Zwarg. Two years ago.

"Lady Gyu-El, would you honor me with a dance?"
A perfectly pleasant-looking brunette extended his hand with a gallant smile, and I cursed him internally. I had tried. Dark, high-necked sheath dress, makeup so understated I basically looked like a ghost, positioned myself near the exit, and did my absolute best to become part of the wallpaper. Ten more minutes, maybe fifteen, and I could have slipped out without anyone noticing or caring. I wanted to groan. Why me?! There were dozens of young, beautiful, vivacious women in this room.
I didn't say a word, but the Zwargian's face shifted, mild surprise crossing his features. He'd felt it. My irritation, plain as a signal flare. I groaned internally.
You've really let yourself go, Celesta.
I breathed in slowly, the way they teach every little girl on Zwarg by the time she's five or six, pictured an ice sculpture, all gleaming facets and clean angles. In my mind it was always the same image: a frozen, breathtaking winged warrior-woman, one hand gripping a slender assegai, poised to throw. My mother had pointed it out to me once in the crystal garden, and for whatever reason, that image, and only that image, helped me pull my emotions back under control.
I smiled politely. "Forgive my beta-waves. I don't feel like dancing tonight. My heels are killing me," I delivered the standard social excuse on autopilot.
"Your heels?"
He glanced down at my feet, which were wearing the lowest kitten heels still considered acceptable at an event like this. My late husband had required me to look impeccable at all times, and now that I was finally allowed to dress for something other than maximum impact, I'd gone with a simple black dress and yes, the most sensible closed-toe sandals I owned. Absolute tastelessness, Martin would have said.
I kept the serene, refined smile in place. "Yes. My feet are tired."
The Zwargian leaned in slightly, essentially sniffing at my emotions, but finding no trace of dishonesty in them, tucked his hand away and shrugged.
"No trouble at all, Lady Gyu-El. I'll confess, I'm not much of a dancer myself. It always strikes me as rather too intimate a thing to put on display in public. May I call you Celesta?"
"Of course," I nodded vaguely, already scanning the room.
Swirling couples, glowing faces, and floaty dresses… The singer's voice was rich and warm, layered with harmonics that were genuinely lovely to listen to. If saying yes to a dance weren't automatically read as a sign of romantic interest, I'd have joined the floor in a heartbeat, but when a planet had a serious demographic imbalance, society wrote its own rules. I stole a glance at the clock on the far wall. A little longer, and I could leave.
"I'm Kristof," the brunette said, reclaiming my attention. "Celesta, I hope this doesn't come across as too forward. I know it's not exactly proper to approach a Zwargian woman before she's agreed to a date, but…" he cleared his throat, fidgeting with his bow tie. "The Laboratory informed me that our compatibility score is sixty-three percent. Can you imagine? Sixty-three…"
Not bad, actually. Though Martin and I scored higher.
The Planetary Laboratory had sent me yet another thick packet of male profiles, men whose genetic compatibility with me had been deemed at least marginally acceptable. Kristof might have been in there. Or maybe not. Honestly, I had no idea; I'd paged through the stack with appropriate composure while the butler watched me like a hawk, and the moment he left the room, I'd dropped the whole thing in the recycler with genuine relief.
Being a widow on Zwarg was, objectively, the best social status a woman could hope for. No husband. No one pressing down on you with his suffocating beta-waves, no one picking apart how you looked or telling you that you were radiating sourness again, no lectures.
Martin had essentially been chosen for me by that same Laboratory, which on Zwarg held more actual power than the Planetary Management Apparatus itself. Combined with the law requiring every Zwargian woman to marry before she turned fifty, I'd simply had no way out. And in the beginning, when I barely knew him, I'd genuinely, naively believed marriage might be… fine.
