33. THALIA

Iwiped down the counter. I couldn’t pronounce his name, even in my own head, so I just called him Patron. But I knew who he was, and his carapace revealed a faint rush of luminous beige to acknowledge familiarity.

“You paying today?” I asked in Trader Common, eyeing him from the shadows of my deep hood. I made sure to really ham it up with my voice—seemed the Gestalt didn’t do subtle sarcasm well.

He made a chuffing sound with the little plates along his armored cheeks that was his species’ equivalent of laughter. Patron always paid.

I produced his favorite drink—a tea that smelled like turmeric and cat litter. In a little saucer. He bent and scooped it up with his mandibles in delicate sips. Not a drop splashed on my clean counter.

I finished wiping things down and busied myself arranging the dishes while Ahane banged around in the kitchen preparing the next batch of soggy pancake custard.

Patron ordered his usual, which I shouted back to Ahane, poured him another saucer of turmeric-kitty-litter-milk and kept my attention somewhere else. Human attention, even what Humans called casual attention, was too intense for most of the Gestalt.

Maybe it was because I looked like a mini version of the Grim Reaper.

Patron ate his food in tiny bites, then proceeded to sip his third saucer while I brewed a fresh pot and he read from a slender tablet.

“News?” I drew my gloved hand across the counter to emphasize news was, in fact, news. It was a gesture I’d picked up from a couple of other articulated after watching Ahane rip them off at rainbow chess. Everyone always wanted news.

Everyone had also not asked questions about the Hunter. The Hunter’s ship had been towed from the docks as quickly and discreetly as possible. No further Hunters had appeared. If anyone suspected why the Hunter had been there, who he had been after, or the end he had met… no one said a damn word.

“News I downloaded before I left the network pod.” He sounded a bit haughty, as always.

Patron was one of half a dozen who I saw regularly and always seemed to have news. They were traversing back and forth to network-covered space, and they were making enough money to pay docking fees and network fees. And they always loved it when I played dumb about the news and acted all breathless and oh you have NEWS, tell me more, you big handsome slug when they had feeds.

Little did they know that once I had mastered any news? in 25XA or Trader, I asked everyone. Let everyone think Ahane had dragged me here because I was a 25XA leper and so, so wistfully homesick.

But I was braced for bad news every time I woke up. He would send another Hunter. Or the Site Master would kill Ahane. The Site Master wasn’t going to fire him. Not after everything we’d collectively brought upon this place.

It had been exactly eighteen sleeps since the Hunter had arrived and departed. It was a matter of time before word got back to my old handler that the Hunter had failed. Another Hunter would be sent. And this one would be prepared.

Patron rattled off a few things I knew nothing about, but the noises I made to acknowledge it seemed to satisfy him.

Time for a gamble. I leaned forward but angled my head slightly so that he’d only see my eye in the hood. “Have a map?”

“A map?”

“Where we are.” This was really pushing the limits of my language.

“You don’t know?”

I pointed a wrapped finger at the kitchen. “Says get on ship. What do? Say ‘no’?”

“Yes?”

I shook my head.

Patron brushed his feelers along his head, where there were two holes that looked like they were for piercings, but the piercing was absent. “No trinket?”

I didn’t respond, and Patron bounced his segments in a full-body head-bob. “Where is home?”

“25XA.”

“You are 25XA?”

And there was that question that Ahane had said nobody would bother asking, except here dumbass me had invited it.

Patron’s feelers moved in a pitying dance, but he didn’t say what his carapace said: oh, she’s deformed. This part of space took all types, and people didn’t talk much about what had brought them beyond the edge of beacon-space. It was either illegal or grim… and quite possibly both.

“A High House 25XA has his pride,” Patron said with a pitying click. “What tier trinket?”

I shrugged.

“Unfortunate for both of you. The cosmos has strange ideas at times.”

I shrugged again. I didn’t have the language to have this discussion, so I was going to have to play sad little unwanted mate.

“Have you ever considered…” A gesture of his feelers. “leaving?”

I focused on him. All my attention.

“It’s not impossible,” he added with a minor trill. “If you’re determined and flexible.”

Flexiblewas accompanied by a swirling brush of his feelers along the counter, one of which just touched my fingers. I yanked my hand back and shuddered under my cloak.

Raunchy bastard. That wasn’t the goodness of his gooey circulatory system speaking.

As if to make amends (or at least change the subject), he set his tablet down on the counter and brought up a 3D orb.

The orb was extremely complex and clearly meant for actual navigation. He tapped at it, removing the complexity, until it was only the galactic core, field lines with nodes that became farther and farther apart—beacons—and then 25XA, and an orange dot. He tapped the orange dot with his feelers.

We were far from Ahane’s home, and well outside the beacon field lines. Ahane had kind of been hoping (although he had not said as much) that we were just outside the beacon field and, as long as he knew what general direction to head in, he’d stumble into it.

He had made peace with his life here, but it didn’t mean he didn’t keep his hope in a little box under his pillow.

