Page 50 of Command

Alina looked confused and then burst into laughter that made Threxin’s limiter kick in as his talons twitched. How dare this pest laugh at him.

“That’s not what I meant,” she chittered. “I meant… Hepreparedyou, raised you to help him get to Heaven.”

“What has that to do with grooming?” Threxin chastised. “Koruth was old and selfish. He inherited a generation of offspring. Few elders were left after the massacre. As was the usual way of things. I need not Heaven. All I wanted was to get away from his hell.”

She thought for several ticks, then frowned. “But you did what he wanted in the end, right? I mean, almost all of it. He trained you to take over our ship, and you did.”

“Myship, not yours. It was mine before Koruth and after. It is my responsibility, as my parents had always foretold—I was always my cohort’s way to escape Apth.”

The thought of Apth left a sour taste on his tongue. Apth was a cage. Threxin had often spent days at theElysiancommand center, staring at the human strung up with his innards splayed open. Trapped in stasis, rotting and being forced back together time and again to keep him useful. Threxin related to that human more than he had to any of the uhyre on Apth.

After another inhale of hak, Alina Argoud propped her elbow on her leg and leaned toward him.

“So what was wrong with Apth?” she asked. “Was that not a good enough planet to go back to after blowing up theElysianto destroy him? We went there hoping it was New Earth…”

“Planets,” Threxin corrected. “Apth is a three-planet system. We inhabited all of them. And no. One of them had been a home, Apth Alpha, but that was before my time. Itburned in one of the massacres. Now it is barely breathable ash. Good only to mine hak.”

“What massacres?”

“You cannot guess, human?” He was growing weary of her questions. The hak appeared to relax Alina and bring her back from the edge of panic, but it also inspired an annoying sense of curiosity.

Her gaze flicked to his hand on her knee as though noticing it for the first time. He drew it back.

“I was wondering about that… I’m pretty sure we all have. You’ve killed people, but…” She hesitated. “Well, there’s never abut, Threxin. It’s sick.”

His apertures narrowed, awaiting the brunt of her denouncement. He could not expect an inferior species without a limiter to understand. She took another quick pull of the hak, then plunged into her words. “You’ve done it so coldly. The vids from Old Earth are so… We all thought you were gonna rip us apart limb from limb.”

Threxin was somewhat impressed that she had found the stomach to say it. No one else had asked. No one else would have gotten an answer. “We are not like that anymore. Koruth was. But he is gone.”

“How? Did you evolve?”

That snatched a laugh from him as he remembered the process of being injected with his limiter as a child. Writhing in pain, high on hallucinogens and shackled to that seat. “You can say that. Very forcefully so.”

“I don’t understand.” She shook her head a little, that infuriating clump of hair falling into her face again.

“All you need to understand,” he bent to her and pulled the tuft from her eyes with a quick talon, “is that my every act comes from reason, not bloodlust. And not emotion.”

“No emotion… No panic?” She angled herself to face him more directly, her guard down behind a mineral haze.

“Never.”

“Do you feelanything?”

“Yes. I feel. The urge is there, deep. It is…” He searched her eyes as though he’d see the words he needed in them. When she remembered herself and tore her gaze away, he did not think—he grabbed her tiny chin and forced her face toward him, jerking it until she again looked at him. “Tempered,” he said quietly, his hold firm on the flesh. “It is tempered before it arises.”

Threxin sighed, spikes slumping with a series of resigned clicks as he released her and rose from the bed.

“Take this.” He held the hak out to her. It burned slowly, and it was enough for maybe two ship weeks. “You will inhale once a day for five of your minutes. And you will see your head medic tomorrow.”

She looked at the twist in his fingers, hesitant.

“It is not a request.”

“Is it addictive?” Her question was thrown out too casually, reflecting a detachment Threxin was trying his best to feel.

“No,” he said. “Not like me.”

CHAPTER 24

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