Contact Syndrome Ch. 01.5

This is a short story of an Alien girl and Alien guy from the planet Idrath introduced in chapter 1. These characters are unrelated to those introduced in chapter 1. I highly recommend reading that before this one to make the world building make more sense. Warning NTR ahead.

Tal Veyhra 2196

Capital of the Republic of Illdrevan

Largest City on the Planet Idrath

1 year before first contact with Humans

The Illdra State Institute stood in a busy district of Tal Veyhra, and every morning loudspeakers played the national anthem of Illdrevan.

Vessan Ardo was nineteen and had been a student there for a year and a half. He studied mechanical engineering. He was a quiet, soft-spoken Idrathi man, he was diligent with his work and mostly kept to himself from day to day. He stayed out of trouble and was loyal to the party and patriotic to his nation as he'd always been taught throughout his life. He felt things were going well for him for the most part.

There was only one thing that continued to trouble him.

He had known Lirae Toss since they were little, when her family moved into the building three doors down from his. They had grown up together, gone to school together, and argued about everything. She had been his closest friend for as long as he could remember. He couldn't have said exactly when that changed for him, only that by the time they were grown, he was madly in love with her, and he had already spent years failing to tell her, and that every year he failed made the next year harder.

Now she was at the Institute too, in the Women's Faculty across the quad, and he saw her every day, and it was worse than ever.

Because Lirae Toss had become beautiful in a way that made men stop on the stairs.

She was slightly taller than him, standing at five foot six, with skin pale light blue that went slightly darker along her collarbones and the insides of her wrists. Her hair was a pale, true silver, so fine it caught the light like thread, and she wore it in the long single braid the Women's Faculty required, though strands were always escaping around her face no matter how often she pinned them back. Her eyes were a clear, vivid red, the color of starbells in early spring, and when she was paying attention to something, really paying attention, they seemed to glow from the inside. She had a narrow waist and full, heavy curves that men could not help but stare at.

She was completely captivating to him, and he couldn't stand his lack of courage.

"You're staring again, Vess," she said.

They were sitting on the low wall at the edge of the quad, the red sun warm on their backs, eating rice cakes out of paper from the vendor at the gate. She had kicked off one shoe and was swinging her bare foot against the stone.

"I'm not staring."

"You were staring at my hair. Is something in it?"

"A leaf," he lied, and reached over to pluck out a leaf that wasn't there. She let him.

"This term is already unbearable," she said, licking sugar off her thumb. "We don't learn about anything interesting. Textile chemistry is so boring."

"Were you good at it?"

"I was magnificent at it." She glowered at the Women's Faculty building across the quad, a squat grey block with the Party eagle carved over the door. "Tomorrow I think I'm going to skip it again."

"Lirae. If you keep skipping, there's no way you'll be able to pass."

"I don't need those classes anyways. I just end up teaching all of the material to myself when I get home" She tipped her head back and looked up at the pale afternoon sky, where one of the military's orbital fortresses was just visible, a faint fixed point of light. "There's got to be so many stars out there. Each with their own planets going around them" She stared softly for a moment and then turned to Vessan suddenly. "Do you think we're alone in the universe, Vess?"

Vessan blushed slightly, suddenly face-to-face with Lirae and her heavy chest moving subtly

"Uhhmm... well the party says there's probably other life out there, but they're most likely inferior to us. Like animals that can't even speak. There's no way they would be able to master space travel like we have"

"How does the Party know they're weaker?" Lirae questioned.

"Because we're Illdrevans," he said, with total confidence. "Nobody's stronger than us. Not on Idrath, not anywhere. If any aliens ever did show up, our fortresses would shoot them out of the sky before they even said hello."

"Vess, you think everything the government says is true." Lirae pouted.

"Most of it is," Vessan said. He believed that, mostly. The Republic of Illdrevan had unified the continent, becoming the strongest nation on Idrath. It built an impressive fleet of ships and colonized the solar system. No one else on Idrath had ever reached the sky. If there were aliens out there, he didn't see why they'd be any different from everyone else the Republic had encountered.

Lirae didn't answer. She was still looking at the sky, her red eyes far away.

