“Has Sissix ever given you a feather?” Rosemary asked.
“Yeah, she gave me one a while back, after she got news that one of her hatch fathers died. He was old, but she was really broken up over it. I put her in the shuttle, flew her out to the middle of this nebula, and just let her yell for a few hours. I got a feather the next morning. I think the whole crew’s got a Sissix feather by now. Well, not Corbin. Probably not Corbin.”
Sissix walked back over to the bench, carrying the jar of scale scrub. She looked between Kizzy and Rosemary. “I… apparently have some explaining to do.”
“Uh, yes,” Kizzy said. “Explaining would be great.”
Sissix nodded toward the road, indicating for them to follow. “A person her age should be settled down with a house family, raising hatchlings.”
Rosemary tried to remember everything she’d been told about Aandrisk family structure. Young Aandrisks were cared for by community elders, not their biological parents. That much she knew. And there were several familial stages Aandrisks went through as they aged. But beyond that, Rosemary was fuzzy on the details.
“Maybe she just didn’t want to,” Kizzy said. “Maybe she liked it better out here.”
“No,” Sissix said. “It’s because she can’t socialize well.”
“She’s shy?” Rosemary asked.
“She’s a rashek. There’s not a word for it in Klip. She’s got a disorder that makes it difficult for her to interact with others. She has trouble understanding other people’s intentions. And she speaks oddly, that much was obvious when I first approached her. I offered to couple with her, but she couldn’t quite bring herself around to that. So, yes, she’s shy, but she also has a hard time figuring other people out. It makes her act a little… well, for lack of a better word, weird.”
“Why snuggle with a weirdo?” Kizzy asked.
“Being weird doesn’t mean that she doesn’t deserve companionship. The fact that she’s running a shop instead of living on a farm somewhere means that she has no house family. And yeah, there are elders who choose not to have house families, but she doesn’t even have a feather family. And that’s…” Sissix shivered. “Stars, I can’t imagine anything worse than that.”
Rosemary looked at Sissix. The familial terms were lost on her, but something clicked anyway. “You were comforting her. That’s all it was. You just wanted to her to know that someone cared.”
“Nobody should be alone,” Sissix said. “Being alone and untouched… there’s no punishment worse than that. And she’s done nothing wrong. She’s just different.”
“There are lots of other Aandrisks here. Why don’t they do anything for her?”
“Because they don’t want to,” Sissix said, her voice growing fierce. “Did you see the two Aandrisks walk by while I was with her? Locals, I’m sure. They knew her, I could tell by the look in their eyes. They can’t be bothered with her. She’s an inconvenience.” Sissix’s feathers had puffed up. Her sharp teeth flashed as she spoke.
“Don’t be fooled by all the warm fuzzy talk and snuggles,” Kizzy said to Rosemary. “Aandrisks can be assholes, too.”
“Oh, we’ve certainly got our share,” Sissix said. “Anyway. Sorry to keep you waiting. I hope I didn’t make you feel awkward. I know Humans can be—”
“No,” Rosemary said. “No, it was a very kind thing to do.” She watched the Aandrisk woman as she walked beside her. Her body was strange, her ways were strange, and yet, Rosemary found herself in deep admiration.
“Yes, awesome, go Sissix,” Kizzy said. “But I am now starving. What sounds good? Noodles? Skewers? Ice cream? We’re grownups, we can have ice cream for lunch if we want.”
“Let’s not,” Sissix said.
“Right. I forgot,” Kizzy said, and laughed. “Ice cream makes her mouth go slack.”
Sissix flicked her tongue with disapproval. “Why anyone would make freezing cold food is beyond me.”
“Ooh! What about hoppers?” Kizzy said. “I could seriously go for a hopper. Mmm, spicy peppers and crunchy onions and a big toasty bun…” She looked at Rosemary with eager eyes.
“I can’t remember the last time I had a hopper,” Rosemary said. It was a lie. She’d never had one. Grasshopper burgers were street food, and that wasn’t a realm of cuisine she’d ever been privy to. She imagined how her mother would react to her chowing down a bug sandwich wrapped in greasy paper while sharing a table with modders and smugglers and arm-hacking patch thieves. She grinned. “Sounds great.”
Ashby ran his palm down the bare torso pressing against his own. He’d had his share of lovers before her. He’d felt plenty of skin. But none like hers. She was covered in tiny scales—not thickly layered, like Sissix’s, but seamless, interlocking. She was silvery, almost reflective, like a fish in a river. Despite all the time he’d spent looking at her, despite how comfortable he was in her company, there were still moments when the sight of her made his words stick in his throat.
It was pure chance, of course, that Aeluons so often managed to check all the boxes on the list of Things That Humans Generally Find Attractive. On a galactic scale, beauty was a relative concept. All Humans could agree that Harmagians were hideous (a sentiment the Harmagians heartily returned). Aandrisks—well, that depended on who you talked to. Some people liked the feathers; others couldn’t get past their teeth and claws. The Rosk, with their skittery legs and jagged mandibles, would still be the stuff of nightmares even if they weren’t in the habit of carpetbombing border colonies. But Aeluons, by some weird fluke of evolution, had a look that made most Humans drop their jaws, hold up their palms, and say, “Okay, you are a superior species.” Aeluons’ long limbs and digits were alien, no question, but they moved with fascinating grace. Their eyes were large, but not too large. Their mouths were small, but not too small. In Ashby’s experience, it was hard to find a Human who couldn’t appreciate an Aeluon, even if only in the most objective aesthetic terms. Aeluon women didn’t have breasts, but after meeting Pei, Ashby had found that he could do without. His teenage self would’ve been horrified.
Lying beside her, Ashby felt like a hairy, gangly mess. But given what they’d been up to for the better part of the last two hours, he figured he couldn’t be that repulsive. Or maybe she just didn’t care about the whole hairy, gangly thing. That worked, too.
“You hungry?” Pei said, though her mouth did not move. Like all Aeluons, her “voice” was a computerized sound that came from a talkbox embedded in the base of her throat. She controlled the talkbox neurally, a process she likened to thinking up words while typing. Aeluons lacked a natural sense of hearing, and had no need for a spoken language of their own. Among themselves, they communicated through color—specifically, iridescent patches on their cheeks that shimmered and shifted like the skin of a bubble. Once they began interacting with other species, however, verbal communication became a necessity, and so, talkboxes came to be.
“I’m starving,” Ashby said. He knew that as he spoke, the sounds coming from his mouth were collected by the jewelry-like implant set in her forehead. As her brain did not have any means for processing sound, the implant translated his words into neural input that she could understand. He didn’t quite grasp how it worked, but he could say the same for most tech. It worked. That was all he needed to know. “Your room or mine?” he asked. That was another part of their standard operating procedure: Make sure only one person was in the room when room service arrived.