by H. E. Trent
“You like?”
“Pudding?”
She nodded. She couldn’t tell what his face was doing, but there was a shifting of his features. “I no see,” she said. “Tell.”
“Sorry. I guess I don’t have a straight answer. Pudding is one of those things I have to be in a certain mood for. I’m sure it’s great. The recipe is probably one of Mimi’s and Court never messes those up.”
She nodded.
A dessert.
She nestled the little canister into the folds of her skirt and concentrated on tearing her bread first. She’d save the pudding for last. Dessert wasn’t an unheard-of thing on the farm, but Ais looked forward to each new concoction. The Tyneali didn’t eat sweets. They didn’t have the taste buds for them. Jekh was a whole new world of flavors.
Sounds and sights and flavors.
She still had so much she wanted to experience.
Likely bored with her, Owen returned to the bathroom after carting her stew bowl to the sink.
Ais ate slowly, savoring every bite of bread and cheese, and making the flavors last. Breakfast would probably be a long time in coming, so she wanted a full belly before dessert.
She gave the dog a tiny piece of cheese, and hovered her fingers over the lid of the pudding container. The magic of anticipation would go away once she’d opened the top and had taken a taste, and she wanted to draw out that feeling just a little longer.
Owen carried the cleaning tools out of the bathroom and tucked them into the small cubicle near the cottage door. “All set in there. You can do anything except shower until tomorrow. I’ll let you know when you can safely run water in the stall.”
She nodded and knocked breadcrumbs off her bodice. At some point, she’d have to get up and shake out the bedcovers, but pudding first.
She gripped the little canister in one hand and the spoon in the other, and made herself wait one more minute before pulling back the lid.
“You gotta talk yourself into it?” Owen had moved to the foot of the bed. He leaned onto the mattress. One of his large hands passed over the puppy’s darker fur. The puppy seemed to be in hysterics, running in small circles beneath Owen’s hand so he’d rub every part of his back.
She knew all too well what that craving for touch felt like. Grimacing, she turned her gaze down to the metal canister and squeezed the cool cylinder hard. “Saving,” she said.
“Trust me, there was a lot more. Court tripled the recipe to use up a bunch of milk. The one guy around here who has Terran dairy cows traded us this morning to use our COM. He hadn’t talked to his mother in a year. Every time he could get into Little Gitano to the meet-shop, he couldn’t get a connection, or no one would answer on the other end. He was really starting to worry.”
“Where mother?”
“Earth.”
“Oh.” Ais unscrewed the pudding lid and wondered where her mother would be if she were alive. Ais wondered if she were safe and happy or, if like Ais, she’d been miserable for most of the past twenty-five years. More, Ais wondered if she’d care about Ais at all if they were to meet.
Does she want her daughter?
Gnawing on her bottom lip, she dipped the spoon into the cup.
“I swear, the pudding is probably good,” Owen said.
“I…” She shook her head. He didn’t understand, not that she’d done anything to assist him in doing so. “Not pudding.”
“What then?”
“You say mother.”
“Yeah?”
She didn’t know how to explain, at least not fluently. She didn’t think he’d understand the few halting words she could give him, so she just shook her head again and put pudding between her lips.
Cold, creamy, sweet.
She held the spoon against her tongue and sighed around the metal.
A simple treat, but a new one for her. A treasure.
“It’s just pudding, Ais.” Owen chuckled, and straightened up at the bed’s foot. She’d never heard him laugh before, or if she had, she certainly couldn’t remember.
Whenever the Tyneali laughed, Ais’s gut had always twisted into knots. The sound was like metal being rasped by the edges of spoons. It made her lungs seize and her palms sweat, and she didn’t know why.
Reg’s overly indulgent laugh was a cruel bark, usually emitted just before some sardonic quip or after she’d flinched away from him. She’d never understood why he found her fear to be funny.
But Owen’s laugh was like a stroke to the back of the hand—a touch that couldn’t be ignored. The resonant sound got her attention, and…it didn’t hurt. She was so used to things hurting.
