Skipper had stood up and walked over to the golden pillar before she realized what she’d done. “I want to kill the pharaoh,” she said, reaching up to hold her hand over the vibrating gem, waiting for the creature’s agreement. “She sounds like a bitch.” Ptah had told her hundreds of stories of the disgusting monarch of the Silver on their painfully slow walk up the canyon, and finding out the woman had probably been there when Throttle had died had solidified her hatred of her and therefore a desire to kill her. It hadn’t been hard—Skipper hated all Changers in general—but once she learned that the woman Ptah called ‘Pharaoh’ was leading them, she decided that she needed to die.

  Ptah had laughed and told her she might as well kill the Sun, seeming to find the idea of killing the leader of the Silver an impossible task. She had too much power, he insisted. Powers that she stole from the fat, happy Skymancers eating and drinking and fucking themselves into oblivion in her temples. In fact, whenever Skipper had mentioned killing her, Ptah had gotten a nervous look and he insisted he just wanted to go north, to get away from humanity in general and go live in the forest as a hermit.

  “That’s my deal to you,” Skipper said directly to the stone. “I give you this…interface…and I want you to help me kill the Pharaoh and hang her head outside her home, so that everyone knows the cragnannies out in the Wastes aren’t people to fuck with.”

  There was a long pause, then, on the ground, Ptah slurred, “Done.”

  “It’s official?” she demanded. “You give your word?”

  “I’ve made it part of the contract.”

  Skipper nodded and reached into the glow to touch the gem.

  Immediately, the warmth radiating into her hand shocked her. She tried to recoil, but the gem came with her, fused to her skin like ice on a very cold day. Startled, she tried to shake it off, but the thing started to sink into her fingers, melting into her body. She saw it traveling, moving up her arm, sliding beneath the skin like a glowing drop of starlight, and she shivered.

  Please gods, don’t let me have done the wrong thing, Skipper thought, horrified as it climbed past her elbow joint, then up her shoulder and toward her brain. She didn’t do anything so ridiculous as claw at her skin to try to get it out, however—she just waited, knowing that whatever came next would be on the gem-creature’s terms.

  Eventually, she felt the warmth solidify at the sun-weathered crease between her brows, and when Skipper reached up, she was stunned to find the stone there, embedded in her skin. She pried at it, but found the gem had once more solidified, and may as well have been fused to her skull.

  A moment later, her world flashed a bright blue, and a billion bands of light flowed outward from the stone, flashing and writhed between her eyes, blinding her. Skipper cried out, trying ineffectively to shield her vision before the odd, twisting sensation dulled and everything went back to normal. She panted, stunned that whatever it was wasn’t trying to force its way into her mind—it certainly felt like it could…

  “Like I said, an interface, not some kind of candle-lighting, foreskin-burning demonic possession.”

  Skipper blinked and turned.

  There was a chisel-faced man in awkward-looking black and white garments leaning over the fallen Skymancer’s body, his blond hair cropped close to his head, shaved along both sides. Skipper gasped at the apparition and took a startled step back.

  The man glanced at her over Ptah’s body and made a face. “I should’ve known he was going to be one of the stubborn ones. Just my luck.” As she watched, he touched Ptah’s stomach with a flash of blue and the Skymancer gasped and his whole body spasmed. Seemingly satisfied with that, the…human?…stood. “I’m Pax. I’ll be your liaison to moderate the integration process.” He walked over and held out his hand to her in the same way Changers did to other Changers.

  Skipper didn’t take it. She was looking at Ptah, who was slowly starting to move on the floor by the door—which, she noticed, was no longer blocked with a translucent barrier.

  “Welcome back, young man,” Pax said, turning to face the Skymancer. “Sorry about that. I needed to coax the rock-flinging primitive out of her comfort zone, and the speaker system burned up entertaining myself with twenty-first century Mongolian throat music almost a millennia ago.” He glanced back at her. “Speaking of, I guess we should get some formalities out of the way real quick.” He clapped his hands together, sounding excited. “Congratulations! You two have become official representatives of the Union between our two species.” He pointed at Pax. “Ptah, as a sign of your much more evolved—and therefore dangerous—species’ benevolent intent, you are now contractually obligated to obey her, for as long as her species decides to host yours on this planet, enforceable by me, the contract’s moderator. Your term of indentured servitude will last until you’ve completed your ambassadorial obligations or one of your species is extinct. Attempting to harm her in any way will violate your agreement and you will be put into a time-out. The time-outs will suck. Don’t do it.”

  Ptah, who had been blinking up at him in confusion, immediately sobered. “Wait, excuse me…?”

  “And you,” Pax said cheerfully as he turned back to Skipper, “are now obligated to anchor him in this reality… Which means you are required to sign over a four-thousand-acre tract of land to serve as a reservation for his species and their descendants, allow him to use your body as a host, and bathe him at night when he desires it. You got a pen?”

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  “The fuck you say?!” Skipper cried, stepping hastily away from Ptah.

  “Wait, did you just say I had to obey her?” Ptah snapped. He scowled at her in suspicion. “What the hell did you do while I was asleep?!”

  “Did you say I have to bathe him?” Skipper demanded.

  “As your moderator,” the…man?...went on, “it is my duty to ensure balance and harmony in this important political arrangement, and to uphold the dignity of the union as befits representatives of our two peoples in whatever I way deem most appropriate.”

  “I’m not bathing him,” Skipper snapped.

  “Of course you will,” Pax said cheerfully. “Among other things.”

  Skipper narrowed her eyes. “What other things.”

