TARA
I stare at the ceiling, my thoughts swirling. “So, you were taught with hard knocks,” I tell him finally. “You had to learn everything the hard way,” I think to clarify.
Brax laughs in his nose, a sort of thrum, and it’s strange but I can tell the difference now, I can hear this is an unhappy vibration. “‘Hard knocks?’ Sounds about so. After Gelert’s Princess—”
Llywelyn. I mentally provide the name that he’s only been able to say out loud once, and it kills me to see his jaw tighten now over even this reference to her. So much tragedy. His bitterness and resentment are understandable.
“—provided the opportunity and the means, I bought the biggest teveking cargo ship I could.”
And he’d just taken on two slaves. Lem had submitted himself into the auction willingly, but poor Tac…
Tac. Tac who had, until very recently, been a slave. At first, an extremely unwilling one.
“I didn’t know a rutting thing about mechanics, about bartering—about anything. None of us did.”
Because you were just kids!
“We got fleeced on deals until we figured it out.”
My heart is aching for him. For the younger him, orphaned when his dam died of a heart(s)attack when her eldest son was beheaded in front of her.
His father had ‘faded after her.’
I shudder.
Brax’s hand strokes my back. “We’ve done a fair job of keeping this ship going, though we’ve run through mechanics due to the engine problem.”
I knew it! I knew what I saw wasn’t good, how could it be? I find my voice. It’s higher than normal but I find it. “Engine problem?”
He snorts smoke and tugs the ends of my hair. “They all should be replaced. As each one fails more and more frequently, the workload… it’s a lot to expect one person to keep on top of.”
“Grake is a slave now?”
Brax shakes his head. “No. No, that’s where he got the credits to put up for your translator today. From me.”
“Grake paid to have me shot?” I say slowly, maybe indignantly.
Brax busts out laughing.
I give him a look that says, ‘I’m glad one of us thinks this is funny.’ I’m going to have to have words with Grake. Words with which I will profusely thank him. Mostly.
His tail curls over my arm and slides back and forth slowly. Soothingly. I sniff.
“He wasn’t up for auction. Without being able to contract him off—”
Which would have meant not having to pay him ‘severance credits’ until his seven-solar term was up. This sounds like a lengthy span of time to me, but then again, just how it relates to my unit of ‘years’, I don’t know.
“I had to pay him a solar’s salary in advance to get him to take the job. It was everything I had; I can’t even afford to hire Lem and Tac on as employees yet.”
“When can you?” I ask, worried for them, for him.
He sighs, relieved. “Soon.”
I blurt it out. “When can I get them?”
I don’t address the issue of what will happen, what I’ll do once I have my babies. I know now that if I separate from Brax, he’ll die.
He’s aware of this, I’m aware of this, we’ve got no easy answers but the important part is having Megan and Simone in my arms again.
He kisses the tip of my nose. “Soon, veetling.”
“The same ‘soon’ as you paying Tac and Lem?”
The scales around his eyes show me he wants to smile. “Just as soon as we deliver the baby Culc.”
I choke.
He pinches the bridge of his snout. “His buyer Comms us at all spans of the rotation for updates and new vids—he’s demanding, but the sale is exciting. Culcs are rare and this one is of incredible quality. He’ll settle the other half upon delivery, and then we’ll be able to afford fuel cells and the supplies we’ll need in order to get our younglings back.”
Our younglings?
“Um, is this the octopus thing—” and seeing that he doesn’t know what my word for octopus means, I try, “—the thing with all the tentacle arms and biting suckers?”
He nods.
Oh shit.
“Brax. We have a problem.”