Martin Gyu-El was considered one of the most influential figures on Zwarg at the time. Wealthy, attractive, well-preserved, at a century and a half, Zwargians age differently depending on genetics, and Martin was meticulous about his appearance. For the first month he even tried to impress me. I understood that later, roughly around the time the criticism started: the dress was too frivolous, the lipstick too bold, my walk too sharp, real aristocrats glide like swans on the Coral Lake, not stomp around like they're late for something. For a while I went along with all of it.
Then, eventually, I didn't.
Our first real fight was over the fact that I hadn't taken his hand on the steps of the municipal building in front of the press cameras. I genuinely don't know why I didn't; I think the holo-flashes just startled me. Martin did not see it that way.
“You're making me look like a fool! Your own wife won't take your hand! What are people going to think when they see those photos in the news feed?! he'd raged. We've already gone two years without children, and now you're acting like you're not even my wife!”
“Darling, two years? You can't be serious. Plenty of Zwargians go twenty or thirty years, some even fifty. It's perfectly normal.”
“It is absolutely not normal! I married you for your high compatibility score! The Laboratory said you would be my ideal woman, and you…”
And I'd slapped him. What happened immediately after was blurry, the fight had triggered such a vicious headache that I could barely think. And every time after that, whenever I raised my voice even slightly or refused to do what Lord Gyu-El wanted, the headache would come back instantly, skull like a cast-iron pot being hammered from the inside, white-hot wires drilling through my temples, actually boiling my brain. Disgusting, awful, physically nauseating. It was simply easier to agree to whatever he wanted than to endure that. Slowly, steadily, my late husband reshaped me into exactly what he had in mind.
When Martin's accident happened, I exhaled. It was a terrible thing to say. I knew that. But it was the first real breath of air I'd had in years. Everyone around me offered condolences, and I… spent nearly a month not quite believing it was real. That I no longer had to choke down raw eggs every month for dinner because my husband believed it would help me conceive. No more uncomfortable below-the-knee skirts and thick stockings in summer heat because that was what Martin preferred. No more towering heels to make our photos look better, no more heavy jewelry to signal to everyone how generous he was. No more mandatory driver, I could just walk through the park if I felt like it. And oh, infinite cosmos, barefoot on the grass. I could talk at full volume because I felt like it. Go to an amusement park. Float in an anti-gravity room. I could scream at the top of my lungs and no one would tell me I was dragging his reputation through the mud.
"Celesta." Kristof's voice pulled me back. "I don't know how many other candidates you have, but to me you are the most remarkable, most desirable Zwargian woman I've ever met. If I could only hope that you might agree to a walk, so we could get to know each other a little… I understand you may still be grieving your first husband, but even the faintest possibility that someday you might forget him and turn your eyes toward the living."
Universe, save me from a second marriage. Never. Not a chance. Not in this lifetime or any other.
"I'm sorry, Kristof, but I'm still mourning Martin."
The poor guy looked thoroughly embarrassed. "Yes, forgive me, that probably came out terribly crude. The last thing I wanted was to offend you. It's just, you're such a refined and elegant Zwargian woman. I saw in the latest issue of House of Fashion that they called you an icon of style and…"
Had to become one. Martin had standards.
"Kristof," I interrupted, not entirely politely, but I had no patience left for questionable compliments. "I genuinely don't know when I'll stop grieving. I really don't. Look around, this room is full of women younger and lovelier than me. I'm seventy-five years old…"
"Seventy-four."
Oh. Someone's done their homework. I married at fifty, spent exactly twenty years being the perfect wife, and have now been a very contented widow for four and a half blissful years.
I took a full breath, preparing to politely but unmistakably suggest he look elsewhere for a bride, when a voice cut through from behind me. Dry, sharp, and dripping with sarcasm in a way I would have recognized anywhere.
"Kristof, you appear to have serious issues with your receptors. I'd recommend seeing a doctor. Lady Gyu-El has impeccable manners and extraordinary tact, but she has been radiating irritation since the moment you appeared. You've bored her from the second she laid eyes on you, and frankly, I doubt a woman of her caliber would ever be interested in an underdeveloped Neanderthal with barely functional antennae. Disappear. I don't want to see you within a parsec of this woman."
