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ANDIE WASHED, AND WHEN she was done in the tiny shower stall, Xandr took her place. He took much longer than she had and she wondered how long it had been since he’d truly had the chance to be clean. She also realized he was trusting her for the moment. Trusting her not to run away, not to go find the guards and bring them down on him while he was naked and trapped in an interior bathroom. Though it wasn’t like she’d risk going out at night, and she didn’t have her communicator, so there was no easy way to call for help. All of that had probably occurred to him, so his shower was probably more of a calculated risk than a true act of trust.
She found two sleeves of old crackers in a cupboard. They were covered in dust, but when she tried one it didn’t even taste stale. Their last meal hadn’t been that long ago, so Andie put the food aside in case they needed to keep it for later. She tried not to imagine what Xandr would look like in the shower. Was he that same purple color all over? Were there markings or scars that his clothing hid? And what about there? He looked sort of human, two arms, two legs, one head, the right proportions, and she couldn’t help but wonder if he’d look human in that way as well. It had shocked her when she first met aliens just how many were capable of having sex with humans, but after six years in this alien land, she’d learned to accept their similarities along with their differences.
And she wasn’t going to dwell on either of those right now. Yes, she’d agreed to go with Xandr to get out of the city, but she still wasn’t sure that he wasn’t going to betray her once they made it past the gates. She had no business thinking about him as anything besides a means to an end. It didn’t matter if he made her heart pound and her body ache. He’d kidnapped her, and even if the situation had changed since then, she couldn’t let herself forget that, not if she wanted to survive long enough to get back home.
The water stopped and Andie looked around the old apartment, trying to find something to do. She settled on an old couch, but there wasn’t anything to read or an entertainment system. By the time Xandr opened the door from the bathroom, she was staring out at the lights of the city and pretending that her mind was far away, even as she was highly attuned to the man just across the room from her. She counted down from three in her head before turning to look at him, totally casual, as if he hadn’t completely taken over her thoughts.
“There’s not much food, but we won’t go hungry.” She nodded to the crackers she’d left on the table beside the kitchen.
Xandr moved where she’d pointed and gave her a chance to study him. The light in the room was dim, and with his coloring he seemed to blend into the blue shadows all around them. But Andie could still make out the wet drops falling from his dark hair and she traced a rivulet of water that fell down his neck and disappeared under his top.
She had to get control of herself. This had to be some kind of survival response to all of the crap that had gone on during the day. There was no way she was actually attracted to a freaking murderer.
“Who did you kill?” The question just sort of popped out, somehow evading the survival filter that she’d developed to stay alive on Ixilta.
Xandr froze, cracker held in the air. He turned slowly towards her and raised an eyebrow. “Is that really a question you want answered?” He set the cracker down and left them on the counter, crossing towards her and taking a seat on a chair beside the couch.
Andie wasn’t sure whether she was grateful or disappointed that he kept the space between them. “I think I need it answered,” she replied honestly.
Xandr wouldn’t look at her while he spoke. “He was a member of my crew. We came here to do a job, had just picked him up when we needed the extra body.” He clenched his hands and stared at a seam in the tile underfoot as if it offered all of the answers to the universe.
Andie wanted to ask what kind of job he’d come for, but she didn’t want to derail this story. It was too important.
He continued speaking. “In my line of work, there are decent folks and those who think committing one crime is the same as any other.”
“Crime?” She was torn between leaning in closer to hear more and rearing back to stay safely away from him.
“Outlaw.” Xandr shrugged and offered a crooked smile to the crack in the floor. “Thief, general doer of no good. But my crew has rules. All good ones do. And when anyone hires on, they know the score. Except I must have misjudged this guy. He was an Oscavian like me, and maybe that made me trust him a little too easily, even though I know just how bad my people can get. But I hired him on. He was my responsibility. And we did the job, liberated some items from the central museum and got away without anyone the wiser.”
“That was you?” The theft from the museum had been the talk of the town a few months back. Precious jewels and several pieces of statuary had been taken in the middle of the day, leaving the security staff stumped. It was so successful that the powers that be hadn’t even managed to pin the crime on a scapegoat.
