EPILOGUE
The Shinkara
JET STOOD ON a high platform overlooking a landscape that looked unlike anything she’d ever seen. She couldn’t remember anything quite like it even in the picture books she’d half memorized as a kid in Chiyeko’s lighthouse.
Even the buildings didn’t look like those from the Green Zone she knew from Old North America... although they came the closest to familiar of anything she could see.
The very air smelled different here, wet in a way unlike the monsoon smells she knew from Vancouver. The air here smelled like rich earth and mud mixed with a chalky, living dust, like somehow, someone had taken life and earth and packed it with water into a single smell, one with texture and water and powder and living things all wrapped into it.
Before they’d landed, she’d glimpsed a few familiar sights, mostly from what she remembered of Anaze’s Retribution on Astet.
They’d been moving too quickly through the sky for her to know for certain, but she’d seen a lake and a high wall... or really, she’d glimpsed them as they sped past... seeing just enough to make her wonder if either or both provided the inspiration for those parts of Trazen’s maze.
Yes, Trazen told her, wrapping his arms tightly around her where she stood and nuzzling her neck and jawline with his face.
“This was my home, Jet,” he murmured.
He pointed, aiming his finger to show her a distant part of the horizon. Through his skin, she got more details in his mind of what he wanted to show her.
“...I got aspects of that underground river from your run with the captive there, too,” he said, adding to the pictures he showed her though his skin. “And the small village there, it was a combination of human villages I’ve seen here, and some that are from a different culture that remained behind after those settlers left...”
She watched the pictures in his mind, fascinated... then got pulled back to the present when she glanced back over the quiet valley with their empty buildings below.
“Do you really think they left?” she said, frowning a little.
He pulled her closer, and she softened into his chest without taking her eyes off the landscape in front of them.
“Yes,” he said, kissing her throat. “I suspected as much, truthfully... after you showed me what my old teacher said.”
Jet nodded, still looking out over the quiet landscape.
The Shinkara had left Earth.
They’d left the Green Zone they’d once inhabited filled with freed animals and humans, along with a scattering of empty buildings and parks. Trazen had already spoken to a few of those left behind and found the local humans had even been trained to run the atmosphere-cleaning machines before the Shinkara left.
The landscape below Jet was something she would have thought a paradise growing up. The very fact that it existed at all made her feel like she was dreaming, even apart from having Trazen wrapped around her, exuding warmth and love from his very pores.
“We can do this there,” he said, quieter. “Where you grew up, Jet... I know it is too late for you to grow up like this, but it can be done in other places.”
“Why do you think they left?” Jet pressed. The question nagged at her. Her mind turned over possibilities, coming up with both good interpretations and bad ones.
Trazen shrugged. She felt different layers of meaning shifting through his mind via the venom, a more complex level of thought than she’d experienced through him before now. Feeling aspects of that joy-filled female Nirreth Jet remembered from the library, she fought with a strange pulse of jealousy. Not sexual jealousy... not even jealousy of the female Nirreth, per se. More a jealousy at an understanding she could feel that Trazen and that female Nirreth shared, something that still lived just outside of Jet’s own mental reach.
He kissed her again, smiling as he pulled her against him.
“I will show you,” he promised. “You will understand.”
Jet did understand one thing, though. One thing she hadn’t before.
“That’s why you went to them,” she said, leaning into his chest. “You made those vows because you wanted to learn from them...”
“Yes,” he said, surprise touching his voice. He wrapped his tail tighter around her. “Of course. Why else would I do it?”
She shrugged, letting herself melt into him more. “I don’t know.” She glanced up, studying his face. “There’s not really a human equivalent. The closest would be a monk or a shaman or something, I guess... and people did that here for all kinds of reasons. They were chosen at birth,” she said, thinking about what Chiyeko told her. “Or their parents wanted them to do it. Or they were lost... even in trouble sometimes, like it was that or jail. Women did it sometimes because they had a baby with the wrong person...”
Trazen let out an amused snort. He held her tighter.
“Why does it bother you that they left?” he asked softly.
She twisted around to look at him again.
“Why doesn’t it bother you?” she said.
He purred thoughtfully from his chest, resting his chin on her shoulder.
“Should it?” he said finally, his voice more matter-of-fact. “I have no regrets, Jet... not for what I chose in going to them. Not for what I choose now. As for the Shinkara themselves... I did not live among them for very long. I did a job for them, because I felt called to do it, and I struggled with the corruption and cruelty I saw every day. I am grateful for what they gave me, and what I learned from them... but I do not feel slighted that they left.”
Thinking about his words, she nodded, relaxing slightly.
She realized some part of her had wondered that, if he would have felt left behind.
No, Jet. No. I believe they meant it as a gift. Possibly even a reward...
Jet sighed again, relaxing more as she snuggled into him. “And the Shinkara themselves? Where do you think they will go now?”
He let out a short laugh. “I have no idea, Jet.”
“None at all?”
“None at all.”
“But why? Why would they go?” Jet said, frowning as she looked over the grassy plains. “Aren’t the Nirreth their people? Will they go to some other Nirreth colony now?”
“I do not know,” he said simply. He pressed his face against her neck. Kissing her cheek, he added softly, “But if they do not think they are needed here, how is that anything but a compliment, Jet?”
Smiling, she let out a low snort, watching as the sky grew darker. They’d flown so far that it was nighttime here, even as it was midmorning in the place they’d left behind. Jet had never been in a part of the world where it was night while at her home it was day.
“No,” Trazen smiled. “You’ve just been to a whole other planet entirely.”
Jet smiled at that too. Another thing to tell Biggs and her mother.
Her eyes drifted up as she leaned her head on Trazen’s shoulder.
Staring at the stars, she realized she could see the real ones here.
The Shinkara had cleared enough of the dust and smoke from the air in this part of the world that she could see past the dense brownish haze that kept the stars from her eyes most nights back home, in Vancouver.
She thought about bringing her family here.
Then she realized she’d rather be able to see the real stars in the lands around her old home. For the first time in her life, that didn’t even sound like wishful thinking. It sounded like something that might really happen... something she might get to witness.
At the very least, she could watch progress in that direction, even if she and Biggs and her mother saw most of that from beneath a Green Zone dome’s wall.
“Maybe we don’t need them anymore,” Jet murmured, still watching the stars.
Contentment seeped off the Nirreth’s skin, even as she felt a low ripple of desire off him, right before he wrapped his tail around her waist.
“Maybe we don’t,” Trazen agreed.
Of course, Jet would still have to explain her Nirreth boyfriend to her family.
That could get ugly, in more ways than one... and not only with Uncle Draven.
Pressing his cheek against her neck, Trazen laughed.
They just stood there for what felt like a long few minutes, watching the night crawl over the remaining lines of light and color that lingered at the horizon.
It had been a long trip, just to watch a sunset in another part of the world.
Still, right then at least, it felt pretty worth it, Jet thought.
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