The boy went pale so fast it was almost impressive, swallowed audibly, stammered something resembling sorry-excuse me, and evaporated into the crowd.
And I… closed my eyes.
Calm. Just calm. You are an ice sculpture, Celesta. You feel nothing dramatic. Pleasantness and mild boredom. Nothing more. You are the warrior-maiden whose skin is so cold that touching her would give you frostbite.
When I opened my eyes, the person I least wanted to see in the entire known universe was standing in front of me.
Dark sable hair swept back from his face, making his thick, spiraling horns appear to lean toward you slightly before curving back at the midpoint. Eyes black as ink. A straight, sharp nose and a jaw that looked like it had never compromised on anything in its life. His skin had the violet tone common to all Zwargians, but with a distinct lean toward cobalt blue, the unmistakable mark of the Lacoste bloodline.
Yudes extended his hand and said, with complete authority, "Dance with me."
Not a question. Not even close.
Breathe in, breathe out, Celesta. This is not the time or place for a scene, especially not in a room full of Zwargians. Martin always said only commoners settle things in public.
In one smooth motion Yudes pulled me toward him and locked his arm around my waist. My mind was so far away that I only registered what dance we were doing when I heard the first shrieking note of the violin. The bandoneon came in right behind it, sharp, cracking, like the snap of a whip. Tango-milongero. The most sensual and simultaneously the most scandalous dance permitted on Zwarg. Convention held that if a man and a woman danced it together, it was an unspoken declaration that the woman had chosen him. The audacity. The majestic organ swelled into the melody, and my heart stopped right along with it.
Some part of my emotions must have slipped through the carefully constructed wall of ice, because the man leaned down and murmured in my ear, "Don't be afraid. I'll lead."
I wasn't afraid. It was something else entirely. Martin had been so obsessed with his own image that he'd hired me tutors and made me learn every formal dance. Why he'd bothered, I never fully understood; we never danced in public, and in private… we didn't dance either. Too vulgar. Beneath aristocrats.
Yudes spun me and began to lead. Perfectly straight back, steady hands, direct eye contact, held without apology. His touch walked the exact edge of what was proper. The music swelled, the sharp accented section giving way to something smoother, and with it the Zwargian shifted tempo, leading slower.
"Interesting. You dance well, Celesta. I assumed you'd be nervous about keeping up."
"You assumed wrong, Yudes."
I'd pulled myself back together. No one could accuse me now of radiating fear or anxiety.
"Hm." He raised his brows. "Are you implying my receptors are faulty?"
"Oh, not at all, I simply meant…"
"…That you're remarkably good at hiding what you feel," he cut me off without a shred of apology. Those dark eyes locked onto mine, and the hand at my back grew heavier.
"You say that like it's an accusation," I murmured, concentrating on staying in time with the music while maintaining eye contact. "Every Zwargian woman is taught this."
"No, no, Celesta," the man suddenly laughed. "I was attempting a roundabout compliment and clearly botched it. Let me try again, directly this time. Celesta, I spent twenty years tearing my hair out and chewing my own tail knowing that a woman like you had become my colleague's wife instead of mine. The moment I heard about the accident that took that oviraptor Gyu-El…"
"You are talking about my late husband!" I said, with genuine indignation, and tried to push him back. Yudes caught me without missing a step.
"My apologies. What I meant was that Martin was a… committed conservative in all things. I wouldn't be surprised if he preferred the lights off and strictly one position."
My face went hot. What Lacoste was saying was beyond inappropriate. And yet somehow, he was managing to say it without a single person in the room turning to look at us. The music wove through its full range of color; he steered me through a pattern only he could see, our feet tracing shapes across the parquet. His low voice reached no one but me, and he apparently was successfully hiding his beta-waves from other Zwargians.
"…So when I heard about the accident, the very first thing I did was submit our blood samples for compatibility testing. Eighty-two percent, Celesta."
