“Priorities first. Clean up, then we talk.”
After washing up, Fásach directed the doll to sit and lift her feet. He pulled his medikit from the wall with a rusty screech, the heavy metal landing on the dirt floor with athunk.He opened it up and set out bandages, a pair of tweezers, and an antiseptic spray that felt all too familiar. Just days ago, he’d done the same for Vin and hisvira.
“My name is Roz,” the doll said, holding out her hand. Fásach stared at her palm. It was the same gesture that Imani had given him when they’d first met. He held her hand for a brief moment, then looked back down at his kit.
“Fásach,” he grunted. “Slide your feet this way.”
“That’s unnecessary. My parumauxi will repair the damage in eighteen turns and seven beats. I think.”
“Youthink?”Fásach raised a brow, looking up at her. She winced, raising her shoulders up. The movement made her breasts swing between her arms, heavy with dark brown nipples. Fásach dropped his stare to the floor faster than a ship droppinganchor. So what, she was a doll? His mother had raised him better.
“I don’t have direct access to my atomic clock.”
“What? Oh, right.” Fásach licked his teeth and cleared his throat. When she’d been covered in foam, he’d barely noticed that she was a mammal just like him, too preoccupied with the stinging itch of foam eating through his fur. Now, though, he needed a distraction. The more off putting the better. “If I clean the wounds, will it make you heal faster?”
Roz paused, then nodded once. “Yes.”
“Tell me what you know about Imani and Vin while I work, then. And put this on.” He tossed her a clean shirt from the footlocker at the end of the bed. She did so and flipped her tresses, now matted and frizzy, over her shoulder. “Are they still alive? What happened at the Conrad?”
Roz gripped her straightened legs as Fásach began the nasty work of pulling bits of volcanic rock and melted plas from her feet. She stayed still and made no noise, but flinched here and there as he tweezed a large pebble from beneath the healing flesh or dabbed at the blisters with the ruined shirt that she’d returned to him.
“They were alive when they left. I’m certain of that. But my originator was killed with an electrical shock of some kind outside of the loading bay.”
“With a cusser?” Fásach asked. Roz gave him a blank stare. “It’s a type of rifle.”
“I don’t have any reference to a cusser in my databases, and I cannot retrieve new references since my connection to the nursery has been lost. She bled very much though.” Roz brushed a hand over her throat.
Fásach frowned. Novak used a cusser most of the time. Advenans were shock resistant, so the long gun’s unwieldy charge gave them the advantage of being dangerous to touch forother species. He plunked another large pebble from the ball of Roz’s foot into a small tin can. Bits of Vin’s scorched plates still cushioned the bottom.
“And you don’t know anything else about what happened?”
“I have a recording in my LMem! Would you like to view it? It’s not very clear, but I will show you.”
“Yeah, show me.”
Fásach knew that dolls weren’t equipped with holotabs, but it surprised him nonetheless when one of her eyes flipped over to reveal a miniature holowell. It warmed up, then the bare half of the room was filled with a crude memory file, the edges of doors, charging pods, and a venandi’s face racing with beads of blue light as if the scene had been sketched out in real space.
The venandi’s face snapped backwards from close to the recorder, craning to the side.
“What the fuck was that?”the venandi warbled. He stepped away, but the view in the recording was pointed at a ceiling full of black pipes, a HUD of vitals and warnings pulsing around Roz’s vision. Her view listed sideways, trying to watch where a loud pop of gunfire had come from.
Suddenly, a human that looked exactly like her burst from an interior door, followed closely by a dark blur that could only be Imani James. Her originator pushed the venandi aside and he slammed into Roz, shaking the memory.
“Hey!”the venandi roared.
“Imani, wait!”
“That’s Vin,” Fásach said, pointing at the scrambled view. A flash of a massive silhouette followed the humans, and then a tail whipped through their line of sight and snatched the venandi witness up. A violent female hiss accompanied the whip that Fásach recognized immediately. Mijka.
“Ssssshit,”her memory snarled, pacing with her long brackish brown claws pinching into her hips.“Fucking scocite! Calm down. Figure it out, Mil. Figure it out…”
Roz leaned forward. “I don’t remember that.” The recording unraveled in a blinding white flash and the room went dark.
Fásach clutched the tweezers in one hand and scrubbed his forehead with the other. Fucking shit was right. Whatever the Conrad plan had been, it had gone south. There was no question about it now. Vin, Imani, Novak, Mijka… They were all either dead, captured, or fighting for their lives.
And if they all went down, the guild would collapse right out from under their feet. Safia and Misila would be swallowed whole by the institute’s Xe-Ex programs.
From the few stories Nov and Vin had told him about their childhood, no fucking way was he going to let that happen.