Page 5 of Rook Takes Queen
“They call the Fever Brothers human lovers,” Naomi adds, grinning.
I find, to my surprise, that the corner of my mouth wants to lift. “That doesn’t sound so bad, being human lovers.”
“Right?” Roxy chuckles. “There are certainly worse things to love in the universe than humans.”
They all start laughing as I sip up the last of my soup.
“In case you didn’t catch my name earlier, I’m Naomi,” says the one beside Chief, a hand resting on her belly. “That little terror in the high chair is Rux, he’s Heavy and Jana’s son. The one asleep in the basket is Argylia, Claws and Lila’s daughter. And the small bandit currently feeding her dinner to a toy with no mouth is Zora.” Across the table, the toddler looks up at her name, beams, and goes right back to it. “And we didn’t all get here the same way,” Naomi goes on, gentler now, watching my face like she knows exactly what I need to hear. “Some of us came out for work. Honest jobs, off New Earth, looking for something better, and ended up scented by an oversized miner who wouldn’t take no for an answer.” A few of the women laugh.
“And some of us,” Jana says, and her voice changes, loses its briskness, “were running from something.” She looks at me steadily, and there’s no pity in it, which is the only reason I can stand it. “Some of us have sat more or less where you’re sitting right now. Soaked, or scared, or both, sure you’d made a terrible mistake coming here and that you’d brought your trouble down on a houseful of strangers.”
“You didn’t,” Lila says simply. “Make a mistake. Whatever it is, you came to the right place.”
“That’s what I told her,” Maxon says quietly, beside me.
And I look around at all of them, the babies, the Xylan males—especially Maxon—and these human women. For one dangerous second I let myself want this type of life. I’ve only been here for a short time, but I can see they lead a good life. Iwant to believe I could be one more woman who arrived at this compound and got to stay.
Then I remember the visa. The record. The line drawn straight to this table. And I lock the wanting back down where it belongs. I wipe my mouth with a napkin and put down my spoon. “I came from Chronos,” I say. “I was working there.”
The whole table goes still.
“How is this possible?” Scar questions. He hasn’t touched his food. He’s been watching me since I walked in, and his voice is flat and careful. “How was a human allowed to work on Chronos?”
“It used to be rare for off worlders to get jobs on Chronos, it’s true. But nowadays it’s very trendy amongst the Royal Pigment houses to have a human employee. We’re considered loyal. Trustworthy. Discreet.” I let the corner of my mouth twist. “No House loyalties of our own, you see. No stake in your politics. The Xylan are the ones who freed us from the Hurlians, so every human on New Earth grows up knowing that the Xylan saved us from our enslavers. We love your species.” I shrug. “So when a Xylan House offers a human a position, the human says yes. Gratefully. Why wouldn’t she? She’s going to be given a cushy, high-paying job and allowed to serve the species that saved hers.”
Naomi presses a hand to her chest. “That’s why you trusted them.”
“That’s why I trusted them,” I agree.
“And what did you do for this House?” Scar asks. “What was your job position?”
“I’m a Keeper,” I say. “A Keeper of Records.”
Ines narrows her eyes like she’s starting to understand.
“A great House hands its most sensitive records to a human Keeper because a human is a vault that walks, talks and never leaks. Ledgers. Correspondence. Manifests. Everything theydon’t want written anywhere a rival could reach. They gave it all to me.”
“Because they trusted you,” Lila says.
“Yes. And because it never once occurred to them that the primitive little human might actually understand what she was keeping.”
Across the table, Scar leans forward. “You saw something that troubled you.”
“Very much. I saw something that...” I look down at my hands, at the gloves of the unmated they gave me at the station, and I make myself say it out loud for the first time since I ran. “There’s an old and powerful Royal Pigment House on Chronos, and in their records there’s a plan.” I swallow. “A plan for this planet. For Timbur.”
“What kind of plan?” Chief questions.
“A plan that I consider to be evil. It’s wrong and unethical, literally against the Scales of Xylan Law. The kind of plan you put in clean language so it doesn’t look like what it is.” I’ve read enough of their euphemisms that they’re burned into me. “Relocation. Resettlement. Demographic correction. Purification.” I lift my eyes. “What it means, underneath the words, is that they want Timbur to belong to Royal Pigment Xylan. Only them. No humans. No other species. No—” I glance around the table, at all these golden-skinned miners, and force myself to keep going. “No Margol, either. Not as anything but labor they control completely. Everyone else removed. One way or another.”
“That’s genocide,” Naomi says softly.
“They don’t call it that. They never call it that. But yes.” I make myself hold steady. “There’s one thing standing in their path though,” I go on, because they need to hear the rest. “One thing they can’t get around. This Royal Pigment house wants toown this planet and everything in it, but they can’t fully, because the Illibrium only chooses Margol Xylan miners.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Chief grunts. “The Illibrium has only ever chosen Margol Xylan as it’s miners since these deposits were first discovered. Every other species in the Four Sectors was offered the Illibrium too for bonding, but only Margol Xylan are ever chosen beyond attunement, to the higher level of bonding with a personal crystal. Illibrium has never wanted any other species to extract it from the caves, not even Royal Pigment, who are also Xylan.”
“And that,” I say, “is the part of the records I couldn’t make sense of. Because they aren’t just trying to remove the miners. They’re trying to do something to the Illibrium itself. Trying to change it in some way so that it will accept Royal Pigment miners. I found traces of weird experiments. I could see researchers on the payroll. There were shipments I couldn’t trace. Whole files about—” I search for the words they used. “The selectivity problem. The attunement problem. As if the crystal choosing for itself is a malfunction they intend to fix.” I shake my head. “I don’t know how. I’m a Keeper, not a scientist. But I know they mean to make the Illibrium stop choosing. To make it obey instead.”
Scar makes a sound low in his throat, like something struck him. “They could ruin the Illibrium. Literally ruin the cleanest, most powerful power source in the entire four sectors.”
