The more honest you are with me, the more sympathetic you might find me.”

“Do you think Ran’vek and Çen’yït did that to those people? That they…tortured and killed them?”

“No. Ran’vek was nowhere near Lok’kar when it happened. As to Çen’yït, how could one person have killed and mutilated so many? It defies ratiocination.”

“Then why — ”

He cuts me off. “What I believe is that Ran’vek and Çen’yït were members of an ancient cult devoted to the worship of beings called Thra’naax’kaa — Those Great Others From Beyond. And I believe you know something of this, more than you would let on.”

I shake my head.

His nictitating lids flutter in amusement. “Deception.” He turns away from me, and I can feel his disgust, his barely contained rage, and his grief, too. Or maybe it’s just the dry heat.

“I could have Ran’vek stripped of his titles and birthright, such that it is. This is within my purview. But wanting for evidence or testimony to support my charges, such a reckoning will appear as naked score-settling. The regent, up-jumped traitor’s spawn that he is, may even side with Ran’vek, and if not him, then surely one of the more opportunistic Grand Generals like Nat’yis or Ya’tan.”

I swallow down a queasy lump of something bitter.

“So you see, I need evidence. I believe you can provide that.”

I shake my head. “No. No. Please…”

“There are so many things I could do to you. I could send you back to your people to face their justice. Or I could let you fall through the cracks of Imperial law and disappear somewhere unpleasant. I’d rather not do anything of the sort. You strike me as a victim of some vicious cosmic caprice. When possible, I aid victims, for such is the prerogative of a magnanimous and just soul.”

I am crying again and it’s only half show. My body trembles. I imagine what might happen to me, all the horrible fates that could await, where returning to Earth would seem almost a mercy at this point. But then I imagine what might happen to Ran’vek, to the rest of the staff, even to Luthei. And of course, I wonder what happens to dear Ran’yït if their father is disgraced, disowned, and likely executed.

I ask the question. Through my sniffling and tears, I ask the Auditor point-blank what will happen to Ran’yït if he succeeds in his vendetta against Ran’vek.

Yal’mak seems to weigh an answer. “I have nothing against a child who is blameless for their parents’ perfidy. The child would have my protection — I would see no harm comes to them.”

I don’t have a Thra’ha’khen’s sense of smell, and I doubt they release any kind of pheromones when they lie. I don’t even know what the tell is for a Thra’ha’khen committing deception. And yet I’m certain to my marrow: he’s lying.

I swallow. “I, I need…could you give me some time to decide?”

I expect anger, wrath, refusal. I am surprised when Yal’mak twirls his hand — the equivalent of a shrug. And after all, why not? He has all the power here. He can afford to be patient with something pathetic like me.

“I shall sleep here,” he says, “And after first meal, I intend to see justice done before I leave this dreary little moon. You have until then to decide. You shall find me in your master’s quarters.”

He gestures to the door — it’s time for me to leave. I rise on unsteady legs and bow my head again. “Auditor, where are Ran’vek and his child now? I haven’t seen either of them since you arrived.”

The gray membranes of his nictitating lids twitch. “Your concern is touching. I wonder if Ran’vek reciprocates such care. The Tin’yee is under guard for the duration of my stay. As for the child, they are confined to their own quarters. You may see them if you wish. Now leave me, I have many more interviews to conduct.”

A full hour later, my eyes still burn. One of Yal’mak’s bodyguards is in the corridor when I approach the elevator. He barely takes heed of me, and makes no move when I open the elevator and step inside. I’m inconsequential to them.

In the gallery, the lights activate as I cross the expanse. I walk past the statuary, past Çen’yït’s gallery, and to my exhibit. I walk through the three layers of holo-mesh, until I am staring at the golden mask and gaping mouth of the warped figure, the crooked angel.

“This is all your fault,” I say. “Your obsession — you couldn’t leave it alone. I told you what would happen, what They’re like, what They do. I wouldn’t be here if you had just listened to me, Axel.”

No answer. Of course he doesn’t answer me. He can’t. Which doesn’t mean my words go unheard.

The guard — one of Yal’mak’s two bodyguards — doesn’t even bother to search me or give me more than a second’s glance. She lets me through to Ran’yït’s room. Part of this is the nigh-sacred importance of the teacher-pupil bond in Imperial culture, but most of it I imagine is that the guard doesn’t perceive me as a threat. And why would she?

Ran’yït is lying on their bed. Listless and vacant-eyed. Cold meat, its blood sauce congealed, sits untouched on a tray on their nightstand.

