The Long Game (The Far Reaches, #4)

by Ann Leckie

What are you going to do now? “I don’t know what to do,” I said to Nish. “I don’t want to die; I want to live as long as I can. But I don’t like the humans telling me what to do. I’m the one who tells people what to do!” It didn’t help that I felt helpless here, spending whole days with only Nish to talk to and the occasional human. The human who had talked to me the most—the chief of all the Field Liaisons, they had claimed—had spoken to me as though I were stupid. I didn’t like that either. Nish had suggested that it was only that this Field Liaison couldn’t speak people’s language very well, and maybe that was the case, but I still had come away from every meeting feeling insulted. “And besides,” I continued, “I don’t like that the humans think we’re cute.” I had talked with enough humans now to sort of understand that word. “You said that humans here would be sad if anything happened to us, but they don’t think we’re people. They think we’re things to play with. The humans on earth could kill all of us and the humans here might hardly even notice; they’d still have their sparkly, fringe-eyed, stiff not-people to give their infants.” “Ah,” replied Nish. “So you’re not just a big bully. You actually think about things.” I was angry at that, but before I could say anything, Nish asked, “Why do people do what you tell them?” That was a ridiculous question. “Because I’m bigger. Because I have other big people to help me make them do what I tell them.” But as I said that, Ni...