Ihad to leave, because I was a sitting duck. And Ahane would get himself killed or worse on account of me, and I just couldn’t let that happen. He’d done so much for me. I owed him. He wasn’t going to like how I’d repay him.

“He has brought you all the way here,” Patron said. “How long have you been traveling from place to place? Further and further from home.”

I shrugged as dismissively as I could, trying to convey they don’t want me back there.

“This isn’t home.” He gestured to the diner.

If I found a way home… did I just… leave Ahane alone here?

My heart caught under my ribs.

“Thank you.”My voice shook with the sudden jolt of emotions that didn’t stop the shocks. I backed away from the counter and bumped into the other counter, caught myself.

Patron’s feelers moved in a soft, swirling motion. “Assistant?”

I booked it into the kitchen and ran into the back. I slammed the door to the bedroom and fell back against it, gasping for breath and gagging and sobbing all at the same time.

I sank down along the door to the floor and tucked myself into a ball.

The plan has always been to get home. Always. Ahane can go home too. He’s just staying for you. He has always just stayed for you.

“Thalia?”Ahane twisted from stirring the large vat of hydrating kernels.

She made terrible sounds that stabbed into both of his hearts. She moved in a flash of her cloak, scurrying through the kitchen before he had even realized she was there.

Ahane twisted. Through the service window, he saw one of the regulars sitting at the counter, feelers waving in a confused fashion, body inclined towards the kitchen in question, a delicate pattern of confusion moving over his carapace.

Ahane dropped the stirring ladle and toweled off his hands. The door to their little shared apartment was uselessly thin, and he easily heard those terrible noises coming from behind it.

Was she sick? It sounded like the deep, gagging sounds she made when she had vomited.

Or was she sobbing? He pressed his hand to the door. “Thalia?”

No reply.

Sobs. Definitely sobs. She was crying. Perhaps throwing up. At the same time.

Ahane spun on his heel and stormed back through the kitchen. His secondary heart burst into a heavy rhythm, and his scales flushed and sharpened. He tore off his apron and kicked open the door to the eating room.

The patron, and now a few others who had just arrived, jumped back in surprise.

Ahane lunged around the counter and grabbed the patron by the feelers. “What did you do to her?!”

He grabbed the 475B’s trinket-holes in his other claw and yanked him up to his face.

“Nothing!” was the trill created by the struggling mandibles inches from Ahane’s face.

Ahane twisted the feelers around his fist, loop after loop, and the 475B tried to strike with a lower leg, Ahane stomped on it and pushed down, stretching his plates and exposing tender segmented flesh. “What. Did. You. Do.”

“We were talking.” The 475B’s initial shock and plea changed to a warning buzz.

“About what?”

“That you’ve taken her from home.” A middle leg stabbed forward and glanced off Ahane’s hardened scales, but not before a few guard hair spikes drove into the tiny space between scales. Ahane flinched as they penetrated his hide and burned.

“I have not taken her from her home!” Ahane bellowed.

“You won’t even tell her where you brought her,” he sneered. “I showed her how far she is from home.”

Ahane slammed the patron’s body down into the counter. It made a clattering sound. The patron took another swipe at him, shoving more fine needles into Ahane’s side. “What did you tell her!”

“I told her where she is,” the hauler sneered with trills and flicks of his mandibles, laughing around gasps of pain while Ahane dug the tip of his tail into the soft join between the 475B’s body segments.

“Then why is she crying?”

“Because of you, I imagine, Cook. Because you hide her out here out of shame!”

Ahane dug the tip of his tail even deeper and the hauler went from gasps of pain to an actual trill of pain as pain became legitimate injury. Fury clouded his scales, hardening them, tipping them with gold while his fangs sharpened and everything narrowed and slowed.

Don’t.

Something whispered to him. Cool. Calm. Distant.

His good sense, perhaps?

Pain burned in his side, spreading towards his arm. More of those damned little things, and he hadn’t even felt it. He barely felt it all now. He was aware of it.

He jerked his attention to the newcomers, who were still huddled by the door. “Take a seat. We’ll be with you as soon as I finish with this. If you upset her again, I think your plates will make lovely serving bowls.”

“You upset her,” the hauler shot back. “She asked a question. I answered it. Are you the one who turned her into that deformed thing?”

Ahane’s scales practically smoldered.

“You’re no common 25XA.” The hauler stood up, feelers waving and mandibles clicking with satisfaction. “You’ve got breath on your scales. You have a House dialect. You’re nothing to look at until you get good and angry. You’re High Science, aren’t you. Biologics, perhaps? And you did that to her, didn’t you? So are you protecting her, or did you disappear?”

“I think your speculation is increasingly dangerous and unfounded. I did nothing to her. But I know who did, and I am never letting them have her again. And if they come looking for her because they heard she was here? I will know exactly who to come find. And then you will find out if I am High House or not.” Ahane barred his teeth at the hauler. “You’ve finished your meal and overstayed your time. Go breathe air somewhere else.”