Page 119 of Decadence

Arin had bid her a nonchalant farewell, as if this sort of thing happened all the time.

Breathless, she hadn’t even questioned him as he’d whisked her away to his getaway ship.

She hadn’t even thought twice as they strode down the corridors and dozens of obsidian-armored, heavily armed Kordolian warriors appeared behind Ikriss and fell into an orderly formation.

They’d marched all the way to the massive docking area in the lower part of the ship, where Ikriss had immediately taken Sienna to his own private cruiser. The soldiers had boarded another mean looking ship, leaving Sienna and Ikriss alone.

In a small and cozy alien cockpit.

Just the two of them.

Flying through space for hours and hours, with nothing but the stars and each other for company.

What bliss.

They’d talked. A lot. For a bad-ass alien ex-commander, Ikriss was surprisingly easy to chill with. They’d exchanged stories about their home planets; small, intimate details about growing up, about the important people in their lives. In the space of a few hours, Sienna learned more about Kordolian culture than most humans would probably ever know.

In return, she told him about her life growing up on Earth; about her childhood growing up in a two-bedroom skybox in London with Isabella and her mother, Stella. Her mother had fostered a strong sense of competition between Sienna and Isabella. In school, music, sports, even at home, where even basic household chores turned into a battle for supremacy—for their mother’s approval.

It had always felt like they were short of credits, even with the monthly allowance Stella got from their stupid mysterious benefactor. Well, short of credits for everything, unless it was related to some form of education or training.

Isabella thrived. Sienna didn’t.

Isabella was perfect. Sienna was the misfit.

They fought like crazy.

As she grew older, Sienna started to find the skybox cloying. She wasn’t interested in AI, or virtual gaming, or Network entertainment. She would go out onto the streets and disappear for hours, much to Stella’s anger. She would simply wander—through dingy back alleys and busy markets, past public housing blocks and through frost-burned, neglected parks.

“It’s bloody dangerous,” Stella would yell when she got home. “One day, you’re going to get abducted by traffickers, and it will be your own bloody stupid fault. Why can’t you just stay home and study and watch the Networks like Isabella? I know you’ll never get an A-rank score, but you can at least try and pass so you don’t end up on the Minimum.”

Her mother’s biggest fear of all was that one of them would end up on the Federation’s Minimum Allowance, which would be much to her great embarrassment and shame.

But Sienna was never scared of going out. Even at that young age—at twelve—she knew how to keep away from the people that would do her harm.

She wasn’t a fucking idiot.

She just wasn’t brilliant like Isabella, not that she resented her sister for it. Izzy had been too absorbed in her academics to pay much attention to her, but she never boasted about her achievements or held them over Sienna.

And still, even to this day, she was quite sweet, even when her focus was stolen by things like multi-trillion interplanetary business deals that Sienna would never really understand.

They didn’t have much in common, but Sienna still loved her sweet, high-achieving, focused, preoccupied, perfect, naive older sister.

Unlike Isabella, Sienna had never really found anything that had interested her until the day that their small home kitchen-bot had broken down, leaving a stack of unused ingredients in the kitchen.

That’s when she’d learned how to cook.

And the pieces of her life had suddenly started to fall into place.

Somehow, she’d just told Ikriss all of that. Things she’d never told anyone before.

How did he do that to her?

“You are impressive, my amina,” he’d said softly as she looked at him expectantly, wondering what he’d make of her very ordinary human life.

She was a pretty good cook—well, good enough to get a couple of Michelin stars if she wanted, although she wasn’t really interested in that—and she’d developed some hard-won business nous, and overall she was pretty proud of what she’d accomplished, but in contrast to her, Ikriss was a damn unicorn; one of only a handful of beings in the Universe that held that much power.

How could her meager accomplishments in life ever compare to his?

---