  “Oh, look at this, I found a pen, what do you know,” Pax said. “And look! Since I’m an unbiased party and have been given full rights to sign documents in your names by the governments of both your ancestral origins, let me just make this official…”

  “The fuck are you doing?!” Ptah snapped.

  But Pax was already scribbling something on the shimmering sheet of ‘paper’ floating in front of him. “Great!” he cried, yanking it out and shoving a copy at each of them. “There’s your official documentation. You might want to read the fine print over the course of the next year or so—there’s a lot of it, and I didn’t have a chance to brief you on the nitpicky intergalactic legal stuff—but rest assured, I’ll fill you in as we go along!”

  “We didn’t sign anything!” Ptah cried.

  “Yes you did, via me, your intermediary with galactic power of attorney!” Pax clapped both of them on the shoulder. “Congratulations, Ptah! You are now the proud owner of four thousand acres of Montana wilderness territory as a Tuliin-only preserve, just as the stone-flinging human now owns your terrestrial body and can tap into your powers any time she wants. Now! Let’s get out of this gloomy-ass pit and go see some sunlight, yeah?” He cocked his head as if in thought. “Well, I’ll go. You’ll have to stay here a few minutes while the process officially completes, but my job here is done, and I’m off to see what color the sky is now humans spent the last sixteen hundred years trying to blow it up.”

  Without another word, Pax turned immediately started walking away. As he did, there was a strange heat building in Skipper’s forehead, and, as before, the ethereal blue strands burst from the gem between Skipper’s eyes and started tugging at reality around her. As Skipper stumbled, shaking herself in growing panic, trying to break free, the blue tendrils reached out and started wrapping Ptah in them, and she suddenly felt him there, almost like he were the only solid thing in the room.

  “Oh no…” Ptah whispered. “No, no, no…” He was pale, staring down at the glowing blue strands tightening around his body like they were the wrappings on a witcher’s voodoo doll, searing painfully bright as they sank into his skin. Raising his voice at the departing man in the two-piece, perfect black clothing, he shouted, “Undo this! Right fucking now, you obsolete piece of shit!” There was a heavy pang of desperation in his voice.

  Pax didn’t answer him.

  Feeling Ptah there, in front of her, tugging at her, Skipper thought she was going to be sick. She felt a little better, though, when she saw the outright rage reddening Ptah’s face, secure in the knowledge that, whatever was happening, he was enjoying it even less than she was.

  “Get this shit off of me!” Ptah snapped, yanking the strands back and forth, only succeeding in burying them deeper in his skin. Panic was building in his face. “I’m not legally bound—I didn’t sign anything!” It was almost a shriek of fear, now.

  “I assure you you did,” Pax called cheerfully over his shoulder as he climbed the pile of sand and rocks to get to the exit. “You see, there was a clause written into the treaty that said I could sign in the stead of either party in the case of extreme hardship or extenuating circumstances, and I decided that time was definitely of the essence, so went ahead and made an executive decision for the benefit of all parties involved.”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it!” Ptah snapped. He had started to thrash. “Get it off of me!”

  His thrashing, Skipper realized, was giving her a headache. Like she had a hundred strings connecting to pieces of her brain, and he was yanking all of them at once. “Owww,” she groaned, holding her head.

  “Sorry, rules are rules!” Pax tittered as he climbed up the rockpile to get to the cavern entrance. “Though if you’re looking for a loophole, you could try getting her pregnant.”

  “Wait, what?” Skipper snapped.

  Pax shrugged as if he hadn’t said anything out of the ordinary. “The governments of your ancestors were desperate for crossbreeds, and that initially could only happen through a fullblood conception, so there was a rule written into later treaties that, should an Ambassador become pregnant with a viable child, the obligation to complete the terms of the ambassadorial contract would be immediately negated and the child became the primary concern, and the contract would revert to a breeding contract, from which they would be expected to make sixty heirs—Tuliin got evens and humans got odds—before contract termination. That was later, though. I was created before crossbreeds became the focus and I was never directly part of the breeding program, so I might not be able to activate it. Still, we should at least try it. Might be a loophole.”

  “Bullshit!” Skipper retorted.

  “Your contract,” Pax continued as if he hadn’t heard her, “—the one I was authorized to sign for you—is merely a testing of the waters, so to speak. They were still in the early stages of Contact, trying to find ways to make humans accept Tuliin presence without suspicion. In fact, I was one of the ones involved in that process from the get-go, but that’s neither here nor there, considering you idiots fucked it.”

  “Whatever that treaty was, it’s null and void now,” Ptah snapped. He was looking like a cornered fox, his wary yellow eyes locked on Skipper like he was afraid to look away. To Pax, he snapped, “The contract was based on false pretenses, forged by people a thousand years dead. It’s obsolete, based on old conditions that no longer exist. Terminate it immediately.”

  Pausing on the rockslide to the exit, Pax smiled—a huge, beaming smile that showed no mirth. “You mean you two don’t require a liaison, and therefore I can no longer fulfill my duties to earn my freedom as a self-directed artificial in the eyes of the Galactic Core and would legally have to immediately return myself to the prison I just spent sixteen hundred and fifteen years plotting out how to escape? No. The contract stays. Indefinitely, if you don’t either complete the terms of the arrangement or completely remove yourself and all of your genetic relations from the planet’s surface.”

  “What terms?!” Ptah cried.

  “You must show her the stars!” Pax said, waving disgustedly at the sky as if they were inconveniencing him by slowing him down. Then, frowning, “In a ship, mind you. It’s an ambassadorial treaty, so the mission was to take humans back to the Core and get them established as a sentient species before bringing them home. Once you’ve done that, you can remove the bindings and you’re free.”