“Because his trainers were a bunch of grade A assholes who screwed him up in every way imaginable.”
“I hate those fucking Eumadian scum,” Zeke muttered. “Okay, okay, what did they do to him?”
I filled him in slowly, everything I’d just learned about Jai’s training, plus his ongoing belligerence and unwillingness to cooperate. I even included his behaviour in that ill-fated shower on our first day. I’d had plenty of awkward conversations with dimari owners about their need to have sex with their dimari, so I figured it was only fair to be on the receiving end of that embarrassment for once.
“So the place we get to with all of this,” I concluded, some time later, “andpleasetell me if this is a ravingly stupid idea. But I’m thinking that maybe the best thing I can do for Jai is to tell him straight out that I’m not his intended master. Right now, he hates me, because he thinks I’m the cause of all the shit that happened to him, and because he’s just waiting for me to shovel more shit into his life as we go along. The only way I can think of to convince him that that’s not true is to tell him that I didn’t buy him; I just adopted him when he got stranded here.”
“Hm.” Zeke gave that a moment or two’s serious thought. “What does Kade think of that?” he asked first, before offering any sort of opinion.
I’d had a conversation with Kade about it before I’d called Zeke, knowing his advice would be invaluable. “He’s kind ofsitting on the fence about it all. It was incredibly stressful for him to find out that I wasn’t his true master, and that was compounded by the fact that the Eumadians wanted to reclaim him and force him to bond to someone else, and then the whole thing with the Nwandu trying to take over our planet. So in Kade’s defence, there was a lot going on at the time. But even so, he’s largely of the opinion that it would be replacing one trauma with a different trauma, rather than just erasing a big chunk of the first one.”
“Which may be true, but on the other hand, Kade learned to deal with that, and in the long run, he’s come out of it pretty well. The downside, I suppose, is that Jai already doesn’t trust you, so you’ve got less leeway to be heaping more unexpected news on him. But the bigger issue in my mind is…” Zeke pressed his lips together and furrowed his brow. “On the PTSD side of things, there are no magical cures. As I’m sure you well know. But having that idea constantly hanging over his head, that he could be called up to serve some ungodly assignment at a moment’s notice, would be slow torture. At least, based on my own experiences, it would.
“If I had the constant threat of being sent back to Ixralia hanging over my head, I’d go insane. Literally, within a week. Even knowing that I didn’t have to go back there, the idea that other teams could be sent was a nightmare. I found a little bit of peace when the Alliance Parliament finally declared the Ixralian wormhole off limits, but I didn’t really start getting a handle on my own mental state until the Ranzors declared what a fucking shitshow that place was. The biggest bad-asses in the galaxy collectively decided that Ixralia was the embodiment of hell. That recognition did a lot for me.
“So there’s a potential benefit there. Sometimes simply having trauma acknowledged as trauma can help to start thingshealing. And if you do that for Jai, that could potentially go very well.
“But at the same time, I would have a really hard time telling you to disregard Kade’s concerns. Even after all this time, if I told Dax that I wasn’t his intended master, he’d lose his fucking mind. Ultimately, we’d probably get through it, because we genuinely love each other, but that’s a whole other level of mind fuck for a dimari. So you’d have to go real heavy on the ‘I’m really glad you’re here and I love having you as my dimari’ thing, except from the sounds of it, that’s not going to work either, because he currently has no reason to trust you. So… Shit, I don’t know, Aiden. I mean, I’m just going off your descriptions of him here. And I know you’re a very observant kind of guy. That’s why you’re in the job you’re in in the first place. But it’s a really hard call to make, given how much could go wrong, no matter which way you decide to go.”
I tried not to be too frustrated with the idea that this conversation was just going in circles. At the end of the day, if there was a simple answer, I’d have found it myself.
But then, as I sat there and pondered the options, another idea occurred to me. “Hey, Zeke… you say it’s hard to make a decision because you haven’t met Jai and you’re just depending on my descriptions of him. Which is totally fair. But that makes me wonder… What if we could arrange for you to meet him in person?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
JAI
Igot off the train and followed my master up a short hill, then around a corner. We were going to visit a man called Zeke, who was apparently a good friend of my master. Kade had stayed home today, having woken up this morning with severe bruising all down his right side, and a mild fever as well. My master had made sure he took a dose of both the painkillers and the antibiotics that the doctor had given him, and then told him he was free to go back to bed, if he wanted to. I, on the other hand, was being dragged across the city, to have a tea party with my master’s friend and his dimari.
