Aavi clearly wasn’t happy. She sat at the kitchen table worrying her lower lip with her teeth. Now and again, the lip would protrude in a pout, and then she’d suck it back in and gnaw on it. Gael found himself mesmerized by the process and watched three full cycles before he remembered that he was supposed to be doing something. A check of his hands brought him back to the present. Canister of Bram’s new soy flour. Eggs. He was making pancakes for breakfast. Right.
Gael set the flour and eggs down on the counter and ducked back into the pantry. He gathered the baking powder and soda and salt and glanced over his shoulder. Aavi’s cycle continued: pout, suck, chew. He put his next armload onto the counter, flipped a switch on the beverage maker, and turned. “Okay, what?”
Aavi’s lower lip disappeared. She looked up and frowned. “What?”
“You. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” Shrug, pout, suck, chew.
Burning sun. “Is it because I’m”—how to put this delicately—“not sleeping in our room anymore?”
Shrug, pout, suck, chew.
He’d fully intended to return to his room that first night, and every night thereafter. Waking up with Bram, though . . . Gael didn’t have a lot of experience when it came to sex. It’d always been a purely functional thing. Something someone else wanted. Now he and Bram had discovered pleasure in so many ways, he found himself checking his Band for the time every few minutes as he counted the hours until bedtime. Yesterday, unable to wait, he’d dropped to his knees in the workshop.
Bram had liked that.
Life was wonderful, and he’d meant to talk to Aavi about their situation. Make an official declaration. Cede the spare bedroom to her with a gift and some ceremony. Only he’d forgotten, and now she was shrugging and chewing at the kitchen table while he tried to make pancakes with experimental flour.
Right, pancakes.
Gael turned to the counter.
Behind him, he heard a small sucking sound.
Blowing out a sharp sigh, he stalked toward the table, pulled out the chair opposite Aavi, and sat down. “Okay, let me have it.”
Aavi’s lips disappeared altogether as her expression wavered between states he couldn’t decipher. Obviously her feelings were complicated.
Gael reached across the table and took her hand. “I’m sorry. I know I’ve been all wrapped up in Bram the past few days. How about if just you and I do something today? We’ll pack some sandwiches and walk up to the cloud garden. Name the rabbit babies so Bram can’t eat them. We can watch HVs all day. Your choice. You can even braid my hair.”
That last was a desperate offer. Gael hated having his hair braided. It felt nice while it was being done. Sort of. But getting the small plaits out of his curls was a freaking nightmare—though it amused Aavi to no end.
Her lips twitched as though she wanted to smile, but then she looked down at their hands. Gael swallowed further peace offers in favor of waiting for her to talk. It wasn’t so long ago when he’d been young enough to figure no one cared about what he had to say.
When she raised her gaze again, tears shone along her lower lashes.
“Oh, honey, you’re breaking my heart. Please tell me what’s wrong so I can fix it.”
“You and Bram.”
Not a surprise. Scorching sun, he’d abandoned her for sex. What else would it be? But it was a surprise, because happiness should be infectious, damn it, and Aavi poking a hole in his balloon of joy was not fun. A part of him had hoped it was something else. The part that definitely wasn’t thinking about what he and Bram might try tonight.
Okay, let’s not think about sex while talking to a young girl.
Gael squeezed Aavi’s hand. “You knew that’s why I was here. To get to know Bram and see if—”
“But you got married without me!” Hurt and anger flashed across Aavi’s face, quickly replaced by a sadness so profound, Gael momentarily lost the ability to breathe.
When had he and Bram gotten married?
Oh.
“Aavi, sweetie—”
“You’re going to send me away, aren’t you? You’ll need my room for your kids.”
“Kids?”
“I could help you take care of them. I’m three years older than you were when you had to take care of your brother.”
How did she know about that?
“Aavi—”
“Please don’t send me away, Gael. Please—”
“Aavi!”
Her lower lip disappeared into her mouth in a severe reverse pout.
“Burning sun.” Gael breathed out, then let go of Aavi’s hand for long enough to make sure he hadn’t broken any of her fingers before taking her palm in his again and stroking the back of her hand in what he hoped was a soothing manner. “I would never send you away. Neither would Bram. He looks at you like you’re the sun. He loves you.”
Her lip reappeared on a quiver.
“You’re my sister, sweetheart. You know you are. You chose me and I kept you. That’s all we need, okay? I’m not sending you away.”
