Page 5 of Alliance
He’d been an enforcer for the guild, busting up territorial fights, raiding gang operations that pushed Huajile just a hair too far over the dangerous edge of lawlessness. Novak Gaul, the guild’s krol, had used him and his partner liberally to ensure the residential neighborhoods remained safe enough for families.
Everything changed a year ago though when Quiopha died.
A tendril snapped right in front of his nose, and he yipped a string of curses, his ears twitching as he ran his tongue over his canines.
“Fás! What a coincidence,” the bane of his krol’s existence blocked Turj and his cronies from view, a wide sneer plastered on her face. Siat Xata waved her lavender tendrils at him, the gold striped pupils set in her mahogany eyes dilated and glintingwith her signature “Eat Shit” attitude. The shilpakaari covert elite extended her wrist as if he’d just give her a shiver for free and be happy about it.
“What do you want?” Fásach bit out, grabbing her hand more roughly than necessary.
“Ooo, careful. You never know when a lady might enjoy that sort of treatment.”
The problem was that shedidand heknewit. Not intimately, but because Xata prowled Xenoden every time she was on their cursed moon. The yiwreni mover glared up at her, pressing a shiver into her wrist. As the name suggested, she shuddered with the instant bite of cold.
“Ah,somuch better.”
Fásach sighed as she settled in beside him, catching eyes left and right. She was a stunning woman and she leaned into that fact, dripping with pheromones that drove other shilpakaari crazy. Several of the shils on the dance floor were facing her now, inviting her to choose them with unnatural fervor.
“I’m not your private mover, Xata, so spill.”
“I heard you met Vin’s new littlehrum-piece.”
Fásach smiled with bitter amusement. “Jealous?”
“Curious,” she corrected, twisting her mane over itself in a sensual dance. “Novak’s convinced those humans arehonorable,”she mocked with an unconvinced gesture, “whatever that means.”
Fásach gave up on looking for customers, hitting the back of his head against the lava-rock walls. He shrugged his shoulders, scratching the itch in his hackles against the wall as he looked at her. “And you don’t?”
“A thousand refugees get tossed into space,” Xata theorized, looking at him pointedly. “Who are they gonna trust when shit hits the fan, their guards or their own?”
Fásach turned away, staring longingly at the exit. She wasn’t asking to annoy him. She’d sought him out on purpose, and the realization made his gums taste like iron.
The yiwreni homeworld, Byd Farrwell began to die when Fásach was a child. By the time he entered his teen years, the forests had decayed into black swamps of plant rot, and its biodiversity had completely unraveled. His people had agreed to relocate off-world on massive colony builders made for tens of thousands of residents, each destined for different planets, while the hjarna spent the next century reconstructing the planet. That was how Fásach and his late mother had arrived on Huajile. On one of the last boats off Byd Farrwell, a tiny commuter puttering towards the volcanic colony, the only place with any space left.
The cost to the yiwreni was so much higher than they’d anticipated. Families and communities split apart. Gods forgotten. Their entire way of life dissolved the instant they left their planet and entrusted their survival to the Intersolar Union. The riots, vitriol, and treachery that defined the next two decades were the blackest in yiwreni history.
No one could understand the humans trapped on Yaspur better than a yiwren.
“I don’t know,” he said sincerely over the thudding bass of Impulz’s music, a crease in his brow. He stuffed his claws in his pockets and pressed down on them with his knuckles. “Depends on the person.”
“Imani James,” she reminded him deadpan.
Fásach grimaced, then licked his fang back into his mouth after snagging it on his wide lip. “Imani is a hardened pistol. She’ll choose her people.”
Xata cursed at the floor, hands on her hips.
“ItoldNovak–”
“As inherpeople. The people that earn her trust. Imani is ride or die.”
Xata stopped, eyeing him. “You like her? Youtrusther…”
“Why does my opinion matter?” Fásach huffed, thoroughly convinced the rest of the night was a waste. It wasn’t worth the ringing in his ears to stay any longer, so he pushed off the wall. “I’m not close with the krol, and I’ve only met one human. Ever.”
Xata grabbed his forearm and spun him back around. Her grip was strong and steady, her eyes no longer that of a femme fatale teasing her next meal, but a commander. A hardened woman making hard decisions. “What does your symphony tell you then?”
Fásach’s fur stood on end, his ears flattening against his skull. He pulled his arm away with an incredulous huff. “What?”
“Imani is about to walk into a dollhouse surrounded by a bunch of human fucktoys with no way to save them. Novak thinks she’s going to stick it through, but I’m not so sure. Is she going to trust us that they’re not real? Or will she fall for the dolly act and compromise the operation?”
