Page 14 of Time Traveling Space Bastards
Everyone was eating, and I really didn’t want to be rude. Especially since she was so excited to try food from our planet. I took a bite, and it was good. The brown stuff on top smelled similar to the milk I told Kuka not to use, so I asked what it was.
“You don’t have chocolate on your planet?”
I saw Enix’s eye scanning as he struggled to chew all the food he had in his mouth.
“No. Chocolate is only possible with cacao trees and we have nothing similar in our galaxy. Wedohave regions that could grow it if we brought seeds.”
“You should do that because knowing an entire galaxy doesn’t have any form of chocolate makes me a sad panda.”
“We should probably talk about the whole murder thing now that everyone has eaten.”
“Someone grab my Everclear.”
“Oh, no,” I said, snatching the bottle.
I knew what she was doing. We could do that after she was safe. And she was adorable when she was pouting. I was prettysure the gesture she gave me was considered rude on this planet, but she was smiling at me.
“I mean, what’s there to talk about? You can’t look into the future to save me because the police never figured out who did it. Ifyoufigured out who I was, then someone on your planet could do. I’m guessing it has to do with taxes.”
“It was,” Enix said. “I found where your book was sold, got into it, and found the name on the tax information. Any Enix could.”
“No, they couldn’t,” Kuka said. “A lot of them have been beaten down and think they are only capable of being clever if they’ve been programmed. You can’t program someone to be clever. You either are or aren’t. Everyone is the embodiment of their experiences, even the Enix. Just because every Enixcouldlook that up, doesn’t mean they would think of it. And the rest of us might not think to ask.”
It was true. Enix’s owner was missing out using him to make money with sex. That was all he’d ever been programmed for, but he was so much more than that. We didn’t tell him that enough because it made him uncomfortable, even though he’d swear he couldn’t feel that way.
“I mean, I’m low key pissed you used the IRS to dox me, but since you did it so I didn’t get murdered, I forgive you. And Kuka is right. I just met you and I agree with him.”
Enix just shoved another donut in his mouth because cyborgs couldn’t blush.
“Men are hopeless,” Omi sighed, stretching. “Remember Yamil, Torrek? You beat his ass and told him you’d kill him unless he stayed away from me, but he used to talk about his work with me.”
Yeah, Omi was going to forever be mad about that and keep bringing it up until the day I died. I didn’t like how Baxter was looking at me after my sister brought it up either.
“For the record, Yamil was a forty-five-year-old, and you were fourteen. Yamil was also high enough up in the Intergalactic Police to know me beating his ass was letting him off lightly. I could have had him arrested because that’sillegal.”
“Anyway,the human police might not have solved the murder, but Enix can access their entire investigation and we have one thing they don’t. Baxter is still alive and she can tell us what they might have gotten wrong.”
Ugh. My sister drove me fucking crazy sometimes, but she’d been accepted into the surgeon program for a reason. Omi was brilliant. She could have gone either way—surgeon or crime lord and thankfully, she didn’t break our mother’s heart.
But first things first. The excitement from our arrival was starting to wear off. She had a lot of alcohol and food. Her eyes were starting to droop.
“You need to sleep. We shouldn’t discuss this when you are sleepy.”
She yawned. Even sleepy, she was a little spicy.
“Only if you tuck me in.”
We couldn’t let her die because I was getting slightly attached.
There was always the final stage of Everclear I always managed to conveniently forget when I decided to hit that bottle. It was similar to the last stage of Long Island Iced Tea. It was the time where I woke up feeling like total trash who might have eaten roadkill the night before.
It was one of the main reasons I didn’t get drunk all that often. But I’d say three time traveling space bastards and a stowaway reappearing after this long and telling me I was an alien god needed alcohol. I tried to be strong and independent. Most of the time I was, but literally,no onecould deal with that without some kind of coping mechanism.
This probably should have been one of those days where I took a long, luxurious hangover lie in, but I did need to call work and solve my murder. I had enough money to quit my job and just be if I didn’t die in two days, but I’d been poor long enough that I couldn’t fathom quitting my job just yet. I was planning on calling in.
When I rolled over, I looked at my alarm clock. Mother fuck. I should have been at work fifteen minute ago. I wasn’t planning on going and was thinking about quitting, but I didn’t want to get fired, either.
I tried to jump out of bed and get to my phone, but the room started spinning and my stomach dropped all the way to my feet. Yeah, I wasn’t going to be moving very quickly today. I stumbled into my living room. My new friends had food waiting, but there was one magic thing I required. If they didn’t have cacao trees, did they have the absolutely magical thing called coffee?
