Language is a mirror, so it’s hardly surprising that of all known alien – or human – languages, the Kithari boast the highest number of words to describe the sensations and flavors of eating. It’s worth reading S. Thompson’s impressive Kithari cultural dictionary to enjoy the full list, but there’s three I find particularly useful:

• Ninzin: the feeling one has upon biting into a food you’ve craved for days.

• Ranar: the disappointment of tasting something that looks delicious but tastes bad or bland (interestingly, this word is also used to describe a mental state that seems to be the Kithari equivalent to depression).

• Olale: a special occasion; a day upon which you try a completely new flavor for the very first time and understand all at once what you’ve been missing.

-the Interstellar Love of Cooking, Volume One

* * *

I glared at the men who surrounded me in the shadowy alley, knowing that things were about to get bad. Getting the alien out of harm’s way was my only consolation, and it was a small one as the five men drew closer.

“My friend is on her way with station security,” I said, hoping I sounded more confident than I felt. “She’ll cut off your balls if you touch me.”

I patted the wall behind myself, seeking urgently for anything to hold onto so they couldn’t drag me down. My right hand curled around a bar of the iron fence and my left groped at a smooth wall, then slipped into a divot I hadn’t expected to find there, an alcove in the building that – as my hand continued to feel its way behind my back – I found held a sturdy horizontal bar of some sort, one that didn’t move when I tugged at it.

A bar that felt suspiciously familiar in the way any household tool you’ve used often does.

“Aww honey, we won’t hurt you if you tell us where he is,” a tall, skinny man wearing a dirty white ballcap said, but I noticed that one of his friends had torn the flat part off his protest sign so the handle had become a long, sharp stake, and he held it with the enthusiasm of a batter intent on a home run.

I jerked my head at the man with the stake. “Your friends on board with that?” I asked. “The Prophet wouldn’t want us fighting each other, brother.”

In the brief moment when his eyes flicked to his friend, I wheeled around and gripped the bar with both hands, hoping desperately that my guess was right and it wasn’t just a lone piece of metal sticking out of the wall. Luck was with me, because it was exactly what I’d thought – a ladder built into the side of the building, for maintenance or to be used as a fire escape.

They lunged as soon as they saw what I was doing, but I made it up several rungs before I felt hands pulling at my legs, high enough that when I wrapped my hands firmly around the bar and turned to the side it was easy to kick back at them as they reached for me. I opened my mouth and screamed as loud as I could, trying to yell louder than the wail of the sirens so someone would come looking, and felt a flare of hope when one of my kicks took the man in the ballcap right in the face. He backed off, howling, with his hands over his nose, and I used the respite to reach for the next rung and pull myself higher.

I was never going to make it, though, and part of me knew it. There were too many of them and only one of me, and I felt my grip on the ladder weakening as they worked together to grab my legs and pull me down.

My head began to spin, dizziness setting in as panic stole my breath and the world grew fuzzy around me. Suddenly I wasn’t sure which Rose I was, the adult who blundered between an alien and its enemies on a space station or the teenager who walked willingly into a church gymnasium to be beaten up by people she thought were friends.

It was almost funny – all these years of thinking I’d learned my lesson, and where was I now? Right back where I’d started.

Maybe you learned the wrong lesson, a tiny voice whispered in my mind, but the time for thinking was over. I yelled as I felt my hands begin to slip, and my head jerked forward reflexively as all my instincts screamed that I was going to fall. I looked down at my attackers, down the alley, down –

Down, to the place in my memory where Michael threw the gym doors open with a clang and stood defiantly before my attackers, then reached out with shaking hands to pull me to my feet.

Down, to where Dove stood in the shadows of the corridor, face a mask of anger as she raised a stunner in each hand and shot the men from behind, so quickly I doubt they ever knew what got them.

The men pulling at my legs fell first and I almost went down with them, but I grasped at the ladder with sweat-slick fingers and slammed back against it instead, my feet scrabbling until I managed to wedge one heel onto a rung. And then Dove was there, arms outstretched, and I half wept, half laughed in relief as I let myself slip down the rungs and fall into her embrace.

Her arms slid around me, patting me gently all over and asking if I was hurt in a strange, wobbly voice, one that didn’t sound like her at all. I clutched at her, then breathed out a sob when she wrapped her arms around me and held on tight.

“You’re okay,” she whispered against my ear, and kept on whispering it as she kissed my cheek, temple, jaw, then pulled me in even closer to press her forehead to mine. “You’re okay?” she said again, and I realized she needed the reassurance as much as I did.

I nodded against her and tightened my arms around her waist. “You kissed me,” I observed, and she surprised me by letting out a choked laugh.

“Sorry I didn’t ask first,” she muttered, “It’s the adrenaline.”

“That’s what they all say,” I answered, and then I pressed closer to kiss her back, properly this time, a soft, slow mingling of lips that she leaned right into with a sigh. Her tongue slipped into my mouth with a hunger that erased any worry I had about whether she felt the same. She moaned softly as her hands tangled in my hair, as a kiss I’d meant to be soft and tentative took on a life of its own, and we might have gone on like that for a long time if a jangling metallic sound hadn’t jerked us back to reality.

