Page 35 of Taken to Voraxia
She licks her lips, lifts a hand, touches my face. Her fingers on my jaw only land there and linger for a moment. Then she withdraws and I am starved.
I feel myself stooping down so I can be closer to her, wanting her to place her hands on me again. Any touch she gives I’ll take.You are my mate.She is my mate. Hearing her say it is a new form of pleasure I have not experienced before.
“With friends, I can talk to them and laugh with them. We know about each other. I can tell them things that I maybe can’t even tell my mate, or my kin. And I never had any kin anyways so in a sense, they’re like my sisters.” She settles her hand on my chest and I am pleased.
I take another breath, tasting her ranxcera blossom air — now stained with a light glaze of musk,my musk —and hold it in my mouth, wanting to devour the taste. Wanting to commit this moment to the archive of memory forever.
“What is sisters?”
“You don’t have siblings?”
“This word does not translate.”
“It’s when a woman has more than one baby. The girl baby will be a sister to the other, and a boy baby will be a brother.”
“More than one youngling? That is possible for human females?”
A sudden image fills my mind, a dangerous one — Miari in our home surrounded bykits. More than one kit? We could have more than one heir…
Hope strikes me with all the savagery of a blade thrust straight through my chest. I clutch at it and watch her, impaled, as she speaks.
“Hexa.” She nods. “We actually have a problem of too many children.”
Too many? I do not understand and I humble myself by blurting out a question, as green as a kit learning everything for the very first time. “But then there must be many hybrids if the Hunt has been in practice since the previous Bo’Raku. Where are they now?”
She shakes her head as I speak and a certain sadness gleams in her eye and in her breath as she sighs, “Our women don’t go through with the pregnancies. It’s too dangerous.”
“Went through with…I do not understand. What happened with the other younglings?”
“They were aborted.” I still fail to grasp her meaning and she must sense this because she quickly explains, “The women went to doctors and the doctors cleaned the eggs out so that they wouldn’t become babies.”
“They did not want their young?” Rage eclipses reason. My plates lift away from my chest. I tower over my Rakukanna even though she is not complicit in this abhorrent act. The thought that she speaks of it glibly however, fills me with disgrace.
Would shedaredo this with our young? What would I do if she did? I cannot think of it. It is a Xiveri mate’s responsibility to defend his mate with everything he has, down to his last breath, butagainsthis mate in favor of his young? This has never been born in the history of all Voraxia. The bonds of Xiveri mates, forged by Xanaxana are too strong, and the younglings, too precious and too rare.
“Though this Hunt was not a human ritual, you mean to tell me now that females discarded their kits…
“Nox! That’s not it at all.” My Rakukanna’s displeased crease returns. Even her mouth turns down and her arms tense close to her body. She withdraws from me. “They don’t survive.”
Silence. My thoughts turn to a slab of helos, left out in the rain. All of the beautiful striations in its marbled, gemlike surface, are stripped away.
“What did you say?”
Her back teeth bite together as she speaks. “The human women that get pregnant from the Hunt and go through with their pregnancies? It’s a death sentence. No female has ever survived it and most of the babies don’t either.
“What do you think happened to my mom? She was part of the first selection, got pregnant along with five other women, and when I came out of her, I ripped her apart. She and another woman were the only two who were able to give birth to living hybrids. That’s why there’s only two of us — me and Darro. The other four babies died and so did all the women.
“Nowadays women aren’t willing to take that chance. Theyhaveto abort the babies to survive, and some of them don’t, even then. We don’t have very strong facilities…” She pivots, crosses her arms over her chest. Her gaze meets mine, but in her stance I can sense both shame and a rage that eclipses it.
She says, “Two dozen women have died in the past rotations from the abortion or infections they got afterwards. And even those that do survive, for some the trauma of the procedure — both mentally and physically — leaves them destroyed for life.
“So no, you’re wrong. Theydowant theiryoung, but they can’t have them. That’s why the Hunt is torture on top of torture. We never asked for it. We never wanted it. But the earlier Bo’Raku or whatever he was called came and made a deal with our Antikythera Council so that every rotation we have to provide women or they’ll take away the Drolax Dome that keeps us safe from whatever wild things haunt our planet, like that monster you killed. It’s a completely unfair trade, but there’s nothing we can do. We can’t fight you. We can’t fight Bo’Raku. His people kill the ones that try to.”
Her eyes are full of water and I open my mouth but there are no words, and it does not matter. In my hesitation, she turns away from me fully and wipes at her face. The window between us is closed.
I do not attempt to touch her, for my emotions are too volatile. Too many questions, tortured images, realizations of the consequences of my own actions and those of my kind, my ignorance, wounds ripped open, all race through my mind.
I think of the unborn kits — human and hybrid — and the human females whose lives were destroyed…it is too great a tragedy to bear.I am Raku, responsible for all of Voraxia’s people, and for the continuity of its future. When she told me that the Hunt was not a human ritual, the suffering it could and did cause these creatures was not among my considerations.The lives lost. I am ashamed that it did not even occur to me. And now this loss is a price paid by the whole of Voraxia.
