by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from Nexus Nine. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead.
Mazel dreamed fitfully of her past lives. Her body changed from small and fluffy to gangly and short-furred, leaving her wobbling and off-balance, then her long, canine legs stretched like taffy being pulled until they became coiling tentacles. Dogs and cats who had been close to Rheun but had died years ago — or hundreds of years ago — whispered to Mazel, saying words she couldn’t quite hear. Mazel woke abruptly from the dream, startled awake by the sensation within the dream of her tentacles calcifying into chitinous legs that only bent in a few places. More places than her feline legs. But so few compared to the infinite bending of a tentacle.
Her heart raced. And her shoulder ached from the hardness of the cot. If she found her way back to her own personal quarters, she could unpack the bags she’d brought to Nexus Nine Base with her and maybe sleep better. She had a patchwork quilt that she’d sewn as a kitten, a bonding project with her father who liked sewing and had wanted to teach her. Each patch had come from fabric cut out of clothes she’d loved but outgrown or scraps she’d bought with her allowance during trips to the fabric store. The quilt was plush and comfy and full of memories — but quiet memories that stayed nicely in their own pieces of fabric rather than reshaping the inside of her mind.
Mazel would sleep much better curled up in her beloved blanket. But she was awake now, and she decided to start her day early. She wanted to start finding answers.
Mazel used the food synthesizer to summon a simple breakfast. Well, she tried to, anyway. The breakfast she programmed into the synthesizer was piping hot pancakes with sunny side up eggs on top. The breakfast that actually sparkled into existence inside the synthesizer looked more like a weird scrambled egg breakfast casserole — the eggs and pancakes had been all mixed together into a mushy pastiche. Neera had warned Mazel that the synthesizers were likely to malfunction… She sent in a request for repairs.
The eggy maple confection didn’t taste as bad as it looked, so Mazel picked at it while sifting through all of the data she could find stored on the station’s computers about Nexus Nine.
The scientific data was limited — ninety years ago one of the first Avioran space flights, Wing One, had passed through the nexus and returned safely. The pilot of Wing One swore she’d experienced visions of the Unhatched during her time flying through the nexus, which she referred to as the Sky Nest. Wing One’s shipboard computers recorded star patterns on the far side of the nexus that guaranteed the passageway led to an entirely different galaxy, not one of the Tri-Galaxies.
Mazel spent some time trying to pattern match the astral configurations from Wing One’s recordings to any of the star patterns in the two new galaxies that had been discovered beyond Nexus Seven and Nexus Eight, called Efta and Octo, respectively. She had no luck. Of course, Wing One had stayed in the foreign galaxy beyond Nexus Nine for less than an hour total, and the recorded data was extremely limited.
Mazel couldn’t completely rule out that Nexus Nine led to either Efta or Octo. She tried to remember that, even if Nexus Nine led to Efta or Octo instead of a sixth galaxy, it could still be the nexus passageway she remembered, dimly, passing through in her far, far past. And Efta and Octo had barely been explored by the Tri-Galactic Union so far. She could still find her origins in one of them.
But Mazel hoped that Nexus Nine led to a galaxy that hadn’t been explored at all before. Fresh and brand new. Or maybe, deeply familiar. Maybe… home.
Mazel shook her head to clear the strange thought from her mind. Her home didn’t lie on the far side of any nexus passageway, no matter what her studies uncovered. Her home was on Earth with the parents and littermates she’d grown up with. In this lifetime. She couldn’t let the weight of memories subsume who she was now.
An unpleasant, atonal chime emanated from the door, and when Mazel went to check, she found Lieutenant O’Neill — West Highland Terrier and alleged wizard — flanked by two Avioran officers in the corridor, each of them bundled up with arms full (or wings full) of equipment. They even had a trolley behind them, loaded up with equipment as well.
“This isn’t everything you requested,” O’Neill barked, barging his way into the quarters. The Aviorans followed him, pulling the trolley behind them. “In fact, some of it, you didn’t request at all.” O’Neill placed a big mechanical box on the cot where Mazel had slept. The Aviorans followed suit. She wouldn’t be sleeping there again any time soon.
O’Neill continued explaining, as he sorted through the equipment: “But we had some scanners delivered for your lab before you arrived, and then some of this stuff is cobbled together from Reptassan left-overs and Quincy’s black market operation. I know, I know, TG-Union doesn’t do black market–” He held his fuzzy white paws up defensively. “–but Nexus Nine Base is weird and different, and I’m just trying to bandage this open wound of a space station into working, any way I can.”
