Princess of the Void

Grant returns alone from the firing range. Hyax seems to think he doesn’t require an escort any longer; he isn’t sure whether that’s faith in his fealty, or she’s just not concerned he’s a threat any longer.

She wasn’t joking about taking the gun away from him. That’s all right. He doesn’t need to be carting a pistol around, anyway. He doesn’t hit the no-gravity turbo boost thing again, on the way up. He’d like to be alone for a while with his thoughts.

That same little rebel that wanted him to explore the greenhouse now whispers to him: pick a floor at random. Stroll around and get in the way. Or crawl around in the vents like Sykora did on Maek—Earth. Earth Earth Earth.

It turns out that a non-turbo’d lift is also a public lift. The door pings open to a stretch of verdant field, crested by an artificial sun. Two she-Taiikari, dirt on their gloves and on their cherubic faces, are talking and laughing as they push a cart loaded with root vegetables toward the lift door. They freeze as they see him.

He stands to one side. “Room for more.”

“Didn’t mean to hold you up, Prince Consort.” The woman pushing the cart gives him a bow. “We’ll take the next one.”

“It’s really okay,” he says.

She shakes her head. “We cannot be alone with you, Prince Consort.”

His brow furrows in confusion as the lift door closes. But it makes sense, doesn’t it? When you can compel someone, and make them forget. He’s the husband of their matriarch. They must be terrified to even suggest impropriety. He thinks about the flash Frelle gave him outside her daughter’s dining room. A simple lie, a simple smile. What if it had been more? As far as she knew, he’d do anything she wanted him to. Completely helpless.

This is the world in which Sykora grew up.

He hits the boost this time. He goes straight to the cabin. He presses the seal on the door and waits.

“Grantyde?” The voice on the other side is full of hope.

He bites back a smile despite himself. “Yep.”

The door slides open. Sykora is tugging a thick black ceramic crate out of a nook.

He moves to help her. “This is heavy-duty. Is this my gift?”

“It is part one of a two-part gift, actually. Thank you.” She scoots to the other side of the box and pushes while he pulls until the crate’s dragged into the center of the room. “I promise it’s nothing as scary as the packaging suggests. It’s just my team being shaky around alien artifacts.”

He steps back and dusts his hands off on his pants. “Alien artifacts?”

“I dispatched a team to Maekyon.” She clicks a pair of catches on the front of the crate. “I wanted to get you something. Well, I wanted to get us something. It’s a gift for me, too.”

“What does that mean?”

She lifts the lid of the box. There’s a guitar case inside.

Grant’s heart skips like a record.

“It’s bigger than the one you had before.” Sykora paces to the other side of the crate to give him a better look. “I don’t know these things very well. But this was what I remember. I drew them a little drawing, but you know how bad I am at those. The gals brought back a few different shapes to be certain, and I hope one of them is right, or I’ll have to reroute another infiltration team. And my Brigadier will throttle me.”

He opens the case. Sitting in its velvet is a brand new acoustic guitar, an art piece in spruce and rosewood and steel string. It is a little bigger, a triple-O rather than a parlor, and it’s gorgeous.

“Holy shit,” he breathes. This is a custom shop Martin. These guitars go for $5,000 easy.

“It’s a gee-dar, right?” Sykora peeks over the opened lid.

“It’s a guitar, all right.” And even though his tongue lags a little behind his brain when he says the word, even though the ih noise in guitar is foreign and unfamiliar to him now, his smile is so wide it aches his face. “A nice one.”

“Oh, thank God.” She’s smiling too. Smiling and blushing. He tries not to look at the horns crowning from her hair. “I’ve so dearly missed hearing you play this.”

“I’ve missed playing it.” He lifts the guitar out of the case. “Did it come with a strap?”

Her face falls.

“It’s okay. I don’t need one. It’s fine.” He should watch it, how distressed he’s started getting when Sykora looks sad. “I can just play sitting down for now. And I’m sure we can just make a strap for it out of any old thing.”

He sits at a chair from Sykora’s kitchenette and tunes up. The hem and haw of his six old friends as they shuffle into their positions in the choir.

Sykora sits across from him. She leans her chin into her hands. Her tail swishes. She says the five words every dude with an acoustic guitar longs to hear from a pretty girl: “Would you sing to me?”

“Sure,” he says. “What do you want to hear?”

“What do you think?” She mimics tapping on a glass wall and chants: “Lonesome. Lonesome. Lonesome.”

He laughs. “All right. Let me see if that language brain thing you put in me lets me sing this still.”

He starts up a cascading fingerstyle chord, clears his throat, and sings.

The words have a new, strange remove to them. But he still remembers them all, remembers their feeling and import even if they don’t come automatically to his lips with their meaning. There’s something beyond the words, anyway. Something universal.

Sykora’s eyes dance as she watches him. From his hands to his face to his mouth to his tapping foot. She sings along with him, on the last verse. Her singing voice is kind of like his, he realizes. Scratchy and warm, like an old record that still plays.

