13
EVE
“More water?” Cleopatra asked. “Or salami? Did you have enough salami?”
She was shoving the water and salami in my face as she shuffle-stepped alongside the sled.
We’d managed to find a sled which had been abandoned outside of a cabin in the woods. Tschenkar had insisted I lay on it, and he forbade me to even walk. Cleopatra and Julia had enthusiastically taken his side.
“Midwife,” Julia said, throwing a heating pad to Cleopatra, “warm the water before you give it to her.”
“Good idea, Auntie,” Cleopatra said.
They’d changed their names and given themselves new roles. Midwife Cleopatra had decided she would help me give birth. Until that happened, she’d decided to just fidget constantly over me, making sure I was hydrated, fed, and that all the pillows I had were propping me up at just the right angle.
Auntie Julia decided she was going to be an aunt, which was a word she’d heard in a gossip circle once. None of us knew exactly what it meant, other than a woman who had some vaguely maternal role, but wasn’t exactly a mother. Tschenkar didn’t know what it meant either. Auntie Julia had proudly declared that she didn’t know what an Auntie was, but she was still going to be the best damn Auntie there’d ever been to my babies.
They were still calling me Engineer, which felt almost condescending by this point, since I wasn’t even allowed to sit upright without everyone fussing at me.
To be fair, the alien baby thing was starting to be a real thing over the past week. I could see my stomach bulging out, and my breasts were impossibly sensitive, sometimes painfully sore. I hadn’t vomited or anything like that, so it turned out that Khetar babies were at least a little bit more considerate than human ones. I still couldn’t believe they’d tapped to Tschenkar through my kitty, but in the grand scheme of things—like a big alien ship calledInseminator—it was one of the less weird things that had happened since I’d first become tainted by Thuliak.
I drifted in and out of sleep. Tschenkar told me I’d need more sleep now, and he’d been right. I woke up again when the sled slowed down. Tschenkar was always the one to drag it, and I looked up and saw him dropping the rope, then looking back at us over his shoulder. He held up one finger.Wait.
We all stopped and got dead silent. Midwife shoved a thermos in my face. I knew if I didn’t take a big sip, she’d hassle me about it later, so I took a swig. It was still lukewarm from when she’d heated it earlier.
Tschenkar had his laser rifle out and sighted.
He spoke in a booming voice, saying something in Proto-Khetar. More voices boomed back, and that’s when I saw what looked like a shimmering rainbow moving through the trees. We’d been searching forInseminatorsfor the better part of a week now, and we’d seen signs we were getting close. Now we were seeing them directly for the first time. The search was over.
One Khetar had a thin, narrow waist, and his skin was the perfect kind of blue you could only dream about the sky being during the grey overcast of winter. The next three I spotted were all shades of autumn leaves, one was vibrant yellow, the other fire red, and the last a burnt orange. They all moved toward us, buck naked, a rainbow of big Khetar cocks dangling between their muscular legs.
Midwife Cleopatra gasped audibly, and Julia fell to her knees. She wascrying.
“I am Tschenkar! Scion of…Scion of theHarbingers.You are fromInseminator, Scioned by Tharkur. This woman—” he took tight hold of my hand then, and to my surprise, he helped me to stand up off the sled. “This woman is Engineer Eve. Thuliak and I have bred her and formed a triumvirate. She’s with children.”
From the corner of my eye, something moved. It was like a shadow moving through the trees, and each time I thought I caught sight of it, it stopped moving. I rubbed my eyes, because they were still all gooey from sleeping.
“I think something is sneaking up on us,” I whispered to Tschenkar.
His body tensed, and he raised the rifle. “We come in peace! Show yourselves.Allof you.”
I saw something else now, coming from the opposite side of the shadow. This one looked like the snow itself was moving, and it was just as hard to see as the shadow form.
Then the two forms showed themselves. They strutted out from the trees and right toward us. Both were Khetar, one was onyx black, the other the purest white, though both had blue eyes.
They walked toward us—no, toward Julia—in what I could only describe as a synchronized strut. When the white one’s cock swung to the left, the black one’s cock swung to the right. They converged onto Julia in the same instant, a black finger touching her left cheek, and a white one touching her right.
Julia shuddered visibly, and when she smiled, it was like she had suddenly become twenty years younger.
“What is this lovely thing?” the white and black Khetar asked, voices perfectly harmonized. I couldn’t even tell which one was which, but one spoke in a booming baritone, the other in a striking falsetto. It was musical, almost like Tschenkar’s laugh, but a different genre of music.
“J-j-j-ulia,” she said, “Auntie Julia.”
“Auntie,” the voices said, and the black and white bodies moved around her in a circle, always completely opposite each other. “May I touch you?”
Julia just nodded, though her eyes were locked on the big black Khetar cock standing before her, getting harder and rising up against the body’s chiseled abs.
Tschenkar laughed. His laugh was still the most beautiful music to me, even after hearing the harmonized voices. “You’re Tharkur, aren’t you? I’d heard the rumors, but—”