Swallowing, she dipped the spoon into the cup once more.
Owen moved about the room, already bored of her. Always busy.
He pulled the tablet down from the shelf and folded his long body into the armchair across the room.
“Did Ais eat?” came Courtney’s voice.
Owen grunted and pointed the tablet screen toward Ais. She was mid-lick.
She quickly pulled her tongue back into her mouth.
Courtney giggled, and Owen turned the tablet away. “The doctor pinged me a while ago,” she said. “He’s visiting tomorrow to check on my pregnancy and he wants to take a look at Ais’s eyes again to make sure nothing’s changed since he did his initial assessment. If his schedule doesn’t suddenly implode, he thinks he could fix the first eye in the next few days.”
Ais set down her spoon. Surgery was far more important than pudding, and she didn’t want the sounds of her own swallowing to muffle any word Courtney had to say on the matter.
“And he thinks he could, what?” Owen asked. “Fix the color perception or the nearsightedness or the other stuff?”
“Both. The nearsightedness would be easier to fix. There’s been reliable surgery for that on Earth for decades now, and Jekhan medical science is far more advanced than ours.”
“You mean the same reliable surgery Brenna refuses to get?”
“Brenna’s a special snowflake.”
Ais didn’t know what that meant, but she knew that Brenna also had some sort of problem with her eyes. She wore glasses and had refused any of the doctor’s offers to correct her vision permanently.
“He thinks he can correct the deformities to Ais’s optic nerves using a laser treatment. Supposedly, that’ll get her close to twenty-twenty vision by the time all is said and done. Figuring out the color issue was harder,” Courtney said. “He had to dig into the few Jekhan medical journals he could still find archives of. Is Ais listening?”
Owen’s blond head lifted. He didn’t say anything, though.
Ais guessed after a few seconds that he was probably wearing a query for her on his face, and she just couldn’t see it. “I hear,” she said.
“Good! So he won’t have to repeat all this in that sloppy, half-assed way of his.”
Ais clapped her hand over her mouth but the giggle squeaked out first.
Owen growled softly.
Ais’s cheeks burned from her slight embarrassment. She turned her attention to pudding once more, hiding her face by hanging her head.
“Anyway,” Courtney said, “there were records of hybrids in the past couple of generations having a variety of eye disorders pertaining to color perception. None were quite the same as Ais’s. Ais seems to have compounded issues.”
“You mean more than one thing wrong at once.”
“Yeah. The doc read her genome and thinks what they did was intentional.”
Ais nodded.
They’d done that to her eyes on purpose. They’d broken some things trying to fix others.
“Ais is nodding,” Owen said.
“Ais, what do you know?”
“They fix brown. Made worse.”
“Rephrase, please.”
“Make…uh, brown. Eyes brown.”
“Oh. I see.”
“What?” Owen said. “They fucked with her genome trying to make her eyes a human color and
didn’t have enough common sense to figure out they were breaking some other thing?”
“I don’t think they care that much, Owen. Sorry, Ais. I don’t want to hurt your feelings.”
Ais shrugged. Sometimes, she appreciated the blunt honesty.
“Doc speculated that because the hybrids didn’t evolve naturally from a population with little genetic drift, there’s too much variation in the genomes to confidently compare one patient to another. Some people on the planet have a lot more Tyneali DNA than others, and the Tyneali DNA may show up in different genetic sequences even in a pair of siblings. So, the Tyneali are probably making shit up on the fly. They’ve certainly got Ais’s genome mapped out, but they probably don’t have anyone else’s to compare it to besides her mother’s.”
“So they can’t guess that nudging one trait may ignite some kind of fuckin’ cascade failure in the rest.”
“Don’t go getting technical on me.”
Owen sighed. “Says the lady who’s been throwing genetic engineering terminology for the past minute. So…what can Doc do?”