When Ran’yït hears the doors seal behind me, they sit up. “Doş’oö!”

I labor toward them. The quills protruding from their spine through the slit in their sleepwear shudder — they are worried for me.

“You look unwell,” they say.

“It’s nothing. I forgot to take my injection today, so the gravity feels worse than usual.”

I wonder if Ran’yït can smell when I’m lying, as Yal’mak can. How pungent is a human lie?

I sit down beside them on their slablike bed. They fidget and stare up at the ceiling, decorated to look like a starry night sky, with slowly shifting clouds and satellites streaking past the more fixed stars. I wish I had had such a ceiling in my childhood bedroom — I would have probably slept better.

“Something bad is going to happen, Doş’oö.”

I try to hug them. It’s difficult with how much bigger they are, and yet they seem to appreciate the gesture. Their shudders lessen, and I can feel their heartbeats slow.

“Nothing will happen to you,” I say. “I promise.”

“Luthei always says we shouldn’t make promises we can’t keep.”

I’m not sure what to say to that. “They’re probably right,” I mutter. “They usually are.”

I try to lighten the mood. I tell them about what we’ll do once “all this” is behind us, some of the lessons I have planned. They barely seem to hear me. Their eyes stare past me, blasting through everything.

“I asked to see father, but the soldier wouldn’t let me,” they say.

“Your father’s all right,” I say.

“So you’ve seen him?”

I look away. I can feel their stare itching at me, desperate for something I can’t give them. If Ran’yït was a human child, they’d be bawling. But they are Thra’ha’khen, so their terror and despair are muted. And yet the air between us is bitter. They are angry with me, with everyone, with a universe full of unfeeling grownups who make mistakes and tell children lies. I know — I have been where they are now. They are facing an orphan’s life, a hardship I know too well. And yet I am the worst of the liars, aren’t I? Because I’ve been lying to them about who I am all this time.

I try to soothe them. I tell them they will be a great artist one day — better than me, perhaps even better than their mother.

“I don’t care about my mother — I didn’t know her, and she never wanted me.”

Instinct tells me to reassure them that that isn’t true. But I say nothing. After all, what do I know? I realize the longer I stay here with them, the more damage I’ll do. I cannot fix what’s broken here, nor reassure them when I can’t even reassure myself that all will be well.

If I care for this child, I have to leave now.

“I have to go,” I say. “You should eat something.” I press the button on the tray and the reheat cycle fires, the blood sauce immediately runny, the meat steaming again. They don’t even glance at it.

“I had a dream last sleep, Doş’oö. You were with me, and we were alone. Father wasn’t there. He was gone, not just out of the room, but gone all the way. I asked you what happened to him, but then you were gone too…”

I hide my eyes so they don’t see me crying, but they must smell my tears anyway.

“…but you weren’t really gone. Or, at least, I could feel you near me. But it wasn’t you — it didn’t look like you. Too many eyes. The arms were wrong.”

I wipe my eyes, then I take up the food tray and set it on their lap. I watch them until they pick up a piece and reluctantly start eating.

#

It’s very late, or else very early, insofar as those words have meaning. I’m trying to put the flask of junasz back when the doors to Luthei’s chambers open and they enter. They don’t ask me what I’m doing here. They are completely silent and dead-eyed as they walk over and snatch the bottle from me.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” I say.

Luthei takes a glass to pour themselves some, but pauses as they eye the level of the remaining liquid. “How many have you had?”

“Just two.”

And there it is. A smile full of corrosive pity, even when they look wearier than I feel.

“You were with Yal’mak?” I ask.

“You make it sound scandalous.”

“What did he want with you?”

“Same thing he wants with everyone, I imagine. To feel in control. Four hours I sat with him. You know how many questions he asked? Zero. We watched each other, and I think after a certain point we were just daring the other to blink. He never did.”

“Is he still awake?”

“I don’t think he sleeps. Why?”

I hesitate to answer. Their listless eyes harden and they appraise me.

“He offered you a deal,” Luthei says.

I open my mouth but close it again.

Their mouth is a tight line. Their pupils are fine as eyelashes. “I suppose I can’t blame you, though I’ll admit, I figured you’d be too hopelessly in love with the Tin’yee to ever consider betraying him. I’ll also admit I had you down as a self-loathing case. Maybe you do care about yourself after all.”

My voice comes out in a mumble.

“What?”

