Page 11 of Mated By Twilight

Tillos frowned. “Did you explain to her what a zero-g actor is?”

“Huh? Should I have?”

Tillos sighed. “Sollit, humans don’t have zero-g technology yet. How is she supposed to know what a zero-g actor is?”

“Oh… Huh…” Sollit laughed sheepishly. “Maybe that’s why she was saying she didn’t understand the things I was messaging her.”

Tillos laughed, long tail smacking his leg playfully. “We’ll explain it to her tomorrow. It will be a nice surprise for her, I think, when we clear up that misunderstanding.”

Chapter 4

Leah

Leah’s mind was spinning. She stepped off the landing shuttle, looking up at the massive ring that constituted the capital of the Coalition. Massive was, somehow, an understatement. It was a ring so indescribably large, it encircled the entire sun. Leah knew that the sun was incomprehensibly far away. That meant the ring was twice as far as incomprehensible in diameter. She could see it stretching up from the horizon – climbing instead of disappearing like it would a spherical world. It stretched up, past her ability to see, and reached up towards the sun, wrapping around it. Far beyond her ability to grasp, much less see.

That was the power of the Coalition. They could build something like this. Leah was awed by the sheer magnificence, the scale, of it. So much so that she found herself accidentally ignoring the domini female that was acting as her guide.

The shuttle had dropped her off at a busy port. A spaceship port. It was like if a busy, international airport had less shops but way more people. There was a concourse, long hallways that all funneled towards the front entrance where customs caught everyone. She couldn’t see departures, but the domini female with her, who had been professionally explaining things, told her that the two flows of people were kept apart for ease of movement.

Leah wasn’t sure what she expected in terms of style, so anything would have been a surprise. But it seemed extra strange just hownormaleverything was. The space port hadn’t been designed with a lot of fripperies or luxuries. It was a place that would get you from A to B and it didn’t see the need to be anything more that. At the same time, it was also bright and huge. Since it was made for species that were much bigger than her, she kind of felt like she was a kid again, walking around in a space that was just a bit bigger than what she would need. Glass ceilings let in a great deal of sunlight while, every so often, there were long, ivy-like plants with green leaves tipped with pink growing down. She didn’t know if she’d call the style futuristic, but it was just this side of otherworldly.

The female domini that was guiding her through had been waiting outside of the shuttle that had brought her here from Earth. She greeted her, helped her put her luggage on a floating cart – like the big, flat ones at home good stores – and showed her how to set it to follow them. Then, she took her to a private room at the front of the massive spaceport to wait for her mate. A trip that had taken the better part of an hour to walk, but Leah certainly wasn’t going to complain. Not when she was trying so hard to look at everything and everyone at once.

The sheer amount of different types of people was mind boggling. She saw people with fur and people with tentacles and some guy that she swore had leaves growing out of his head, though he was gone into the crowd before she could get a good look. There were purple people and silver people and people who flicked between colors as they walked. The sort of diversity of origin she couldn’t imagine, but she knew would have made her family extremely uncomfortable.

She forced that ingrained distrust down, deep down, and ignored it as a product of her youth as she instead made herself appreciate everything she saw. And looking at it through that lens, this place really was absolutely incredible.

Now, Leah was just sitting there, in the small but rather comfortable space with the domini lady, as she stared out the huge, bubble window at the sky. At the ringworld stretching up into the sky. The sight just made her think that her parents were even more foolish than she thought. They really thought humanity had any ability to stand against a power like this? Even more foolish, they really wouldn’t have been able to see the beauty in something like this?

Though it wasn’t a particularly common a thought, Leah once again found herself really appreciating the fact that she’d gotten away from all that. As hard as it had been. As hard as it continued to be, as a part of her still missed her family and the comfort and stability of home. But if she had stayed, she never would have been able to see all this.

She checked her phone again. Her mate had sent her a message through True Match, promising to be there soon. But that had been told to her by the domini lady. Her phone still worked, to an extent. All the systems that didn’t require a connection – the camera, calculator, a few of the games – worked just fine. But everything else required a connection through communication relays back to Earth, and that made everything work that much slower, and she had to have a special link with whatever they had as wi-fi, which she didn’t have right now. She was just checking the time to see how much had passed – though she was now supposed to be using the new time system she had learned, it was hard to break the old habit. Besides, twentyminutes was still twenty minutes, even if they wouldn’t use those measurements.

So, the message, ‘we just got here. See you soon’ was the last one that they would exchange over text. The last one that she would have to worry about being mistranslated. She couldn’t wait for those translation errors to end.

Her mate was still in communication with the domini female acting as her guide. She was messaging him their location since she knew the space port. All Leah was doing was sitting near the window, playing solitaire on her phone, and humming nervously to pass the time.

The waiting room, while comfortable, wasn’t fully private. The wall facing out onto the concourse was glass from floor to ceiling, giving her a view of the various alien species walking past. There were a couple food stalls, like she would expect from an airport, but not a lot of stores. Mostly, it was just people trying to get from one place to another. There were other meeting rooms, some sleeping pods for those who needed to rest, but for the most part, it was just aliens with luggage that they either carried, dragged, or floated behind them. Aliens with scales, with feathers, in every color of the rainbow, all of them so big, she felt like she was likely to disappear if she tried to walk out in that crowd by herself.

Leah began alternating between staring out the window at the sprawling space port, the ring, the periwinkle blue sky, and the distant, sparkling city before turning her head and checking out the abundance of aliens walking around, trying to guess which one was her mate. Her one and only. The guy she was guaranteed to love for the rest of her life. It was exciting and scary.

All the while, she hummed and mouthed her favorite songs under her breath. Trying not to disturb the domini female who had given her a wide berth – either out of politeness or displeasure at being here, Leah couldn’t really be sure. But Leah knew that people didn’t really like it when others sang or hummed around them, so she tried to keep it quiet.

But her nerves had to work their way out somehow, and singing was just something she liked to do, ever since she was young. She’d even been in choir in her private, religious high school, but never got further than that. She certainly wasn’t worthy enough to be a professional, but music and singing was still something that brought her joy and calmed her nerves.

And now that she had a mate, it would soon be something she could do for her babies. Singing them to sleep. Singing with them while they cleaned. Humming to them when they were sick or fussy. All those things she’d always been promised growing up.

A husband, a family, a stable home – it was coming towards her now.

Just a little longer.

Just a little-

“Ah. There they are.”

The domini female’s voice was startling. Leah jumped, sitting up quickly. Heart pounding.

“There,” she said, pointing out of the window. “The ones with white hair and purple scales.”

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