Page 26 of Warrior's Captive
The woman approached, her lips spread in a wide smile. Vivid green metal glittered up one earlobe and dripped from the other. “Viv! You made it!”
“Um, hello,” Vivian said. She wasn’t much of an actress, but she understood that while the guard was with her, they’d pretend to be friends.
“Did you want tea?” Banujani asked.
“Tea would be lovely.” Vivian frowned slightly, then sighed and held up her comm. “Tai’ri said I could wave this thing over a terminal and it would debit his account?”
“Yup.”
Banujani steered them towards the cafe. Vivian only knew it was a cafe because she spent a part of each day learning the local dialect manually from a program loaded into a learning tablet the safehouse had allowed her to keep.
“You should be able to access the list of foods approved for your physiology as well,” the guard continued in a lowered voice.
They placed orders at a kiosk and chose a table. Vivian hadn’t had any particular purpose when emerging from the house, had just wanted to get out.
Banujani lounged in her chair, eyes constantly roving, foot tapping on the floor as if there was an invisible tune running through her head. Or maybe she drank a lot of coffee. Or whatever passed for coffee here. She hadn’t yet gotten her hands on beans.
“This has to be rather boring,” Vivian said, apology in her voice.
The woman’s gaze swung back towards her. “Boring is good. We want boring.”
“Of course.” Vivian almost blushed. “I should know better.”
Banujani nodded. “Feeling boredom means you’re acclimating. That’s good.”
She’d needed this. Another layer to help her return to normal. A new normal. She was healing. She didn’t wake in the middle of the night disoriented anymore. She smiled when she thought of her baby. She would never forget how the child had been conceived, but it was becoming easier to have small pockets of time where everything felt hum drum. Domestic. As if they were just another new age mixed species couple planning for their first child.
“So,” Vivian said, determined to emerge just a little more out of her self-imposed shell, “tell me something funny about Tai’ri.”
Banujani glanced at her, then grinned and tugged on one of her multitude of earrings. “Yeah? Okay, I’ve got a story for you.”
10
Sittingand waiting was the worst. When that happened, Tai’ri distracted himself with minor tasks—administrative work or training. But this mission was personal. He hovered beside Evvek, eyes trained on the monitor.
“Cover is solid,” Evvek muttered, red-tipped cabled hair draped down his back.
The data analyst made up for the ruthless blandness of his work environment with yellow skin pants and nothing else, displaying a honed physique. He’d left his arms where the bonding tattoos were placed alone, but every other inch of his body was inked in swirling alien designs. Script, symbols, all revealing Evvek’s fascination with off planet cultures.
“Should have hits by now.” He rattled off a string of commands, switching to manual after a time, and then his fingers flew across the boards.
“Up the bid again,” Tai’ri demanded.
Evvek’s head snapped up, his tri-colored gaze irritated. “Slow down,aja’eko. If you look too eager, you’ll scare the suppliers. This has to be done carefully.”
Tai’ri ground his jaw against a reply and nodded. He refused to prove Vykhan right about his lack of objectivity for this hunt.
If today his job was to wait and hover, then he’d wait and hover.
He’d left Vivian with Banujani and come to this hidden satellite office in the city. Their equipment was unregistered, and in front a real currency exchange conducted brisk daily business.
“Wait, wait.” Evvek hunched over, fingers swiping. “I’ve got an offer.”
“What is it?”
Tai’ri’s insides clenched as he struggled with anger. Evvek had crafted a careful profile for Tai’ri of a bored, wealthy male from a two-generation merchant family looking for ‘off-planet’ pets for his new menagerie. Female, proven breeders, of good health and trainable. Evvek sprinkled a host of other coded language guaranteed to attract the right brokers—those who traded in alien females of compatible species for sex and breeding purposes.
Tai’ri reminded himself that wasn’t always the fate of these females. Several times Ibukay’s teams had busted households who kept the aliens for household labor or even as party entertainment. The females weren’t always abused. If it had happened to Vivian, she might have gone to a household where she’d be relatively well treated.