“I won’t tell,” Mazel swore.
The Aviorans helped get all of the equipment off of the trolley, and then O’Neill dismissed them. The terrier and cat were left alone, surrounded by towering piles of scientific devices, none of them operational.
“I’ll be working on your lab all day,” O’Neill said. “Getting everything set up and working. Any requests? As to the order I install these in? Or where any of it goes?”
“Anywhere it fits,” Mazel answered, already having reconciled herself to losing the cot. She would need to find her own quarters before tonight.
The terrier looked around the plain quarters, perhaps gauging whether there would be enough power sources or whether he’d have to do rewiring. “These are really nice quarters,” O’Neill mused. “Large. And most of them don’t have windows, but then I suppose you need to be on the outer edge of the ring to tap into the station’s main arrays. And First Race knows you need the space!” The ramshackle, uninstalled equipment had already filled most of it, wires and power cords dangling from them with potential.
“While you’re here,” Mazel said, “you should know that the food synthesizer was malfunctioning earlier.”
“Not surprising,” O’Neill observed. “Good to know, though, since I’ll be installing a number of these power hungry devices into the synthesizer. It’s the perfect power conduit, but I’ll definitely want to get it fixed first, so it doesn’t fry them with unpredictable surges.”
This meant no more snacks in the lab. Mazel sighed. She really would have to find her own quarters. She thought about asking O’Neill if he could change the horrifying atonal sound of the door chime, but compared to everything else happening, it just seemed too trivial. She needed to get used to a certain level of discomfort on this retrofitted Reptassan station.
The terrier went to one of the walls and began removing screws from a panel. Once the metal panel came down with a teeth-gritting screech, he dug his paws deep into the wiring inside, quietly swearing to himself the whole time about cold-blooded engineers and their tail-backwards designs.
Mazel could see she wasn’t going to get any more work done in the lab today. Too many distractions. She downloaded everything she could find in the station’s computer tagged with “Wing One” or “Sky Nest” into a port-screen and excused herself. O’Neill didn’t seem to notice her leaving.
Mazel wandered the corridors of Nexus Nine Base for a while, familiarizing herself with the sinuous layout. The corridors coiled back and forth, doubling back on themselves more than on a Tri-Galactic Union designed space station, and the doors were set back from the hall in intimidating archways. Everything was built out of dark materials — slate gray, steel gray, gun-metal gray. But the lights were bright, almost like heat lamps. Mazel’s creamsicle and white fur and pale uniform reflected the yellow light fairly well, but the brightness soaked into the dark gray walls and floor, radiating back out in an oppressive warmth.
Cold-blooded architecture, Mazel supposed.
Eventually, Mazel found her own quarters — #347. The number was posted clearly beside the door, but she hadn’t yet discerned the pattern governing which order the numbers were in. Once inside, Mazel laid the port-screen with her reading material down on the cot and got to the business of unpacking. She only had a few bags. Tri-Galactic Navy officers were encouraged to travel light. In space, every gram counts. Besides, most useful objects could be synthesized when needed.
Mazel spread her patchwork quilt over the cot and synthesized a couple of fluffy pillows to go with it. Well, she tried to. The pillows came out lumpy and flat. Still, better than nothing.
Mazel placed her few sentimental mementos around the room — a confusing mix of pictures and knick-knacks from her childhood as Mazel and precious objects saved from previous lives. She had a flute that she’d never played with her current body and a curved sword, much too large for her. But each of them had traveled with her for longer than Mazel had been alive. She hung them on the bare walls with hooks from the synthesizer. At least those came out right.
Mazel’s precious souvenirs from her most recent kittenhood felt strangely cheap and shallow in comparison to the gravitas of these objects that had belonged to her for lifetimes but had barely touched her paws in the brief time since she’d inherited the Rheun chip. These were the objects that had survived from one host of the Rheun chip to the next, deemed important enough to be kept even though they’d belonged to her when she’d been someone else.
Mazel lay on the cot and read the port-screen. She discovered that most of the material she’d downloaded was Avioran scripture and scriptural analysis. Religious writings. She should have expected that. The nexus was a religious icon to the Aviorans, and everything they wrote about it had been filtered through that lens.