He finishes the song. There’s sweat on his back where it meets the chair.

Sykora’s gaze bores into his. “May I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“What does it mean, this song? I had so many ideas of what it meant.”

“I guess I can translate it now, huh?” He rubs his chin. “This is a weird feeling in my brain.”

Her eyebrows raise. “Don’t work too hard, dear. We don’t want to disrupt the pathways as they adjust.”

“I think I’ve got it,” he says, and he plays the song again. This time, he sings it in Taiikari. It’s odd, the ways the rhythm no longer fits and the words no longer rhyme. He keeps having to pause and reconfigure both the song and his mind.

He glances at Sykora after verse two and pauses for a different reason. Silent tears streak her cheeks. She blinks. “Keep going.”

His throat is getting a little thick. This is the second day in a row he’s made his wife cry. He clears it again and finishes the song.

“That’s so sad,” she says, softly. “I didn’t know. You always sang it like a love song.”

“It is a love song, kind of.” He plucks a ghost note. “It’s a love song for a love you can’t have. It felt just about right, I suppose, for where we were both at.”

“Does it, still?” She shifts in her seat. “Are you still that lonesome?”

“I don’t, uh…” His palm rubs his strings. “I don't know. Don't think so.”

“After you came to me,” she says, “on the worst days, when they strapped me down and cut me to see if my blood could turn invisible, or when they pumped me full of poison and forced me to run until I collapsed. I told myself: endure this for a few more hours, and tonight, Grantyde will sing to you. I’d try to listen to you in my head. Your beautiful voice. And then every time you sang that song. Do you know what I would think?”

He watches her tail slowly wagging. “What’s that?”

“I’d think: I need to get free. Not for the Pike, not for the Empire. Not even to stop the pain.” She scoots her chair forward. “I need to get out of this cell, so that I can kiss this alien.”

Use it, Hyax told him. Maybe he’s not the only one close to breaking. Maybe she’s thinking about it—the freedom he’s asking for, the reward he promised.

“I wanted to kiss you, too,” he says. “I thought you were the prettiest woman I’d ever seen. And you looked at me like…”

Like she’s looking at him right now.

“On the shuttle, you pulled away from me.” She stands up. That sinuous walk of hers, the tilt of her hourglass hips. One size fits all. She takes a step closer. “Were you afraid of me? Of what I did to escape?”

“I was,” he says. “And I tasted blood.”

Another step. “I’ve killed before. I’ve killed many people, Grantyde. And I’ll kill again. It’s the job. It’s how I keep my sector safe.” Her lips part. Her teeth gleam behind their dark, plump curves. “But there’s no blood now.”

“I see what you’re doing,” he says. “You’re going to try to kiss me so irresistibly that we fall into bed.”

“You’re a uniquely strong-willed Prince Consort,” she murmurs. They’re round and thick and subtly down-turned, her lips. It makes her resting face sensual, almost pouty, in defiance of the wisecracking woman he’s come to know. “I’d have to try very, very hard.”

“You said hands to yourself in that letter, you know.” A soft laugh creeps at the edge of his words.

“I did.” She puts her hands behind her back. She rocks back and forth on her heels. “But you didn’t.”

A piece of the hard bark inside him tears and falls away. Underneath he’s fresh and pale. Don’t, his defiance snarls. Don’t do this. Stop, Grant, you dumbass. STOP.

But that newly uncovered part of him whispers: She loves you, Grant. Everything she's done—the good and the bad—she's done because she loves you.

The rule is no sex. A kiss isn't sex. A kiss is fine. A kiss, at the very least, is what Sykora has earned from him so far. Yes, she's claiming ownership over his life, but she saved it first. She cares deeply about him. Loves him, maybe. She’s not showing it the human way, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

There is no going home. There is no undoing what he did. He can’t just ask blindly for his freedom. He has to figure out what that word even means to him now. He watches the tip of her fuchsia tongue slide a shine of saliva over those pouty lips, and draws a preliminary conclusion:

He is no longer interested in any definition of “freedom” that demands he keep his tongue outside of Sykora’s little blue mouth.

“How about this.” He sets the guitar aside. “How about you get thirty seconds to try?”

She looks like someone just told her she won the lottery. Just for an instant, before that wry Princess smirk is back. “Forty five.”

He slips his hands between her arms and her waist, and lifts her into his lap. “Forty. That’s the best you’ll get.”

She slides closer, still with her hands folded tight behind her back. Her gaze dances down to his lips and back up to his eyes. “We’ll see about that, Mr. Maekyonite.”

She’s small and light, but she doesn’t feel delicate. There’s something solid and substantial about her, in the bold rhythm of her curves. She’s built for Taiikari males, who are at least within spitting distance of Grant’s height, and her hips are generous enough that she can fold her pillowy thighs around him and just manage to cross her ankles at the small of his back. The insides of her legs are fever-warm.

He wonders, not for the first time, what it feels like inside Sykora of the Black Pike.

He wets his lips. He starts the count.

“One, two, three…”

She lunges for him.