“I said, it’s not for me, it’s for Ran’yït. I made my mind up to do what’s best for Ran’yït.”

Their flat expression bores through me. “If that were true, you’d have resigned your post long ago.”

I feel as if I’ve been struck. “Who the hell do you think you are?” I ask.

Luthei’s eyes close to slits, face blooming with mirth. “The lesser of two sinners in this room, but not so vain as to think that redeems me.”

My hands are screaming at me to grab their throat. “You’ve hated me since I got here.”

Their eyes open and they eye the cylinder of junasz again. “You didn’t drink enough.”

“What?”

Luthei bares their green, crystalline teeth in undisguised frustration and shakes the junasz at me, little bubbles forming at the surface. “Not. Enough.”

They mean the dosage.

I am still reeling, still trying to understand how they put it together so quickly, when they thrust the flask into my hands. “Have another drink. Then say goodbye to Ran’yït, because whatever you and their father mean to do, the child deserves to be clear of it.” Their voice is shaking now, in a way I have never heard a Kadian’s voice tremble. Their smooth, clammy fingers lay over mine, and I feel their slow, faint heartbeat.

They kiss my cheek, a quick, almost motherly peck, and I feel the static charge billowing from their neural locks, making my hair stand on end. We are both so tired, both so worn and weak, we practically fall against each other.

“You must despise me.”

“No, Pascale. Just as I do not despise the Tin’yee. You are both touched.”

We stay like that a while, not really hugging, more sagging against one another. And then I go to see Ran’yït one last time. Because Luthei is right — if I truly love the child, they must be far away from me.

#

It’s almost like he expects me. Yal’mak is in Ran’vek’s chambers, standing with his arms clasped — Yhak posture — as he stares at the false windows with their display of the Kesh’tir nightscape.

“You’ve made your decision?” he asks, not turning to look at me. He speaks in French, of course.

I can hear my own heavy breathing. As I approach the Auditor, I am aware of my smallness, my frailty. He is not as large as Ran’vek, but still as big as the biggest of humans and likely much stronger.

“Yes,” I say.

“Do you know, Çen’yït’s body was never found when they swept Lok’kar Station? My son’s was — though not in one piece, nor even in a few. But as for Çen’yït — nothing.”

I say nothing. I shuffle a little closer to him, testing the distance between us, seeing if he’ll react. He doesn’t.

“I’m not a fool, Human. I know this won’t bring me anything like solace or even closure. But much as I believe Ran’vek and Çen’yït were driven to do monstrous evil by a compulsion they could not understand, so too am I mastered by my own — ”

When I plunge the syringe into the small of his back, he barely twitches. He falls silent midsentence. I stumble back, my arms and legs suddenly gelatinous with terror. I can’t believe I actually did it.

The needle is so tiny and he feels around for it the way one might try to remove an annoying insect. He is so calm, and there is a sort of regality in how slowly he moves.

“What have you done?” he asks, his voice calm as he turns to look at me.

I see it in his eyes, probably before he feels it — the blood vessels bursting around the irises, darkening with bruise-purple blood. The first cough is almost polite, and he holds a fist over his modesty, but I see the stain seeping through the veil’s fine fabric.

The second cough is more violent, and he falls to one knee as he is seized in a fit. Coughs turn to retching as the blood gushes freely, uncontrollable hemorrhaging as the alcohol in the junasz destroys his circulatory system.

I try to back away but trip and fall onto my back. All I can do is watch. At first he thrashes, as if his impending death is some great beast he can wrestle with. But then, as if by some incredible triumph of fortitude, he falls still, and in that last moment, he clenches his teeth, now exposed as his modesty has ripped away, and he lets out a final gush of blood through that wall of fangs. The old Auditor looks almost relieved. Calm, somehow.

I watch Yal’mak as his retching and coughing slow and diminish in intensity. I am beyond horror now, fascinated by this dying animal. Awestruck by his arrogance — he never saw any threat from me — and even more astounded by the poise and dignity he exhibits even now. For one instant, the retching and coughing cease. And I think perhaps he will live, that I have failed. He lifts his chin from the puddle of his own viscous, chunky blood, and he hisses something in Kesh’tir. A curse, I think, a promise of revenge. But then he says a word I know: “Thra’naax’kaa.”

And then he speaks to me in French. “Ils sont là.” They are here.

He settles back into his little drowning puddle, his arms smearing crooked wings of blood into the floor before all movement ceases together.

#

Weapons discharge in the corridors. The fight is brief. The two bodyguards are outnumbered and surrounded. They do not surrender, and so they join their master in whatever waits beyond this life.

