18. THALIA

Ahane had gone to take a shower, and I had settled for splashing some cold water in strategic places after I’d had some me time. Which I hadn’t had since Earth. Even though He had asked me to. I’d refused no matter how many times He had asked, demanded, punished, or tried to bribe me.

It had been one of my first lessons in how the Greys thought consent and bodily autonomy were quaint notions, and the Greys did not have the same understanding of no that Humans did.

Ahane was something (and someone) that overwhelmed everything else. Including the cheese-grater memories in my head.

I fell asleep afterwards and didn’t dream of anything.

“Food.”

I yanked out of my sleep, totally disoriented by time and place and the fact someone was talking to me. I flopped over and bolted upright, clutching blanket up around my breasts. Dingy, battered walls. Dingy blankets. Smells. Dim lighting.

“Where—” I looked around. Where the fuck was I?—

“Thalia.”

My brain did its best compass needle impression and my attention swung towards that voice and my name.

Memories slammed into my head. I grabbed handfuls of hair and curled on myself. Everything flashed behind my eyelids in explosions of light and sparkles and jagged shards of things half-remembered. I dug my fingers into my scalp. Memories of darkness and white and chrome and endless, endless, endless variations on those things entangled with endless gray bodies and clammy chicken fingers in my head and breathing and moving and?—

“Thalia.”

“It’ll pass, gimme a minute,” I grit out.

The brush of his nails. “Tha?—”

“Don’t touch! Don’t touch! Don’t!”

The snow globe of the damned settled. I dropped my hands to my lap. Ahane stood very close but not touching me. His tail lashed back and forth while corkscrewing at the tip for several seconds before he moved close again and spoke in low, commanding High Dialect.

I wanted to collapse into his words. Maybe I did. Because one of his large hands was behind my back, supporting me, while the other rested gently between my breasts. Just the fingertips. Or talon-tips.

“Say that again,” I heard myself rasp.

He obliged, and this time it sounded even lower and fuller and more commanding. I shivered all over. But a good shiver. A shiver that almost made me cry.

No crying. There would be no crying. No weeping, sniffling, or the delicate little peeping noise I could never master.

I picked myself up. He gently helped, his warm hand never leaving my back, and his sunset gaze waiting. I swallowed. “I’m okay.”

“Did you hit your head?” His hands didn’t move.

“Didn’t know where I was for a minute.” I pressed the heel of one hand to the corresponding eyeball. “Couldn’t remember.”

“Do you remember now?”

“Yes. Yes, I remember.” I rubbed my eyeball. Still couldn’t massage my brain.

“What’s my name?”

“Are you kidding?”

“What’s my name.”

“Bob.”

His scales rushed red-sedan-bleached-by-Florida-sun. With forced calm, he said, “My name is not Bob.”

Hearing him say Bob had been worth it. It sort of popped out of his mouth, but he managed to extend it to three syllables. “I was joking. Your name is Prince Red.”

He glowered. “I cannot tell when you are teasing. Humans are impossible to read.”

“Don’t be dramatic.”

He glowered his best I am not amused shade. “I’ve made a meal.”

Mealwas a bit of a stretch. More like sustenance to ward off starvation, but starvation remained a valid option if it meant more moth-slop. “I’ll pass.”

“It was not a choice.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

He stared at me.

“Fine.” I threw off the blankets. Fine. FINE.

Ahane practically sauntered into the kitchen. I glared at that swinging tail of his (and the very nice ass in those pants) as I followed.

I poked my slop while he ate more green custard pancakes.

Would be a shame for me to ruin the comfortable silence with… a question. But I wanted to know about this “mate” business that had seemed to be ultra extremely taboo. And anything taboo in a place like this had to be juicy.

It was that or risk a conversation about why I’d needed him like I had. My brain had already been a snow globe once that day. Maybe I should feel more gross. Gross enough to apologize for using him, because that’s what I’d partially done, and not feeling sorry enough to apologize made me feel a different kind of gross.

Maybe that’s why I’d always attracted shitty boyfriends. Because I was, deep down, a piece of shit.

I stirred my slop, watching my spork cut grooves in the moth pudding. “So what is this mate business?”

The warmth of his scales dissipated to hard sparkling.

“Everyone thinks that’s what we are. So what are we?” I prodded it as if it were a sore tooth. It sure felt sore inside. Maybe that was the cesspool buried deep in my soul.

