AllFreeNovel
Share Us
That made the engineer scowl, but he wiped the blood off his nose and went back to work, muttering to himself behind a curtain of straight, stark white hair. Yeah, Marex was definitely somebody important.
“Shall we enter the ship, to make certain that Wes is comfortable?” Marex asked Jax. “We brought a portable heater to help make Zathkar more livable for you both.”
Jax’s eyes narrowed in suspicion, but I nodded. “That sounds like a great idea. Let’s do it.”
Part of me wanted to drag Jax onto the ship by his ear, but even if he weren’t more than a foot taller than me, that wasn’t the way to handle this. Something about this place, and these people, were making him feel unsafe, and it wasn’t right of me to ignore his instincts. He’d spent the last week telling me stories of how he’d earned his title as a warrior, so frankly, I didn’t doubt that his instincts were way better than mine.
I also trusted Marex, and I was sure he didn’t mean me harm, but that didn’t preclude him intending Jax harm. And that? Was not going to happen.
So we climbed onto the ship, to where Marex had left the supplies right there in the bay. He motioned to them. “This is all that we have brought onto your ship, Warrior Jax. I believed that you would wish to inspect it before incorporating it into anything Thorzi made.”
I held up a hand, and they both looked at me. “I’m sorry, just, could we settle this right now? You... are Thorzi. You’re a little shorter than the warriors I know, but you’re all enormous and blue, and with the blue eyes and the super shiny hair and no facial hair and—you just are. You’re Thorzi.”
Jax scratched his sexy stubble, as though needing to distance himself from the description, but Marex sighed—and nodded. “You are right, Wes.” Jax opened his mouth, face thunderous, and Marex held up a hand and continued, “And you are wrong.”
“They are not Thorzi,” Jax added, his eyes narrowed and lips curled back in something resembling a snarl. “They are Zathki.”
Zathki. Now that was a term I’d heard over the course of the last month. Never in a good light—more like if I’d been a kid in the US during the Cold War, hearing about Russians.
“You are familiar with the term, then?” Marex asked. I nodded and motioned for him to continue. He walked over to the pile of blankets and the machine they had brought along. “Forgive me for changing the subject momentarily, but your lips are turning blue, and that does not seem to be your natural state.”
He tapped the machine, then opened a side panel to reveal guts that looked strangely like the panel Jax had shown me in the Thorzi ship, all strange text and crystals. He motioned to it, meeting Jax’s eye, and after a moment’s inspection, Jax gave a grudging nod in return. Marex snapped the panel back in place and tapped a button on top of the thing, and almost instantly, it started sending out warm air.
I practically collapsed in front of it, holding out my frozen hands in the heated flow. “Okay. So you’re Thorzi and you’re not Thorzi. What is this, like, Australia? The Thorzi sent you here as a prison and now you all kind of hate each other?”
“Have the Thorzi told you about the homeworld?” Marex asked, and at my head shake, he sighed and sat down across from me, apparently ready to settle in for the long haul.
Jax scowled at him, sat down next to me, and pulled me into his lap.
“Are you pissing on me right now?” His startled look and Marex’s surprised laugh reminded me that I was on an alien world, and they weren’t going to understand shorthand concepts like that. “No, not like actually... It’s a colloquialism. Like animals pee on things to mark them as territory.”
“Indeed, some do that here as well,” Marex agreed. “Fortunately for you, Thorzi are prone to such ancestral behavior, but they aren’t inclined to the actual act, that I know of.”
Ancestral behavior? Oh, like someone back home calling someone else a neanderthal. Interpreter implants were weird.
“Well, as long as that remains true,” I agreed, giving Jax a narrow-eyed look as he glanced between Marex and I in... I didn’t know. It was one of those opaque Thorzi expressions that didn’t correlate exactly with human ones, so it could have been amusement or anger, and I wouldn’t have known. I just sighed and leaned back into his warmth, opening my blanket far enough to wrap it around him as well as me, before turning back to Marex and prompting him. “The homeworld?”
He nodded. “Our people once lived on the burnt-out husk that lies in orbit between this moon’s gas giant, and the jungle world of Thorzan. All of our people. Our unfortunate actions led to the destruction of our home.”
Both of them, at the exact same time, bowed their heads and mumbled, “May we learn from the past.” It was a little creepy, but like... like they’d made it into some kind of religion, remembering it.
After a moment, Marex took a deep breath and spoke again. “A cadre of scientists decided that the sensible path was to use their technological abilities, and learn to survive under the icy crust of Zathkar.”
“And the strong realized that they could tame Thorzan,” Jax said, holding his head high.
Marex quirked a tiny smile, but he didn’t correct Jax. “The other group thought going to a world with carnivorous plant life, giant beasts, and a bare strip of inhabitable land around its equator was a fine challenge. And they met it and thrived. As did we on Zathkar.”
I let my head fall back against Jax’s hard chest, considering.
So the Thorzi’s mortal enemies, whom they were prepared to go to war with... were practically other Thorzi.
It didn’t matter how far I’d come from home, how different things were, nothing really changed anywhere, did it?
CHAPTER16
JAX
It grated, that Marex pretended such familiarity with Wesley, as if the Thorzi were base enough to spill waste on our bed mates unbidden. I hated his amusement, and a vision of digging the plasma claws my mark provided into Marex’s soft, pale face flashed behind my eyes, so tempting.