Nonetheless, there was a lot to be learned from the Avioran writings — they’d been studying the nexus faithfully for as long as they’d had language. The information had to be translated from poetry into data, but the data was still there.
Specifically, she knew that the nexus had been appearing in their skies for centuries; she knew it appeared irregularly. Sometimes the Sky Nest appeared multiple times in a year, and other times, it stayed dormant for decades.
Mazel knew from researching the other eight nexuses that the passageways were generally only visible — with their brightly colored fireworks-like displays — when something passed through them. Of course, the object passing through a nexus passageway and triggering its photonic exhibition could be anything from fully crewed spaceships — or fleets of them — down to particles of space dust.
Since there was no record of aliens from a distant galaxy descending on Avia, Mazel imagined that most of the Sky Nest’s appearances could be chalked up to space dust. There might be an unusually thick cloud near the passageway.
The atonal door chime rudely interrupted Mazel’s scientific musings and shook her out of her reverie. When she answered the door, she found Captain Bataille on the other side, bearing an opened flagon of peanut butter beer.
“I didn’t know if you’d still like the stuff,” Bataille said, shifting the flagon between his paws nervously. Peanut butter beer had been Darius’ favorite.
Mazel wanted to say, “Of course! I still love it!” But she knew the yeasty brew wouldn’t agree with her. And she’d spent enough months confused by her own choices, unsure of what she really wanted, that she’d had to develop guidelines. And number one on the list was — no matter how much she’d enjoyed eating something in a previous lifetime, she needed to respect the body she lived in now. And Mazel didn’t care for beer.
Bataille’s triangular ears flicked back; he could sense her hesitancy and was reacting to it. The ease that had existed between Mazel and Bataille yesterday was slipping away, and Mazel was desperate to hold onto it. Shep was her anchor here. As long as he knew her, she knew that she hadn’t totally lost herself by coming here. Because Mazel Tabbith would never have accepted — let alone requested — this mission.
“I don’t drink beer anymore,” Mazel admitted. She checked the time on the port-screen that she was still clutching in her paws. The time was much later than she’d expected — she’d spent all day reading about the Sky Nest. “But you know, I’d love to get some dinner and catch up like you suggested yesterday.” She tucked her port-screen into one of her uniform’s pockets.
“Let’s do it,” Bataille woofed. “After you.” He gestured for her to lead the way.
“You don’t want me leading the way,” Mazel said as she stepped out of her quarters and into the bright light of the hallway. She’d dimmed the lights in her quarters for a more muted, peaceful atmosphere. “We’d never get anywhere. I spent ages wandering through these decks this morning before I found my way back to my quarters. I’m seriously thinking about synthesizing up a loaf of bread so I can leave bread crumbs to lead me home. I’m just worried about–”
“–what the synthesizers will actually give you.” Shep laughed. “Yeah, Lt. O’Neill has been busy since I got here fixing broken synthesizers. It’s like a blasted whack-a-mole game.”
Mazel wondered how well that phrase would hold up if the Tri-Galactic Union ever discovered a race of sentient moles. Not well, she expected.
“Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking,” Bataille said. “And I’ll drop ‘whack-a-mole’ from my vocabulary the very minute I meet one. Okay?”
Now Mazel laughed. “You did know what I was thinking,” she marveled.
“Sure, I did.” Bataille began striding down the corridor with his long legs, but he quickly adjusted his pace when he noticed Mazel was having trouble keeping up. “We’ve only been friends since we were puppies, Big Dog.”
“But… does that mean I was only thinking it because Darius would have?” Mazel wondered.
“Hah, oh my, you sound just like Darius used to after getting the Rheun chip from that bear–”
“–Augrula. I loved being her.”
“Right,” Bataille agreed. “That’s what Darius always used to say too. She sounded awesome. Regardless, I’m going to tell you now the same thing that I told you back then.” Bataille stopped and turned to look Mazel directly in the eyes. He tucked the flagon of peanut butter beer under an arm and placed a large paw on each of her shoulders. “You are my friend. You are yourself. No matter who that self is–” His muzzle skewed into a lopsided grin as he adjusted the words. “–she is awesome, and I feel lucky to know her.”
Mazel nodded, trying to take the words in. They were familiar in a deep way. They were words that had pulled her together a lifetime ago, before she’d even been born. “Thank you. I knew I needed to come–” She wanted to say “home to you.” Instead she said, “–be near you. I knew that serving with you would steady me.”
