Page 26 of Captain Santiago and the Sky Dome Waitress
“Tankball?” He lifted a brow. “I didn’t know you liked it.”
“Barney is teaching me the rules. It’s…” Lucie could feel her cheeks heating. “It’s fun.”
“I’ve always found it to be a confusing mess,” Elijah said, and looked down at the big pad he’d placed on the table.
Lucie would have moved off without a word, but if she did, then she would be letting him think she was the type of person who liked to watch a “confusing mess”.
She said, “Tankball is a strategic game. It’s three dimensional, and you have to think five moves ahead of where the ball is. It only looks confusing if you don’t understand that.”
Elijah looked up from the pad, his eyes narrowed. “Is that so?”
Lucie drew in a deep breath. “Yes, it is so.” And this time, she did walk away, her heart in her mouth and her pulse banging in her ears.
Elijah Santiago had continued to sit at the same table every morning since, and every morning, their conversations grew longer. They discussed tankball—well, Lucie did, while Elijahstopped dismissing it as a silly game. They talked about the music festival scheduled for the main plaza in the next week, and the more famous musicians and bands who would be playing.
They talked about the new rain schedule, which everyone was complaining about. Elijah mentioned that he would be flying out and wouldn’t be there the next morning, so then they talked about Shanterry, where he was going, and the amazing technology that was coming out of that sector including, of course, the original and best miniature spine implants that let sentient computers live and breathe inside cloned human bodies, like hers.
It wasn’t until she caught herself laughing at Elijah’s description of the first time his second mate had found his way to Interspace, the other dimension that only Varkans could navigate, that allowed ships to cross vast distances of space in an eyeblink, and had wet his pants in astonishment, that Lucie thought to ask herself a vital question.
Is Elijah sitting at the table because of me?
The answer was binary. Yes or no. But the implications of either answer terrified her so much that this morning, Lucie had felt sick at the idea of facing him, and wondering what his answer would be.
It wasn’t real nausea, but she had felt uneasy enough that telling Olivette she couldn’t possibly manage the shift had not felt like the lie it really was.
And now Barney was challenging her about it, too.
“It was my day off,” Lucie said defensively.
“Not on the Sky Dome’s schedule.”
Lucie gave a soft hissing sound, a small hard knot in the center of her chest starting to hurt. “Barney…” she warned him.
“You tell me not to break privacy, but you’ve watch that video so many times…it’s not for information about the man you have to avoid, anymore.”
Lucie put her bowl down once more. Carefully. She put her feet back on the ground and gripped her hands together. “Look at me,” she said.
Barney appeared on the screen hanging over the bed. He wasn’t smiling.
“You have to understand something about me, Barney. I don’t know if it’s because I’m a new Varkan or if it’s just the way I am. But I make bad decisions.”
“Everyone does. Humans most of all.”
She shook her head. “I make too many decisions based on feelings and…and not enough datacore processing. I know you don’t know what that means. Not yet. But they warn you about it in the nursery. That emotions are so strong and so…physical, that at first, you don’t realize how much they’re driving your decisions. They control you, in the beginning. You have to learn how to separate decisions from emotions. And I’m still not good at it.”
“What decision are you trying to make?”
Lucie stirred her cooling soup.
“Luce?”
“I don’t know if I’m going to go on to Nicia,” Lucie said. “Not yet, anyway.”
Silence.
She looked up.
Barney was frowning. “What’s difficult about that?” he asked.
