Page 32 of Seven Oars
“I am half-human and half-Tana-Tana,” she whispered.
He leaned back in his strange chair, making it creak.“What’s your name, hybrid?”
“Rosamma.”
“A strange name for a strange life form.”
Someone laughed extra hard behind her.Two someones. Nud and Xorris.
“Where are you from?” the Striker asked.
“We’re from Meeus.”
“Where were you headed?”
Were. Past tense. The trip she hadn’t wanted to take was officially over.
Ironically, she wasn’t feeling too grateful at the moment. She’d much rather be flying to Priss.
She swallowed.“We were going to Priss.”
“The asteroid?”
The second scarred beast stepped forward.“Where’s your cargo?”
“We were the cargo. We were moving to Priss.”
“Dumb alien.” That was Nud.
He kicked Rosamma. She bit her tongue to keep from whimpering and kept her watering eyes fixed on the Striker, whose scarred face wavered in front of her.
“More to the point,” the Striker said evenly, disregarding Nud’s aggression or Rosamma’s pain,“why were you, human women and a Sakka from Meeus, flying in a decommissioned spacecraft with no defense system, escorted by members of theRix defender force?”
Rosamma’s face hurt. Her side hurt. And it was hard to speak with a bitten tongue and a throat that kept closing on a sob.
But not speaking would mean more pain.
“Another pilot was supposed to take us to Priss. His name was Lyle. But he got sick. And the defenders… they came unexpectedly. I don’t know who arranged it.”
It might have been Cricket, Lyle’s mate. Or Paloma, Ren’s girlfriend. Or Lyle himself.
“Who is Lyle?” the Striker asked, punctuating his question with a nudge of his boot. It didn’t hurt, but it warned her that the next time she gave an unclear answer, it would. Worse than Nud’s.
She wanted to curl into herself and cry, and say she gave up; they could kill her now.Yet stubbornly, she kept her eyes on the Striker’s ugly alien face.
“Lyle is Rix. Like you. Rayanor Lyrem. That was his full name.”
The guy smoking the pipe coughed.
Others fell quiet.
The Striker sat forward in the chair, revealing odd, washed-out designs etched into the seat that gave Rosamma a vague sense of dread.
“The Shadow Flyer?”
She’d forgotten Lyle went by that handle in his previous life.
“Yes. I believe that was what he was also called.”
