“You booked aholosuite?”
“A positive clasp means the claiming happens immediately.” He shrugs one enormous shoulder. “There isn’t time to arrange anything afterward. So I arranged it before.”
“Before I said yes.”
“On the possibility that you would.”
“So the entire family has known since yesterday.”
“Yes.”
“Leahhas known since yesterday.”
“Yes.”
I put my face in my hands. “She looked me right in the eye at the lift this morning and asked me how I slept.”
They’re allthere when we come up the road.
Every one of them. The whole compound, out in front of the house at the dead end of the road at the edge of the jungle, seven brothers and six brides and a heap of children and Grytelstanding slightly apart in the good coat he wears when he doesn’t know what to do with himself. Jana’s crying already. Hook is grinning so hard it looks painful.
I don’t have anyone.
That’s the thought that hits me on the path, and it hits harder than I expect. There’s no line to consult and no manager to negotiate and no family to stand up for me. On Chronos this ceremony takes two Houses and a priest and a thousand rotations of stone. I’ve got a dead mother and a dead father and one brother in a cell on Arkell-Seven.
And then Roxy takes my left arm and Leah takes my right, and Ines steps in front of me and straightens my collar with the same expression she uses on a document, and Lila says “you’re not doing this on your own, don’t be ridiculous,” and I understand that I have thirteen people.
“Ready?” Chief says.
“No,” I say.
“Good. Nobody is.”
The gloves come off.
That’s the part I’ll remember. Not the rest of it — the gloves.
I’ve worn them since the diurnal I stepped off that transporter disk. Nine months. I’ve slept beside that male in them. I’ve had my hands in a grid with them on. I put them on before I open my own front door.
And I peel them off, right there in front of the compound, and hand them to Leah, and my hands are bare in the warm wet air for the first time on this planet.
Cayzor takes his off too. His claws are enormous and dark and scarred all over the knuckles the way every miner’s are, and I have never once seen them.
“You don’t have to say anything,” he says. “There’s no chant here. We’re not that kind of family.”
“Good, because I can’t remember anything.”
“Just take my hand.”
So I take his hand.
It’s like touching a live seam.
That’s the only way I can describe it and I’m an engineer, so I’ve thought about it a great deal since. My palm goes into his and there’s a half-second where I have time to thinkoh, his skin is so hot—
And then it detonates.
There’s a point of contact where his hand meets mine and it goes from warm to burning tosomething else entirely, and the heat drives up my arm like a current finding ground, straight through my shoulder and down my spine and pooling low and hard in my belly. My knees give out. He catches me without letting go. Every hair on my body stands up. My heart is going like something coming apart and I canfeelhis, both of them, hammering through the joined palms.
