“I don’t want to,” she says, a tear splashing down her cheek.
I take her by the shoulders, and rage flows through me; not at her, but at Kerz tradition, at Zethki, at the family. I want to tell her that I will find a way to have her to myself, that I will protect her, that everything will be all right. But these are promises I don’t know if I can keep, promises I did not expect to make. And I don’t break my word.
“Listen to me,” I say, and she looks up at me, her eyes making me seasick. “You must. Do you understand? You must.”
She holds it in her hand and stares at it.
“I don’t want to,” she says. She looks up at me. “I lo—”
“Do not say it,” I tell her. I push her hair back from her face.
Two enormous tears fall from her eyes. Kerz women don’t cry; this should have no effect on me. But her tears affect me in a place I cannot name or understand. I place my lips to her right cheek and taste the salty water of her pain. It wrenches inside of me.
“I will do it,” she says.
I’m relieved, and anguished. I begin to stand back. I know what she wants before she says it, so the words are already leaving my mouth before she finishes her request.If you love me,she whispers.I will do it.
I’m not a native speaker of her tongue. Humans use ‘love’ in many contexts. There is a word in Kerz for what I feel, a word for a Kerz who has bonded with a female and will die to protect her, and that is what I feel. I would burn the whole the world down for Anya Mann, and that is what I would have to do to have her for my own. And that cannot be. Not now.
“Kryth’a sar slorim,” I tell her. Mykrythis yours.
She doesn’t request a translation. Her eyes are wet as she stares at me, and they burn through my skin and to my heart, where her tears seem to seep and make me, a Kerz, cry with her sadness.
After a movement of her head, a minute nod, she drinks the liquid inside the vial without taking her eyes off mine.
CHAPTER14
Rysethk
Zethki is in one of his wilder moods when I enter the meeting room—an ostentatious cavern that was once a religious chapel of some kind, high-ceilinged, much more like a throne room than a place to conduct business.
But Zethki, like his father, fancies himself a king more than a leader of a legitimate business. I suppose it’s fitting. This is a family business, and it’s more crime than business, more war than peaceful negotiations. The Kirigok do business first but tolerate no deviation from their terms. They are ruthless, and enforce with violence. A throne room makes the most sense, really.
Hiskrythis fluctuating with anger, arousal, aggression. I approach mustering as much calm as I can. This is normally not a difficult task for me; killing a man barely makes my pulse quicken. But lurking in mykrythis the secret of my love for the untouchable Anya Mann, and so, for the first time in my life, I feel fear as I approach my unpredictable cousin.
“Oh, here he is!” Zethki yells, when he sees me. He is drunk, which doesn’t change him much except that it makes him even less predictable. I stand at the end of the long table around which he has gathered hiskapsuke.“The great mastermind, my ingenious cousin, the great Rysethk! How nice of you to join us, you ignominious shit. Sit down, come, sit here!”
I do so, seating myself in my usual chair, my mind racing. Zethki being upset and swearing at all of us is nothing new; it could be about his bedsheets being scratchy or about an impending war, it would all sound the same. I’m normally unfazed, but now my heart races.
I manage to appear calm. I hope.
“Zethki. Tell me what troubles you so that you revert to insults,” I say. This is what I always say.
Zethki laughs. Then he frowns. Then he leans over the table to scream at me. “Tell mewhatI am to make of this, these ignorant, incompetent Mrakans, these… what are their names?” he screeches at Minuak, his ‘accountant,’ snapping his fingers. Minuak fumbles with a digital folio and shakes his head.
“The, uh… it’s the Bora… Borga…”
“The Borgeen,” I say calmly. I’m now relieved. The Borgeen are a crime family in Mraka-71, osmium suppliers and arms dealers whose wealth and power are the direct result of only one thing: their possession, by fluke, of a moon full of osmium. I wave my hands and relax in my chair. “What now?”
Zethki is annoyed by my calm. He has always been: he’s incapable of repression of emotion, incapable of control, and though he would never say it, he covets this power of mine. “These Borgeen, you smug sack of shit for a cousin, have sent a convoy of Ragatrek missiles, yes, like we agreed. Except that the bastards, the reeking piles of shit, have made the core with some… what is it, this inferior metal?”
Zethki turns to Minuak, seething.
“Lead,” Minuak says, trembling slightly.
“Lead! Lead when they live on a fucking moon the size of Gyraltra made of fucking osmium. This is what they send to me. To Zethki Kirigok.”
Zethki turns to me, fuming, his eyes wild with rage. I’m perplexed, mostly by the Borgeen: they are stupid, and they are hacks, but they do in fact live on a moon full of osmium, and so the ruse seems particularly idiotic. It isn’t as if Zethki’s temper is not known throughout the system, and it isn’t as if it’s taken lightly.
