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He glanced at me out of the corner of one eye, suspicious, his lips pursed and shoulders tense. Good. He was clever, and more important, not as innocent as he had first seemed. He had the sense to be suspicious of me.
“’M not a kid,” he mumbled as he stared at the floor ahead of us. “Sorry if I got all defensive, but sometimes when people say that, they’re... people aren’t supposed to think of kids like that. And since I guess you brought us here for babies—”
“It was the source of my concern as well,” I agreed. “Perhaps you are not being asked to carry a child, but even the donation of gametes being asked of you is not appropriate for a child.”
He made a strange, pained noise, like there was something stuck in his throat, and avoided my gaze for a moment, but nodded. “So about that. That’s, uh, really what we’re here for? Just to give you a, um, a donation? Couldn’t we have just done that back home?” He made an awkward hand gesture that it took me a moment to understand, and when I did, I couldn’t hold back my laughter.
It was a strange sensation, laughing, and not one I indulged in often, but seeing the little innocent—definitelynotso innocent—referencing something so crude, well—
We stopped in front of a door, and I reached out to input the code to open it and turned to him, still... smiling. What an odd feeling. “It is more complex than that. Almost all children are created in the tubes, you see. And the splicer does not always work.”
“Splicer?”
I shrugged, holding out a hand for him to precede me onto the walkway that led from the lab to Crux’s home. It wasn’t the biggest, and certainly nothing when compared to the palace’s stunning view over the cliff, but if he’d wanted to see the jungle, it would do.
He had been looking at me, so when he turned to look out the door, he gasped, eyes going wide.
“You wished to look around.”
He rushed to the edge of the walkway, making me worry for a fleeting second that he would fling himself off it. But he stopped at the edge, leaning over the railing with wide eyes and open mouth. “It’s beautiful.”
“Thorzan is a beautiful place,” I agreed. Perhaps more deadly than beautiful, but there was no reason for him to worry about that. He would not be wandering into the jungle, to have to concern himself with the flora and fauna of our world. “I do not know what the splicer is, but I am not a scientist. I only know that it is what makes the embryos. Those are put in the tubes, and the children grow inside them. It does not always work, so sometimes repeated attempts are necessary.”
He turned to look at me, eyebrows drawn together to leave a tiny crease between them. Then his eyes went round. “Oh, you mean the baby thing. That’s why you can’t just take a, um, a sample. It might not work, so you’d need more.”
His cheeks pinked and he glanced away, staring out over the jungle, his eyes wide, taking in every detail. “What about eggs?” he asked without looking back at me. “The ladies don’t have as many of those, you know. We guys could just keep going forever, but they’ve got a finite supply. It’s a lot you’re asking of them.”
“No,” I disagreed, leaning on the railing next to him but watching his bright eyes and flushed cheeks and radiant shining hair instead of the same view I saw every day on the way to the lab. “It’s everything. If it were, as you said, a donation, it would be a lot that we asked. But we didn’t ask your agreement. We stole you from your people and brought you here to live in cells. We ask everything, and give nothing in return.”
At that, he turned his whole body away from the view to stare at me, openmouthed. “You’re not even gonna try to dress it up? Make it sound good?”
“It isn’t good. It’s evil. Why pretend?”
He continued to stare at me for a while, silent, shocked. Then, against all reason, one corner of his lips turned up, and his eyes twinkled. He leaned toward me, as though he had a secret to share, and when he got close, he whispered, “You hate this.”
There was little I could do for him, this sweet, innocent-but-not-innocent human. The way he shone was almost painful to look at, shimmering and beautiful and something I could never have. But despite our assured future misery, I could give him at least one thing: the truth.
“I do.”
Stranger yet, he smiled at me. His gaze drifted away from my eyes after a moment, down to where the most recent of my star marks, still sensitive and hot, crept up the side of my neck.
His hand drifted up as he looked, as though he wanted to touch it. Madly, I wanted him to. No one touched my marks. Not even me most days.
But his hands were small and soft, and his skin radiated blessed cool in the middle of the jungle heat of Thorzan. For reasons I could not name, I wanted nothing more than to feel his touch on me.
Still, not the new one.
“Not that one,” I rasped.
He startled and looked back up at my face. Unlike the other humans, he didn’t flinch away from my too-blue Thorzi eyes. “What?”
I reached out and took his hand in mine—gently, in case he wanted to pull away. Instead of touching it to the new mark on my neck, I pulled it up and set it on the mark on the right side of my chest. My very first mark.
As I held his hand over it, I lifted my free one, allowing the purple spiked blade to extend from the center of my palm. “This mark allows me to make these. One in each hand.”
“It’s hot,” he murmured, staring at it in awe.
I nodded. “It is made of plasma. Like the star that made the mark in my skin.”
