The fury breaks. Not all of it. The ridges don’t go back to bronze. But the almost-smile arrives, and it has something behind it that wasn’t there before. Something fierce and gentle at the same time. Something I am going to be thinking about for a very long time.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he says.
And the way he says it makes my chest ache in a way that has nothing to do with bruised ribs.
8
Run
Lorri
Moretea.Thegalleyis warm. The hours move and the conversation moves with them, easy now in a way it wasn’t before, as if telling him the hiding thing has opened a door that I didn’t know was closed. He tells me about being told he was defective — not in those words, not directly, but in the careful, gentle way that people tell you something is mistaken with you while insisting it’s fine.
“Skiveth males are supposed to — there’s an instinct. A recognition. It fires in your twenties, thirties at the latest. Everyone has it.” He looks at his mug. “I didn’t. The physician said I was a late bloomer. Then they said I was atypical. Then they stopped using words that meanteventuallyand started using words that meantnever.”
“They told you it was broken?”
“They told me I would love differently. Which is the kind way of saying I would love less. Or wrong. Or not at all, not the way my species is built to.”
I look at him across the table. The male who slayed a Vrennak with his bare hands. The male who stood between me and five hundred pounds of corrupted predator and made a sound that stopped it in its tracks. The male who checked my hip with two fingers when he wanted his entire hand and asked,may Ibefore every touch.
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” I say.
Something flickers across his face. Quick. Unguarded. The almost-smile cracks into something more real and more broken than anything I’ve seen from him today.
“Yeah,” he says, almost inaudible, “it is.”
We sit with that. The two of us. The girl who learned to hide and the male who was told he was broken. Two outsiders in a warm galley, finding out the same thing at the same time: that the shape you were told was wrong might just have been waiting for the right fit.
“Captain,” HORATIO. Very soft. “The air composition in the galley has shifted. I am not going to speculate on the cause.”
“HORATIO.”
“I am simply noting it for the atmospheric log. Which I am maintaining for scientific purposes. Exclusively.”
The datapad is still on the table from the cargo manifest. The station network is accessible; lockdown restricts movement, not data. I havebeen thinking about something since the tongue conversation and the ridge conversation and the temperature conversation and the way he went still when I said I liked his hands.
I search:Skiveth biology. Sensory processing.
The results load. I tilt the screen toward me. Casual. Like I’m checking the cargo manifest.
Forked-tongue chemoreception. Airborne pheromone detection. Processing ranges. The specific paragraph that says Skiveth males can detect shifts in the biochemical state of nearby individuals through airborne sampling, including: stress hormones, adrenaline, immune response markers, and arousal indicators.
Arousal indicators.
He can taste when I’m turned on.
He has been tasting it since I walked up the ramp. Every flutter, every spike, every time his jaw did the thing or his shoulders moved or the command voice went through me. He has tasted every single one. He has been sitting in this galley, tasting the air between us and knowing what I’m feeling. Not guessing. Knowing.
I scroll further. Temperature complementarity. Thermoregulation compatibility. The section on bonding biology — pair bonds, hunt instinct, claiming — is long and detailed, and I skim past it because it’s dense and clinical, and the part I’m interested in is three sections down.
Skiveth courtship behaviors. The hunt instinct, when activated, manifests as a heightened predatory-pursuit response. The male experiences an intensified drive to pursue the identified mate, often expressed through tracking, chasing, and physical demonstrations of capability. The pursuit is consensual — the instinct includes a hard wired requirementfor reciprocal engagement. The female must initiate or accept the chase for the behavior to activate fully.
The female must initiate or accept the chase.
I set the datapad facedown on the table.
The sauce is drying on the lucky top. My hip aches. I have a gauze pad on my temple and bruises forming in places I haven’t found yet. A Vrennak nearly killed me two hours ago. I should be scared. I should be curled up in a corner processing the near-death experience with the quiet dignity of someone who understands the gravity of what just happened.