I’ve been alone with the corpse for what feels like a few hours. It’ll be waking time soon — I am not the least bit tired. The blood has flowed in interesting directions, seeping from the body across the tiled floor, making a lopsided star pattern. I take this as another providential sign from Them.

Earlier, Luthei entered to check on me when the blood hadn’t yet cooled. They saw to those contingencies which I’d neglected, directing the household guards to rescue the master and to silence the Auditor’s bodyguards and the crew of his shuttle. Two bodyguards, a pilot, a steward — that was the totality of his entourage. I can only conclude that he wanted to be murdered; he made it so easy. Not that I imagine for a second that I’m going to get away with this. But I had to do it — for Ran’yït’s sake.

At least, that’s what I tell myself. It’s another lie, isn’t it? Une tromperie, as Yal’mak would have called it.

When the door opens, I expect it to be Luthei again. It isn’t. Ran’vek’s wrists are bruised from tight manacles only recently removed. I notice this right away and my heartbeat flutters from concern. But more disconcerting is the look on his face. Palpable shock; horror even. Here is his enemy, dead; killed by a tiny human artist. Did I expect gratitude, joy? Maybe so.

“What have you done?” he mutters, standing in the doorway, as if he’s afraid to come closer.

I realize at last why Ran’vek needed me. It’s not just because he needed another artist after Çen’yït died in her failed summoning on Lok’kar Station. It’s because he realized I, like Çen’yït before me, would do things he himself could not.

Because he will not approach me, I come closer to him. I wrap my arms around him and push my head against his chest. His larger primary heart is pounding like a marching drum, the smaller one is slow and faint.

“What have you done?” he says again. It never would have occurred to him in a thousand years to attempt anything against Yal’mak. He would have accepted his fate, been shamed and disentitled and ultimately exiled, if not executed. And Yal’mak knew this, hence why he’d traveled with such a light complement — his enemy had already as good as surrendered.

I swallow, feeling like I’m swallowing down the last of the simpering, innocent art tutor I’ve pretended to be. What I hoped I could be. If Yal’mak had never come —

“I did what needed doing. For your sake, and for Ran’yït’s.”

“You’ll be put to death. We’ll all be put to death.”

“We can stop pretending now, love. I’m ready to stop pretending.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You know what I am,” I say, looking up at him, catching his eyes with mine. “How I’ve been touched. You knew — it’s why you found me. The ones you call Thra’naax’kaa — we can reach them. I know we can. We were both so close, you with Çen’yït, me with Axel. Now we can finish it.”

He takes a small step back. I tighten my grasp around him. I’m terrified for a moment that I’ve misjudged him, that he isn’t who I thought.

But then I feel him relax. His enormous hand settles on my back and his major heartbeat slows into sync with the minor. “The Empire will realize what we’ve done,” he says. “We need to get Ran’yït away, far away, somewhere safe.”

We. I can live off that word.

I speak into his chest, to his syncopated heartbeats. “We need to work quickly. If we can summon the Crooked Angels, there’ll be nothing your enemies can do to us or to Ran’yït.”

“Çen’yït’s research was lost with her. I’m not sure we have the time…”

“We don’t need her research — I know enough, love.”

And I know someone who can help us.

#

Axel is watching us as we step through the three layers of holo-weave.

“All this time…” Ran’vek mutters.

“Hello, Axel,” I say.

The eyes, which I always claimed were made of resin, are obviously not resin to anyone who’d look closely. But then, how could any sane person have ever imagined the truth? I reach toward them.

Axel blinks, a golden eyelid furling over a dark eye before my finger can reach it.

Ran’vek is silent for a while — this must be difficult for him to digest. But at length, he finds his tongue again. “How does this help us? It can’t speak, can it?”

“He can’t, no,” I say.

I reach above Axel’s head. The eyes track my hand. They flinch when I grip the brittle golden apricot that is his ear and break it off. Ran’vek leans closer, awed by the polychromatic ichor that leaks from the wound.

“But he can give us the paint we need for our work.”

“I see. But if this is the paint, what’s the canvas?”

I show him my teeth, a big human smile. It must be so scandalous to his every sensibility, but I can feel the excitement in his major heartbeat.

“Oh, love, it’s us. Us, this manor, this moon, all the space around it. It’s us. It’s everything.”

