He looks at me across the hold. Blood on his arm, rod in his hand, jaw set.
“We need to calm it down. If it stops perceiving us as a threat, HORATIO can widen the field perimeter and pull it in. But it has to stop fighting first.”
“How do you calm down a Vrennak?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never dealt with one on a ship before.”
The Vrennak turns.
It turns toward me.
All four eyes. The plated skull angles down to my height, and the jaw opens a fraction, tasting the air or reading my heat or doing whatever a Vrennak does when it’s deciding about you. Ten feet between us. Less.
I don’t freeze.
The panic is happening. It is happening at a pitch that should have put me on the floor, should have locked my legs and blanked my vision the way Vresh’s roar sent me down the ramp at Bay 13. The panic is happening, and my voice is still in my throat, and my hands are still at my sides, and my brain, underneath all of it, is doing something I did not know it could do.
It remembers my mother.
Not the mining colony. Not the evacuation drills. Not the three brothers who could all handle this better than me on their worst day. One specific thing: the voice my mother used when the colony’s nervous cat got stuck behind the heating unit. The cat was old and half-deaf and terrified and my mother got down on her knees on the dirty floor in her work coveralls and talked to it. Soft. Steady. The same three words over and over until its claws retracted, and it crawled out into her hands.
This is it. This is what I have. A comfort voice and a mother who could talk a cat out of a wall.
I can talk to a predator. I have talked to my brothers, who are functionally the same.
“Vrennak.”
My voice comes out low. Lower than I expected. The half-octave drop that happens when I’m scared.
“Hey. Hey, it’s okay.”
The jaw closes a fraction. The four eyes stay fixed.
Behind the Vrennak, Jazil is moving. Not watching. Not waiting. He is circling toward the cradle with the rod low, pressing gauze from the kit to his forearm one-handed, and his eyes flick to me once before he drops to the cradle base and starts working the manual housing. Using the time. Using my time. Whatever I’m doing, he is spending it.
“We’re going to put you back to sleep. You’re okay. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
The bioluminescence dims. The pulsing slows. The plated skull tilts the way a dog tilts its head when it hears something it’s trying to place, and my heart is slamming but my voice is steady. My voice is my mother’s voice. My voice is the only thing in this hold that is not made of metal or muscle or teeth.
“I know. I know you’re scared. You were asleep, and now you’re not, and this place smells wrong, and nothing here is yours. I know.”
The body posture eases. The forelimbs lower. The tail stops sweeping.
It’s working. It’s actually working. My hands are shaking, and my voice is not, and the Vrennak is settling, lowering, and something in its chest is making a sound that is almost, almost —
The sound changes.
Low. Keening. A frequency that sits behind the breastbone and aches. The bioluminescence flickers, dims, flickers again in a pattern that looks like searching. The Vrennak’s head swings away from me. Not toward Jazil. Not toward the pod. Toward the sealed bay doors. Toward the wall. Toward something that is not here.
It mates for life. If this one is bonded and can’t find its mate —
The keening builds. The forelimbs that had been lowering locked straight again. The four eyes come back to me, and they are different now. Not milky. Not calculating. Bright and wrong and full of something I recognize because I have seen it in the mirror, in the faces of people who have realized they are alone somewhere they don’t understand and the thing they need is not coming.
My voice is not enough. My voice quelled the fear, but it can’t fill the space where the mate should be.
“Lorri. MOVE.”
The Vrennak lunges. Not the calculated stalk from before. A grief-blind charge, forelimbs wide, and the sound it makes is not a roar. It is the sound an animal makes when something has been taken from it and the taking has no name and there is nothing left to do but break.