She nodded carefully.
“I’m sorry I just up and left. I meant to talk to you, but . . .” How to explain the complexity of his own emotions? Giving his own lower lip a bit of a nibble, Gael contemplated their joined hands. Aavi’s fingers were so delicate, even against his. When he blinked, he almost imagined he could see Loic’s hands. Blockish and square. The old grief rippled through him. He patted the back of Aavi’s hand.
“I never feel like I have to take care of you,” he said. “My brother was different. I guess you’ve been listening in when Bram and I talk, and that’s okay. Family shouldn’t have secrets. But you should know why it’s different with you. Loic needed me in a way you never have, so I sometimes forget that you might need things.”
Things? Terrific, Gael. Because everyone needs things.
“I don’t need a lot of things.”
Gael tried to stop the smile, but couldn’t. “Things can be important.”
Aavi was also trying not to smile, and her grin faded before a new question. “Why couldn’t I come to your wedding?”
“Because we haven’t had one. Not everyone who is, um, together, gets married.”
“But I thought that’s why you were here. To marry Bram.”
“Maybe? I mean . . .” So not ready for this conversation. Gael pushed out another sigh. “We’re still getting to know each other.”
“But you’re sleeping in his room.”
Awkward . . .
Gael gazed at the ceiling—not so much hoping for divine inspiration as a moment to collect his thoughts and maybe decide if today was the day he’d scar a child for life. When he looked back down, Aavi was doing her pout-suck-chew thing again.
“So, um . . .” Gael cleared his throat. “What do you know about, ah, what adults do in bed together?”
Aavi’s eyebrows drew together and down. She dipped her chin and spoke to the table. “It’s not just adults. The other slaves told me that as soon as I turned twelve, my master would take me to his bed. I would be one of his brides.”
Gael winced. He had suspected as much, but the idea of Aavi being used in that way, ever, would always be abhorrent.
Not for the first time, he wondered at her inherent cheerfulness. Why she wasn’t always chewing on her lips and asking awkward questions. But even though he didn’t quite understand how she remained so sunny, he appreciated her attitude. Could he address this question without dimming her brightness?
“That would have been so wrong, Aavi. Sex”—okay, the word was out there now—“is supposed to be something people who love each other do together to, um, show how much they like each other. Adult people.”
Had he ever packed so many lies into one sentence before? Also, did this mean he officially loved Bram? Conversation for another time, Gael.
Aavi was giving him a look, and not a good one.
Gael gave her hand another squeeze. “I’ll never let that happen to you. Ever. And if Bram and I get married”—his heart was giving up all sorts of extra beats—“you’ll be there in the front row. You’ll probably be the only person there. I don’t have anyone else. You’re it. You’re all the family I have, Aavi.”
Gael studied their hands, blinking away the image of Loic’s fingers again, and focusing on hers. Maybe now would be a good time for the gift he’d, well, not worked on since finding his way into Bram’s bed. “I was making you something.”
“Me?” Aavi sounded really small now.
“Yeah. It’s not quite finished, but I can show it to you if you want.”
“Okay.”
Disentangling their fingers, Gael pushed back from the table. He ducked into the HV room and pulled his secret project out from the bottom of the pile of samples he was making for Maia. When he turned, Aavi was right behind him.
He held out the folded cloth. “Here. I’ll take this end and you, yeah, hold that corner.” Gael stepped backward so the cloth unfolded between them, shaking out to its full size.
Aavi gasped. “It’s stars!”
Three dozen, so far, cut and sewn in a pattern that looked, quite frankly, like something a sightless mole might put together. But they were all moles in Zhemosen, those from the lower levels. Color down there was muted, light restricted to lamps. The sun and stars were rarely, if ever, visible.
The quilt he was making for her was nothing like the night sky, not even here on Alkirak—from up on the plateau where the clouds gave way to the endless spangle of the galaxy. But it was pretty and bright and it had made him happy. He’d hoped it would make Aavi happy too. That it would make the room at the end of the corridor hers.
“I figured by the time I was finished, I’d be ready to be with Bram and that I could give this to you so our room could be yours.”
“Will you still finish it?”
“Of course I will.”
“And make matching pillows?”
“If you want.”
“Does this mean you love Bram?”
Gael nearly dropped his end of the quilt. He tightened his grip on the fabric and started folding it toward Aavi. She let his silence hold until they had the quilt packed back into a neat square.