Vizier Jen’şar planned for an assault, expecting resistance, perhaps even before his personal cruiser could enter the atmosphere. No such adversity materialized. The House of Ran appeared first as a small blemish upon the black belt of the moon’s habitable zone, like a pockmark on its skin.

The cruiser landed on a plateau just outside the manor’s grounds, kicking up huge waves of gray silt that washed over the overgrown furrows and the neglected orchards. Once the ship’s engines switched off, a total silence held sway.

The Vizier could have sent an underling — any number of Auditors would have jumped at the chance to avenge Yal’mak. But he understood well the importance of upholding Imperial authority, and besides, Regent The’kar had made a direct request that he see to it personally.

A full regiment of five hundred soldiers disembarked from the cruiser and swarmed over the grounds. They soon had total control of the fields, orchards, and the manor itself. Not that they met any opposition. From the bridge, Jen’şar watched the feeds from their helmet monitors as the soldiers swept through servants’ hovels, through the black orchards where the fruit was rotting on the overburdened boughs, and through the lavish rooms of the manor itself.

He thought of the poor child, the Tin’yee’s offspring, who even now was with Jen’şar’s second consort in her quarters on the lower deck. Ran’yït had begged to be allowed to see their father, and Jen’şar, by no means unfeeling, could only promise that were it possible, he would make sure the child would see their father one last time. Even if they only saw the corpse.

Ran’yït and the Kadian, Nins Luthei, had been apprehended by Imperial transit security while attempting to charter a freighter into Ducerian Space. At present, the Kadian was being extradited back to the Kadian Systems to face justice for serious financial misconduct, namely the sin of insolvency. Jen’şar pitied that Kadian in a way he did not pity Ran’vek, nor the human murderess he’d apparently taken up with. But more than anything, he pitied the child. What future could they have now? Adoption into his own house was out of the question — the best Jen’şar could do would be to find a minor house willing to take and train a twice-disgraced highborn child as a retainer.

Jen’şar’s attention was arrested back to the constellation of screens in front of him. One of the squad commanders had found an elevator and was now descending.

#

The manor’s registry reported 42 household staff and 113 indentures. Not a single one was found, alive or dead. The Vizier’s soldiers combed the entire manor twice. They even sent recon teams out into the wilderness, some straying into the tundra and the hot desert that stretched out on either side. Nothing.

In later debriefings, many of the Vizier’s soldiers reported an uneasy feeling, as if at every moment they were being watched. Jen’şar, though he’d never admit it, felt the same way, especially when he left his cruiser to descend into the manor and see for himself with his own eyes the “monument” his soldiers found.

They found it in the gallery, hovering over the works of various artists, greater and lesser. At the center of that gallery was the only body they’d find: that of Tin’yee Ran’vek. This identification was only possible by analyzing the carcass’s genetic material, for the thing itself resembled less a body and more a voluminous sheet of leather, like a grisly rug, painted with strange swirling patterns and scored and seared in places.

This was not the only object containing Ran’vek’s genetic signature. Subsequent scans found traces of the late Tin’yee in many of the pieces in the gallery’s collection, along with signatures of many other Thra’ha’khen — dozens of different markers belonging to dozens of people. But even these discoveries paled beside the enormity of the monument.

Jen’şar stood beneath it for a very long time, slackjawed behind his modesty, at a loss for words and ideas. He had never seen anything like it. How did it float there, with no obvious form of propulsion, rejecting the input of gravity, triumphant in its defiance to thermodynamics? Scans asserted the presence of human genetic material within the person-sized object, but Jen’şar could not believe it was organic — it shimmered, like a sculpture of the most exquisite metal, made to resemble a chitinous creature, a crawling beast with segmented limbs and a many-appendaged thorax. And eyes — so many eyes, a constellation of black orbs that seemed to track the observer.

Jen’şar found he couldn’t count the number of limbs that swirled unevenly from the body and veered and jaunted in crooked paths. One blink, he counted five, then his eyes opened and there were eleven. Another blink, only seven. Then thirteen. Always prime numbers.

Without much conviction, Jen’şar directed his soldiers to find a way to bring the object down so it could be further analyzed. Not one of his soldiers moved. He could not blame them. Nor would he press the issue — how could any just leader give a command he himself could not carry out?

Be it superstition or prudence, Jen’şar saw fit to quit Ellumai-II with haste, taking only the remains of Yal’mak and his retinue, which his soldiers had discovered buried in an unmarked grave in one of the orchards. The rest they would leave to the House of Ran, and to the unmoving shadows that abounded on that now unpeopled moon.