Page 43 of Xel: Broken Bond

“We took a shortcut through the Folian wormhole,” Rohinavon replied.

I snorted, partly in amusement and partly in disbelief. I could only assume she was joking. “The Folian wormhole is guarded by eight different sensor beacons. Nothing gets through there undetected. You said you were on a smuggling ship, right?”

“Yes,” Rohinavon agreed. “And I paid hima lotof money to bring me here. So yes, we jumped through the Folian wormhole, and yes, we did so undetected.”

I frowned. “Well, that probably answers my next question, then. I was going to ask how you got through the Rendol wormhole, particularly now that we’ve got Culrad technology in our sensors. But if you managed to get through the Folis system…” I shrugged. That must have been one hell of a fancy ship to work around that much technology.

But the more I thought about it, the more questions I had. “How old is your son?” I asked next. But before she could answer, a low rumbling sound filled the air, and I instinctively looked out the window, though there was little chance I could see anything useful from here. “That sounds like Aiden. Bloody hell, he really was in a hurry to get here,” I muttered. It couldonly have been a total of about twenty minutes since I’d called him, and he would have needed ten of those to get across the city. “I’m going to go meet him. Xel, can you stay here with Rohinavon?”

“Yes, sir,” he replied, stern and serious, and I wondered what he would do if she actually tried to leave. Thankfully, she seemed to be willing to cooperate, though she was still wary of our intentions.

“I won’t be long,” I said. I shoved my feet into my boots then made a run for the back paddock, praying that nothing went wrong in the time it took me to collect Aiden and get back to the kitchen.

CHAPTER TWENTY

XEL

“I’m sorry I was rude to you before,” Rohinavon said, the instant my master was out of the house. "It's not your fault that you’re here. It’s just that I worked so hard to find somewhere to go, and I spent all the money I had on the smuggler, and it was a shock to think that this might not be somewhere safe after all.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. It seemed that my previous master had not been a good man, and I was currently having some very mixed feelings about that. And some very mixed feelings about Rohinavon, as well. I’d never given any great consideration to what a Vangravian female might be like, but nonetheless, Rohinavon was quite startling. “You care about him very much, don’t you?” I asked. “Your son, I mean.”

“Yes, I do.” Then she took note of my frown, and matched it with a scowl of her own. “Does that bother you? Do you think I shouldn’t care about a male child?”

This entire week – ever since my master had died – had been a long and arduous venture as I tried to figure out who I was and what was happening and what was expected of me. Seeing thetiny creature in her pouch – barely even big enough to be called a baby – I felt a growing understanding about why I’d been so angry about Rose giving birth to her calf. Because for a few moments, I’d felt an equal fury about Rohinavon’s child.

“We have a thumbit in the barn,” I told Rohinavon. A moment after I’d said it, I considered that she might not know what that was. If she didn’t know anything about food from other planets, it wasn’t likely she would know about their wildlife either. “A thumbit is a farm animal. They walk on four legs and can carry packs for migrating people. One of them gave birth to a calf a couple of days ago.”

Rohinavon waited, and I was grateful that she wasn’t impatient. I was already having enough trouble figuring out what I was trying to say. “I was very angry when the calf was born. And then I was very angry when you threatened my master back in the barn. But not because I was worried about his safety,” I went on, already knowing she would be jumping to the wrong conclusion. She seemed to view my loyalty to my master with derision, rather than respect. “I was angry because you’re willing to put your own life at risk to protect your son.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” she challenged me. “Do you think it’s inappropriate that I want to protect him?”

I was silent for a moment, breathing slowly and deeply to try and quiet the raging thoughts in my head. “No,” I said eventually. “It’s entirely appropriate for a mother to protect her child. For a thumbit to protect her calf. But it makes me angry because…” I felt my hands trembling, and clasped them together in my lap. “Because no one ever wanted to protect me.”

My gaze was fixed on the floor, shame and embarrassment and grief and anger all warring for space in my head. Why was her child, this helpless little scrap of flimsy arms and legs, any different from the child I had once been? Why had the woman who birthed me not cared even half as much as Rohinavonclearly did? I’d spent the early years of my life working as hard as I could to please my trainers, and when I’d succeeded, I’d been rewarded.Rewarded, but neverloved. And then I’d been shipped off to meet my master – a man whom my trainers had assured me would love me, but Mr Ronson never had. I wasn’t even sure he’dappreciatedme. He’d ordered me to work, and ordered me to take his cock, and told me I was a good boy for doing both. But love? I didn’t think so.

And then I’d been sent here, to a new master who didn’t want me, and didn’t understand me… and why the fuck was Rohinavon’s son so very different and special? Why should he have what I never had?

“I want…” Rohinavon began, but then cut herself off. “That’s one of the reasons I’m here,” she tried again. “I want to change… everything. Every year, there are millions more children being born into a corrupt system, being forced to grow up in a dichotomy of elitist power or unrepentant slavery. I want that to stop. I want…” She paused again, her brow furrowed in concentration. “Who’s Aiden?” she demanded suddenly. “Cole said he was a friend, but he seems awfully insistent about Aiden coming here, and he’s apparently coming in a shuttle, or a hill-jumper, or some other very fast aircraft, which a normal civilian would not have access to. Not on Vangal, at least. Are things so different here?”

I spent a few seconds weighing up the pros and cons of answering her. “No,” I said a moment later. “Not so different.”

“So who is he? And first and foremost, is he going to cause me problems?”

That was a harder question to answer. I knew relatively little about Aiden, since I’d only spent a couple of hours with him. But what I did know was that Aiden had brought me here, to my new master, and said master so far didn’t understand me and refused to sleep with me. But at the same time, he ate his meals with me,and invited me to spend time with him, and let me adopt pets to live in the house with us. It was a difficult thing to judge on only three days’ experience, but the situation was slowly but surely improving.

Back at the hotel, Aiden had let Kathy join our discussion, and he’d taken her concerns about my safety seriously, and Kade had been allowed to speak his mind. On the whole, that was a very odd thing for a dimari, but since my bond with my master had been broken, I was re-evaluating a lot of the things I’d been taught to believe in, including the idea that a dimari should not have opinions of their own.

“I don’t know Aiden well,” I admitted to Rohinavon. “But everything I’ve seen of him so far points to a man who tries to be honourable and respectful. As for who he is… He works for the military, making sure all the dimari on Rendol 4 are being looked after properly.”

Rohinavon rose from her seat, a look of fury on her face. “Your master has invited the military here to control me? To arrest me?”

“No,” I corrected her, remaining both calm and seated. “He’s coming to help you. I firmly believe that. They both have good intentions, even if they don’t always know what the best course of action is.”

“If the Alliance Parliament finds out about my son, we could both end up dead.”

I considered that. “According to what you said earlier, you’ve roused the anger of the entire Vangravian species. Or the female half of it, at least. So you don’t just need a place to hide. If you’re going to survive this, you’re going to need some powerful allies.”

Rohinavon shook her head and rubbed her eyes. “This was all so much simpler in my head.”