Somewhere along the way he'd switched from formal address to familiar, but given how many years we'd known each other, I let it go.
"Three percent lower than Martin and I," I said, almost automatically, and immediately bit my tongue. Brilliant, Celesta. Standing at a formal social event, comparing how well his genetic material matched mine. Wonderful.
But all I got in response was an amused little sound.
"Trust me, there are things that can't be measured in percentages."
I wanted to roll my eyes so badly it physically hurt. I had heard that exact line from at least every other man who'd tried to court me.
"Yudes, I appreciate the… effort, but this is inappropriate. I'm in mourning and I have no interest in any kind of relationship."
"Pfff." And there he went, rolling his eyes without a moment's hesitation. "You can keep playing the grieving widow if you like, but it won't work on me. My receptors are very sensitive, dear Celesta. There isn't a trace of grief in you for Gyu-El's death. You never loved him. And you do, in fact, find me rather appealing."
I couldn't help it. I laughed, a short, sharp sound.
"That's quite an assumption."
My dance partner had been to our home many times: the penthouse in the capital, the country estate. He and Martin both worked in the Planetary Management Apparatus, and they'd frequently shut themselves in Martin's study to deal with urgent business. Next to my stiff, reputation-obsessed husband, his colleague had always seemed… more alive, somehow. Yudes could throw his head back and laugh out loud at a dinner table, or drop an off-color joke without blinking. Martin never corrected him—Lacoste came from an old aristocratic family, after all—but he'd click his tongue and puff out his cheeks like an offended hamster every single time.
The dance was ending. Yudes spun me one last time, and on the violin's ringing final note caught my full weight and pulled me flush against his chest.
From the outside, it probably looked very dramatic. From the inside, my feet were aching, those ridiculous heavy earrings were pulling at my ears, and the moissanite necklace I'd worn out of sheer Martin-conditioned habit felt like a choker. When Yudes pressed me against him and essentially made me bury my face in his neck, I barely managed to contain the flash of irritation.
He smelled of sharp citrus cologne and underneath it, an unexpectedly sweet trail of strawberry; someone else's perfume. So why exactly was he here bothering me? He had his strawberry to dance with.
The music stopped completely. I tried to pull free from the iron grip, but the moment I looked up into those ink-black eyes, the room spun faster than anything the tango had managed. Memory ambushed me without warning: every time Yudes had come to visit, the dry remarks he'd made trying to make me laugh, the flowers he'd once brought, the times I'd found myself quietly comparing him to my husband and thinking that maybe I should have…
Stop. That never happened. Stop.
A thin thread of heat flared up somewhere inside my skull, and tiny, vicious little hammers started tapping at my temples. It never happened. Except, what if it had? You do find me rather appealing. Ridiculous. I had never, not once, looked at Yudes as a potential lover or husband. He was no different from Martin: the same breed, the kind that steamrolled everyone around him without a second thought for anyone else's opinion. Besides, I hadn't even seen his profile when I turned forty-nine and the Planetary Laboratory sent that letter with the list of optimal candidates, the gentle reminder that I had exactly one year left to choose a man and fulfill my duty to the species. Yudes hadn't even entered my life until after Martin announced our engagement. I remembered that day clearly, because…
The headache sharpened so suddenly it felt like someone had decided to drill through my skull with a red-hot bit. And just when I thought that's it, I'm going down, full theatrical faint incoming… it stopped. All at once. My vision came back reluctantly, everything bleeding into soft smears of color. My hearing followed in lazy, sluggish pulses.
You do find me rather appealing…
What in the hell kind of auditory hallucination was that? I shook my head to clear it, and realized it wasn't a hallucination at all.
"…Celesta has held a piece of my soul for a very long time, and I am grateful for this extraordinary, passion-filled dance she has given me…"
With the last ghostly tap of the hammers, the room snapped into sharp, horrifying focus. I stared at the Zwargian who had dropped to one knee and was delivering a speech with great solemnity. Around us, an enormous empty circle had opened up; every other guest had drifted back to the edges of the room, leaving only the two of us standing in the middle of the dance floor. That ridiculous empty space felt like a canyon. On one side: me and Yudes. On the other: everyone else. One step sideways and you'd fall.
