Snake Keeper by Alexandra Norton
CHAPTER TEN
I COULD NOTdeny the infuriating attraction. It built at a worrying pace once we crossed the line of touch in the nest. I tried to fight it, but it became increasingly difficult to resist the longing for that spark of electricity running between our bodies. I found myself brushing against him during dinner, or finding excuses to seek him out during the day.
If only it was just a physical pull I felt toward the alien, but no. We talked now. Xioumar opened up just as slow as I, but once he did I learned many stories. He told me of how the Father selected him to be a Keeper. He shared the tale of his brief romance with the Father’s daughter Zoe, the lack of bond between them no matter their efforts. I told him things, too. I even told him about my (unimpressive) dating history back home. Eventually, I told him about my father; about how we lost Mom; about how worried I was. I didn’t know if he understood; Xiorn apparently didn’t maintain contact with their parents into adulthood. But he tried. Maybe that was enough.
Fortunately for my attempts to keep my hormones in check, the Keeper spent most of his days away from the planetoid. When asked what he did all day, he was not forthcoming: “Managing the practicalities of adding another species into the Federation is a time-consuming task.”
He refused to elaborate further, which drove me mad, but I was used to living with a man who could tell me nothing about his job. I distracted myself by learning about the Xiorn with Zeetha. I’d gotten used to her, even if the Xiorn still unnerved me with their serpentine eyes and unnaturally smooth movement.
I liked to watch the outer ring circling us outside. Sometimes, I’d traverse the planetoid room by room, seeking the best view of the ring in our present rotation. I watched the lights move on the surface many kilometers away, making up stories about the lives of the ring’s inhabitants.
The Keeper’s cable shuttle would arrive at the same time each day. We would eat dinner with the others. Sometimes we would dance, but I avoided that as best I could, usually finding a convenient excuse to duck out when the chimes began to sound their disjointed orchestra. I nearly got lost in that intoxicating wave of movement once already, and that was when I hated the man. I couldn’t risk getting swept up in it now that a connection had developed despite my best efforts.
Be strong, Emily.
I caught Xioumar watching us from the doorway as I finished my Xiornian lesson with Zeetha in one of the ring-facing rooms of the planetoid. I brushed my hair to the side of my face to hide the involuntary smile that twitched across my lips.
“I think that’s enough for today. Athio, Emily,” Zeetha said, rising from her cushion and slinking from the room.
“Athio,” I muttered. I began to mess with the foam cushions, setting them straight next to the low stone table at which we studied. When my hands had nothing more to fidget with, I turned to look at the outer ring through the window spanning the wall, focusing intently on an apparently fascinating speck of light on its surface.
I tensed when now-familiar muscled arms wrapped around me from behind and the Keeper’s hard torso pressed against my back. My mind jumped first to trying to block the wave of charged warmth that seeped into my skin through our points of contact, as it always had. If I wasn’t careful, I feared my body would give in and sink into the sensation. I might never find my way out.
“Kaltha,” I looked up at him, eyes tracing the line of his jaw above me, falling to his lips, curled in a small smile.
“Kaltha, my Kept. I see Zeetha’s lessons are paying off.” He tightened his embrace and rested his chin on the top of my head.
“What are you afraid of?” The Keeper muttered into my hair.
Myself.
But what good is it doing me?
I put my hand on his, tracing the curves with tentative fingertips. Bit by bit, my taut muscles uncoiled in his grasp and I relaxed against his chest. We stayed there, watching the outer ring as I settled into a newfound sensation of delicate peace.
***
ONE DAY AFTERour morning meal (the roasted meat was growing on me), Xioumar announced it was time for me to see the ring. I had not left his planetoid since my arrival, except the one time I was taken to meet the Father. Now, I would see the surface of the ring, which was allegedly covered with the same protective, magnet-esque shell that I had encountered in the shuttle and in the nest (Xioumar said they called it the “membrane”, at least that was the closest English word for it).
I was excited. I hadn’t explored Xioumar’s entire planetoid yet, but frankly the rooms looked very much the same: bathing chambers, nests, storage compartments. Sometimes I ran into other aliens, who acknowledged me but were mostly indifferent (all except Zeetha). And I had been watching the ring from the nest every day, spotting tiny lights dotting the windows in its belly as well as on the surface. From afar, it looked to be bustling with activity.
“Stay close, Emily,” Xioumar warned me once we were on the cable shuttle to the outer ring. “The ring is different from the inner planetoids. It is harder, more chaotic.”
I nodded, only half listening as Zeetha and I crouched at the membrane on the side of the shuttle, watching the approach. My eyes widened as we got close enough to see more of the surface and spot the thousands of tiny tents, pixels on a screen, dotting the rim.
The cable took us to a landing bay at one of the upper levels of the ring. From there, it was a short walk to the surface itself.
We stepped out below the transparent membrane into a quiet surface entry area. I stumbled and careened back when I looked up. The expanse above me sent me backwards into Xioumar, who steadied me against his chest.
“What if the membrane breaks?” I clenched Xioumar’s arm behind me, as if he could prevent me from falling into the infinite blackness of space.
He stroked my arm as we both watched the void above and all around us. “That can’t happen. But if it did, everyone on the surface would die in an instant. There would be no pain.”
“That’s not reassuring,” I glared back at him.
“This station has been operational for thousands of years, and the membrane has not punctured even once within that time. The Federation’s technology is reliable. Soon, perhaps your species can benefit from it as well.”
I took a deep breath, held it, and released it slowly from my lungs.
“Yes,” I squeezed his arm.