Xandr nodded, but there was no glow of pride, only the melancholy for how this story had to end. “Anyway, we got to celebrating. Things got rowdy, as they do. And then this guy decided that he wanted to take more than just some stuff. Talked about how we were so close to the slave markets that we could make some quick credits with hardly any trouble. He pulled a girl aside and said he wanted to keep her.” Andie’s hand flew to her mouth. She knew what it was like to be stolen by greedy aliens and it made her sick to imagine Xandr, anyone, doing it. Xandr continued his story without pause, his tone even. “I told him that we don’t operate like that, gave him a chance to let her go, but he wouldn’t. And when I told him he was off the crew, he told me that it wasn’t my crew anymore and that I could hand over the ship or he’d go to the guards and tell them exactly how things went down. So I drew on him, laid him flat, and by the time the guards came around he wasn’t breathing anymore.”
“All because he wanted to steal your ship?” That wasn’t a good reason for murder, even if the guy Xandr killed sounded like a piece of crap.
“No,” Xandr insisted. “I can always get another ship. Doubt I’ll be in charge anymore once we get out of here. But it was my responsibility to protect the crew from that scum. And that girl. I don’t deal in people, and if I’d let him go, he would have found another ship, another crew happy to sell flesh. I can’t fix the whole galaxy, but ending one slaver before he began was the least I could do.”
When he put it like that, maybe it was a bit more acceptable. Andie tried to imagine it. There were some pretty terrible people living in Ixilta, people she had to deal with every day. And she’d done her best to ignore them, to put aside the evil they did, all in the hopes that she would remain safe, remain out of their grasps. She’d been frightened of the prospect of prison, or of the worse things that could be done to her. And she’d let herself believe that since she wasn’t out there perpetuating violence and evil that she wasn’t responsible for all of it. Maybe that was wrong, maybe Xandr had the right of it. She was even more confused now that she knew his story and she wasn’t sure how to sort out her mind.
“So how did you become an outlaw?” Maybe if she knew more about him she could find the line between right and wrong and figure out where she was supposed to stand. Maybe knowing more would extinguish the inconvenient desire that had flared within her. Or maybe it would make it worse. But they had a long night ahead of them and that was a risk Andie had to take.
Xandr smiled. “Well, it was thievery or the Oscavian army, and I was never one for following orders.”
“Let me guess,” Andie smirked. “You’re much better at giving them?”
His shrug said it all.
“But isn’t the Oscavian Empire huge? Why did you only have those two options? I mean, surely you’ve got accountants or something.” Earth was considered a backwater by many aliens, but before her capture, there had been plenty of paths for Andie to take her career on.
“The empire is huge,” Xandr conceded, “and stratified. Perhaps there were a few other paths I could have forged, but none that would have saved my family or their honor.” He stood again and grabbed the crackers from the counter, effectively ending that line of conversation. “What about you?” he asked once he was satisfied with his snack. “What’s your story?”
“Same as anyone else’s in the city.” It was Andie’s turn to shrug. “I got brought here against my will six years ago and I’ve been surviving ever since. It could be worse.”
“That tells me your situation. What about you?” He studied her with an intensity that made her squirm.
“There’s nothing to tell. Ixilta does its best to stamp out all of our individuality. Whatever I was before, it’s gone now.”
“That’s not true.” Xandr moved from his chair to the couch and his heat was almost too much to bear. “If the city had really beaten you down, you would not be here with me.”
That reminder was a bucket of ice on her thoughts. “It’s not like you actually gave me a choice.” She stood. “It’s getting late. I’m going to sleep while I can. Wake me when it’s time to go.”
She left him there, walking towards the small bedroom with a straight spine and steel in her step. She didn’t want to get to know Xandr, didn’t want to empathize with him, and she certainly didn’t want to learn enough to make her nascent attraction to him bloom into anything greater. She needed to use him to get off of this hell planet, and that was that. Anything else could rot.