“Does he love you?”
“I don’t know.” In the small hours, when Bram wrapped him up in his arms and panted softly against Gael’s neck, the scent of sex and sweat lying over them like a warm blanket, it felt like he might. Bram always held him so reverently in the after, as though Gael was something precious. In those moments, Gael loved Bram. Dizzyingly.
When they weren’t in bed together . . .
His heart gave one of those extra beats and his thoughts swam. His fingers and toes tingled and utter joy spread outward from the middle of his chest.
“I like him very much,” he whispered.
Aavi smiled. “You should make him a quilt too.”
The sun was well over the edge of the crater when Gael stepped out onto the terrace carrying two steaming mugs. Bram watched him approach, bathed in the gathering light, and wondered when it had become more important to watch Gael walk toward him than to measure the distance between the sun and the horizon. Probably when he’d started missing the dawn in favor of an extra hour in bed with his lover.
“Thanks.” He accepted a mug of coffee and turned to raise it toward the sky, saluting the morning.
“So today is the day.” Gael moved up beside him and raised his mug in a similar gesture. Sometimes Bram wished he could show Gael the sun on his birth planet, Kadia. A yellow orb in a perfectly blue sky. But with Gael beside him, Alkirak felt more like home than the All Hands commune ever had.
“Today is the day,” he agreed.
Muedini Corporation engineers were scheduled to arrive that afternoon, equipped to descend into the crater. Bram hadn’t figured out how he felt about the expedition yet. That Muedini was sending a team out here meant this discovery was important. But if it was too important, he might lose everything he’d built as they prospected for more. Bram looked up at the broad arch of stone supporting the terrace above them. The larger part of his farm—the fields of soy and corn, his hobby plants and turbines. The small animals he had been acclimatizing to the altered atmosphere in the hope that one day, he could introduce larger beasts. Everything he did would become a part of the history of this colony. But he also did it for himself. Building his home had become something between a project and an obsession. A form of poetry he was actually good at.
Surely they wouldn’t take it all away. They could negotiate rights. He could cede just the claim. Carve another road . . .
Gael’s fingers brushed his. “They’re going to measure the deposit and decide it’s too small for them to worry about, whatever it turns out to be.” His tone was reassuring.
Bram tried for a less inflexible smile. “They’ll compensate me well if—”
“This is your home, Bram. Credits aren’t the same.”
He loved that Gael understood that, but didn’t quite like the fact he still thought of the farm as Bram’s home, rather than theirs. “What are your plans for the day?”
“Aavi wants to visit the cloud garden and take some more holo videos. I was going to pack a lunch. We’ll make sure we get everything done before we go.”
Between the three of them, everything wasn’t as much as it used to be.
“I can take care of whatever you don’t get to. You two can head out whenever you want,” he said.
“Maybe you could come with us.”
“Another time. This is a plan you made with Aavi and I want to . . .”
“Brood until the company gets here?”
“Something like that.” Time for a subject change. “Doesn’t she already have footage of the cloud garden?”
“She’s documented every corner of the farm. There’s a part of me that worries about it, like she’s trying to capture it all in case she loses it. But another part of me thinks that we need to let her do it because maybe she’s collecting it instead. Making it hers.”
“It’s probably both.”
“She wants to film us in bed.”
“She what?”
“Just cuddling.”
Bram didn’t know what to say to that, except, well, yeah, no. “I, ah . . .”
“I so regret telling her we were having sex.”
“She’s not stupid.”
“No, but I could have gone with the fiction of us liking to sleep together.”
Bram grinned. “We do like sleeping together.”
Gael ducked his head. Sometimes Bram wondered if their romance was all manufactured, but the tightening sensation low in his gut as he watched color creep across Gael’s cheeks suggested otherwise. He touched Gael’s arm, and Gael looked up with one of his smaller smiles.
“I can still excavate a new room for Aavi, if you’d rather keep your old one. Or a new one for you.” Bram had hoped to have reason to excavate new rooms in the future anyway. If his contracted companion agreed to raise children with him.
When Gael made no immediate answer, Bram apologized. “You don’t have to answer now, and I’m not asking you to decide your future, I just—”
Gael tucked his head in against Bram’s shoulder, the movement cutting off whatever else Bram might say. Bram put his arm around Gael and held him close, taking the unexpected connection as his answer for now. It was a good answer. It wasn’t Gael packing his bags and heading over the horizon with the last departing rays of the sun.
