I pushed the nearest tray aside and leaned back, bracing myself on the backrest.
“How about dessert?” Vai said.
I shook my head.
“I couldn’t even if my life depended on it.”
“Then I’d better offer you something worth more than your life!”
He plucked a bunch of large ovals from a thick stem.
“These are called glocks. They’re the most delicious fruit in the empire. Maybe in any empire.”
I peered over at them.
They had strange little bumps on them that sucked at my skin.
“They’re not alive, are they?” I said.
“They’re plants, so I guess they are alive in some way. Try it. You’ll like them.”
He tossed a glock in his mouth and munched on it happily.
It was only fruit, right?
Even if it was from an alien world…
I screwed up my face as I bit into it.
The juices ran down my chin and I hastily wiped it with my sleeve.
The flavor exploded across my tongue and zipped through my body.
“Wow,” I said. “If more fruit tasted like this back on Earth, kids would hit their daily quotas easily!”
I munched on the rest of the glock until it was gone.
Okay, so now I was stuffed.
“It’s my favorite,” Vai said. “There’s an orchard near my home and I used to play there as a kid.”
“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“An older sister. You?”
I shook my head.
“I always wanted a brother or sister. Every time my friends had an argument with their siblings, I offered for them to come live with me. They never did though.”
Something about the training earlier piqued my interest.
“Have you ever been to the Shadow Realm before?” I said.
“Yes. It’s… challenging. Largely the opposite of our galaxy. At least, they used to be, before we expelled the Shadows there and they began claiming it and turning it into a hostile wasteland. They dug up the resources and backward engineered any advanced technology they could lay their hands on.
“The real difference between us and them is their desire to dominate. Every species wants to do well. That’s only natural. Every species wants to be strong and pass on the best possible future to their offspring but the Shadow want nothing but power. No matter what it costs.”
“They sound like real charmers,” I said. “Has anyone ever been taken by them before? By the Shadow? Have they even managed to take their ‘fated mates’ back to the Shadow Realm?”
Vai’s eyes looked everywhere but at me.
“Yes.”
“And the… things they did to them,” I said, thinking over how the fated mates were passed from one Shadow to another, “they always happen?”
“Yes. They’ve bred many Shadow hybrids by forcing their fated mates to breed an entire army. They grow stronger while we grow weaker.”
I thought about being abducted by Iav and the destiny that might have befallen me if Vai hadn’t rescued me.
“Why did you come save me?” I said.
It was a question that’d crossed my mind many times since I’d first encountered him.
“You didn’t have to,” I said.
“He’s my Shadow—”
“I know. But that doesn’t mean you had to rescue me. You could have sat at home and done nothing.”
Vai looked at me as if that was the very last thing he could do.
“No,” he said. “I couldn’t. None of us could.”
Why? I wanted to ask.
But the M’rora were an alien species.
There were things they did that wouldn’t make sense to me and likely never would.
Vai leaned forward and pressed his lips together between his fingers.
“The bond between the M’rora and the Aror’m is an old and mystical one. It’s more of a feeling than anything else.”
“But you said you can’t feel your Shadow.”
“No.”
“Then how is it like a feeling?”
Vai frowned and tried to put his thoughts into words I might be able to understand.
“It’s like when you think about how you might act in a certain situation. What if you found money in the street? Would you pick it up? What if someone dropped it outside an orphanage? What if it was outside a big mansion? Everyone would respond differently in those situations because each of us is different. You know what you might do—at least you think you do. Sometimes people think they would do one thing but they would end up doing another. You never know until the moment comes.”
“What’s that got to do with your Shadow?”
“I know what he’ll do before he does it. I know this because a part of him is me and a part of me is him. Every living creature has both a good and a bad side. Our Shadows are the physical embodiment of everything bad about us. They are evil and they are not good, and the things it would do to achieve its goals detest me. Just as the things I would do detest it. I don’t know if I can explain it any better than that.”
“Yin and Yang,” I said absentmindedly.
“What’s that?”
“It’s an Asian philosophy that describes opposites in nature. They’re related and linked to each other and no matter what you do, you can never quite escape that part of yourself.”
“Yin and Yang,” Vai said. “Yes. That explains it very well. I am the good side, he the bad.”
“But I guess it only looks like that from your perspective.”
Vai cocked his head to one side.
“Nothing my Shadow does is good.”
“Not to you. But in his world, everything he does is right. Even if it looks like the evilest thing to us.”
Vai smiled.
“I’ve never thought of the Shadow as anything but mindless killing machines. I suppose you’re right. Either way, I can’t let him have you.”
I smiled up at him.
I liked the sound of that and wanted him to say it again.
I glanced at his hand on the tabletop.
I wanted to touch it.
But dare I?
And if I did, what would he read into it?
I bit my bottom lip, reached over, and took it.
His hand was cool to the touch, just as I somehow knew it would be.
“I want to thank you for coming to rescue me. You didn’t have to.”
Vai smiled and slowly turned his
