Page 19 of Alliance
Fásach stared at her as she joined him at the window, the stiff heat brushing the curls around her face. Parumauxi were sentient nanobots that behaved like mediplasma. There was no way something like that was standard for a doll. He should know too. He’d helped move micro-swarms on the black market in his predator-fluid days. Soldiers, mercs, pirates… A parumauxi swarm could be the deciding factor in whether you survived a raid or not. Highly illegal, but highly effective.
Andinsanelyexpensive.
Roz wasn’t safe on Huajile.
“I like the view from up here,” she mused, the corner of her mouth curling. “It makes me feel taller. What a strange feeling. Do other humans like the feeling of being tall?”
Fásach stared at her profile intently while she looked down on the market. “I think we all want to stand tall.” And he would. For Safia and Misila… maybe for Roz too. A chill ran down Fásach’s hackles as he realized just how close she must have come to the nightmarish agony of a doll in need of such advanced healing tech.
“Gather up whatever’s left to sell. We need to get water, rations, and some real clothes,” he rasped, licking the inner terrain of his sharp premolars. Suddenly the old shirt he’d givenher was an insulting gesture. She deserved things that fit her, not his shitty hand-me-downs.
“Okay.”
She turned inward to the room, scanning with her full-spectrum vision. Fásach stepped in her way and carefully rolled his thermophobic hood back over her tresses. “Combs are hard to come by,” he mumbled, tucking the strays away, careful not to catch her eyelashes, “but let’s try to find one of those too.”
“What’s a comb?”
Fásach tucked the hood into the dirty neckline of his shirt, then took a measured step away from her. “Don’t worry about it right now. Let’s just pack up and get the hell out of here.”
07
[Transmission inbound.] “Testing, testing…”
Fásach’s serious tone tickled my ear as he commed me directly, testing a software update to his bionics that gave me native access. I jumped up with a bright smile and waved at him from several stalls away.
“I heard you!” I called.
The corner of his mouth twitched as he put his hands in his pockets, curling his claws away from the fabric. “You can speak normally, you know. As if you have a linguitor.”
His voice was close even if his body was far away. Of course mine should sound the same for him. I’d been overcome with excitement, which suggested I was having trouble regulating my expressive output. My cheeks prickled with heat. Embarrassment? This seemed to suit the emotion I felt. “I’m sorry. Did I yell in your ear?”
“Linguitors adjust volume on their own, so don’t worry about it.” He turned away from me, perusing a display of respirators with perked, fuzzy ears. “Let’s test range. What do you want to talk about?”
Still smiling, I followed his example and turned on the balls of my feet, walking my fingers across a table full of sheathed knives with a contemplative hum. “Thank you for providing my clothing. My core temperature is far more stable now.”
“The palladium you scavenged paid for it, not me.”
“So…Ipaid for it?”
“Yeah, Roz. You did.” Something about his tone felt softer. Perhaps he was also smiling? I stopped and stared down at my new secondhand boots and thermophobic coveralls covered with oil stains and smooth plasticky patches where the material had melted. It wasn't perfect by a long shot, but it was mine. “Wow,” I awed, then drew my brows together. “But you said this is too big on me.”
“It is. Hjarna are built very differently from you.”
There was no doubt about that. I pulled out the voluminous hips by the pockets and the fabric tented around my figure, except where it dragged across my chest uncomfortably.
“Is your clothing also tailored for hjarna?” I asked.
“What?”
I tilted my head with curiosity, poking at a myriad collection of gun straps at another vendor’s stall. The tusked merchant gave me a curious four-eyed look, but continued to attend to another customer while I glanced through them.
“Your clothing is also too big,” I clarified, thinking about how his shirt caved around his chest, how the armscyes drooped off his slim shoulders. Even the neck was too large, collapsing under the weight of the loose fur around his collarbones.
“Oh…” Fásach’s tone shifted. “No, they were printed for me when I was predator-fluid.”
“What does that mean?”
“You don’t have files on yiwreni in your databases?”