A low rumble disturbed the morning. Bram glanced toward the north. The sky continued to brighten as the sun moved slowly overhead, and the clouds were no more dense than usual. When the sound repeated, he looked over his shoulder. Light flashed off something moving along the cliffs about half a kilometer to the south of his farm.
Gael had turned with him. “What is that?”
“Muedini come early?” Bram speculated. In only one vehicle. Had they decided his claim was essentially worthless? If so, why send someone at all?
Aavi came running out onto the terrace, her light-blond hair flying up in a sudden breeze. “There’s a flashing orange light in the hall. I don’t know what it is.”
“Visitor alarm,” Bram said, holding his arm out for Aavi. “I didn’t want to be surprised all the way out here.” He left his explanation there rather than share the fact he had sometimes walked around without pants. Or that as the colony grew, his farm wouldn’t always be the extreme end of civilization.
He gave Aavi a squeeze and kissed the top of her head, then let go of his little family, relinquishing his hold with reluctance. Handing over his half-empty mug, he said, “I’m going to head to the upper terrace. See who it is.”
“I’ll come with you,” Gael said.
Bram nodded.
Gael tried to hand both mugs to Aavi, but she tucked her hands behind her back. “I want to come to!”
“You’re supposed to be packing for our picnic.”
“We can see who’s here first, can’t we?”
Bram gestured toward the upper terrace. “C’mon. Let’s get upstairs.”
Leaving Aavi and Gael to go about their business, Bram hustled to the ramp connecting the upper and lower terraces. By the time he got to the garage, the noise of the approaching rover was louder and more fierce. The vehicle was larger than it had first appeared, which in no way soothed his fears. Not that he was afraid. Just anxious. Too many of his hopes for the future seemed to hinge on this moment. He stepped out into the amber daylight and waved. The vehicle slowed as the road leveled out onto the terrace, and parked neatly at the edge of the field where Bram stood, dust billowing out from beneath the huge, knotty wheels.
The canopy swung up and Orfeo stepped out.
Only Orfeo.
“Abraham.”
Bram frowned. “Something on your mind, Orfeo? Satellite passes overhead twice a day.”
Orfeo was pulling off a pair of gloves—the gesture old and familiar. Gloves were an essential part of their former careers, and Bram still wore them out of habit when operating any machinery.
“I’m here to do the inspection,” Orfeo said, tucking the gloves into his belt.
“Just you?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Wasn’t expecting you until the afternoon.”
“I decided to make the crossing before the sun came out. Where are your guests?”
Bram’s scalp prickled. “Around.”
“I looked into the girl for you.”
The prickling intensified. “Yeah?”
“Very, very interesting.”
Bram said nothing. Orfeo would get to the point when Orfeo wanted to get to the point.
Orfeo got to the point. “She’s listed as stolen property. The Warrant Collectors’ Office has a contract out for her return, and for the man who took her.”
“The man—”
“’Bout 170 centimeters tall. Dusky complexion. Gray eyes, curly brown hair.”
The prickle moved down the back of Bram’s neck, leaving a heated flush in its wake. Sweat sprang out along his hairline. “If you got something to say, just say it.”
“You were always a dumb fuck, Bram, but this is the mother lode.”
“The WCO holds thousands of contracts. Is there a name with that description?”
“Does there need to be? You bought yourself a criminal.”
“I didn’t buy myself anything.”
“Nothing ’cept a passel of trouble. Here you are, playing happy families with a stolen kid and a killer—”
“A what?”
“You really know nothing, do you? Have you slept with him yet?”
“What?” Bram’s cheeks were heating again.
Orfeo shook his head. “You stupid, dumb—”
“Shut the dust up and speak plainly. If you’re accusing Gael of a crime, spell it out. I don’t have time for word games.”
“Your lover is some sort of assassin. That plain enough for you? He killed the girl’s owner, and apparently he also killed his brother.”
Though the idea of it turned his stomach, if Bram been standing closer to Orfeo with a heavy object in his hand, he might have lashed out. He took a second to catch his breath and heard a footfall behind him, Bram turned. Gael stood there, flanked by Aavi, and the expression on his face . . .
Holy hands, no. A sick swirl of horror moved through Bram’s gut. Orfeo had to be lying. But if he was, why did Gael look so damn guilty?