"I'd like to meet them," she said finally. "Whoever they are. Just to see."

----

Early 2197

A few months before first contact with humans

He decided he would tell her on Lantern Night.

It was the perfect occasion, he told himself, lying awake in his narrow room with the cold coming through the window glass. Every year at the turning of the long winter, Idrath's smaller moon passed in front of the red star for a few minutes, and the whole world went violet-dark. People would light paper lanterns and release them into the sky. People made wishes when the light came back. Young men often used this chance to confess their love.

Lirae always observed the festival from the rooftop of her family's home. Vessan had watched it with her every year since they were young.

This year, he decided he would light his lantern, and when the light came back, he would tell her.

He practiced it for a week. He bought two new lanterns from the paper-seller by the river gate, the good kind with red starbell patterns printed on the sides. He wore his good jacket under his coat, a high-collared one with the silver clasps that had been his grandfather's.

The roof was cold and crowded. Lirae's mother and aunts sat in a row on the parapet passing a flask of hot vel tea. Down in the street, bands were playing traditional songs. Across the city, every roof held its own small crowd of dark shapes, waiting.

Lirae stood at the edge of the roof in a long red coat with the hood pushed back, her silver braid falling over one shoulder, her breath fogging in the cold. Her cheeks had gone dusky with the chill, a deep blue under the pale, and she was bouncing on her heels with excitement like she always did.

"Vess! You're late. Did you bring good ones?"

He held up the starbell lanterns. Her eyes lit.

"Those are beautiful. Where did you get those?"

"River gate."

"They're the expensive kind." She took one and turned it in her gloved hands, tracing the printed flowers. "Starbells. You know what those mean, right? On Lantern Night?"

His heart stopped. "What?"

"mom says girls used to give them to boys they liked. Or boys to girls, I can't remember which. It's an old courting thing." She laughed and handed it back. "Don't worry, I won't tell anyone you're secretly a romantic."

"I'm not--"

"Shh. It's starting."

The moon touched the edge of the star.

The light didn't go the way night went. It went violet first, then a deep, velvet blue, and the shadows lost their edges, and the whole city held its breath. The instruments in the street fell silent. Lirae had stopped bouncing. She stood perfectly still with her face turned up to the sky, and in the strange blue light, with her silver hair gone dark and her red eyes catching the last of the sun, she looked like something out of a movie.

Vessan's mouth was dry. When the light comes back, he told himself. Say it when the light comes back.

The last red sliver vanished and all across the city, on every roof, the lanterns lit.

Thousands of them. The city became a field of small warm lights under a dark sky. Lirae lifted her starbell lantern as high as her arm would go, and her face, lit orange from beneath, was so happy it hurt to look at.

"Make a wish, Vess," she said, not looking away from the sky. "Hurry."

"Lirae," he said. "I need to tell you--"

"Shh, I'm wishing."

He waited. The light from all the lanterns flickered on her face. Her eyes were closed.

He opened his mouth.

"Lirae," called her mother from the parapet. "Help your grandmother, her lantern's tipping."

And she was gone, kneeling beside her grandmother's stool, laughing, steadying the old woman's shaking hands around the string, and the moment folded up and blew away like ash.

When the star came back, she turned and found him and smiled, and said, "What did you wish for?"

"Nothing," he said. "I forgot."

"You always forget." She bumped his shoulder with hers. "Next time, then."

Next time, he told himself, walking home through the old quarter with his unlit wish heavy in his chest. Spring, then. I'll tell her in spring, the old-fashioned way. He'd do it properly.

But In spring, the Humans came.

----

Spring 2197

First contact

It began with the state radio interrupting the evening music with a bulletin no one understood.

An unidentified vessel, possibly of extrasolar origin, had been detected at the edge of the system. It had transmitted a message. The Defense Command had interpreted the message as a demand for surrender, and the Republic of Illdrevan did not surrender. Defensive measures had been taken. Citizens were to remain calm.

