Grant watches the Taiikar cityscape filter past below them. The trains catch his eye, today, labyrinthine magnetic railways burrowing through a warren of glass tunnels, and crawling funiculars puttering up great pyramidal tracks. Grant always enjoyed taking trains, the smooth chuffing motion and the speeding horizon. He wonders if he’ll ever take one again. Something in him doubts that, with his stature and station being so lofty.

He’ll never be an anonymous wanderer on this city’s crowded, colorful streets. He’ll never know what it’s like to be a normal citizen in the Empire. Small, comfortable, harmless and unharmed. He used to like that feeling. The amicable apathy of the world. The constant rhythmic ritual of meeting a person, and exchanging friendly words, and a warm parting, and of being comfortably forgotten. He will never feel that again.

He feels a pulse of loneliness so acute it shortens his breath.

His wife’s head nudges against his shoulder and her leg slips onto his. He rests his palm on her knee. He’s so large compared to her. So ungainly. Nowhere to hide anymore.

“Are you all right, dove?” she whispers.

He nods. “Just feeling out-of-place, I guess.”

She looks out the window by his side. “We’ll be home soon.”

He’s about to tell her, not like that. I’m the only Maekyonite anyone I have ever met has ever met. The only one. And I am so far from home. I’ll never be home again.

And then he meets her crimson eyes. And no, he realizes. No, she’s right.

“Yeah,” he says. “Home soon.”

“I am too, you know,” she says. “Feeling out-of-place, I mean.”

He rubs her knee. She gazes down at the cityscape.

“I don’t...” She starts, and falls away.

“I know what people say about Void Princesses,” she says. “I know that they’re… that to them, I am not a real Princess. I see the way the Taiikar coterie looks at me, the way they look at you and my command group. This Void Convocation I spoke at—it used to be that if a Void Princess failed to give a satisfactory accounting of her actions, they’d execute her and replace her.”

“That’s awful.”

“It still is that way, sort of,” Sykora says. “Zithra’s just never done it. But it’s rooted in punishment. That’s what they think of what I do. They see it as a punishment. But I never saw it that way. I was—I am

so proud of myself, and my sector, and my crew, and what we’ve done. And the opinions of these…Core worlders.” She spits it like it scalds her tongue. “They never mattered to me. But then you. And our family. And the way you looked at me when you found out about my detonator. It’s the first time I’ve ever felt like…”

He waits patiently.

“Like a victim,” she murmurs.

“I—” Grant very nearly breaks the sorry rule. “I never meant to make you feel that way.”

She shakes her head. “It’s not because of anything you did. Or, well. It’s not your fault, I mean. You just showed me a different way of seeing, I suppose. You made me aware of things.” She slaps his leg. “And you were too adorable and now I want your babies. Which is your fault, actually, so forget what I was saying and grovel.”

He laughs. “How about I make it up to you instead?”

“Oh, very well.” She nuzzles his arm. “Let’s go find you a cup to cum in.”

***

They take a glass-walled lift down through a warty skyscraper shaped like a berry-laden branch, its precarious height dotted with pods and observatories. Grant feels an odd sense of vertigo as he watches out the window. The lift on the Pike whisks him much faster than this, of course; but he isn’t used to this vast and rolling sky in front of him. Here he is finally in spaces large enough to accommodate his size and he’s come down with this bizarre agoraphobia.

Axyna opens the door for them to her cluttered and overheated clinic. Between her black cloak and her shiny anticomped goggles she reminds Grant of an oversized beetle. “Welcome to the wishmaking workshop,” she says. “Shoes off.”

Grant bends to fit through the door and remove his boots. Sykora kicks her sandals off and strides past him. “Your time is appreciated, Specialist-Gefreiter.”

Grant casts a skeptical look around the riot of Axyna’s working space, which seems to double as her living space. Specimen jars, cluttered desktops, sheaves of notes held down by half-finished mugs of tea. A stuffed two-headed kindek glares at them from atop a spiralized bookshelf. Grant assumes the second noggin on that thing was sewn on after its taxidermy; but the uneven amber-and-blue lighting makes it hard to know for sure.

“Had to get it done before you split.” Axyna scoots a pile of dog-eared books from a reading desk onto the chair that attends it, and perches on the countertop. “I hear you’re running some kind of errand for some Marquess. And I thought—well. You know how the mountainesses are when they want something from you.” Her head bobs back and forth. “Lofty, lofty. Far to fall. I figured, why risk it? Got to grab some of your man’s miracle-spunk, make sure we have it in case he ends up fried to a crisp somewhere.”

It is a credit to Sykora’s excellent training that mention of Maekyonite miracle-spunk barely puts a chip in her polite facade.

“I’d happily take an egg or two off you as well, Majesty, if you like,” Axyna says. “Though I suppose it’s not entirely necessary. We’ve plenty of Taiikari eggs. Hell, I could lend you a few.” She snickers. “What kind of fucked-up infant would we make, eh?”

That finally cracks Sykora’s mien, releasing a stormcloud of impatience. “My husband and I are very busy individuals, Specialist-Gefreiter. Let’s be about our business and then part.”