I wasn’t looking forward to being forced to socialise with one of my own kind. I’d long ago learned that I had little in common with other dimari. A significant portion of them had stopped trying to talk to me after I was chosen as a combat specialist. We, along with pilots and nurses, were considered the most intelligent of the dimari, and those with lesser specialties, like domestic servants, were resentful of the extra attention wegot. And then, when I’d been chosen to learn an extra skill as well, the few dimari who still spent time with me had given up. Honestly, I didn’t blame them. I was too busy to pay much attention to them, and they were too intimidated by the cold, calculating way I began to assess the world.
A dimari answered the door when we arrived, his scales a pale, sky blue. He grinned when he saw who it was. “Hello, Commander,” he greeted my master, with clear enthusiasm. “It’s so good to see you again. Please, come in. Would you like some tea or coffee?”
“A herbal tea, please,” my master said. “And for Jai. This is Jai, by the way,” he introduced me. “I assume Zeke told you he would be coming with me. Jai, this is Dax.”
Dax beamed at me. “It’s so good to meet you,” he said. “Kade was so kind to me when we first met. It’s always nice to meet another dimari. Oh, and I’ve been talking to Rov as well,” he rambled on, as he waved us inside and closed the door. “He’s the dimari who went to live with Lieutenant Drevarious. It wassonice of Colonel Henderson to pick out a dimari for him. I think he would have had a lot of trouble choosing one for himself. And Rov is… Well, he said it’s a bit of a learning curve, to be honest. He wasn’t sure how to deal with the trauma side of it, but he’s reading all the notes I gave him, and he seems very eager to be helpful. I’m giving him as much advice as I can. I realise that having a master with PTSD can be…” He paused, then glanced bashfully at the other man who had come into the room; a human man with a similar physique to my own master. I assumed this was Zeke.
“An absolute fucking pain in the ass?” Zeke finished Dax’s sentence for him. Dax did his best to look demure, but seemed to be fighting back a laugh at the same time. “Challenging,” he finished his own sentence, far more politely than his master had.Then he bowed his head to his master. “Please excuse me, sir. I’ll start preparing the tea.”
He disappeared around the corner, into what I assumed was the kitchen. My master and Zeke immediately moved further into the living room, my master sitting on the sofa, and Zeke in an arm chair. This was the first social excursion I’d been on with my master, and I wasn’t sure what the protocol was. Was I supposed to sit beside my master? Or stand? Feeling uncomfortably conspicuous, I fell into an ‘at ease’ posture near the end of the sofa.
Thankfully, my master noticed and immediately patted the seat beside him. “Come and sit down. We don’t generally stand on formalities on Rendol 4. And dimari are expected to behave largely the same as their masters do. When we sit, you sit. When we eat, you eat, and so forth.”
The brief explanation was helpful, and so I sat down beside my master. What followed was ten minutes of idle chat, detailing Zeke’s recent activities and a few more updates on the new dimari, while Dax brought in the tea and bustled about, making sure everyone had a cup. Then he sat down on the arm of Zeke’s chair, since there wasn’t quite room for them both to squeeze into the seat itself. Zeke immediately put his hand on Dax’s leg, and Dax smiled the quiet, satisfied smile of a man who was hopelessly in love with his master.
I glanced sideways at my own master, at the foot or so of space between us, and the way his hands were firmly placed in his own lap. I had to make an effort not to grind my teeth.
After a few more minutes of talking about nothing in particular, while everyone sipped their tea, my master sat up straighter. “Dax, Zeke was telling me about the herb garden you’ve been working on out the back. Would you mind showing me around?”
“Of course, sir,” Dax said, with a smile. He seemed to smile a hell of a lot.
My master stood up, but when I moved to follow him, he held up a hand. “We won’t be long. You can stay here and talk to Zeke for a bit.”
I could what? I knew nothing at all about Zeke, and I was hopeless at small talk. A lot of erotic companions were trained in a variety of social skills, since they were expected to not only fulfill their master’s desires, but very often, to advertise themselves as a hireable sexual service. Their job was to entertain, to entice, to seduce, and they typically had extensive social training to meet those goals. I, on the other hand, had been taught very little in my role as erotic companion other than how to endure the most intense physical experiences and maintain a profound degree of stamina. Conversation had never been part of the role.
But before I could get too flustered about my lack of social skills, I saw the way Zeke was watching me intently… and I felt my gut churn as the situation suddenly made sense. I’d been brought here as a ‘favour’ to my master’s friend, then. It wasn’t uncommon for masters to pass their dimari around to have sex with their associates, whether that entailed a bribe for a business deal, a favour for a potential customer, or a gift for someone they genuinely liked.
But… Wait, that couldn’t be right. My master hadn’torderedme to obey Zeke’s instructions. Which left me free – technically, at least – to refuse to participate in whatever sordid desires Zeke had. Surely my master was sharp enough to have realised that?
