Page 20 of Tempting Fate

In my mind’s eye, I saw Imani, her bright, kind eyes and her easy smile. But as my heart lifted, my stomach soured. It had been two days and I still owed her an apology. On the rare occasion I had ventured outside my dwelling, there had been no sign of her or the other human. I could only imagine she was irritated with me—and avoiding me. And while I could have asked Orukem to find her, I suspected that would not be well received.

I blinked against the prickle of tears, a disproportionate reaction, no doubt exacerbated by this damnable withdrawal.

Three things I can do.

One. I could sing my rites.

Two. I could care for the chiyi—not that she seemed to need me any longer. She had left our room again, just a small dusting of pollen over Kri’s shrine to show she lived here.

I should read about shaa. About hybrids. Face the truth.

Three. I could learn about the galaxy.

A wave of overwhelm swamped me, and I slumped in the chair. From being taught to have no interest in the wider galaxy—beyond trade goods, of course—or the many varieties of sapients who inhabited it, I would now be required to take at least a little interest in order to make a new life on an alien planet.

A tiny spark inside me, one I’d kept dormant, flared to life. Oh, I had more than a little interest. Who could learn that Lietan Shipyard also made vast mobile construction yards without wondering why they’d developed that specialism and who would benefit? Or why rich folk in Coroupicai would want silks from Hydouis without knowing why that particular silk was valuable? And when one learned it was spun by vast worms that lived in lavathermal vents, and that other sapients lived in the vents too—how?—well, any reasonable being would be curious, would they not?

But that was as far as my curiosity had been allowed to venture. I’d been permitted knowledge for trade only. Information limits had been hard-coded into my computer system; no amount of tinkering or hacking could allow me to access data that simply wasn’t present.

And yet I held all of this knowledge in the datapad in my hands.

The sheer scale of it was terrifying. Exhilarating.

“Commara, tell me about the inhabitants of the lavathermal vents of Hydouis,” I said to the datapad’s AI.

Commara wasn’t the Com-AI system I was used to, but the cool voice held a welcome, soothing tone. “Good morning, Airida. The ydukar of Hydouis are large bipeds, larger than their surface cousins, the ydouir, with the power to manipulate rock…”

I spent so long reading I had a headache, an unusual one that ached at the front of my headspines.

Why? My energy was picking up, true, but as one symptom faded, another took its place.

When Orukem arrived, she took my petulant complaints in her measured stride, returning with painkillers. I held the capsule in my palm, the first medication I’d been allowed in the weeks since I’d left Orith.

Swallowing it brought back memories. I swallowed those down too, tolerating Orukem’s idle-talk, content for the distraction.

She caught me rubbing at the tender spots and batted my hands away to inspect the area. “Ah. Your spines were covering it, but it’s your horns growing in at last.”

“My what?” I shrugged the female away. “For the love of all the gods, I do not have horns.”

But the love of the gods was not with me as I lacked the strength to get up and leave.

“Airida, some of us have horns, as shaa do.”

Did I really have to endure my companion’s nonsense on this again? “Kri’ith do not have horns, as you well know.” But the logic of it could not be faulted. If I had indeed inherited these recessive genes from my parents, it would explain everything. Did Shohari carry them too? Did it matter?

Orukem thinned her lips into a line and brushed aside her front headspines, dipping her head so I could see. Nestled between them were indeed bony bumps, as though a headspine had not grown length. “Will you let me show you what shaa look like?” It was the fifth or sixth time one of them had asked me. The usual denial rested on my tongue.

My mind is the strength that makes me whole.

For the first time—with an exaggerated sigh—I acquiesced. “As you wish.”

Orukem pulled a datapad from her bag and passed it to me. The screen lit up with images of tall, slender sapients with bird-like feet and deep orange skin. Lean yet strong, their muscles on clear display. Angular faces. Smooth, no spines, different ridges. And yes, horns, though that was a generous description if ever I heard one. Little bony nubs rose above their foreheads, just within the colourful, fleshy plumage they bore instead of headspines. Their horns were angled towards the sides of their heads, not quite in alignment with their familiar-but-not eyes.

I remembered the doctors’ visits, the tests because my parents worried about my vision, that my eyes were malformed. Not only did they look strange, they leaked whenever I was sad—which had been often until I had learned to control it. My crystalline irises were a normal colour, thank Kri, but they were smaller than they should be, surrounded by a solid pale blue at the outer edges, always a cause for concern. But no, other than a simple sight correction, my eyes were perfectly serviceable.

I pushed my spectacles up the bridge of my nose. I hadn’t been permitted even to attend an eye correction facility. The doctor who came to my cottage—presumably sworn to secrecy—had been able to do the testing there, but was not licenced for electromechanical reshaping. Instead, I made do with old-fashioned spectacles. I liked them, with their simple metal frames and basic nanobots to keep them clean. They didn’t stay on well any more, the grips worn, but my parents hadn’t seen fit to get me new ones.

But now, looking at the pale blue eyeballs of these shaa, with their marbled, opaque centres, the parts of my eyes I’d always considered malformed were simply shaa features, not kri’ith.