The next morning, the Institute was silent. No one went to lectures. The streets were choked with people, a river of bodies flowing toward the government quarter where protestors waved hastily painted signs demanding total war. News bulletins blared from open windows, their frantic voices swallowed by the crowd's roar. On the quad, students stood in huddled groups, necks craned toward the sky. High above, the faint silver needles of the Illdrevan defense fleet cut across the atmosphere, punctuated by silent, distant flashes--too quick and too far to make sense of. Lirae found Vessan at the main gate, his face bloodless and still.

"It's them," she said. "Vess. It's aliens! They came. I told you someone would"

"Someone attacked us" he said.

"The news said they sent a message" She grabbed his arm hard. "What if they were just saying hello?"

He didn't have an answer. He simply looked onwards towards the sky.

For the next few hours the radio announced victories. On the second day, the voice reading them began to sound frightened, and soon, the Illdrevan fleet was no longer visible in the sky. Vessan began to notice figures far above the clouds he did not recognize. Very faint, vague figures he could not make out so clearly.

The evening was shattered by a cruel sound that began as a distant hum, then sharpened into a high-pitched shriek.

Against the bruised twilight of the sky, white-hot lines scored downward. The light arrived first--blinding flashes that painted the rooftops in stark relief--followed by the deep, concussive crack that rattled windowpanes in their frames. First the Defense Command towers flared and crumpled. Then fire bloomed silently over the dark ridges where the missile bases lay hidden. The Party hall's dome vanished behind a rolling cloud of pulverized stone. Finally, a direct hit on the Institute's annex tore through the building where Vessan had once spent an afternoon bent over his examination papers; now it was only a column of black smoke shot through with embers, rising like a funeral spire. The air itself seemed to tear as a succession of booms shook the ground. Each one was answered by screams rising from the streets below.

Idrath was being bombed.

For nine days the sky burned. Vessan and Lirae sheltered in a deep bomb shelter underneath the city. They listened to the radio, which continuously urged civilians to evacuate underground. But eventually the radio stopped saying anything else. Lirae sat with her grandmother and held her hand. Vessan sat across from them and watched her face in the lamplight, the way it went still and pale every time the ground shook.

On the seventh night, when the others were finally asleep, she whispered to him across the shelter floor.

"Vess. My uncle worked at the missile base in the eastern hills. Did you know that?"

"No."

"He told my mom something a few months ago" Her voice was very small. "He said he believed we'd be going to war with Khesrin very soon"

"That's not true."

"He said it. And then the base in the eastern hills was the very first thing they hit." She was quiet for a long moment. "He said relations were breaking down and that it was just a matter of time"

"So are you saying that's what this is? Are we at war with Khesrin?"

"No I don't think so... I can only get a little bit of internet, but I saw cities all around the world are getting hit with these bombs, including places in Khesrin" she said flatly

"But that makes no sense!" Vessan protested loudly. "Why would Khesrin bomb its own cities!"

"Vess... It's not Khesrin. We're not fighting other Idrathis. I told you it's Aliens didn't I?"

"N-no way, that's impossible. How could any alien force us underground like this"

"I told you, Vess, sometimes things aren't what you think they are"

He didn't understand, then, what she meant. He understood much later.

On the tenth day, the radio came back on. A man who wasn't the usual announcer read a statement in a flat, exhausted voice. The Republic of Illdrevan, The Khesrin league, along with several other minor nations around Idrath had surrendered unconditionally to alien forces. The Defense Command was dissolved. The Party of National Unity was dissolved. Citizens were to remain in their homes and await instructions from the occupying authority.

When they came up out of the shelter, the sky was clear and red and quiet, and the orbital fortresses were gone.

The humans arrived like weather.

Vessan could not believe it, real aliens right before his eyes.

There were so many of them. They were tall and imposing, and their skin came in various colors, but not blue. Even their shortest soldiers stood a head above most Idrathi men, broad and pale and loud, speaking a language that sounded like stones knocking together. They wore grey uniforms with an insignia of a planet, a picture of a world that wasn't theirs. They took the government district, the train stations, every important building. They pulled the Party banners off every lamppost in the city in a single afternoon and burned them in great heaps in the squares while their soldiers stood around the fires and laughed. They renamed the capital. Tal Veyhra became New Sacramento, apparently some city from their planet. He could not figure out how to pronounce it.