***
THE ENTRY AREAled directly into a bustling tented market. It looked almost human: the tents packed close to each other, hundreds of Xiorn shuffling between stalls, the sights and smells of goods and meat. The only thing that seemed out of place were the “people” themselves: hundreds of pairs of snakelike green, red, yellow eyes, moving in inhumanly smooth, purposeful gestures. Whereas at such a market back home people would jostle and jerk through the crowd, here movement was more of a wave: bodies slid against each other in a way that almost made them look like one cohesive organism. I was very clearly the clumsy outsider as I kept colliding with strangers.
Xioumar saw my struggle and grabbed my hand tight in his, guiding us smoothly through the crowd. Every few feet was an unfamiliar smell: from roasted meat to an almost fishy odor to wafts of spicy sweetness permeating from a stall stuffed to the brim with dry herbs and fresh flowers. Xioumar felt me hesitate at the flower stall and doubled back, nudging us both into the calmer pocket of the tent, away from the river of bodies.
The blooms stacked on the tables of the stall were moving more like animals than flowers. I gasped as a plant with black and pink striped tendrils for flowers writhed to lick my skin and wind around my wrist when I got too close.
The seller looked older: a small, dark woman with pale blue eyes and mostly round pupils: among the least threatening pairs of eyes I’d seen on the Xiorn. I took a liking to her immediately.
“I’ve got just the thing for your Kept,” she said to Xioumar and dug through the pile of flower stems before her, sending explosions of sweetness and spice to my nostrils as the disturbed plants released their nectar.
She emerged with rainbow dust covering her ebony face and a long stalk in her small hand. The stalk burst with shifting, pulsating blood-red flowers. They opened and closed in unison, as though the plant was breathing. She extended it towards me and I took the tip of the stalk delicately, careful to avoid disturbing any of the blooms. I sucked in my breath and pulled my hand back when I felt a prick. A droplet of blood formed on the tip of my index finger.
“Careful, now. It’s not gentle. You must learn to handle its thorns,” the woman cautioned. I sucked the blood from my skin and tried again, carefully grasping the stem around the thorns.
“With care and some light, it will bloom for five years,” the woman smiled.
I balked. A cut flower, surviving for years? I hugged it gently to myself as the blooms angled toward me.
“Efsto,” Xioumar handed a square metal chip to the woman.
“Thank you?” I looked up at him, guessing the translation. He nodded.
“Efsto,” I said to the woman.
We said our goodbyes and promised to return. Something about the alien’s manner and kind eyes made me feel safe in her presence. No trace of predatory danger or intimidating glare was to be felt like it had with the other Xiorn so far, especially so with my Keeper. I had grown more used to meeting his gaze when he stared at me through crimson snake eyes, had even taken time to examine their depths more closely, but it unnerved me still.
After an hour in the flowing crowd, stopping at stalls, ignoring curious stares, I grew overwhelmed. Xioumar noticed, for he soon led us down through a sliding hatch to the first lower level of the ring. We descended into a quiet, dimly lit dining hall with a few small, familiarly narrow tables sprinkled throughout.
When I regrouped and caught my breath, I realized Zeetha was no longer with us.
“She had to run some errands,” Xioumar explained when I questioned her absence.
We sat at a table in the darkest corner. I realized I’d been sweating. The aliens ran so hot that they heated the entire market, and pressing against them to get from one stall to the next was like colliding with tiny heaters. I noticed none of them induced the buzz of current on contact like Xioumar had, however.
“Why is your skin different?” I asked him when a tall, older Xiorn set three bowls of meat and another of hydrating bulbs at the table and left us alone.
Xioumar cocked his head. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
Feeling brave, I reached out to run a finger gingerly along his forearm, tracing a line to his wrist, across the dips of his hands. The electric buzz sent a pulsing tingle from my fingertip to my wrist.
“You don’t feel that?” I asked.
Xioumar flipped his hand slowly under mine, resting it palm up on the table. The lines on his palms ran in a different configuration to those of a human; I traced them with my index finger absently, observing the buzzing sensation.
“Strange,” I thought to myself, “how comforting that little shock has become.”
“I did not know you felt it, too. I thought…” Xioumar frowned.
“What?”
“I didn’t know your kind can feel our currents.”
“We can’t. I can’t. I only feel yours.” I scraped the tip of my nail along the calluses under his fingers and saw a shudder run through him. I pulled my hand away.
“We sense each other’s currents, the life force as we call it. But to what extent depends on the individual. The more Xiorn bodies fit, the stronger the sensation. Some bodies are constructed for one another like puzzle pieces,” he explained. “Back on your planet, I felt the humans’ currents, too. With each greeting, or brush of the elbow, I felt their life force. But they were muted, incompatible; all except yours. When we clasped elbows at the introduction…”
He intertwined his fingers with mine. My stomach twisted into knots as his “current” invaded my body, coursing up my arm and into my chest.
“That’s why I had to take you. I couldn’t let that other female become my Kept when I knew… When I knew there was more in you.” Xioumar leaned forward, something new in his eyes. Excitement? Joy? I looked at our tangled fingers, his thumb tracing electric circles on the back of my hand.
He brought his other hand under my chin, tilted my head towards him, and closed the distance between us. Sparks exploded behind my eyes as our lips connected. My head buzzed, on fire with the current coursing between us. His two-pronged tongue nudged my lips apart as he deepened the kiss. My tongue met his own gently, tentatively, coaxed into curiosity by his own. A small moan escaped my throat as nipped my lower lip between his teeth, tugging gently before our mouths parted.
I cleared my throat and leaned back, suddenly very focused on the myriad of bowls of meat on the table. I picked a few of the more bloody pieces I knew Xioumar preferred and placed them in his empty bowl, busying my hands and eyes, focusing on anything but the alien before me. He did the same, picking out strips of roasted kor and piercing a bulb for me.
We ate in silence. I took the time to mull over what was happening, and try to untangle what I actually felt for this alien that I was meant to despise from the very core of my being.