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creeps. They take forever to fix stuff.” I went to the kitchenette and pulled my glass salad bowl off the shelf under the counter. Back at the card table, I set the rose-colored bowl upside down on the stand, covering the flashlight. The glow through the bowl made a dusky rose-hued light. It was pretty, though too dim to see much even near the table. Althor peered at the makeshift lamp. “That’s clever.”
    “The lights go out so much I had to figure out something.” He stepped closer to me. Too close. It made me aware of how different he was: voice, step, body, clothes, everything was unfamiliar. He had put his box away, but where I had no idea. His clothes lay flat against his body.
    He spoke gently. “Sometimes the night needs a softer light.” His hand folded around my hair—and that’s when I saw the hinge. A ridge ran from the base of his middle finger to his wrist, letting him fold his palm in half, lengthwise from fingers to wrist. “What happened to your hand?” I asked.
    “My hand?”
    “It has a hinge.”
    Althor stiffened, and the air tightened like a sheet of plastic. He withdrew from me, niot visibly, but I felt it as much as if he had turned and walked across the room. He spoke coolly. “It had a defect. When I was born. This is how they fixed it.”
    A birth defect? I flushed, wanting to kick myself for my lack of tact.
    Then I had an odd sensation: Althor reset his mood, like, a computer. He relaxed and hinged his hand from wrist to fingertips, folding it around mine. Bending his head, he slid his other arm around my waist. Then he kissed me.
    I knew where we were going, and it was happening too fast. I had always been shy, even with boys my age. I didn’t understand why I was acting so out of character. Both of us were, actually. To this day I’m not sure how much of it was the intense pheromones humans with our rare genetic makeup produce and how much was the instinct born of those genetics. Salmon don’t think about why they must swim upstream to mate; they just do it. All I could have said that night was that it felt right, as if we blended like colors swirling into paint.
    When I slid my arms around his waist, he felt solid and masculine. He nuzzled my hair. “I like your perfume.”
    “I’m not wearing any.”
    “It must be you, then.” Lifting his head, he nodded toward the bed. “Maybe we should sit down.”
    “Okay.” I couldn’t look at him. I was too young and too confused to realize we were dealing with more than normal attraction. My main concern was how to ask if he had protection. Althor had a better idea what was happening, but his worries were about the star-spanning ramifications of his actions. He was making a choice that, for him, would normally have been rigidly controlled by the government, with or without his consent.
    He drew me to the bed and sat down, his booted feet planted wide apart on the floor. I stood awkwardly in front of him, between his knees, holding his hands in mine.
    “Don’t you want to sit?” he asked.
    I nodded, too nervous to answer. Then I sat next to him, trying to figure out how to ask what I had to ask. Althor nudged me onto my back and stretched out next to me, sliding his hand up my body, starting at my thigh and pulling up' my skirt, then moving his hand over my clothes to my waist. His grip was so big and my waist so small that he closed his hand more than halfway around it. He went up farther and cupped my breast, along with a handful of ruffles, as if I had said, “Sure, you can touch me there,” instead of what I wanted to say, which was, “Slow down.”
    “So pretty,” he murmured. “Who would have thought I would end up here with you tonight?”
    Ask, I thought. But how? What wouldn’t sound stupid? What did it matter if it sounded stupid? Better stupid than dead or pregnant.
    “Tina?” He stopped rubbing my breast. “Is something wrong?”
    “Do you have a thing?”
    “A thing?”
    “You know. A condom.”