The Institute closed for eight months. When it reopened, the Party eagle had been chiseled off the Women's Faculty door, and the Women's Faculty itself was gone. There was a single section for everyone now and a new program in the old military annex that taught the humans' language, along with their law and administration.

Lirae enrolled in it the first day it opened.

Vessan went back to engineering. The humans needed engineers. They needed everything: clerks, translators, mechanics, cooks. They paid in their own currency, which bought more than the old money ever had, and they asked for very little in return except that everyone stop trying to kill them.

Lirae was always talking to the human soldiers now. Vessan would see her by the annex gate, head tilted up to listen as one of the tall, grey-clad guards spoke to her in that rough, stony language. She'd laugh--a bright, unfamiliar sound--and sometimes blush, turning away to hide it behind her hand. She missed their usual walks along the quad wall. When she did talk to him, it was always about Humans.

"Do you know what Corporal Hayes said to me today?" she said one afternoon on the quad, swinging her feet off the wall.

Vessan didn't know who Corporal Hayes was. He had a feeling he was about to.

"He said my English was better than his." She laughed, tipping her head back. "He was joking, but he leaned in close to say it, so I could hear him over the generator. Vess, he had to bend nearly in half. I came up to his chest." She held her hand flat at the level of her own chin, then raised it, marveling. "His hands are enormous. He was holding a coffee cup, and it looked like a toy."

"They're all big," Vessan said. "So are livestock"

She didn't seem to hear him. Her gaze had drifted past him to the old military annex at the far end of the quad, where two human soldiers stood guard at the door in their grey uniforms, rifles slung, talking to each other in their loud, easy way. One of them stretched, rolling his broad shoulders, and Vessan watched Lirae's eyes follow the motion all the way through. The tip of her tongue touched her lower lip. She didn't seem to know she was doing it.

"They don't look at you the way our men do," she said quietly. "When a Human guy looks at me, It makes my stomach go strange."

"That's the syndrome," Vessan said. It came out harder than he meant. "That thing the humans talk about. It's in your head. It's a sickness, Lirae."

She turned to look at him, and for a moment her red eyes were very cool. "Is it a sickness when you stare at me on Lantern Night?"

His face went hot. "I don't--"

"You do, Vess. You've done it for years." She said it without cruelty, almost fondly, and somehow that was worse. "I'm not angry. I'm just saying. Wanting someone isn't a sickness."

Across the quad, one of the soldiers caught her looking and grinned, then lifted two fingers to his brow in a lazy salute. Lirae lit up. She raised her hand and waved back, quick and shy, then ducked her head and laughed into her shoulder like a girl caught passing notes, the flush spreading up her neck and into her cheeks.

Vessan's hands had curled into fists on his knees. He made them flat again.

"He's probably got ten of you," he said. "They all do. Half the girls in the old Women's Faculty are hanging off human arms at river gate. They don't care which one of you they get."

"Maybe." Lirae was still watching the soldier, who had turned back to his partner but kept glancing over. "But at least they're looking."

She hopped off the wall, brushed off her skirt, and slung her bag over her shoulder. "I have English class at three. Hayes says if I keep practicing, I'll sound like I was born in America." She looked proudly at Vessan, excited to display her new knowledge. "That's a nation on the Human planet, y'know!"

She walked off across the quad toward the annex. When she passed the guards, she slowed, and said something to the tall one, and he laughed and held the door for her, and his hand rested on the small of her back for a moment as she went through.

Vessan sat on the wall alone and watched the door close behind them.

----

2198

By the spring of 2198, walls across the city were awash with slogans and flyers.

The Idrathi men who painted them called themselves the Unbowed. Everyone knew someone who knew someone. The humans scrubbed the words off, and the next night they were back. Bombs went off at checkpoints. A human officer was shot in the market. In late spring, someone hid explosives in a delivery of pellfruit for a human battalion's mess hall, and forty-one humans died eating dinner.

Vessan's father came home that night smelling of smoke and slept like a stone.

