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41. THALIA

“So I can just walk out of here,” I asked. Because previously, we’d been chased up here.

“We can. You are a citizen now.”

“Just like that.”

Ahane’s tail swept in a yes gesture.

The sunlight was bright and the gravity intense, but the guards were gone, and while there were some milling about below the stairs and pointing from the street-goers, a calm had returned.

The planet’s two suns bathed everything in an autumn-orange light, like a long afternoon, and the air was crisp. Cold. I shivered.

“It is late autumn.” Ahane moved close.

I’d really, really escaped. And there was sunlight (or was it starlight?) on my skin for the first time in… I didn’t know how long.

The sky was not blue—it was blue-ish, but also tinged with orange. The clouds raced across it, very high, with silver-purple bellies and narrow shapes. I inhaled again. Caught in my throat. The breeze sent my trinket softly tinkling in my ear “I never believed I’d see a planet again.”

Ahane kept me close as we went down the stairs—my legs trembled—and we walked back to the docks. The two guards he’d bloodied up had been replaced with two more that didn’t look happy to see him, but they limited their unhappiness to angry stares.

They sure looked like they had something to say.

“We can’t fly the ship to the house?”

“Not until the salvage title comes through and I get a personal storage permit.”

“You aren’t worried someone’s going to sniff around it?” Like the annoyed guards. The smuggle-shuttle looked like a crap-wagon, but it had not-for-sale Grey tech all through it.

“No one is going to risk their job to sniff around this crate. It’s mine.” His scales smoldered with his specific brand of I’m trying not to be smug about it because plain brothers are not allowed to be smug, but I am very smug smugness.

“Hey, buddy, don’t take all the credit.” I brushed his trinket with my fingertips and his scales intensified their shade to a full-body blush.

No one was coming for that ship. The Greys kept their business affairs like a starfish kept arms: lose the arm, escape the predator, regrow arm later. Who owned that shuttle on paper had been erased along with the rest of the facility, and that come claim your property would end up on the undeliverable pile.

The Greys would eventually piece it all together and realize we had their shuttle. And I would have loved to be in the room when they realized oh shit.

The Greys had contingencies and failsafes and redundancies, and they had a certain amount of risk tolerance, but it was all a calculated risk. They’d already had their calculations fucked up by House 8 once. They were welcome to try again. Shit might finally get wild enough the Gestalt did something.

“But we can’t just leave it here long-term,” I said as we stepped on board and I made it a point to not look down. Because it was a long way down to the lower city.

“We won’t.”

After so long in a cloak and wraps, it felt very odd to not be concealed, and for people to be… looking at me. We were in the Temple district, so there was a variety of species, most of them taproot, and they all gawked at me and gave me a wide berth, eyes jerking back and forth between me, Ahane, and our trinkets.

I gawked in return, because most everyone—especially as we walked out of the Temple district—was a 25XA and the array of colors and attire was dazzling. Most seemed to be shades of pewter and orange, but there were pale pinks and hot pinks and hot pinks with gold and a million shades of blue and purple and green and red.

He stopped moving and joined a cluster of other people. People moved away. Ahane held my hand in his. I tried not to turn into mental goo from the sensory saturation.

A bus shaped like an egg glided up and chimed a happy little song at us while opening its door.

My brain damn near caught on fire.

A 25XA, a Human, and a first-tier trinket. We did not fit any standard of whatever they had expected to see today.

Feeling was mutual. I’d expected to be thrown in a hole.

Goddamn it. My expectations were constantly not being met. What the hell.

We had to change buses several times until we got to the edge of the city and the bus carted us down a long, straight road into fields.

Ahane watched out the window as miles and miles of fields passed by, with mountains rising behind us and the horizon endless ahead of us. The fields were the gray-yellow of late autumn, tall grasses and miles of fence line.

So… Space-Nebraska. We were in Space-Nebraska.

On the horizon, a storm was coming in, the edge of the massive wall of clouds deep gray-purple.

I brushed my hand along his thigh. “Are you okay?”

He nodded, eyes on the incoming storm wall.

I leaned my head against his shoulder. He was home. He’d never expected to see any of this again. I would probably be the same way if this was Earth.

The bus spit out people along the way until there was us and a couple of folks snoozing and obviously in it for the long haul. Eventually, the pod stopped and dinged. We were in the middle of nowhere—just fields and fields and fields. And the remains of a broken down wood fence stretching along the opposite side of the road, and a beaten-up stone walkway overgrown with weeds and grass and a fragile-looking gate that wouldn’t have kept a gentle breeze out.

Our stop, apparently.

The bus glided away.

The wind from the oncoming storm front pulled at my hair and made the gate creak and shift on its sad hinges. I pushed hair out of my face, dazzled by the sensation of wind, and the smells and sounds. The wind was damp and chilly, and the air smelled like autumn and grass and mountains.

Ahane looked up the path that traversed a gentle incline and hid whatever was beyond it. The stone path had once been much wider, and the stone had all matched, and there was some evidence there had been an elaborate miniature mosaic between the stones to act as grout. The stones were now all faded and pitted and the entire thing mostly overgrown. In the grass on either side of the path beyond the current stone pillars made of stacked rip-rap like rocks were the eroded remains of much taller pillars. The gate currently sagging on its hinges was a more recent addition and seemed to have been forged out of scrap.

“Is it like you left it?” I asked.

He nodded once.

By my prison counting method, it had been almost four months since Ahane and I had taken up residence in the diner. The time before I had started counting was a bit blurry. And I had no idea how long I’d been with the Greys.

We went up the walk and crested the soft hill and I finally saw the house.

More like… luxurious faded country mansion situation.

And there were people coming out the front door.

“Holy shit,” I said to myself. The guy at the front was the exact same guy I’d seen in His head.

There was the twilight colored guy (Keiron), and then a towering, glowering pillar of contained aggression and salt the color of a dark forest and emeralds (Taidc), and the single most beautiful sentient I had ever seen. And without a doubt, also an arrogant and mischievous asshole who knew how fucking gorgeous he was. That one must have been Erkus, the much younger baby brother who dreamed of becoming a doctor.

With Keiron, and wearing a strange mishmash of cloth stitched into a rather convincing body-con dress, was a tall woman with a tumble of brown hair and hazel-green eyes. Her feet were bare, and she didn’t have a trinket either, and at her feet walked a cat. She was smiling in that open I’m so glad to see you way that instantly made me uncomfortable because social expectations. She was a head taller than me, and big-framed, and the only thing that didn’t make me hide behind Ahane was her forearms had the same probe-scars I had.

Keiron grabbed Ahane and yanked him close. Whatever he said in High Dialect was muffled by Ahane’s scales, and didn’t need translation.

An ache took parts of my soul.

Maybe it was best I never got back to Earth.

Because there was no one to greet me like that.

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