We pulled apart just in time to see Emiliano on the other side of the locked ironwork door, supporting the feathered blue alien while an older man fiddled with a set of keys. Emiliano raised his eyebrows, looking relieved and maybe a little amused at catching us draped over one another and surrounded by unconscious bodies, but the other man pursed his lips and averted his eyes as he opened the door. He muttered something, his words fast and sharp as he made an emphatic gesture, then held the door open.

They were standing in another narrow alley not too different from the one we were in now, except that the trash bins were more orderly and I could make out a second door at the far side that led directly into the courtyard surrounding the mosque.

“Get in here,” Emiliano told us, gesturing urgently as he eyed the men Dove had stunned. “Are they dead?”

Dove shrugged as she pulled me through. “Just stunned, they should come to in a while… if they’re lucky. They attacked Rose, five to one,” she added defensively.

Emiliano said something to the older man, who locked the gate behind us, then waved us hurriedly through the second alley – which seemed to be the trash and recycling area for the mosque – and closed the interior gate as well. Then he backed away, gesturing with both hands before turning and walking hastily around to the front of the mosque.

“Guess we’re not invited,” I observed, and Emiliano nodded uncomfortably.

“ISUF is looking for aliens who attacked a protest,” he explained, “and they shouldn’t be, Octavia wouldn’t ask for help, so something bad is going on.”

“Can’t blame him for not wanting to tangle with ISUF,” Dove sighed. “We’ve got to hide the Elik, then, and I’d better skip the official paperwork for stunning those assholes so we can stay under the radar. Where can we go?”

Emiliano’s face was tight as he led us around the side of the mosque. “Kebab King,” he answered, and Dove and I shot each other baffled looks as he peeked around the edge of the building, then led us quickly around the fountain. He paused again at the road, looking back and forth a few times before pointing to a narrow alley along a building just across the street.

“Run across, then take the second door on the right. It’ll be open,” he assured us, and waved Dove and I forward first. We ran for it and found ourselves in a dusty backroom filled with boxes and kitchen equipment, the sound of clattering pans and murmuring voices coming faintly from beneath a door that led further into the building.

I sniffed appreciatively at the scent of roast meat and spices, comforted by the homely smells. Emiliano hurried in behind us, the alien still leaning on his arm, and he shut the door quickly, sliding the deadbolt closed.

“He’s in shock,” he told us as he lowered the alien to the ground. He shrugged out of his sweatshirt and draped it over the huddled figure. “He barely managed to lead us to you. Take care of him, I’ll be right back.” He turned and disappeared through the door into the front of the building.

“How does Emiliano know the alien is male?” I asked as I dropped to the ground and tucked the sweatshirt over the creature’s chest, then bent to examine the gash on his thigh and winced at the amount of dark liquid that had soaked into his clothing.

Dove pulled a packet out of her weapons belt and unfolded it, revealing a cloth pad. “Male Elik are blue, female are tan, third sex dye their feathers all sorts of gorgeous colors,” she informed me. She handed me the pad and nodded at the wound, then dug into her belt again. “Apply pressure with that, here’s tape to wrap it. We need to lay him down, get his feet elevated.”

I bound the wound, then adjusted the Elik’s position and tucked my sweater over his legs to keep him warm. I left one hand resting on a pulse point I’d found on his neck, comforted by the steady beat even though I had no idea what the creature’s normal heart rate should be. I spared a smile for Dove. “What else do you have in that pouch?”

“Hand cuffs, epipen, pain killer, antibiotic ointment –” she paused, her words fading away as she looked at me. Even in the dimly lit storage room her expression was easy to read. I’d spent enough time obsessing over the emotion myself to recognize fear when I saw it. “Nothing that could put me back together if something happened to you,” she said, so softly that I almost could have imagined it.

“I’m sorry I left you,” I told her, the words rushing out. “I’m sorry I grabbed the alien and put us at risk. It was stupid.”

Dove shook her head as she sank to the floor beside me. “You could no more walk away from a wounded alien than I could – well. You did what you had to do, and you probably saved his life.”

I shuddered, wishing I could forget the loathing in the eyes of the men who’d cornered me. “Ahn was right,” I told her, remembering our conversation from before everything went bad. “I want you to teach me how to protect myself. What else did she say?”

“She was right about a lot of things,” Dove said in a distracted way, as though she was thinking very hard and barely aware of her own words.

She glanced at the unconscious Elik, then turned to me and lifted a hand to cup my cheek, stroking softly with her thumb. The electricity our kiss had awakened quivered back to life inside me, not caring in the least that this wasn’t the right time or place. She felt it too, I could tell from the way her body stiffened and her gaze flicked first to my eyes, then my lips.

“We need to talk about this,” I whispered, waving my free hand to indicate the two of us as her fingers smoothed the hair at my temple, each touch sending a thrill through me. “It’s not just the adrenaline, Dove, not for me. But I know this is your job, and I don’t want to –”

Her finger moved to my lips, bringing my words to a halt as she sighed out my name. “It’s not the job that’s the problem,” she told me.

I frowned. What was that supposed to mean? Her dark eyes were gentle as she watched me, and it took all my self-control not to reach up and return her caress, run my fingers over the mole below her left eye and back to release her braids from the band that restrained them, then down her arms to trace the lines of her tattoos. The only thing that stopped me was the feeling that once I started, I might not be able to stop.

Well, that and knowing that Emiliano was likely to pop back in at the worst possible moment.

“So there’s a problem?” I asked, and felt my heart sink at the slow, pained look she gave me in return.