Page 10 of Crush
“But it’s what the Luster consortium will believe,” he argued. “They will think that if we can fulfill needy females such as yourselves, then our contracts will be reliable and strong too.”
“That’s silly,” she sputtered.
“So is thinking that aliens from so far apart might somehow come together,” he pointed out.
It shouldn’t upset her so much, not when she’d realized long ago that all her relationships had been transactional. Still, the strain sank into her muscles, all the way to bone.
She might make a new life on theDeepWander, but in too many ways, this was what she’d wanted to get away from—and Teq was too much like the man she’d left behind.
Chapter 5
He’d made a mistake. Teq realized it, just as he realized that Mag would rip off one of his arms and beat him over the head with it if he didn’t make things right with the Earther female.
With Adeline.
But what could he say? He’d badly fumbled his interrogation about why the Earthers had signed up for the IDA, only to basically confess that the orcs had the same mercenary motivations. He wanted to explain, but he couldn’t reveal their new fortune—assuming that the Earthers weren’t spies who already knew about it—just to assuage her suspicions.
“I can’t have feelings,” he blurted.
Adeline took a little stumbling step, and he reached out to steady her, which she accepted for another step before turning away. “Feelings? I don’t understand. The IDA made it seem as if your species had the same basic sensory requirements, more or less.” She gestured at the slymusk oozing past them on the wall, leaving a trail of silverglow behind. “I mean, we knew you evolved underground in caves, but you still use enough light that us Earthers would be able to live with you. If you think this won’t work—”
“It’s not all orcs,” he corrected. “Just me. Of all the crew ranks, I believe a crusher’s place is too dangerous to consider taking a wife-mate. So I always knew I’d never feel the i’lva.”
She looked up at him, a pucker of skin between her strangely mesmerizing eyes. “I’lva? What’s that? I don’t remember that word in the IDA handbook and my translator isn’t giving me anything either.”
He might’ve regretted mentioning it at all, except maybe it would give the other orcs a better chance with the Earthers. “Sometimes I think the i’lva is just one of our myths,” he told her. “It was said that once upon a time when our people would meet their life-mate, the i’lva would ignite within them, like a light that would always guide them home through the darkness.” Though he meant to speak as clinically as a handbook, his voice shook, and he looked away from her. “I don’t know if it was ever true. When our environment destabilized, the changes in temperature and biochemicals meant almost no wife-mates were hatched or transitioned. And the stories of the i’lva just faded to the dark.”
Their steps had slowed in tandem as he told the story, and although they could hear the murmur of voices from the galley ahead, for some reason they paused in the hallway just out of sight.
Adeline was looking toward that liveliness, but then she glanced at him again, and the lights and the shadows added facets to those odd Earther eyes. “On Earth we have stories of true love too,” she said. “Unlike you, I did believe them. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t.” She looked down at her two hands, where her fingers were linked tightly together, and he wondered how much harder it was to hold on with so few hands and fewer digits. “But I did believe, and at least I got Ollie out of the deal. But maybe feeling isn’t all there is. Maybe…” She glanced up at him again, partly hidden behind the fringed lashes. “Maybe it’s as you say, better not to get lost in feeling. We have all this technology, right? The IDA’s matching algorithms, spaceships, breaking hunks of space junk into a living.” The curve of her mouth—the lips he’d just pressed against his own—seemed a little sad to him, despite the sensibility of her words. “We can still survive without risking our hearts, right?”
“This is so.” When she jerked her head up and down in a decisive affirmation, he did the same, though the Earther gesture made his antennae wobble awkwardly. They turned in tandem to join the others in the galley.
He had said she was intrepid to come all this way, and now he knew she was also wise to realize the dangers of wanting too much.
So why did the wild pulsing of the i’lva still burn through him?
When they joined the others in the galley, he forced himself to hang back as she hurried forward to reunite with her hatchling.
Ollie flashed all his little teeth at her, waving a fistful of foodstuff at her. “Mom, look! It’s an alien hot dog! They made it especially for me. It’s synthesized bug proteins.” The hatchling gave his mother a strange sort of look, with the little arches of hairs above his eyes waggling up and down above the corrective lenses. “But, like, synthesized fromactualbugs, not like, you know,othersorts of things you might havecalledbugs before you knew them better.”
Teq couldn’t quite make sense of what the hatchling was saying, but Adeline gathered Ollie against her side. “And are you trying the orc food too? We are their guests, so it’s polite to sample a bit of everything.”
Ollie made a face that wrinkled the respiratory organ in the middle of his face; squishy Earther features were capable of a dizzying array of fluctuating expressions. “There’s an algae salad, kinda like the slymusks eat, but maybe you’d like that more than me.”
She laughed and squeezed him with her arm. “Show me what else you’ve tried.”
Mag had been circling the room, the other orcs making way for their apex as was proper, but he stopped at Adeline’s side. “Tell us what you like and what you need,” he urged. “Because we hope you’ll soon feel like more than guests.”
When Adeline did the smile gesture at Mag, Teq looked away, his carapace suddenly feeling too small and tight. He flattened one hand over the crusher glyph etched into his thorax, right above his primary circulatory organ.The dangers of wanting too much. He’d just told her he couldn’t feel, so why was he feelingthis?
Reluctantly, he slanted another glance at the Earther female and his apex. Mag should choose Adeline for his wife-mate, and Adeline would do well to return Mag’s favor. They looked right together, both of them moving with that smooth confidence of those who knew their place and their value, their outer layers unmarked by the labor of hard rock. The salvagers and miners at the Luster couldn’t fail to be impressed.
Teq wanted to leave the cheerful bustle of the galley behind him, plunge into the depths of the nearest asteroid and lose himself in some unstable tunnel. But there was no distracting danger to be found at the moment, not when they were focused on wooing these Earthers to carve out a reputation at the Luster.
That was what mattered, and he didn’t need to have any feelings about that at all.
But somehow, as the gathering continued, he found himself lurking just beyond Adeline’s sight, like a crumbling comet fatally caught in the gravity well of some enticing star. He watched how she gave her focus to her hatchling and to Amma with the same smile; saw the way the other Earther females deferred to her; detected when that smile altered subtly around Dorn and some of the other orc males; marked that she carefully tried all the feast laid out for the new arrivals…but went back for more of the dewdrop whorls. The bite-sized confections were decorated with filigrees of caramelized sweetness encasing a chewy, melting inside.
