“Mine was thejungle,” Lila offers. “Zayzon counted to twenty for my head start. He told me to run. I said why would I run? He said because he couldn’t stop himself from throwing me down otherwise, and I thought, well, fair.” The whole table laughs. “So I ran.”
“We clasped hands on a dance floor,” Jana says serenely. “I am the only person at this table who got clasped someplacecivilized.He took my bare hand mid-dance, turned into an absolute beast in front of three hundred people, and then we went to the holosuite and he paid a frankly upsetting amount of currency to program a claiming forest, and he chased me in it. Very romantic. Very expensive.”
“Mine was in the mine,” Roxy says. “The actual mine. Gorzan and I clasped down in the dark and that’s just where it happened. Right there.” She catches my expression. “That’s a Timbur thing, by the way. On Chronos you have to claim in one of those ancient forests, or a holo suite copy. But Timbur has special dispensation, we can claim in the jungle, or in the mines, anywhere on the planet. Because when they first settled here there was no holosuite, so they made accommodations, and then they just kept it. So nobody here does the forest performance. It happens where you are.”
“Mine was the mist,” Naomi says quietly, and there’s a softness in her face. “In the cavern, during the mist event. Our gloves came off in the crush and we clasped on the ground and Bayzon’s personal crystal lit up so bright it turned the whole fog white around us.”
“And mine,” says Ines, who has been quiet and watchful all evening the way she always is, “was in the middle of the Kryzon confrontation, which you may have heard about. Texon clasped my hand in the worst possible moment with all his brothers standing right there, and then he told me to run, and chased me through the jungle in the rain.” She lifts one shoulder. “Actually, it was the best night of my life. And now look at me.” She pats the bump. “Six months of payback.”
“What is the chase part of it actually like?” I question as I pour more wine. “It sounds, um, painful and hard? Was it scary?”
“It sounds bad on paper,” Lila agrees. “The Xylan are a huge, powerful species and we’re much smaller and considered delicate compared to them. But it still works fine for us. He chases you, he catches you, and he claims you. But here’s the thing nobody tells you until you’re in it.” She leans forward. “Your job is to make ithard.”
I blink. “To make it hard?”
“Yep, you fight,” Roxy says with relish. “You run, hide, kick, scratch, bite. The harder you fight, the better. It’s the bride’s whole role, to show him how strong you are by not making it easy for him to claim you.”
“And here’s the genuinely unhinged part,” Jana says. “Theyloveit when you hurt them during the claiming.”
“They do love it,” Leah confirms.
“Theywantthe wounds.” Roxy is gleeful now. “A claiming injury is a point ofpride to a Xylan male.They show them off to each other like trophies.”
“Tell her about what you did,” Jana says.
Naomi chuckles. “I broke Bayzon’s arm.”
My mouth drops open.
“During the chase, I got up high on a rock formation in the holosuite forest and when he came up after me and well, there was a drop, some leverage, and physics did the rest.” She shrugs one shoulder. “His arm broke.”
“She broke hisarm,” Lila says, with the reverence of someone recounting a legend. “And hefinished the claiming anyway,with a broken arm, because he was so out of his mind happy about it.”
“He wasthrilled,” Roxy confirmed. “Genuinely. The happiest I have ever seen that male.”
“That same night, lying in the med lab getting it set, he was taking pictures of his own broken arm and sending them to every Xylan he’d ever met. And he still has them. They get passed around at gatherings.My bride broke my arm.” She shakes herhead. “It’s the stuff of legend, apparently. Males I’ve never met congratulate me.”
“Wait.” I am laughing so hard I have to set down my glass. “Theywantyou to hurt them?”
“Oh, theyloveit,” the entire group says, more or less in unison.
“A bite mark, scratch marks, bruises, a broken ankle or arm is even better.”
“They’ll wear those marks for a week and brag the whole time,” Roxy says. “Your bride fought for you. That’s the whole thing. The more savage she was, the more she wanted you. It’s deranged and I find it deeply flattering.”
“And the bar,” Jana says solemnly, “is a broken arm. Naomi has now set the bar so high we all have to live in Naomi’s shadow.”
“I do my best,” Naomi says serenely.
I’m wiping my eyes. “That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.”
“Ah, it’s romantic,” Jana says, “the way enormous violent aliens do romance, which is, hurt me and it means you care.”
After the laughter dies down, Ines speaks up, “There’s a part of it nobody warns you about, though. The good part is that they’re all virgins until the claiming. So you’re always his first and his last. And if you happen to not be a virgin too, you’re the experienced one. The one who knows what you’re doing. And he is so undone by it, so overwhelmed by every single thing he’s feeling for the first time.”
“So I’d be teaching him,” I say.
“You’d be teaching him,” Lila confirms. “Which, I’m not saying you’ve thought about it but…”