"…My darling, will you be my wife?"
A ringing silence fell over the room. Nobody moved.
Girls weren't born often on Zwarg, and engagements didn't happen often either. Normally a Zwargian woman spent years carefully reviewing candidates from her Laboratory list, going on dates, slowly building something with a potential partner. The whole process was gradual; sometimes it stretched out for decades. Some women started considering options at thirty to make sure they were ready by fifty. Others had known their future husband since childhood. Either way, an engagement between two Zwargians was rarely a surprise.
It was definitely supposed to be a surprise to the bride.
"What?" I managed, still blindsided by… all of it. Every single part of it.
"Will you be my wife?" he repeated, softer this time, but with quiet, unmistakable pressure, his eyes holding mine.
Every fiber of my being felt it: that arrogant, horn-headed man was trying to use mental suggestion on me. Again. And how smoothly he'd set it up: everyone conveniently stepping back, Yudes holding eye contact, fingers wrapped around my wrist. Very clean. I might have admired the technique, or rather the horns, if I weren't already feeling genuinely nauseous. The influence had started soft and warm, barely perceptible, like a gentle tide rolling in. If it hadn't been for Martin, who'd reached for that particular trick at every available opportunity, I might never have caught it. But I did, and the cold recognition, the bone-deep fear that history was about to repeat itself, turned that warm tide into a burning sting that drove into the base of my neck again and again. Cold sweat traced a slow line down my spine.
Me? Marry a Zwargian? Again? Over my dead body.
"No!" I screamed loud enough for the entire room to hear, and wrenched my hand free.
The enraptured crowd snapped back to life. Whispers erupted across the hall. The refined, aristocratic face before me went slack with pure astonishment. What? Nobody's ever said no to you before? Good. You started it.
"Yudes, this is absolutely outrageous!" I let out a loud, dramatic sob, sparing one fleeting moment to imagine what would have happened if I hadn't spent years of marriage learning to tell my own emotions from the ones being carefully piped in from the outside. "I am a widow! I still love my husband with all my heart, and I only agreed to this dance out of pity!"
Take that, horn boy.
"Perfectly understandable, I suppose, such an important man, and still no bride. Not one Zwargian woman has said yes to you."
"Celesta…"
I could practically hear the tooth enamel splintering. I kept going.
"…I live only in the memories of my dear Martin. What a tragedy that he was taken so young! No man could ever come close to what he was!"
I smiled bitterly at that last line. For once, I wasn't entirely lying. Living up to the late Gyu-El's legacy was genuinely no small feat. Just consider his endearing habit of washing his hands and brushing his teeth eighteen times a day.
"I am so terribly sorry to disappoint you, Lord Lacoste, but you seem to have misread the situation entirely. I am simply not in any place for romance. Surely you can see that."
The memories surfaced without effort. Celesta, you're not seriously wearing trousers in front of the press? Showing your emotions so openly is indecent. You cannot fly the flyer yourself; what will people think? That I can't afford a driver?
I let it all go. The careful, practiced shell of composed detachment I wore in public; I dropped it completely. Self-pity came flooding in, and I released every last bit of it outward into the room. The stronger the emotion, the stronger the signal.
It was scandalous. Borderline offensive to every Zwargian present. Peak village behavior, Martin would have said. I didn't care. I broadcast pure, unrelenting grief on every frequency I had, a crushing sense of loss and longing. The thing was, I wasn't grieving my husband. I was grieving the easy, unburdened life I'd had before marriage, when I owed nothing to anyone, when demographic imbalances and racial duty were just words that happened to other people. The guests couldn't know any of that, of course; they only caught the general field of beta-waves, each Zwargian filtering the signal through the lens of their own receptors. I poured every drop of bottomless, lightless sadness I had into it.