“My pleasure,” Bataille said, leading the way down the hall again. “Now what was this about not finding your way back to your quarters until this morning? I don’t have officers sleeping on the bulkheads, do I?” He shot her a leering grin. “Or did that charming squirrel doctor make a big impression on you?”
“Oh goodness,” Mazel said. “He is quite something, isn’t he? Though he comes on a bit strong.” This was better. This was the comfortable give and take that she expected from her best friend.
“Well, I know he would have turned Darius’ head,” Shep said. “I’m just not sure if you have the same type.”
“Honestly, I’m not sure either,” Mazel said. A year ago, she knew exactly what type of tomcat she liked. There was nothing that made her swoon more than crisp stripes that came into adorable little Vs right above bright green eyes. And thick white whiskers sprouting out of dimpled dots of dark fur on a paler muzzle… Oh, just the thought of such a tom made her feel all faint and fluttery. She’d had crushes on a series of just such toms during her kittenhood schooling and years in the academy.
And yet… Now she had memories of fifty-year-long marriages; deep, long-lasting, complicated loves. Why, she’d met the love of her life more times than she could count on her claw tips. And those beloved life partners had ranged from short to tall, husky to bony, fluffy to short furred… and when she remembered far enough back, smooth skin and even tentacles…
Mazel could feel her heart skip when she remembered the faces of each of them. Red fur and floppy ears; shaggy blonde curls and a big black nose; clear blue Siamese eyes. Each one had changed what she found attractive.
One of them was still alive.
“Have you talked to…” She couldn’t bring herself to say her husband’s name with a mouth that had never kissed his.
“He contacted me, shortly after you… Darius… died,” Shep said. “He said… to look out for you. He knew you’d come to me.”
Mazel smiled sadly. “He knew it before I did. Is Jeb…” She choked on her son’s name.
“He’s okay,” Shep said. “Sad, of course. But he sends me updates. He won an award for his latest science project in school and wanted to show it off to Uncle Shep.”
“Good for him.” Mazel stiffened her whiskers, refusing to let the wave of emotion overtake her. She was young. She’d never had a son. She didn’t have a husband. She had… memories.
Another one of the rules she’d had to make for herself — but she’d made this one lifetimes ago — was that she didn’t go back to romantic relationships from previous lives. It almost never went well. It wasn’t fair to her new selves… or her old beloveds.
Mazel Rheun was a different person than Darius Rheun, and she couldn’t step back into his life like he hadn’t died. But she could continue her friendship with Shep.
“Buck up, Big Dog,” Shep said. “They know the deal. No one’s expecting you to run home and fold yourself into a family that Darius started before Mazel was born.”
“I’m not that young,” Mazel objected.
“I’m saying that you’re not a delinquent father,” Shep said, suddenly serious. “I know Darius worried about that a lot, and who could blame you — him — given what his dad was like. But Darius was a great father. And now… you’re done being a father. For now, anyway.” Shep bumped his arm against Mazel’s much lower shoulder in a friendly, jostling way. “I don’t know what Mazel’s plans are. Care to enlighten me?”
They came to the elevator, and this time it slid into place smoothly and promptly, almost as if it were actually responding to Shep pushing the button for it.
“Did O’Neill have time to fix that since yesterday?” Mazel asked, ducking Shep’s bigger question about her life plans.
“He fixes it every day,” Shep answered as they stepped into the elevator together.
As they descended toward the esplanade, Mazel found herself identifying with the wonky, temperamental space station and also the dog who kept fixing it. She had to fix herself every day too. Maybe some day, the fixes would take, and she could just live through a day without figuring herself out from scratch all over again. She remembered times in her life — her long life, the one lived by Rheun — when the trail of memories following her had felt like a blessing instead of a burden. She tried to believe those days would come again.
The elevator doors opened onto the esplanade, and dark metal walls were replaced with star studded vistas. The progress that had been made overnight was stunning. There was still rubble, but it had been gathered into piles along the walls. Scorch marks had been scrubbed away. And a couple of the little shops had been decorated with brightly colored silken banners.
“This looks better,” Mazel said, impressed.
“Of course it does,” Shep agreed, leading the way toward Scharm’s Bar. “This is going to be the next big destination for Tri-Galactic Union research soon. A central hub of activity! It’s got to look the part.”