“The nearsightedness is the more pressing issue. He’d fix that surgically, first in one eye, then the other. She’ll have to wear eye patches afterward, so that’s why he’ll only do one at a time. She still needs to be able to at least discern light and dark in the interim. The color correcting would require actual genetic tweaks, and he wants more time so he can target as few sequences as possible with the therapy.”
“When?”
“A few weeks, maybe. Like I said, everything depends on whether or not his schedule goes sideways in the next little while. Erin tries to help him out with basic first aid and nursing stuff when she goes into Little Gitano, but he’s still the only doctor around. In proportion to everywhere else he goes, he probably spends more time on this farm than is fair.”
“What time is he coming tomorrow?”
“Early, he said.”
“Okay. I’m sure Ais’ll be up.”
Following a few closing pleasantries, Owen returned the tablet to the shelf and then stuffed his hands into his pockets. She thought he was looking her way, but couldn’t tell for sure. She concentrated on scraping out the dregs of her pudding.
“I didn’t say anything about your scare earlier,” Owen said.
Again, she stopped licking.
“I didn’t want to get Court riled up. I’ll talk to her about what you saw in the morning.”
She nodded.
Owen walked slowly across the room. He paused briefly in front of the bed, and then began collecting the castoffs from her meal. She handed him the empty pudding container and the spoon.
“I guess you liked that.” He walked to the sink.
She didn’t respond, but his tone had seemed more rhetorical than querying. That tendency had befuddled her when she’d first arrived at the farm. The Tyneali rarely spoke unless they wanted responses. She hadn’t understood that sometimes people spoke just to inform others of what they already knew.
At the edge of the bed, she carefully lifted the hem of her long skirt to catch any residual crumbs on her bodice, and she brushed down any she could feel. The trashcan was next to the counter, and the floor looked free enough of obstacles.
She padded slowly toward the black receptacle, pausing occasionally when the puppy crowded her ankles.
Owen stood with his rear end leaned against the counter’s edge and his arms crossed over his chest. “You didn’t put on the salve today?”
Confused, she stopped. “Salve?”
“Remember? For your skin?” He pantomimed rubbing something into his flesh.
She sighed. Just that quickly, she’d forgotten how rock and thorns had rent her skin. She was supposed to have applied the salve to her skin one more time to prevent infection.
“I…I do tonight,” she said.
“The container is mixed in with your stuff from the house. Should be easy to find.”
Nodding, she shook the contents of her skirt into the garbage. She’d smear the gunk on immediately before changing into her nightgown, then she could spend the rest of the night until she’d nodded off listening to another of those Earth dramas she’d discovered in the tablet’s files. She’d been too distracted to hear more than a few episodes earlier, but the plot had intrigued her—something about untrustworthy maidservants and wicked aristocrats. Royalty fascinated her. They were supposed to have been elevated above mundane concerns, but their misfortunes were exponentially more scandalous than those of common men. She could never be sure if she were supposed to root for them or hate them.
Owen pushed away from the counter and stuffed his hands into his pants pockets. “I’ll be back early, I guess. Before the doctor gets here, at the very least. You’ll probably want to have breakfast before he gets to work on you.”
It didn’t dawn on her that he intended to leave until he’d unlocked the door and opened it.
“You go?” Panic shot through her. There she was by that window again where that thing had been staring at her, and no one would have been able to do anything to stop him if he’d wanted to reach in and choke her, grab her. He could have drugged her and stolen her away. She would have been gone, and Owen would have returned cursing her as the “silly little fool” who’d escaped because she didn’t know what was best for her.
“No, no, no.” She darted toward the door, her skirt catching between her legs, the playful dog tangling up her steps, some unknown item left on the floor making her stumble.
She was going down, down, down, and that time, Owen didn’t have his arms out to catch her.
She hit the floor hard, slamming her knees and then her elbows and chin. The pain didn’t register, because she was already scrambling blindly to her feet again to run.