Nearly everyone in the room felt it.
The murmurs grew louder by the second. Still on one knee, Yudes had gone dangerously red around the whites of his eyes. His nostrils flared.
Right. Slightly overdone, perhaps.
I swallowed against a completely dry throat, turned on my heel, and ran.
"Celesta!" Lacoste's voice cut after me, sharp with wounded pride. I was already through the door and not looking back.
Hallway, stairs, exit. Somewhere in my peripheral vision I caught Kristof, pale and utterly devastated, stepping toward me with something he clearly needed to say. I was already digging through my evening clutch for the flyer keys.
Beep.
The racing car blinked its perimeter lights in cheerful greeting and lifted its wing door. Half-expecting pursuit, I dove in, fired the engine, and hauled back on the controls, pulling the flyer into the air. As I peeled away from the Central Municipal Palace lot, the side window caught a flash: large, dark, gleaming horns that looked suspiciously familiar. Try and catch me, I thought, and floored it.
The hot wire in my skull was still pulsing, but speed had always been my cure. God, I loved being in the driver's seat. Night-time Zwarg streaked past beneath the hull: running lights of other vehicles, neon outlines tracing towers and office blocks, long glowing caterpillars of streets and crosswalks, dark patches of pocket parks nestled between buildings, all of it smearing into luminescent ribbons of color. Darkness and light, light and darkness. A painting by a very unhinged abstract artist.
The altimeter read just a couple of kilometers up, but I felt like a bird tasting open sky for the very first time. Tears ran down my face and I wanted to laugh anyway. My hands on the controls were shaking. What if Yudes had pushed through? What if I hadn't caught the mental pressure in time? What if my second marriage had looked exactly like my first?
I flicked the toggle and climbed higher. I wouldn't have dared this altitude during the day; at this height, the light bouncing off Zwarg's moissanite peaks was blinding, but the planet at night was something else entirely. Breathtaking in a way that made your chest ache.
Learning to fly solo had been the first thing I'd wanted after Martin died. And I didn't care what anyone thought about a woman at the controls.
I scanned the glittering landscape below and nudged the flyer toward the darkness ahead. My favorite place. The Clear Sea, as they called this particular wonder of Zwarg, had water so pure that not even plankton bothered to live in it. I set the flyer down right on the shore, stepped out, kicked off my heels, and pressed my bare feet into the cool damp sand.
I exhaled.
The sea murmured quietly.
This. This was good.
I'd loved this place since childhood, treating it like my own private resort. My parents had never taken me off-planet; with Zwarg being what it was, an exit visa for any female resident was nearly impossible to get. My mother would stroke my hair and promise that my future husband would surely take me somewhere wonderful. My father would nod. In practice, Martin had always been too busy to take me anywhere, but he had bought an estate near this beach, so there was that.
The sea sent a playful spray of foam against my ankles, pulling me back. Far off, where the blueberry-cobalt sky full of crushed-diamond stars dissolved into the water, seagulls called. A soft cool wave curled around my feet and erased the deep footprints I'd left in the sand behind me.
The burning sting at the base of my neck had finally gone quiet. The pain was winding down the way an old, grumpy bear winds down for winter: circling his den a few times, rearranging his bedding, grumbling at nothing in particular, and then at last going still.
Will you be my wife? Yudes's voice drifted through my head, quiet and uninvited.
The panic had finally loosened its grip. I sat down right there on the shore, dress and all, pulled my knees to my chin, wrapped both arms around myself, and breathed out long and slow toward the water.
"Not a chance. Not Yudes, not any other Zwargian. Not any man, period. Nobody is making me do anything. I'm a widow."
And that, that right there, was the one thing I would be genuinely, endlessly grateful to my late husband for. Not the ancient family name. Not the money spread across all those accounts. Not the property portfolio.
The widow status.
Which on Zwarg, when you got right down to it, was just another word for untouchable.