Her smile broadens. “Maybe tomorrow. I need dishes first.” She gently retrieves her braid from Pacy’s grasping hands and tilts her head, thinking. “Our resonance. All right. What do you want to know?”
“Everything,” I tell her. “Spare no detail.” I want to experience it through her words since I cannot remember it.
“All right.” Stay-see presses her fingers to her mouth, thinking. “Well, I think it happened when I woke up out of the tube.”
“Tube?”
She absently pulls a tuft of fur from Pacy’s hand and hands him a bone. He immediately begins to gnaw on it. Her smile widens, and she looks over at me. “I should explain. When we first arrived, some of the girls were awake, and some of us were asleep in the wall of the ship. In stasis. It was like we were asleep, but unable to wake. The aliens were keeping us stored like…” She gestures at the bone Pacy is drooling on. “Like you keep the bones here. Waiting to be useful.”
People were being treated like this? I frown to myself. “Go on.”
“When Georgie and the others were rescued, they freed us from our sleep. One by one, we were pulled free from the wall and woken up. We didn’t have much to wear, so each person was given a fur cloak to wrap around them. I don’t remember who I saw when I first woke up, but I know it wasn’t you.” Her smile is indulgent.
“Why not?”
“You told me you were guarding the entrance. You were so excited and worried that all of the girls were going to resonate and there wouldn’t be a mate for you. And then Vektal sent you away to dispose of the trackers we had in our arms.” She rubs her upper arm in memory. “You were to dump them into a metlak cave, and you told me you resented every step of the journey.”
I do not know what the trackers are that she speaks of, but thestory she tells me is intriguing. “I did not wish to do my chief’s bidding?”
“I don’t think that was the part you had a problem with,” Stay-see tells me, a smile on her face. “You were afraid you’d come back and all of the females would already be mated and you’d miss out. Someone was resonating, and Vektal had resonated to Georgie, and that only left ten women for the rest of the hunters. You told me you raced as fast as you could to finish your task and returned back to the hunting party because you wanted to be there just in case any of the females resonated to you.”
“Any females…not you?” I frown at this thought. “I was not immediately drawn to you?”
“Oh, I doubt it.” She tucks a strand of her mane behind one small, round ear. “I believe I spent most of those early days hiding under as many furs as I could wear and weeping copiously.” Her brows go down, and she looks unhappy with herself. “Jeez, I guess I cry a lot.”
“You were scared,” I say, feeling the need to defend her. “I understand this.”
The look she sends my way is pleased. “We were all scared. Some of us just handled it better than others. I was one of the blubbery weepers instead of one of the strong ones. I’m fine with that. People have different strengths, you know? Mine isn’t bravery.” As I watch, she picks up our son and pulls him close to her, hugging him. “I think I’m a better mom than I am a warrior. I’m definitely more of a nurturer than a fighter.”
“I see no problem with that.”
“Good,” she says with a chuckle. “Because I don’t think I can change. Georgie, though, she’s strong. And brave. Liz, too. AndKira. They were our leaders when the rest of us didn’t know what was going on.” She shrugs her shoulders and presses a kiss to Pacy’s forehead, even as he wriggles out of her grasp, reaching for the bones he was playing with. She lets him crawl out of her lap and looks over at me, her expression full of warmth and affection. “At any rate, I was busy hiding from everyone. You were all very scary-looking to me. Between the horns and tails, the glowing eyes and the blue skin, you all looked very fierce. Anyone that tried to talk to me, I hid behind Kira and waited for them to go away.” She raises her brows at me. “Not very brave, I admit.”
I still see no fault in this. I try to imagine myself in her place, full of fear and surrounded by strangers. I think she is very brave, no matter her thoughts.
“You caught up with our group just as we made it back to the tribal cave. You walked up with this big dead animal slung over your shoulder like some sort of caveman and dropped it at Vektal’s feet, looking all proud of yourself. You looked over at the girls like we should be impressed by your skills.”
“And were you?”
“I don’t know if impressed is the right word. I do remember it made Ariana cry because she’d never seen a whole dead animal before then.”
I do not know which one is Air-ee-yawn-uh. “What did you think?”
Her eyes light up. “I remember thinking that you were clearly trying to impress the girls, and if that was your way to do it, you were failing.”
I grin at that. “What should I have done to impress you?”
“Bring me a fur coat.” She chuckles. “Or hot soup. In the world that I come from, the meat we eat is all pre-packaged and in nice, tidy little containers. You don’t have to kill the animal to have dinner. You just pull out a package of meat and cook it up.”
I try to imagine this and fail. “I…do not understand.”
“I know.” Stay-see sounds amused. “I have told you about it a dozen times and you have never understood it. It’s something you have to see to believe, I think. At any rate, that animal—it was a dvisti—brought us together.”
“It did?”
Her smile grows broader, more delighted, and my body reacts to her pleasure. She looks so happy in this moment that it makes me ache with need. I want her this happy all the time. “Yes,” she says, continuing her story. “So there you were with this big kill you were proud of, and all of us humans had just arrived at the cave. Everyone was rushing out to meet us, and it was very overwhelming. I remember people trying to welcome us and steer us toward the fire, but we humans were scared, so we wanted to stick together. Someone parked us near the fire and told you to bring the kill so we could roast it. I remember you were very upset at the thought of all that good raw meat being burned.”
I grunt acknowledgment. Even now, I still have a hard time understanding why humans wish to burn their meat before they eat it. When I first realized it, I thought Harrec was teasing me. It turns out that while some of the humans eat their meat fresh, most prefer to scald it until the blood is burned away…along with all the flavor. I suppress a shudder.
