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“That is Elga. Lapak’s hanjin.” Jamen waved the girl over.
Elga bowed her head and spoke to Jamen in a slightly reverent tone. She pouted when Jamen mentioned Paige’s name. Lapak scowled at the woman, who in turn bowed her head even lower.
The nuances of the introduction were lost on Paige. Was this normal? Why wasn’t Jamen translating? Instead, he puffed out his lips and Lapak growled something at Elga. She looked up, straight into Paige’s eyes.
“You’re human!” she gasped in heavily accented English.
“You speak—” Paige began.
“Elga helped me with some translations before I left for Earth,” Jamen said hastily. Perhaps a little too quickly.
Elga’s mouth snapped shut.
Paige suspected Elga might have been something more than a translator for Jamen, but for now she didn’t care. Elga was somebody she might be able to talk to, and find out more about Jamen. She needed female friends, too. She already missed Katie more than she’d imagined she would.
“Elga will help you when needed,” Jamen explained, taking Paige’s elbow. “For now, I need to show you where you’ll work.” He nodded to Lapak and they moved on, leaving the other two whispering in the corridor.
“She was yours, wasn’t she?” Paige blurted in a hushed voice.
Jamen stopped in his tracks and she nearly bumped into him. He glared at her. “What she was is not relevant.” The tone was sharp and she got the message—now wasn’t the time for quizzing him about his past.
Jamen’s office was nearly as big as his whole apartment. The outside wall seemed fluid and alive, its colors rippling as the light caught it. Another force field, she guessed, not daring to touch it. His desk, a curved construction raised on a dais took center stage. He let her wander around while he fired up his consoles.
The desk spoke in a mechanical voice—the computer was almost alive too. Three-dimensional images, which reminded her of holograms, lit up around the desk, overlaying each other with images and text. When Jamen sat, they ringed him and he settled into the chair in the manner of a man accustomed to its comfort. He pressed something on the console and the whole dais rotated, taking the desk and 3D projections along with it in a circuit. He spoke to the computer, ordering it to do something.
“This is the heart of my work. These,” he pointed at the floating screens, which nearly hid his features entirely, “are where I meet my fellow senators, converse and debate.”
“You don’t have a chamber?” She peered closer, seeing only flickering faces and reams of incomprehensible text.
“Like an assembly room? No.” He shook his head.
“So everything happens remotely?” She thought it strange and detrimental. Humans needed face time because it helped with communications.
“Small committees meet in person. But given the size of the Empire, it isn’t always possible to convene a full senate. This allows us to conduct business as and when senators are available. We meet formally, once a year, in the presence of the emperor when new senators are invested and older ones retire.”
Behind his desk, hanging on an internal wall were bold banners with lettering and a gargantuan spear. She touched the fabric of one dangling banner—it felt friable and old.
“Careful,” he warned as she examined the brightly colored decoration. “They are my clan’s emblems and symbolic representation of our power. My brother, Galen, has the ceremonial sword back on Earth.”
“The judge.” She’d heard about him and his human lover. Who hadn’t? “What about your father and mother?”
Jamen snapped his fingers and the images surrounding him evaporated into nothing. She could see him clearly now, no longer a blur. His face sharpened, bringing his nose and chin forward. He had such a regal face. For an alien.
“Galen and I share the same father. But different mothers.”
“Half-brothers, then.” Without marriage, there were no stable families.
Jamen’s eyebrows furrowed. “Half?” he queried. “By that definition, many of us have half-brothers and sisters.”
“Do you have any sisters?”
“One. By my mother.”
“But a different father?”
“Yes. Of course. I’ve only met her a few times. She’s younger than me.”
“And Galen is older?”