Vessan didn't ask. He hated the humans. Every Idrathi man he knew hated the humans. They had the audacity to just show up to a planet, bomb it, and then take it for themselves. They had taken a city, renamed it, and every day took more of the women in it. Vessan quietly supported the Unbowed, but was not brave enough to actually join himself.

Lirae spoke about the Unbowed only once.

"Another one last night," she said on the quad wall, arms wrapped tight around herself. "The checkpoint at river gate. Three humans dead, and two Idrathi girls. One of them was in my English class, Vess. She was nineteen."

"I heard."

"Every week it's something. We just can't live like this"

Three weeks later, she showed him a leaflet.

A crisp human-printed page, English above, Idrathi script beneath. The United Nations of Earth Department of Defense was forming a new service, the Auxiliary Corps. Female non-human volunteers only. Training in law, languages, administration, and security. Pay three times higher than any civilian post. This would be a uniformed position with authorization to carry firearms and perform arrests. Applicants with human-language qualifications especially encouraged.

"I'm signing up" Lirae said flatly

Vessan felt his heart drop into his stomach.

"To hunt our own people," Vessan said. The accusation was like ash in his mouth.

"To stop all this chaos" She said it gently, but she didn't look away. "Vess, I'm top of my class. You know what I could be in the Corps? An officer. In a few years. An actual officer." She smoothed the leaflet flat on the stone of the wall with her palm.

"Your mother won't like it,"

"My mother told me to do it." She folded the leaflet into her pocket

The first Auxiliary parade marched through the central square on a bright red morning in early summer.

Two hundred women in gray uniforms marched in perfect step behind human commanders, rifles on their shoulders, boots polished until they reflected the sky. Every one of them wore a blue armband on her left sleeve, the same blue as the flag of the humans. Crowds lined the square cheering. Vessan stood among them in his rust-brown sash and searched the rows.

Lirae marched in the second row. Her silver hair was no longer in the Faculty braid. It was pinned up under her cap in a sleek, neat human style, baring the long blue line of her neck. The grey human-styled uniform accentuated her full figure. She carried the rifle on her shoulder like she'd been born to do it. Her chin was up. Her red eyes stayed straight ahead.

She was smiling.

She didn't look for him in the crowd.

The human sergeant at the front of the parade was named Cole Brannigan.

Vessan met him by accident three weeks later, delivering a cart of machine parts to the Auxiliary barracks, a former Party dormitory near the river gate. He'd taken work at a human repair depot and the depot sent him wherever someone needed something carried.

Brannigan signed for the crates without looking at Vessan, said something over his shoulder in English, and someone behind him laughed.

Vessan knew that laugh.

Lirae stood in the corridor with two other recruits, her cap tucked under her arm. She was laughing up at Brannigan with her whole face.

She saw Vessan a moment later and lit up. "Vess! What are you doing here?"

"Deliveries."

Brannigan glanced at him then, a quick, flat look that took in his height, his high collar, his rust-brown sash, his handcart, and dismissed all of it. Then he put a big hand on Lirae's shoulder, said something in English, and walked off down the corridor.

"What did he say?" Vessan asked.

"He said don't be late for drills, Lira." She was still watching the corridor where Brannigan had gone. "That's what he calls me. Lira. He says it's easier."

Lira. Not even her name. A human shortening of it.

She didn't seem to mind.

After that, Vessan noticed everything.

He noticed that the Auxiliary Corps began making arrests in late summer, and that the raids came at night, and that the women who led them were ruthless. He noticed that the red words on the walls came less often, and that the Unbowed's leaflets turned uglier in tone, full of threats against the collaborator women.

He noticed that his father stopped going out after curfew, and then one night in early autumn went out anyway, and didn't come home. The news listed him among forty other names, arrested, followed by a short paragraph thanking the Auxiliary Corps, Second Company, for its diligence.

Lirae was in the Second Company.

He never asked her whether her unit was the one that arrested his father. He didn't want to know. The next time they met on the quad wall, she squeezed his hand once, hard, without saying anything, and he understood that she knew.

He noticed that he now very rarely saw her. That when she did, she talked about all things human. The silver bracelet on her wrist, Earth-made. He noticed that she smelled like the Human men now. He noticed that she checked her phone constantly, and every time it buzzed, she smiled at it in a way she had never once smiled at him.

