Chapter 23

CHAPTER 23

THREXIN

A lina Argoud was hyperventilating. Threxin had started off dragging her down the public hall to her cabin. But when the blood drained from her face with such suddenness that he was sure she would collapse, he flung her over his shoulder instead.

He paused at the entrance to her cabin. After hesitating a tick, Threxin authed the door open with his blood and stepped inside. He dropped the female onto the bed, where she tucked her knees and bent her head between them, tiny skin bumps spreading to pepper her bare arms and the back of her neck. Threxin shoved at his erection through his pants, closing his eyes to will it away.

"We were not seen," he said gruffly to the female falling apart in front of him. The crown of her head bobbed up and down between her legs.

"I know," she breathed. "I just… need a minute. You… can… go…" She sucked in a wheezy breath between each word.

But instead of getting out of there as he knew he should, Threxin glanced back at the tiny human shaking in her bed, fear and pheromones thick in the air around her. She had been through a lot, everything considered. She'd watched him kill her kind, cared for his wound, and then was forced to watch Orion Halen fuck her charge into oblivion. It had aroused her too—he had scented it. But Alina Argoud was clearly unstable, and if he wanted her to remain useful, it was only logical that it was up to him to bring some… comfort.

Shoq. Threxin raked a hand over the spikes atop his scalp, tilting his face to the ceiling.

"Stop panicking," he said.

Alina's shoulders rolled in a silent spasm.

"Are you refusing my command, human?"

The question only made her tremble more aggressively. How ironic it was that the humans thought his kind were the ones unable to control their emotions.

Well, at that time they were. But not just them. And now his kind had evolved. At least his cohort did. The humans were the uncontrollable ones.

He would control them.

Threxin sighed, lowering to his haunches at the side of the bed in front of her as the human continued her breakdown. Threxin's fingers traced the edges of the dressing on his chest, where the ghost of her touch still lingered. Giving his head a shake, he withdrew the firedagger from its sheath on his belt.

She glanced at his hand with the movement, and when her slow human brain processed the weapon, something like resignation flashed across her features. Threxin dug in his pocket for the roll of hak he'd kept there. He squeezed the hilt of the dagger in his fist, just enough to heat it without producing the blade. Holding the charred end of the roll to the heat until it sparked, it sent up a puff of mineral dust.

He cupped the twist of hak to his face and inhaled the dust floating up from the burnt end. He held it there for a few ticks, then puffed the filtered vapor from his mouth and held the hak out to her.

"What is it?" she asked, wiping tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand .

"Take it."

She did, and Threxin nodded his approval. "Something that may help. Swallow it deep."

Alina frowned as he nudged her hand to her face and curled his palms around her hand, directing the hak toward her.

"Breathe," he said.

She kept her gaze lowered as she inhaled. She wasted a bit of it with a series of little coughs, but that was normal for a beginner. The female got the hang of it soon enough, her hand replacing her own to cup the air around the roll of hak and direct it to herself. She would be feeling that spark now, in her throat.

"It burns a little. Scratches." She coughed behind her hand.

"It is supposed to."

Threxin hadn't considered it before and now wondered if humans' airways were made from more delicate materials. It was probable, which would mean the hak could either injure the tissue or, more likely, penetrate more deeply for greater effect.

His theory was proven correct when Alina relaxed. He took note as her shoulders unwound. The flow of sickening adrenaline weeping from every pore abated, staling into a musty remnant.

"That was fast," Threxin observed.

She lowered the roll of hak in her hand to her knee and leaned her head against the wall. When she looked up, the relief in her eyes melted right in, unwinding a heaviness he hadn't even recognized weighing on him.

Threxin looked around her cabin as if for the first time, taking in the weird objects and colorful fabrics. It all looked out of place on his ship, but here, in the confines of her cabin, they seemed to fit right in. Her bed was small and safe, comfortably constricting in contrast with the oversized one in his own quarters.

He would sit for a tick, only to relax. Taking his place against the wall beside her, Threxin watched Alina take another inhale of the hak and accepted it when she passed it back.

"What a fucking mess, huh?" she said, voice a little hoarse.

He chuckled quietly at the frankness in her voice, taking his turn.

"Regret it yet?" she asked.

"What?"

"This." Alina spread her arms, indicating everything and looking only slightly apologetic when she bumped his shoulder.

"This ship is mine by blood," Threxin stated.

"Yeah, but why do you even want it?"

Threxin's spikes twitched, considering. This was perhaps the time to leave. The female was fine. Calm and growing too bold.

"My father," he said instead. "My blood father. He told me stories of this ship and my blood right. The other offspring thought it stupid. I thought it stupid also. Even when I was older and we discovered Elysian , and learned that it was very possibly true, I wanted nothing to do with this myth."

"But?" Alina angled herself toward him.

"But Koruth had other ideas."

"Korth… Your adoptive father, right?"

"Adoptive?" Threxin searched through his memory of Universal for a definition.

"Like, someone who took you in after your parents… Well, what happened with them anyway?"

Threxin took another pull of hak. This was not how he imagined this conversation going, but it seemed that indulging her was helping her calm down. "They were killed in the final massacre. Soon after we took Elysian. "

Her eyes widened. "I'm… so sorry."

"It was a long time ago." Threxin bristled at the pity. He did not need it.

"So, Koruth…"

"Koruth had been a nonbeliever. But after Elysian he saw in the ship's records that it was all true. The ship my father's blood owned existed, and it was named Colossal . Only my father was dead."

"But you weren't…"

"I was not." Threxin lifted his chin in mild agreement. "Koruth saw the records of your Heaven. For him, Heaven was immortality. Our kind's natural lifespan is only slightly longer than yours."

"And he wanted his people to live forever…" Alina finished for him.

Threxin scoffed with a staying hand on her knee. " He wanted to live forever. The rest of us were just… How do you say in your tongue?"

"Along for the ride?"

"Yes."

Alina looked like she was thinking very hard. "So he wanted to use you… But how did he know Colossal would ever come to your galaxy?"

"We kept one of your kind from Elysian . We sent it in a scout vessel to transmit a call Colossal would receive."

"How'd you know he'd do it?"

Threxin processed. Humans utilized a myriad of confusing contractions. Finally he detangled the words.

"A sacrifice," he said. "One of ours accompanied him."

"So Koruth groomed you to do all of this. This whole time…" Her leg shifted beneath his hand. "And then you killed him."

"He did not groom me," Threxin balked. "Both me and my brother groomed ourselves. We needed not our father to bathe us."

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… He prepared you, 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."

" My ship, 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 the Elysian command 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 the Elysian to 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. It burned 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 a but , 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 feel anything ?"

"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."