“Yeah, but how did you…”
“I leased a portion of the esplanade to Quincy,” Shep said. “It’s unorthodox, but blasted if that Phiboon doesn’t know how to get things done! He hired a bunch of Aviorans and sub-leased sections out to others. He’ll take a cut of the profits from most of the shops around here.”
“Why not put an Avioran in charge?”
“None of them wanted the commitment. Most of them hate this place,” Shep said.
“Right, the Viper’s Perch.” Mazel tucked a paw into the pocket with her port-screen and touched the device, thinking about everything she’d read about the Avioran’s beliefs.
Instead of Scharm’s Bar, Bataille directed Mazel toward a hole in the wall behind a draping, blue, silk curtain. “Do you still like Ursine food?” he asked.
“I think I do…” Mazel answered. In all honesty, she hadn’t eaten any Ursine food since changing. And Mazel Tabbith hadn’t eaten Ursine food ever. So, she wasn’t sure. “I… I don’t know. But… I’d like to try?” She remembered Ursine food as being rich and meaty, coated in crispy, honey-soaked skins, and served on beds of wriggling worms. She didn’t know how she felt about eating wriggling worms anymore… but the crispy, honey-soaked skins sounded delicious.
An Ursine man dressed in what looked like a suit of chainmail armor showed the captain and Lieutenant Rheun to a table, one of only five in the establishment. It was a small place, and the only windows were on the floor beneath their feet. Blue silk draped over all of the walls, and combined with the bright, warm lights, the effect had a sunshine feel — blue skies over a black sea. Except the sea stretched down forever. And the restaurant was only a small collection of lifeboats, rafted together and adrift on the ocean.
The Ursine man took their order — Mazel let Shep do the ordering, except she asked for a glass of sardine wine — and then disappeared into the back, leaving them to talk. They were the only patrons in the restaurant, so while Mazel knew better than to tell secrets on the esplanade — since apparently Quincy could be anywhere — she felt comfortable and safe talking openly about her life over the last year.
Shep was careful whenever he talked about Darius’ family; Mazel could tell he was trying to feel out how much she actually wanted to know. He respected that she needed her distance. At least for now. Perhaps later, when she was more settled into being Mazel Rheun, she could find a way to connect with Darius’ son. A new kind of connection. She would like — eventually — to be Jebastion’s friend, and not lose him completely from her life.
For now, though, she settled for listening to Shep’s second- hand tales. She was proud of that boy. Jebastion would be a good friend to have. Some day.
If he wanted to be friends with a cat who was a little older than him but remembered being his father…
“Rheun?” Shep said.
“Yes?” Mazel looked up from the plate of meat and wriggly worms that she’d been idly poking with her extended claws.
“You were drifting again,” Shep said. “That’s all.”
“I seem to do that a lot these days.” Mazel tried to smile, but she could feel that it didn’t reach all the way to her whiskers.
One of the silky blue curtains drew back, and Commander Neera stepped through with a creature Mazel hadn’t seen before. It looked almost like another cat with pointy ears and fuzzy white and orange splotched fur, but it moved wrong, too stilted and jerky, bending in slightly the wrong places. The effect was eerie and unnerving.
“Who’s that?” Mazel asked the captain.
“With Commander Neera? That’s the local chief of security,” Shep answered. “Zhe’s been the chief of security here through three administrations now — the Reptassans, Neera’s Avioran skeleton crew, and now mine. I’ve been trying to convince zim to work with Tri-Galactic Navy officers, but zhe’s very set in zir ways and has a retinue of Avioran officers zhe prefers working with.”
“Wait, you can’t mean Chief Omoleura…” Mazel said, staring harder at the creature. She could believe this strange creature was another insect, but it didn’t look at all like Omoleura. It didn’t have noticeable wings, instead favoring a more mammalian-style bipedal stance. And its face was… weird; like Mazel’s own feline face, right down to her asymmetrical markings, had been shakily hand-painted on a piece of creamy white velvet and draped over a lumpy head. But definitely not beaked. Yet… a cluster of multi-faceted eyes were tucked away, nearly hidden beneath the creature’s chin in exactly the same way as Omoleura’s had been.
“But…” Mazel stuttered, struggling with reconciling these two wildly different insects. “I met zim yesterday… zhe looked…”
“Like an insect camouflaged as a bird?” Shep prompted. “Yes, zhe usually looks that way, but zhe changes from day to day.”