He jabbed his spork into the center of one custard-cake.

I sighed. “It can’t be that bad, can it?”

“Are you familiar with the concept that perceiving something is what makes it ‘real’?” He did some danger quotes.

That was high school physics. “Yes, I know all about the cat in the box and how the cat is alive and dead until you look in the box and reality has to pick life or death.”

“That’s why I don’t want to tell you.”

“Fine. I’ll wander around asking someone else to explain it to me.”

“Not if I don’t teach you the words for it,” he bit back.

“Damnit, Ahane, I choose danger! Everyone thinks it already, so it’s already real, isn’t it?”

“…no.”

“You’re already telling them I’m a 25XA but I’m not suddenly going to be 25XA if they get a look under my hood.”

He set his fork down and ran his hands over his face. “Mates are sacred in the Gestalt. And they think I am not wearing my trinket, keeping you covered, and denying you’re my mate because I’m ashamed.”

“Obviously, I got that. But what is a mate.”

Ahane said, “That the cosmos itself chose us for each other.”

I stared at him. “…right. And how does me knowing this put me in danger?”

“Because every species in the known galaxy needs a trinket to fall in love and recognize their mate. No trinket, no mate. The trinket awakens your awareness of your mate. Your mate doesn’t realize it until you physically meet.”

“…because they haven’t looked in the box,” I said slowly.

“Yes.”

“Holy shit, that sounds terrifying. So some guy can just roll up one day and be like ‘hey, baby, I’m the one for you’ and you instantly fall in love with them?”

He nodded.

“No thanks. Nooooo thanks. You could have your own thing going with kids and a?—”

“No. We cannot fall in love without a trinket. But there have been pair-bonds—those are arrangements where a couple exchange legal promises to exist as a pair for mutually beneficial reasons—that have been broken up by a mate. But pair-bonds don’t involve love.”

“So you can’t fall in love. Not even a little.”

“Not without a trinket.”

That sounded like a lot of horseshit to me. “…and where does one get a trinket?”

“You buy one at one of the Temples throughout the Gestalt. There are different qualities of trinket. All are expensive. The best ones provide your most perfect, ideal match. The least ones provide only love. Top-quality trinkets also give you the best chance at ideal happiness, and your offspring being born under its influence.”

Now the bullshit was turning very, very weird. “If all the trinkets promise love, why does it matter which one you get?”

“The top ones provide a mate that is everything you need.” Ahane’s scales swirled with something resembling discomfort. “You select a pair of trinkets at Temple, and focus on your perfect mate to imbue the trinket. If they are wealthy, powerful, a certain color or appearance, a certain profession, a certain species, a certain lineage—whatever it is you want and think you need. There are many possible mates for you in the galaxy. The more powerful the trinket, the greater its abilities to resonate with what perfectly aligns to both your needs and wants, known and unknown, and to make one of those unrealized possibilities reality.”

“Totally sounds like wishing.”

“It is not wishing.” His tail swished against the floor. “It is science.”

“I call bullshit on this. Pure bullshit. Knock it off and tell me the truth.”

“It is the truth. Except for Humans. Humans are the only species in the galaxy that can find their mate without a trinket. It’s a very recent discovery. It was discovered not long before you and I met. It was discovered on 25XA, actually. I have no idea if the wider Gestalt even knows.”

Before we met. How cute. He meant before I went on vacation with my space commando buddies, but we won’t be talking about that. “So how did you find out this super-secret new information?”

“Same reason I knew where to find a darksite full of Humans.”

I stared at him waiting for him to go hah, got you! But he didn’t. He was dead. fucking. serious.

Slowly, I said, “So… what’s the problem with me knowing, exactly?”

He leaned across the table. “If you have a mate and he isn’t on Earth, he will be drawn to this place and he will eventually come to find you.”

Oh…

Oh.

What kind of degenerate would know how to find this place?

Exactly the sort of asshole I tended to attract.

“Or you will be drawn to him and do things to find him, not realizing that is what you are doing.”

That sounded like a good cover story to start hitchhiking back to Earth. Especially if mates were super-duper sacred. I could lie and say I had a mate waiting for me on Earth, and I had to get back to him.

I cut patterns in my moth slop. “So… when they saw us um… in the hallway, they just assumed we’re…”

A nod in the obvious fashion.

