Page 21 of Tempting Fate

My chest constricted, my heart racing as if trying to get away, but once I started noticing similarities, I could not stop. My lack of breadth or robust kri’ith body fat. The different orange shade to what should be the paler parts of my skin. The darkened lines over my brows, though this shading was full and deliberate on the alien faces.

“Do you see?” Orukem asked, her voice as gentle as a weri bird’s song in the light of dawn.

Spines of Kri.

I could not deny what facts and logic revealed. As if to prove it to me, my hybrid eyes began to leak, the ache in my chest expanded, and I swallowed the noises that wished to escape. “I do.” I was not kri’ith. Not shaa. “I am shaa’ith. Like you.”

It tasted like a bitter, miserable truth—but a truth all the same.

BY THE MIDDAY meal, I felt able to make it to the central seating area and perhaps enjoy some communal food instead of taking my meals alone in my dwelling. With everyone being originally from Orith, so many of the dishes here were familiar, though many people leaned into shaa heritage and culture as well as local fare, so there was a good mix and variety.

I took a quick shower, dressed, and ambled out to the centre of the village.

So many sapients in one place. At least fifteen shaa’ith sat in the central area with plenty of spare seats around them, their animated chatter filling the air. Most of the males sported gems in their tusks, oranges and blues and purples sparkling in the morning light. I covered my mouth, hiding my shameful smooth tusks from view.

My stomach lurched. I had been taught etiquette, taught how to hold conversations at events—the most useless teachings ever, I had thought at the time. But I could handle this. I could.

Imani was there, her tiny frame hiding between two villagers.

She still hadn’t been back to see me. I needed to make things right, but I didn’t know what to say, and certainly not with so many people around.

“Airida. It’s good to see you up and about.” Orukem patted the seat next to her, and I sunk down on the log bench without too heavy a landing. With all the tech of the town’s industrial areas towering over us on one side, it was curiously satisfying to have a rustic thing like this; it made me think of home.

Yet home was here now. Amongst strangers. “Thank you. It is good to see the sun.” Such a truth. On Orith, my garden had been my place of joy. Though deep down I’d known the tiny cottage and its grounds were a prison, the garden had felt anything but.

My heart swelled. There was a garden here.

Orukem clacked her jaw. “I’m glad we’ll be seeing less of it soon. It was unbearably hot in high summer.”

“I take it you’re from the north?” Anyone from the southern hemisphere was used to much more than this.

She swallowed. “Yes. We don’t talk much of Orith. Most of us would rather forget.”

Of course they would. “My apologies. I did not mean to cause pain.”

How could I talk to them if I couldn’t speak of the things we had in common? Although living secluded in a trading enclave was a world apart from the shaa’ith colonies, and why would anyone wish to speak of those?

“Airida! Your removal from Orith has well and truly poked the iltji nest,” someone said, their tone full of accusation.

I had not considered what might have occurred back on my home planet since I’d been taken. Yet Tokki and Daiytak had stood in my parents’ house and announced the truth about shaa’ith to everyone present—and broadcast it to nearby communications channels too. Those in the colonies were not sick with a genetic condition but were in fact hybrids due to recessive genes in multiple bloodlines; the news would have rocked Orithian society to its core.

All attention turned to me.

I froze, anything I’d ever learned about etiquette and conversation fleeing my brain. “Oh?” I said, at the same time someone else muttered, “Amongst other things.”

“Wait, have I heard this?” someone else chimed in.

The first speaker blew out a breath. “A friendly faction on Orkri is finally willing to enter the fray. They might even cover us if we launch a large-scale rescue.”

The shaa’ith had a faction on the other kri’ith homeworld? My removal from Orith had caused problems? Repercussions?

Too many thoughts, too many questions.

More voices joined in.

“They’re willing to risk a diplomatic incident to save all our people.”

“We don’t have the infrastructure here to deal with that big an influx of people!”