Page 58 of Zalis
“You are making several assumptions based on incomplete data.” He nudged the plate back toward her.
She gave him a sour look but did not protest. He had agreed not to treat her as fragile or monitor her food consumption, but she had only eaten a quarter of her meal. It was unacceptable.
“Tholla is enroute to Val Mori.” Zalis pulled up the ship’s schedule on his comm unit. “TheJudgmentwill stop there tomorrow for supplies. This is fortuitous.”
“Tomorrow? I don’t get any time to think about it?”
He could hear the conflicting emotions in her voice, a desire for justice and the urge to never have to revisit her ordeal. Facing her captors would make the wounds fresh again.
“I would give you more time if I could,” he said. “Justice has a poorly managed schedule.”
That earned a huff and a twitch of her lips. “And we can take a shuttle to the planet’s surface and do the thing?”
“Yes,” he answered.
“Everyone will know. I know that sounds lame, but I don’t want people looking at me and feeling sorry,” she said. “Or telling me how brave I am. It’s exhausting.”
“Many others will be also taking the opportunity to stock up on provisions and items that do not replicate well. No one will know the true purpose of our trip.”
She scratched behind her ear. “Not to sound too much like a capitalist drone, but will we have time to go shopping?”
“We will make the time.”
This answer seemed to please her. She added another splash of the vivid red-hot sauce and finished her omelet. Good.
Zalis would move the stars to ensure the trip went smoothly. Nothing would upset her.
GEMMA
“Do not be nervous,” Zalis said.
“I’m not nervous,” Gemma replied, which was a complete lie.
Zalis pointedly glanced down at her trembling hands.
“Fine,” she admitted and hid her hands under her thighs. “I’m a little nervous.”
She shouldn’t be. She would be anonymous behind a protective barrier. Those monsters wouldn’t be able to see her, let alone hurt her. If they did manage to escape custody, Zalis was right there. Her bulwark would never let anything happen.
And it wasn’t like she’d accidentally run into the warehouse where she’d been held. That was on Tholla’s moon. After landing, Zalis pointed out its location in the sky. If anything, Tholla held good memories. She was reunited with Emry here and got pins in her ankle.
Still, her hands shook. It made no sense. From the moment she woke up in that cage, she kept it together. She was focused, angry, and full of spite. They might have broken her ankle, but they weren’t going to break her. Now that it was all over and she was safe, she was falling apart. Nightmares. Headaches. The uneasy sensation of being watched when she was alone. And for no discernable reason, she trembled like a leaf in a storm, which was just humiliating.
“You do not have to do the identification,” Zalis said.
“I do.” The people who did this to her needed to know they didn’t break her and they couldn’t frighten her into silence.
After all this was over, she and Zalis were going to wander a farmer’s market, visit all the food stalls, and get ice cream or a frozen fruit equivalent. Both, if possible. Most importantly, she was going to enjoy the feeling of the sun on her face for the first time in more than a month.
All that was in the future. Until then, she had to sit in a busy corridor in a police station, waiting to be called in by Constable Pama.
“Can we talk about what you’re wearing? That’s a lot of buttons,” she said.
That morning, instead of dressing in his normal gray-on-dark-gray uniform, he wore a form-fitting sleeveless white shirt with equally form -fitting tan trousers. Over that, he had an indigo jacket with brass buttons. Somehow the jacket had both a cowl and a capelet over one shoulder and she had no clue how any of that worked. On the jacket front, he wore one of his dragonfly drones as a broach. His knee-high boots were leather and with matching brass buttons on the outside that did nothing. She knew this because she watched him use the invisible zipper when he dressed.
Zalis looked like he was on his way to pilot an airship. All he needed was a pair of goggles and a top hat with some gears glued decorating the band. It was whimsical. She liked it.
“I do not wish to discuss the matter,” he replied, sitting stiffly.