“Really?” Mazel’s voice lowered to a near whisper as Neera and her friend came closer. “Then how do you recognize zim?”
Omoleura approached their table and raised zir arms — each feline-looking arm seemingly constructed out of two multiply-segmented insectile arms held close together, all covered with creamy white and orange fuzz. Mazel found herself wondering how many different uniforms Omoleura had to keep in order to fit zir extremely changeable body. Or did zhe synthesize a new one every day?
“Because I’m unique,” Omoleura declared, vibrating zir pairs of insectile arms that in concert looked like singular feline arms. As long as Mazel didn’t look too closely. “If you see someone on the station who… doesn’t fit. Doesn’t look like anyone else. Doesn’t quite… belong–” Omoleura spun around, nearly dancing. “–then that’s me! Chief of Security Omoleura! One of a kind!”
Neera twittered in amusement. She seemed extremely fond of the unusual insect. “I see the captain has shown you where the high-ranking officers hang out after hours.” Neera directed her statement to Mazel, but she nodded curtly at the captain. “Mind if we join the two of you?”
Shep took a moment before answering, making sure to catch Mazel’s eye and measure her response. But Mazel was happy to spend more time with the crusty bird. Neera intrigued her, possibly even more than the bizarre chief of security who was seemingly imitating Mazel today.
“Not at all,” Shep said.
Omoleura and Neera each grabbed a chair from the neighboring tables, all of which were still empty, and pulled them up to Shep and Mazel’s table. The Ursine waiter — possibly the chef and owner too, given how small the place was — came over and took their orders, chainmail suit clanking with his every move.
Soon the four officers had a feast on the table between them and the place still to themselves.
Neera ate none of the meat, but she eagerly accepted all of the wriggling worms that Mazel didn’t want. So the cat dumped her pile of worms onto the plate of the bird. Omoleura ate delicately, almost nervously, like zhe was waiting for the others to look away before taking dainty nibbles at the honey crusted meat. Mazel could understand why — zir face split open sideways in a pair of mandibles, completely destroying the illusion of felinity.
After her glass of sardine wine had been refilled twice and the conversation had ranged far and wide, Mazel finally blurted out at Omoleura, “Why do you look like me? Yesterday, you looked like Neera, sort of, but now… why me?”
Omoleura put down the piece of meat zhe’d been nibbling on, straightened up, and seemed to draw a deep breath… except, Mazel didn’t think Omoleura breathed in the same way as birds and mammals. “I don’t know,” the insect answered at long last. An anti-climactic answer.
“I’m sorry,” Mazel said, abashed. “Was that a terribly rude question?” She rushed on, a little too tipsy to wait for the answer: “I wouldn’t have asked outright like that, except I think sardine wine affects me differently now that I have this Rheun chip in my head…” She held the glass of opalescent wine up to the light and swirled the oily liquid around. “I do love it though. And sometimes I just want to feel like myself, you know? My old self.”
When Mazel looked away from the wine glass, all three of the others were looking at her, not saying anything.
“Maybe you don’t know…” she said, mostly to Omoleura. “If you change so much, even more often than I do… was there ever a time when you felt most like yourself?”
“I feel most like myself these days when I look like an Avioran,” Omoleura answered. “I feel… discomfited when I change into something as new–” Zhe gestured at zirself. “–as this.”
“New?” Mazel’s ears perked up in surprise. She couldn’t imagine that mimicking any of the other Tri-Galactic Union cats — or small dogs — who’d been on Nexus Nine Base for the last few weeks could be all that different from mimicking her. Neera had barely been able to tell her and Lt. O’Neill apart. To Omoleura, they must look at least as similar.
“It used to be,” Omoleura said, leaning back from the table, giving zirself a little more space, “that I’d go into a chrysalis and change into a new form every time I met a new creature. When I was very young, it didn’t even matter if they were sentient. Just one day after the other, new form after form. Every night, I’d…” Omoleura hesitated, seemingly judging whether to proceed. “I don’t know how graphic I should be.”
Mazel blurted out, “They had to cut my skull open to shove the Rheun chip into the slimy gray folds of my brain. I was able to watch the whole thing in a mirror while they did it. Totally conscious, brain exposed to dry air. Couldn’t feel a blasted thing.”
“I think what Big Dog’s trying to say,” Shep said, “is go ahead and be as graphic as you like.”