Every night he lay awake in his narrow room and told himself what he'd been telling himself for years.

Tomorrow.

He was twenty-two when he finally ran out of tomorrows.

----

2199

The starbells bloomed early that year.

He went to the flower seller by the river gate the first morning they appeared, before he could lose his nerve, and bought an armful with money he'd been saving since autumn.

Then he walked to the barracks by river gate. The guard at the door was an Idrathi woman with a blue armband who looked at the flowers, then at him, with something that might have been sympathy. She told him which floor. He climbed the stairs. His heart was beating so hard he could feel it in his teeth.

He knocked.

The door did not open.

He knocked again, thinking she must not have heard.

Once again no response. He wondered if she was gone. He then realized the door was left unlocked.

The door gave under his hand. He had meant only to leave the starbells. Instead the latch clicked, lamplight spilled through the gap, and Lirae's voice came with it, saying a human name like she had been saving it in her mouth.

He stepped in, saw, and stopped in the strip of dark beside the hinge.

Lirae was on her back on the cot, shirt shoved up under her arms, trousers gone, silver braid half undone across the pillow. Her pale blue skin had gone darker across her chest and along the insides of her spread thighs. Her breasts were bare, heavy, jolting every time the man between her legs drove in. Cole Brannigan had his uniform open only at the waist, one big hand under her knee holding her open for him. He was thick, thicker than anything Vessan had let himself picture, and Vessan could see the stretch of it: the way her cunt had to yield around the human's cock, slick and flushed darker blue at the rim, gripping him on every withdrawal before taking him again to the hilt. The sound was wet and steady. The cot frame ticked the wall in time with it.

Vessan eased the door back to a crack. The flowers crushed against his coat. He stayed.

Brannigan pulled almost all the way out, slow enough that Vessan saw the shine on him, the heavy shape of the head, and Lirae made a desperate little sound and tried to follow with her hips.

"Don't tease," she said. "Put it back. All of it. I want that big human cock back in me."

He sank in with one long stroke. Her mouth fell open. Her breasts shifted up her chest, full and soft, nipples tight in the lamplight, and she grabbed at his sleeves as if the size of him had knocked the sense out of her hands.

"Oh--fuck, you're so thick. I can feel every bit of you. Idrathi men aren't like this. They're not this deep. They're not this big. I've thought about a human cock since the first week you people were in the square, and it's better, it's so much better, don't stop."

She rolled her hips to take him deeper, greedy, and the wet sound got louder. Brannigan braced harder and fucked her in earnest, each stroke burying him until his hips met hers and her breath broke. Her heavy breasts bounced with it. He filled a hand with one, squeezed, dragged his thumb over the nipple until she arched and swore, Illdrevan first, then English, as if the human words fit better now. When he bent and sucked her, she held the back of his head and pushed her chest into his mouth.

"Yes. Suck on them. Human men always stare at them. I saw you staring. I wanted your mouth on me. I wanted this cock in me. Bigger--God, you're splitting me open and I want it. I want all of that big human cock. Don't you dare go gentle."

Vessan watched her face because he could not make himself do anything else. Clear red eyes wet at the corners, flush high on her cheeks, mouth open around the things she was saying. The girl he'd known was gone. This Lirae locked her legs around a human's waist and begged for the size of him, and every word landed under Vessan's ribs like a door shutting. He had the starbells in his arm. He had the sentence he had failed to say for years. She was spending her voice on another man's cock.

Brannigan drove in harder. The cot knocked. Lirae cried out, high and shameless, and her hand slid down between them, not to push him out, just to feel where he stretched her. Her fingers came away shining. She looked at them, then at his face, dazed and delighted.

"Look how wet I am for it. Look how much I have to open for a human. I used to lie awake wondering. It isn't even close. Your cock ruins me. Big and thick and mine right now. Say you're not going to pull out. Tell me I get human cum. I want it deep. I want to feel a real cock finish in me."

"You're getting it," Brannigan said, rough. "Horny xeno bitch. Take it."