“Be calm.” Owen tried to grab her by the shoulders, but her momentum was too great. She rammed against his body, and he was another hard thing, but he was the thing she hadn’t wanted to leave her.
“No alone!” she shouted at him, gripping the flannel of his shirt and squinting up at his face.
She could just barely make out his expression, but at least at the closer distance, she could tell he was wearing one. He looked confused, or maybe conflicted.
“No alone,” she repeated. She had to make him understand.
“I… Damn.” He looked to the door, then back to her. “I could call Amy over, but Amy would want to spring you out. Shit.” He dragged his hand down his chin, tugged his short beard, and then blew out a long exhalation.
Don’t leave me here.
If he did, she would hide until she found her courage, and then she’d run. She wasn’t going back to that space station. She wasn’t going to let anyone else take her when she was becoming so used to having her feet on solid ground.
“Please.” Her voice was a whine, and she didn’t care if she sounded weak. She grabbed his shirt and pleaded with a tug. “Afraid.”
His lips twitched and eyebrows sprung upward. But then they fell and the set of his mouth softened.
“I don’t want you to be afraid if you’re going to hurt yourself trying to run,” he said unemotionally. “I’ll stay. Okay?”
CHAPTER NINE
Growling, Reg Devin smacked his palm down hard atop his ship’s steering console, startling his copilot awake. If Reg hadn’t known any better, he would have thought the entire fucking universe was conspiring to foil his plans.
“Shit,” Locke muttered, straightening up in his seat and tugging at his harness. “What happened?”
“Nothing new. Just thinking about the same garbage as before.”
Reg growled again and initiated the descent sequence into the city of Buinet. Never before had he returned from a trip with an empty cargo bay. He wasn’t the kind of man who advertised his plans, but for some reason, people seemed to be cutting him off at every turn. He was bleeding money, and he wanted to know why. He suspected that if he had to pinpoint the start of his problems, though, they’d started abou
t two years in the past when he’d paid the match agency for a certain wife.
That bitch Courtney McGarry had slipped through his fingers.
He’d been so close—practically engaged to the whore—but he’d taken too long to return to Jekh after a trip to drop off some cargo. By the time he’d returned, someone else had put his dick into her. She’d had some other man’s baby. He didn’t know whose, only that she’d called off the arranged match.
Reg had paid good money for that match. From the time her name had popped up in the colonial singles database, she’d been his. He didn’t want her for what was between her legs—though he would have taken that, too. He’d wanted her because she was Owen McGarry’s granddaughter. The man was supposed to know things about the Tyneali that no one else did, and Reg wanted to know those things. Reg thought certainly that the man had passed down some of that knowledge to his grandchildren, and he was going to get it from Courtney. If Reg were going to make money, he needed an advantage. She’d slipped through his fingers, though—nearly drowning his ass in the process.
Then, mysteriously, his ship had been stolen. Some of his contacts said they could have sworn they saw Reg’s Beauty near Delius Secundus, but the name painted on the sides wasn’t right. The ship didn’t say “Reg’s Beauty.” In fact, the ship didn’t carry a name at all, and the unique communications signatures were wrong.
His gut told him that they had indeed seen his ship, but he had no way of tracking the vessel, or the hybrid toy within whom he’d stolen from the Tyneali station. The Tyneali were going to give him good money to get her back. And he had been planning to give her back…when he was done with her. Unfortunately, he had no idea where she was, and the Tyneali were breathing down his goddamned neck, and not giving him an inch of room to run.
They’d probably even followed him into orbit on Jekh, though he didn’t bother looking. He’d learned in the past week that the creatures were stealthy. If they didn’t want to be seen, they wouldn’t be. Even if he wanted to outmaneuver them in space, he couldn’t—not in the bucket of bolts he was temporarily flying. Beggars couldn’t be choosers, though. He’d needed a ship fast, and his sole contact on the closest Terran-occupied space station had negotiated a sale with some swindling idiot from a watery planet called Galinga. The ship probably couldn’t beat a three-legged Chihuahua in a ground race.