So I turned toward the courthouse, where the paper sent me, and went to find the man who'd put my name in this in the first place.
The town hall sat at the wide end of the main street, stone footings under a dark-timber frame, the gallery up on its two big posts and the broad doors thrown open so a bull could walk through without dropping his head. It had been a charter house, a grazing court, the room where they'd run the tribunal that nearly took Maisie back to Earth. Today it was quiet. A clerk's table sat near the dais. Dust turned in the light from the high windows.
And Remmen was at the far end with a stack of folios, buttoned into the pressed coat he wore to remind the rest of us we were civilized now.
He looked up before I was halfway across the room. He always knew when a door opened behind him. None of us ever lost that.
"Lorkin." He set his pen down and folded his hands. The silver on his horns caught the window-light when he tipped his head. "Twice in one week. I'm starting to feel courted."
"Where's Nezara?"
"Not sure. Last I heard she said something about audits." He leaned back. "You came all the way to the hall to ask me that?"
"No." I'd come here because Nezara was gone, which made Remmen my only other option. The Agency didn't run New Knossos; it was not the law here. I needed another solution. "I want the rest of Zarcal's placement. Strike his name off Chloe's match contract and write mine. There's ten days left on it. When it closes, I'll marry her. Properly. Whatever your paper needs me to sign."
For a moment, Remmen didn't say anything. He had a politician's face, smooth and pleasant and built to give nothing back, and I watched him decide which of three or four answers to hand me.
"You?" he said. "The male who walked into Nezara's office a month ago to strike his own name off the rolls?"
"Things have changed."
"Have they?" He let that sit. "And now you'd take a bride. A human one." He didn't make it cruel. He made it gentle, which was worse. "Why?"
I'm her mate.
The words came up flat and certain, the way they had every hour since the first breath of her in that little box. No question of it on my side, and never had been. But it wasn't a thing I'd hand Remmen across a clerk's table, where he could hold onto it and use it later. So I gave him the part that was true and kept the rest.
"She's on her last placement," I said. "It fails, she's on the next ship out. I can stop that. I'm willing to."
"Does she want it?" Remmen asked. "You, I mean. Not the staying. You."
And there it was, the question I hadn't let myself stand still long enough to ask.
I knew what I felt. But did she feel the same?
She slept against me now and didn't flinch. She'd taken the knife I forged for her and kept it close, careful with it, and it mattered to her that the hands that made it had been mine.
There was a feeling in her, and I'd have sworn to it in front of a tribunal.
But underneath it, low and shamed and mine to carry, the other thing. That a woman as quick and warm as Chloe was clinging to the only roof in town that would have her, and only a fool takes a grip like that for love. She liked the horns. She was cornered. Neither one was the same as choosing me, and I knew it.
I didn't believe it. Not really. But it lived in me, and it didn't quiet down just because I told it to.
"I think she'd do whatever it took to stay on Ceres-9," I said. "Even if what it took was me."
Remmen studied me. "That's not what I asked."
"It's the answer you're getting."
"Hm." He came around the table, unhurried. "So let me see if I have it. You'd take her off Zarcal's hooves, marry her, give her your name and a roof and everything else. You'd keep her." He stopped a stride off. "Even if she never loves you. You'd do that to her."
It went in clean, and I felt my hands close.
"Don't," I said. "Don't stand in this hall, and ask me what I'd do to her. You found the Agency, and you signed us all up to it, my name in with the rest, your seal on the order. You made this town a place where a human woman gets put in a house with a male who wakes up swinging, and now you want to know if I'm gentle enough for the job."
"I want to know," Remmen said, even and quiet, "if you're about to do to her what was done to you. Keep someone who doesn't want to be kept."
"She stayed." My voice came out rough. "I dropped her packed bag on the floor and left her every chance to pick it up and walk. She stayed. You weren't there."
