I’m a handful of lunar rotations older than him, but that might as well be decades of solar orbits.
He shrugs, and his maniacal, boyish personality returns with his characteristic suddenness.
I don’t like this quality in a general. It screams instability. I initially believed it was put on, Zethki’s version of a madman ploy. But I begin to wonder if he’s not actually mad.
Either way, it’s not a good quality in a leader, soldier, or businessman.
Zeth is supposed to be all three.
“You need to train thisaksa’traout of her,” he tells me.
I glance at the girl, who is sitting on a bench in her holding cell, her sedative spilled across the floor, her fists balled up and her face furious. “That is your task,krezkat,” I tell him. I strike a friendly tone, calling him brother.
I’m pleased that he takes the bait.
He puts a hand on my shoulder and smiles. “This is why I love you so much,krezkatu.” He takes the time, as always, to call me ‘lesser brother.’ “You take on the tasks I cannot handle.” He looks back into the cell. “I have no time for this. I like my women submissive and skilled.” He looks back at me, and a fearsome darkness flashes through his eyes. “Just don’t become attached,” he says.
His tone is very serious, almost as if he has reached into the depths of my mind and plucked a truth from it—a dangerous, reckless truth that even I haven’t admitted fully to myself.
But Zethki laughs loudly and slaps me hard on the shoulder. “You are the smart Kerz,” he says in his heavily accented English. “You say this is the one, this is the one.”
Another frightening flash in his eyes.
“She had better be,” he adds.
He leaves, humming a tune, and again I wonder if he has gone crazy from space travel, or if he was always mad, or if this is just an elaborate ruse.
I look into the cell when he has departed.
I can feel mykryth, again, as I look at her. It’s hot, but the feeling that fuels it is unlike anything I have ever felt before. This angers me, and I’m grateful for the rush of that anger on the heels of this foreign feeling.
I told Zethki that this sister was more likely to bear children. There were favorable facts to back up this assertion: she has mated with few humans and with no other races, unlike the other sister. She has coloring flaws, and I told Zethki that this is indicative of a mixed lineage, boding well for breeding and for health. She is not as thin as the other sister. I told him this indicated greater fertility.
But there was no imminent reason to select this sister, and all of these stories were just that: stories.
We planned to take Fiona Mann all along.Ichose Fiona Mann.
I only changed my mind, there in the ballroom. And I don’t know why.
The feeling pulses through mykrythagain, and I dig deep for my anger. Anger at myself, primarily; I have made an uncharacteristically bad choice. If Anya Mann is not a fertile human, Zethki will be furious.
With me, naturally.
It’s contemplating Zethki’s anger that I feel, deep in the center of mykryth, a feeling I haven’t felt for decades.
Fear.
It’s not for me.
I look at Anya. My palm itches with the phantom sensation of her skin beneath it. She is not a flawless beauty like her sister—human and Kerz facial features are very much alike, and attractiveness is rated in much the same way. But I like looking at her. I like her lips; I like the rare shade of her hair. The speckles across her nose, the flecks of brown in her gray eyes.
I like the smell of her body, the way her pussy began to overflow when I touched her.
I should not feel this way. I put it out of my mind.
She is mine only to train, only to break in and prepare for Zethki. He likes to share his women with me, but she will be different, as his wife. Zethki, like all Kerz, is fierce about his legal property. The human represents a great prize to him.
I sniff. I try to do so indifferently. This is just a human girl, a pawn in a game of power. She is weak and weak-willed, and I will see that when I train her. Then I will know for myself that she’s just another human—pathetic, without honor orkryth—to be used as a womb and a blood tie.