Neera shrugged her wings. “I’ve heard it all before. Plummeting winds! I’ve even seen it. You can’t creep out me.”
Omoleura’s faux face couldn’t smile, since it was constructed of differently colored patches of fuzz on a stiff exoskeleton, but zhe shifted zir double legs in a way that seemed to show greater comfort. “It feels like my insides turn to liquid… and I spit up silk, so much silk. I think it really is my insides, melting and reforming into a chrysalis shell that I spread over myself. Then I sleep. By the time I wake up, the chrysalis shell has grown brittle and breaks open. When I emerge… I’m someone new.”
Omoleura’s multi-faceted eyes seemed to glint at Mazel, and the insect added, “I mean, I look like someone new. On the outside. On the inside, I always feel the same. I can’t even imagine having my mind combined with another mind, full of lifetimes of memories.”
Mazel sat up straight, the fur on her shoulders bristling under her uniform.
“No offense meant,” Omoleura droned.
“None taken,” Mazel said, trying to understand her own reaction and sort out her complicated feelings. “I mean, I can’t imagine being like you either. Having my body change like yours does, frequently, unexpectedly, and out of my control? That sounds terrifying.”
“It is sometimes,” Omoleura admitted. “But it’s not entirely out of my control. Not any more. That’s why I was so surprised to go into a chrysalis last night. I hadn’t been planning to.”
“You plan to?” Shep asked, nudging the conversation back into motion when it lulled, like any good sheep dog would.
Neera seemed unconcerned by the sudden awkwardness at the table, and Mazel was caught up in her own musings.
“Oh, yes,” Omoleura said, answering the captain. “If I don’t go into my chrysalis every so often, I get all stiff and brittle. I’m no good for anything that way.”
“I think,” Mazel said, letting her thoughts trip out of her mouth almost before she’d formed them, “that I was bothered by the idea that you can’t imagine being like me… because in some ways, you seem more like me, living through all those changes, than anyone else I know.”
“I feel the same way!” Omoleura exclaimed, seemingly so excited that zhe shifted zir entire body in a way that completely destroyed the illusion of zir camouflage, distorting the illusion of felinity entirely. “I think that’s why I went into my chrysalis last night and came out this way. When Jerysha told me about your Rheun chip…” Omoleura settled back into the semblance of a calico cat, mirroring Mazel. “…I just hadn’t felt a connection like that with anyone before. I hoped… maybe you’d be someone who could understand me.”
“Well, I can understand that feeling,” Mazel said. She held her glass of sardine wine up and gestured with her other paw, indicating Omoleura should raise zir glass of fizzing green liquor. When zhe did, Mazel clinked their glasses together. “Cheers,” she said.
“Cheers,” Omoleura responded in a cheerfully cello-like tone.
“Oh! It’s like this poem in the Book of the Unhatched,” Mazel exclaimed, remembering one of the passages of scripture she’d read earlier that day. She recited, carefully, making sure to get each word exactly right: “Though some may swim through waters deep, and others run over grasslands quick, let those in the sky remember, wings are not flight — flight is different unto each who experiences it. Flight is freedom.”
“That’s beautiful,” Shep said.
“Is it right?” Mazel asked Neera. The bird looked stunned, and Mazel was worried she’d accidentally butchered a sacred piece of scripture. Or worse, maybe she shouldn’t have been quoting it at all. Maybe only priests — Vees — were aloud to speak the Book of the Unhatched aloud.
“It was perfect,” Neera said. “I just…” She tilted her head. Her feathers looked especially blue in a room draped with blue silk all around. “I didn’t expect you to know it.”
“I’ve been studying the Sky Nest,” Mazel said. “I want to be respectful with my studies.”
Neera nodded solemnly and folded her wings behind her. The conversation drifted on, but then suddenly, out of nowhere, Neera squawked, “I’ll take you to talk to the Vee tomorrow. We can’t bring a Broken Twig to the station, but if I vouch for you, the Vee can get you a session with the Twig of Foresight at the Temple of Yunib. We’ll need to borrow a shuttlecraft to get down to the surface.”
“Done,” the captain said. Then he raised a paw. “If I can come. I’ve been hearing about these Broken Twigs since I got here, and they sound fascinating.”
Neera agreed, and the party broke up shortly thereafter. They would all need a good night’s sleep if they were going down to Avia in the morning.
Continue on to Chapter 4…