Before she woke up, I ran out of the house. I was dressed in more durable clothes than what I'd worn yesterday. I was a little breathless when I made my way to the port. The second that Xuan spotted me, he whisked me off of my feet and kissed both of my cheeks, Draka style. I could see Draka nobles looking at us, but I didn't care if my mother got a dozen comm messages. If she knew who Xuan was, maybe she would leave us alone. The connections that we could forge with his brothers-in-law might be worth consorting with a Yore. I wasn't anywhere near done with him, no matter what my mother believed.

"Where are we going today?"

"Did you mean what you said about learning about your Yore heritage? You only were hesitating because you've been told not to?"

"Yes," I said.

"Then you might like what we're going to do today." He brought me back into the hover floater where we'd shared my first taste of passion yesterday. "Be polite."

He started up the motor. This time, I didn't jump when the floor turned into the view of what was below us. He took me far from the city, into a tiny town on a mountainside. He anchored the hover floater above a lake.

"We're going to visit some people."

"Who?"

"The wild Yore."

I didn't know what he was talking about.

"When the Draka colonized the planet, there were places that they couldn't touch with their guns and superior technology. The planet itself fought them out of the wildest places. The place that I'm taking you today doesn't exist on any Draka map. I'm trusting that you won't speak a word of this to anybody who asks you about what we did today. I can send the hover floater on so that it looks like we're taking another cruise through the mountains. You can talk about the lagoons, but you can't tell the Draka about this. Do you understand?"

I was choked up with emotion by the trust that he was placing in me, a stranger. We might have made love yesterday, but that didn't mean that the two of us had spent much time together. "I promise not to talk about it."

"Good." He took me to the exit. There was a tiny platform. "Wrap your arms around my waist like we're going for an airbike ride."

I stepped on the platform and wrapped my arms around him. He smelled spicy.

Then we were falling to the ground. I wrapped my arms a little tighter. His arms came around my shoulders and he nuzzled the top of my head. "You'll get used to it if you do it a few more times," he said. I didn't know if I even wanted to, but maybe it was necessary to be a Yore instead of just a Draka.

When we got to the ground, there was someone waiting for us. He had skin the same color as Xuan's. He eyed me with suspicion.

"Who's that?" he asked

Xuan.

"Someone new. Someone I trust." Xuan shrugged. "You can tell us to go back if you want."

"I want to be here," I said.

"She won't betray us," Xuan promised.

"I don't like it, but you're already here. Send the airship on."

Xuan touched some kind of control on his watch and sent the airship away from the lagoon.

"Come in, then," the man said. Then he vanished.

I jumped in the air, but I realized that it was simply an illusion. He'd been standing next to a rock. Xuan came to show me the concealed entrance before waiting for me to enter. It looked dark in there, but there were tiny points of green light.

"Where's the light from?" I asked as I went into the ground in a cave full of green stars.

"Glow worms."

"Ew!" I yelped.

"Relax. They're tiny. They won't hurt you."

I knew that her mother would believe that the glow worms were filthy. If I were a little younger, I knew that I'd be spanked for even getting near them. But I wasn't a little girl anymore, which meant that I could descend into a glow worm cave surrounded by untamed Yore. I kept descending, even though the cave floor was incredibly wet.

"Xuan," I said. She heard the endless number of echoes in the cave. "Wow, it gets loud in here."

"Yeah," Xuan said. "They don't speak out loud down here."

I wondered what they did speak and how I could be expected to learn about my Yore heritage from people who didn't speak. But Xuan seemed to know what he was doing and had taken the risk of bringing me here, so I felt like seeing what he had in store.

As we got lower, the number of glow worms increased and the lights were brighter. I finally reached a small underground lake. Beside it were a bunch of small huts built out of stone.

A lot of little kids were playing with a ball outside of the huts, but as soon as they saw me, they went into hiding, screaming "Trốn" to each other.

I didn't understand why they were running away. I realized as they vanished that all the children were barefoot. I looked down at my Draka clothes. While they weren't as formal as the clothing that I'd worn to watch Xuan fight, they didn't fit in down here either.

An old woman came down, her hands on her hips. She glared at me and caught my eyes, not letting them go.

I fell on my butt as I saw a symbol flash in front of my eyes. I could feel her ire and the fear behind it. I saw the kids at different ages and the baby that this woman cared for inside of a hut.

The wild Yore were telepathic. It was hard to sort through the images and emotions that I was being bombarded with. My polite society face didn't let people know my true emotions. I was taught that they were rude. And here I was, being assailed with emotions and images by a total stranger.

I struggled to fight the tears that were filling my eyes. Being so emotional was allowed for little kids. I’d had emotional displays like this trained out of me at a young age with long punishments where I sat in a chair facing the wall. But as I relaxed a little bit, I could sort through the emotions a little better than before.

Swallowing hard, I turned back to her and tried to open my mind up. She gave me more images, more babies, and the drooling mouths of babies she’d cared for made me smile.

She smiled in return. Then she touched my hand.

And I fainted.

* * *

“Arienne,” Xuan said, shaking my shoulders. “Are you okay?”

“Where am I?” I asked, looking around.

“You’re on the ship.” He shrugged. “I carried you back up while you were out. You were unconscious the whole time?”

“Yeah,” I said. I blew out a long breath. “What an interesting experience.”

“Sorry for not warning you about it,” Xuan apologized. “I worried that you might tense up and close them out. Your mental shields could have kept them away from you, but you did very well.”

“I passed out,” I protested, wrapping the blanket on top of me around myself. “I don’t think that I did well at all.”

“I called the ship back when you fainted and climbed out of the cave with you. They like you.”

“They like me? We barely met.”

“When they send images to you, the link is open both ways. She saw into your mind and saw how much you loved the babies. She also saw that you’re half Yore.”

“It’s the half of me that most people like to forget.”

“I like all of you, Draka or Yore, it doesn’t matter.”

Xuan lowered his mouth on mine. I could feel him tasting the temperature of our relationship, trying to gauge how I felt. I wrapped my arms around him, drawing him closer.

When I was breathless, I let go of him and tried to look down at the floor.

“Where are we going now?”

“We’re not heading straight back, not if you’re okay.”

“I am.”

“Then we’ll go to a lagoon that I like. You need some training.”

“Training?”

“There was an old woman who taught my sister just a little bit about being Yore. The wild Yore are working up to this kind of thing. It’s what you learn as a teenager. We’re far past the age where we should be learning this, but the wild Yore don’t want to get it wrong. You can try it, if you like.”

“What?” I said in a wary tone. he had sprung the Yore telepathy on me as a surprise.

“Auras.”

“What are those?”

“I’ll show you when we disembark in the lagoon.”

When the ship stopped, he wrapped my arms around him as we descended. I just kept my eyes closed. We walked a little bit away from the ship.

Xuan said, “Close your eyes. Open yourself.”

I didn’t know how to do it, but I tried. I could feel his heartbeat thrumming in his wrists. I could hear birdsong and the soft lapping of waves on the shore.

Then I saw what he was talking about. I could see with my eyes closed. All around me was flickering light. I opened my eyes but could still see it.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Welcome to your aura,” Xuan laughed. I twirled in a circle. It was like a light show centered on my body.

“What’s it made of?”

“The ancestors’ blessings,” Xuan replied, wrapping his big arms around me. “Their love is always with you, no matter what you’ve been told.”