I stabbed my spork into my slop. “Okay, this doesn’t make sense. How is the Gestalt just now finding out that Humans can fall in love? The Gestalt has taken Humans from the Greys before. I know the Greys don’t take Humans that are in serious relationships or have children, but surely this has come up before now. Do you just not question the Humans and go straight to torture?”

He split a custard-cake in two with his spork, then two again. “When a Grey ship carrying Human cargo is caught by Gestalt Special Enforcement, the Greys erase everything. Including Human minds.”

The more the Greys tampered with the brain, the more the brain recognized the incoming trauma and engaged its own defenses. It scattered memories in strange places, tried to reshape them, fragmented them into tinier pieces, and stored them in a back room with no key.

Neural pathways got more and more fragmented, and it became harder and harder to think. Your entire mind becomes a hoarder house. You have no idea what’s in there, where anything is, what was even there to begin with, and you can barely move around.

Things get worse from there.

I could not fathom the trauma that erasure probably involved. “So nobody thinks to take the Humans back to Earth.”

Ahane’s scales were a sad, grim shade of red. “The Gestalt takes the Humans and performs a procedure to [No translation available] their brains for any trace evidence. A high-ranking member of the Gestalt then takes the Human into their care.”

My translator didn’t provide a definition for the word, but supplied that the word Ahane had used meant to extract every single bit of a desired resource with no regard for the cost or damage left behind.

I had always assumed (or hoped) that the women on the first ship I’d been on had either not survived or had been ultimately returned to Earth. But were they still out there on ships that played cat-and-mouse with Gestalt Special Enforcement, not deemed “chosen” but still held as raw materials or lab rats?

I had to swallow my gorge. “What… what is the Gestalt looking for in our heads that’s so important?”

He snorted and his scales matched the bite in his tone. “Irrefutable evidence that the Greys are, in fact, going to Earth and it’s by order of the Grey Collective.”

My stomach hit the floor.

Your mind goes to weird places when you’re told that the Gestalt will do far worse things to you than chicken finger mind-probes, actual physical probes, needles, fluids, impregnation, and beetle-dicks attached to feral testosterone-riddled Breeder Greys that lack the brain structures necessary for impulse management because someone engineered genitals before the brains. It becomes a rather intense mental exercise to try to figure out what could be worse than that.

…And now to find out it was just the Greys being butthurt that the Gestalt didn’t accept their erasure was as complete and efficient as possible, and instead the Gestalt went in there and scraped the Human brains for scraps. And said procedure wasted time, energy, effort, caused more damage and only yielded worthless scraps for a net negative. The Gestalt persisted in wasteful, inefficient, not-optimal behavior.

That was anathema to the Greys.

I ran my hands over my face and laugh-sobbed to myself. “Fucking hell. Fucking, fucking, fucking hell.”

Ahane’s silent waves of unspoken anger soaked into the air.

For all Ahane was soft-spoken and gave off vibes he was way more out of his element than he wanted to confess, he wasn’t a bumpkin come to the big city. He’d been with a posse of space commandos that spent their vacation days destroying secret bases and daring the Greys to cry about it.

Maybe he’d been the cook. Maybe the mechanic. Maybe just the new guy. But there was a minimum threshold of don’t fuck with that guy required to even know the agenda of that particular club, and he’d been on the go team.

“I guess the Greys aren’t subject to Gestalt law, so they do have an argument it’s none of your business,” I said mostly to myself.

He gave me a strange look. “They have been part of the Gestalt since before they engineered themselves into what they are now.”

Fucking hell again. I had misunderstood everything.

That’s why He’d told me anything. Because He’d known I was an idiot who didn’t know enough to know when she didn’t know a damn thing about anything. “They… are?”

“Yes. They didn’t tell you?”

“… No. They… they made it…” I was such a moron. I stopped talking before I explained what an idiot I was to have not made the connection.

My soul tried to crawl into a miserable hole.

Ahane tapped his tail on the table and then used it to point at my food. He flicked it into the flat serving implement shape from before. He didn’t need to actually say eat.

I took a mouthful of slop.

It tasted better than I felt.

Another mouthful.

Still tasted better.

Another.

Still tasted better.

Another.

I set my spork down and stared at the slop. The taste was disgusting, but it and the gorgeous male sitting across from me were better than I deserved.