Pei knew this fact in the same way that she knew how to breathe, and yet all the same, the Akarak made her wary.

She’d never seen one of their kind in a place like this – in a spaceport, sure, but always on the fringes, digging through scrap, scuttling through alleys, conversing only among themselves. Never in the thick of a marketplace. Never alone. Never walking around a fuel shed, browsing algae starters and fuel pumps, as the individual she was watching from a distance was doing now. Akaraks were not a common sight in GC space, but Pei had assuredly had dealings with them – not in words, but with weapons. She’d caught a pair of them snooping around her shuttle once, and had scared them off with nothing more than a pistol drawn. Another time, a crew of them had been in the process of stealing the cargo she and her own crew had been sent to collect. That incident hadn’t been so easily resolved. Pei had never spoken with an Akarak, but she had a pulse-rifle scar on her upper arm thanks to one, and had ended the lives of two more with her own hand.

That was the sort of fact whose layered meanings she had no desire to unfold further.

Pei turned her attention back to the spiral of blooming hedges she stood within. Their long, horn-like flowers were pretty (despite being yellow), and their scent was pleasingly sweet. A small swarm of pollinator bots moved among them in a soothing sway, meandering from blossom to blossom, rolling their soft, dusty brushes with a mechanical hum. Pei was glad to be outside, glad to have her feet on the ground. Her ship – her main ship, not the shuttle she’d travelled in – had a garden, like most did, but it just wasn’t the same as one woven into a planet. She knelt down, grabbed a pinch of the mulch blanketing the hedges’ roots, and rubbed it between her fingers with reverence. She loved her ship, loved her crew, loved a life spent above instead of below, but stars, there were times when she missed dirt.

The back of her neck prickled with the empty touch of being seen.

She glanced up, and over.

The Akarak was looking at her.

They were too far apart for Pei to see the Akarak’s face – not that she would’ve been able to read the expression anyway, knowing as little about them as she did. Like all of xyr kind, the Akarak was housed within a bulky, bipedal-bodied mech suit, sealed away in a windowed cockpit that occupied the space where an ordinary-sized head might be. The suit itself was a bit taller than Pei, but its operator was child-sized – no, smaller than that, even. Pei could’ve placed xyr in a satchel without difficulty. She could make out a few physical details: spindly limbs, short torso, the hint of a beak hiding in shadow. But even without a good view of the Akarak’s face, Pei could tell they were staring at one another. The moment in which they could each pretend they weren’t had gone.

There was movement within the suit: a lever pulled, buttons pressed. The suit obeyed, straightening up and raising both of its four-fingered metal hands. At the Akarak’s command, it turned the palms outward, and tipped the fingertips gently to each side.

Pei’s inner eyelids flicked with surprise. The stance the Akarak’s suit had adopted was that of an Aeluon greeting, the kind you gave a person when you were too far apart to press palms. It was an unremarkable, everyday way of expressing a friendly hello, performed by the last sort of figure she would’ve expected it from. The combination was nothing if not surreal.

Pei stood still for a moment, then cautiously returned the gesture.

The Akarak’s suit gave a polite tilt of acknowledgement, then returned to the business of buying algae.

Before Pei could process that exchange, a loud rattling sound approached. Pei had no natural sense of hearing, but the auditory-processing implant embedded in her forehead allowed her to cognitively register sound and understand its associated meaning (the sensation was something like reading, but without a screen present). Vital as this need was in a galaxy where everyone else insisted on carrying out vibratory conversations delivered via air, the implant could not communicate the sound’s direction in the same neural way that it relayed the sound itself. This simply wasn’t something a non-hearing brain could comprehend. To accommodate for this, the implant gave her skin a gentle buzz on the right side of her forehead, letting her know where the noise was coming from.

She turned to see the younger Laru ambling in her general direction, walking on xyr hind legs and pushing a three-tiered cart with xyr forepaws. The garden had a clearing at the centre, a spacious, short-cut lawn with tables and benches designed for a variety of species’ posteriors. It was here that the Laru was headed with xyr cargo.

Pei approached, and the smell of warm sugar caught her attention. ‘What’ve you got there?’ she asked, mentally operating the talkbox implanted on the outside of her throat (a talkbox could be implanted anywhere, really, but other sapients preferred it when your ‘voice’ – computerised though it was – came from the same direction as your head).

The child – Tepo, was xyr name? Tuppo? something like that – parked the cart and turned to face Pei. Except … xe didn’t quite face her. The Laru were a species that Pei was familiar with, but it didn’t take an expert to grasp that the shaggy kid was shy. Xe looked somewhere in the vague vicinity of Pei’s face, just short of looking her in the eye. ‘Please enjoy these traditional Laru desserts, compliments of your hosts at the Five-Hop,’ xe said in joyless recitation. Xe gestured at the cart with all the enthusiasm of someone cleaning out a clogged drain.