“Our business, she says.” Axyna hops from the desk and pulls the handle on a cabinet festooned with magnet-pinned slips. “All we really need is hubby here today. You didn’t need to worry yourself. What was I gonna do, compel him?”

She pulls a silvery, bullet-shaped tube about the size of a pencil case from the cabinet and turns around. She looks at Grant and continues turning, until she has executed a full 360 degree rotation. She replaces the tube in the cabinet and pulls another one out, this one the size of a water bottle.

She underhand tosses it to him. “All right, Prince Pinky. Here’s your cum-catcher.” She pulls a staplebound magazine from the middle of a stack of periodicals and holds it out. “And here’s some porn. Off you pop, pun intended.” She points down a hallway whose pallid, sterile light contrasts with the grand wilderness of her office. “You can use the examination room. Not expecting any other clients.”

Sykora plucks Grant’s sleeve. “I trust this wench not, husband,” she says, in English. “She isloathsome.”

They’ve been learning his old language together. Their primary source is his dad’s old pulp sword-and-sorcery books, and Grant imagines their dialect sounds ridiculous, but it’s good enough, and it’s one of the few languages they can be sure no Imperial Core eavesdropper will understand.

“A wicked sorceress indeed,” he says. “Yet we have little choice.”

“Alas.”

He gives her a parting squeeze and takes his weird thermos thing and his porn into the sparse, spartan examination room. He pours some lukewarm water for himself from its gleaming, sabsum-scented sink. How long has it been since he masturbated? Nearly a decacycle. Long enough he wasn’t calling them decacycles yet. He does his best to steady himself with a sigh as he unzips his uniform pants. It’s for your family, dude. Just get it over with.

He tugs his pants around his ankles and tries to get comfortable in the reclining examination chair. Like most pieces of furniture that are not built for purpose, it creaks under his weight.

He looks askance at the rolled-up pamphlet Axyna handed him. He unfurls it and flips through.

Well-drawn renderings of Taiikari women, their proportions exaggerated even further than the already-curvaceous reality, in various states of undress and sexual congress. He snorts as he turns the pages. Dommy subtitles accompany most of them, telling him to be good for mistress.

He looks at the chrome thing in his hands. He unscrews its lid. There is a lubricated opening receptacle in a shape suggestive enough that his marching orders seem clear.

He glances back at the porno mag and sets it aside. He lays back and imagines Sykora. Her hair tickling his chest. Her breath picking up. The tightening of her grip on his shoulders. He thinks about the delight that flares in her eyes the moment she makes him lose control and seize her. The play-fighting she does to urge him into pinning her in place. The melting noises her body makes. The tight little ball she rolls up into when she’s so overwhelmed that she can barely move or think any longer, can only give herself into his keeping. He thinks about the little bulge in her stomach when he’s inside her. He thinks about that bulge staying, and growing.

He’s hard, finally. Feeling like a total fucking weirdo, he reaches for Axyna’s contraption and lowers it onto himself. It’s warm inside, and squishy, and there’s clearly some lubrication. He shuts his eyes as he moves it up and down. Maybe that’ll help.

A click slams his eyes open again. The door tilts out. He sits bolt upright, starts to shove himself back into his boxer briefs like a guilty caught adolescent.

Sykora’s big red eyes peer through the crack in the door. “Oh, hello.”

He exhales a shaky, adrenaline-venting laugh. “Hi, Batty. She’s letting you back here?”

“Letting me. Sykora scoffs. “As if she has the authority to stop me. I hope I didn’t just ruin your flow, dove.” She slips further into the room, hands behind her back, moving with an air of exaggerated innocence. “I just wondered…” She looks to the pamphlet on the counter. “The paraphernalia isn’t doing it for you, hmm?”

“Not exactly. I’m used to, uh… well I was used to video. Now I’m flat-out not used to it.”

“Video. Like live action?” Her brows rise. “How lewd. We don’t have that sort of thing in the Empire.”

“No?”

She shakes her head. “Tight pornographic guidelines. No live-action recordings or photography. Just drawn-out stuff and the occasional live competitions.”

“Live competitions?”

“I gather by the tone you didn’t have those on Maekyon.”

He shakes his head. “Have you, uh… been to any?”

“I’ve been in the audience once or twice. Handy for picking up some pointers.” She takes a step into the room. Her hip’s sinuous tilt follows the smooth sway of her tail. “But I find that my tastes are sort of… specific these days.”

He grins and sits back. “Specific, huh?”

“Mmhmm.” She climbs into his lap.

He lays a finger on her jaw and tips it upward. “Mine, too.”

“I want to help,” she murmurs, breaking away from the kiss that follows. “Can I help?”

“Did she say that’s all right? I don’t want to do any return visits.”

“Doctor Fuckstone—is that what you called her?”

He laughs. “Fuckenstein.”

“Right. She says as long as I don’t contaminate the sample it should be fine.” She fiddles with the examination chair controls. “How do we—aha.” A whirr accompanies the downward coast of the chair until it’s at a steep recline. “Lay back, dove.” She shifts atop him. Her tail plucks the sample collector from him. She lifts his newly vacant hand up to her chest, and presses it into the warm, heartbeating softness there.

“Let me be useful,” she whispers. “Use me.”