I shake my head. “We are not compatible.”
She continues to gaze at me. Do I see a flicker of disappointment? Or am I mistaken? And then it’s gone. She turns her back, fussing with the buttons on the dispenser.
“Humans don’t work that way,” I comment, trying to change the subject slightly. “The way you find compatible mates is very different.”
“Gods, no.” She laughs. “No. We’re a disaster. We fall in love with the wrong people, we fall out of it, we do it again, we have arrangements. Situationships. We get it wrong constantly and then we write songs about it, especially when it’s very messy and there’s been a great deal of crying. But we can also have life-long mating commitments too. We are all over the place.”
“And you have offspring together, without a mating bond?”
She pauses. “Sure. All the time. Plenty of people raise kids on their own. Or the father’s around, or he’s not, or he sends money and shows up at holidays. Or…the parents are a life-long couple who raise the child together.”
“There’s no one waiting for you back on New Earth. You are truly unmated?”
“No, there’s no one,” she says. “Well, there was someone who was a partial boyfriend. We broke up prior to me leaving to come on this job. It’s just me.”
It’s just me.
Why am I pleased to learn that this female does not have a mate?
Mara talks about her brother.
It comes out easily, over the last of the lasagna.
“He had a rough few years,” she says. “Couldn’t hold anything down, he had three different jobs in two years, and it was always somebody else’s fault when he was fired, and after a while I just…stopped asking why. I know how that sounds, but there’s only two of us left in our family, you know? And I could either interrogate him about it and lose him, or I could do something useful.”
“So you hired him.”
“Yes.” She smiles. “I made him my assistant. Steady work, steady pay, and I get to drag my brother across the Four Sectors with me, which, honestly, it’s the best decision I ever made. He’sgood, Cayzor. He’s better with beings than I will ever be and everybody loves him. Doors open, crews trust us, contracts come through him half the time. He makes me better at this.” She shakes her head, fond. “Eight years now. He hasn’t missed a day.”
“Heh.” A male who could not hold work. A history of instability and failure, of other beings always being at fault. And then, all at once, steadiness, beginning the moment he attached himself to a female with security credentials and access to restricted systems in every sector he’d care to reach.
I put it away. And I sit across a table from a human female who loves her brother, and I let her go on being proud of him, and say nothing at all.
“Cayzor,can I ask about your face?”
I lean back, somehow ready to speak about this subject. In fact, I’m ready to tell her the flat-out truth. “It happened the night my parents were murdered.”
“Oh, jeez, I’m sorry, and now I feel like such a jerk for asking. I thought it was a work accident. I…”
“No, it’s alright. I want to tell you.” And then I keep talking. “Trunk and I came home first from our shift because we were still in training. It was full dark by the time we came up the road. And the front door was standing open.”
“Oh no.”
“My mother never left the front door open because you don’t want anything that lives in the jungle wandering into your domicile.”
“So you knew something was wrong.”
“Yes. We approached the house and Trunk was behind me.” I stop. Start again. “Which is why he’s alive. There was blood in the hallway and on the floor, coming out of the passage to their room. I remember noting that it was cooling, the edges of it had gone tacky and the middle hadn’t. That’s what my mind did. Standing in my own house, in my parents’ blood, my mind didarithmetic.It told me how long it had been.”
“Did you discover how long?”
“Not long at all because the murderers were still inside the compound. Three of them, and they were masked and quiet. I thought I was going tokillthem. I didn’t think about running or getting Trunk out. I saw that trail of blood in the hallway and every thought in my head went out like a light, and what was left was that I was going to put all three of them into the floor. Instead, they put me down in under a minute. Both of them, working together, and the third never even moved, hewatched. And one of them opened my face from the temple down to the jaw.”
“Gods.”
“By the time Trunk got to me, they were gone, into the jungle. And I got up off that floor because I could hear my brother shouting, and I stumbled down the passage to my parents’ room. They were in their bed.”
“Cayzor.”
