“Now, I will draft the contract.”
I nod, setting my empty cup aside, then hesitate. “Wait?—”
“Cold feet?” he asks.
Those intimatelyhumanwords on his strange tongue derail my train of thought. “Stop that.”
He wobbles his head slightly, which I take to be his equivalent of a shrug.
“I just… we should at least know each other’s names first, right?”
“It’s not relevant to the nature of the contract.”
“It’s relevant to how insane I’ll sound later.”
“Haven’t you already passed a critical threshold on that matter?”
Anger rises in my chest, but I keep hold of it, instead speaking deliberately and enunciating each syllable. “My name is Andromeda. What’s yours?”
He huffs a laugh, then makes more of that melodic clicking noise. His throat and lips move in a mesmerizing way as he makes the sound. Then he says, “Humans usually call me Arthur.”
I snort. “Really?”
“No,” he sighs, “but I thought I might be able to get it to stick. It’s a clever little play on Arthropoda, don’t you think?”
I stare at him.
He continues, “You know what Arthro?—”
“I’m familiar with the phylum,” I say flatly.
“Fine,” he sighs. “People call me Sylvus.”
“People already call youSylvusand you’re trying to getArthurto stick?!”
He tilts his head. “Is that a veiled compliment?”
“No. Whatever. Forget I asked. Draft the stupid contract.”
His cool, amused, appraising expression makes my cheeks glow brighter. I hope he hasn’t figured out that little quirk of human anatomy, but if he has over twenty years of experience, I doubt I’m that lucky.
He glides back from the table—it’s impossible to think of it as ‘stepping’, with that mesmerizing way his limbs coordinate in perfect smoothness—then lifts his back legs.
They touch the spinnerets at the end of his abdomen, drawing out gossamer strands of fresh silk. He weaves them with mind-boggling speed and precision, soon producing a small, circular piece of incredibly complex fabric.
It catches the light strangely, throwing off glinting rainbows.
It’s stuff like this that makes humans incredibly primitive in comparison. The other species in the ISCC have senses and abilities way beyond a human’s. They can interact with dark matter, anti-matter, gravity threads, time strings, consciousness energy, and all sorts of other shit that will make a human go insane if we think about it for too long.
It’s better if we just think of it as ‘magic,’ so we do.
He snips the circular, iridescent silk from his spinnerettes and sets it on the table in front of me.
“How do I know you made it exactly to my specifications?” I ask.
“Touch it.”
I do—and at the bizarre sensation, I snap my hand back. It’s like running your hand over clingy, sticky microfiber—butinside of my brain.