He fucked her faster. Her breasts jolted in his hand and against his chest. She came like that, forehead pressed to his, cunt gripping him in fluttering pulses while she said his name and then not his name.

"Human--my human--give it to me, fill me up, I love it, I love big human cock, I love how deep you are, don't stop, don't pull out, cum in your alien, please, please--"

Brannigan slammed in to the hilt and stayed. Vessan saw his back lock, saw Lirae's eyes go wide as the first thick pulse hit her, then the next, her legs clamped so he could not withdraw, her hands fisted in the grey shirt. She felt every spurt. She moaned through it, soft and shocked and happy, kissing his jaw, telling him she could feel how much a human gave, how hot it was, how she wanted all of it, how she was not letting him out until he had emptied that big cock inside her.

When he finally sagged she laughed, breathless, and kept him buried, one bare heel rubbing the back of his thigh.

"Stay. I want to keep a human cock in me a little longer. I want to feel it while it's still hard. I want to walk back with you leaking out of me so I remember how big you were."

He could not make himself stay at the crack. The sounds from the cot were still going, her voice gone soft and wrecked, Brannigan's lower and pleased, and if Vessan kept listening he was going to do something with the flowers that he would not be able to explain. He eased the door almost shut, careful of the latch, and went down half a flight to the turn of the stair where the landing hid him from the corridor. He sat on the step with the starbells across his knees and waited. The flowers had been crushed against his coat; there was blue pollen on his wrist and on the cuff of his grandfather's jacket.

It took longer than his hands could stand. Twice he stood up to leave. Twice he sat again, because he had spent years leaving, and the sentence was still in his mouth, and if he walked out with it one more time he knew exactly what the rest of his life would be. Above him a door opened and closed somewhere else in the barracks. Boots passed on the lower flight and faded. Then, at last, their door opened for real.

He climbed back up. His knees did not feel like his.

Lirae was in the doorway in an oversized grey shirt that was not hers, bare-legged, silver hair loose and tangled, a mark darkening on her throat. She smelled like the room. She saw him and stopped.

"Vess," she said. "What are you--"

"I need to tell you something." The words came out in a rush, nothing like he'd practiced. "I should have told you years ago. On Lantern Night, on the roof, with the starbell lanterns. I tried. I tried a hundred times. I've been a coward every day since. I love you, Lirae. I've loved you for longer than I can remember. I've spent my whole life trying to deserve the way you look when you're happy." He held out the starbells, and his hands were shaking. "These are for you. If you'll have them."

For a long moment she didn't move.

Then her eyes went soft, and she looked at him with something that hurt worse than anger, worse than laughter, worse than anything he had imagined all those nights lying awake.

It was pity.

"Oh, Vess," she said quietly.

Behind her, deeper in the room, Sgt. Brannigan's voice called out in English. "Lira? Who's at the door?"

Brannigan stepped into the doorway behind her, barefoot, in nothing but uniform trousers, his shoulders filling the frame. His chest was marked across one shoulder with fresh red scratches. He looked at Vessan, He didn't look angry. He looked faintly amused, the way a man looks at a stray dog that has followed him home.

Lirae didn't step away from him. She leaned back against his chest without even looking, and his arm came around her waist as if it lived there. She fit beneath his chin. The oversized shirt was his. Vessan's whole body went cold.

"Vess," she said, and she sounded so kind, which was the worst part of all. "Cole and I are getting married. It's the new law. Humans and Idrathi can get married now. We're filing our papers soon. I was going to tell you. I just didn't know how."

She reached out and took the starbells from his hands, gently, the way you'd take something from a child. She looked down at them.

"They're beautiful," she said softly. "Thank you."

Then she passed them back over her shoulder without looking. Brannigan took them in one big hand, glanced at them, and set them somewhere behind him, out of sight.

Not in water.

"You should go home, Vess," Lirae said. "Please. I don't want this to be hard for you."

Brannigan bent and murmured something into her ear in English, low and easy. She laughed, and swatted his arm without turning around, still looking at Vessan, and her face was flushed and bright and happy.

"Goodbye, Vess," she said.

The door closed.