19 Penny
Thilar left me in Sunhai’s hands and he did it rather abruptly. I couldn’t blame him. There seemed to be a bit of tension on that ship and he was certainly feeling it.
God, I had so many questions and no idea how to get answers to them.
But answers would have to wait. I knew I was deficient and needed to catch my body up after Mekah.
Sunhai gave me some kind of wrapped cracker first before proceeding to tell me how much I needed to bathe.
And it didn’t take an acute alien sense of smell to know she needed a shower herself.
Finding out a monrian ship did in fact have quarters for washing was a blessing.
They even had soap shaped into round bars similar to Earth, though it wasn’t scented and it didn’t turn to those pleasing suds.
It did leave me feeling clean afterwards, though, and the sandy texture scrubbed away most of the filth I still felt lingering on me from that prison.
I wasn’t sure I would ever feel fully washed of that place.
The water of course was freezing, but my clothes helped to alleviate the chill once it was all said and done and the discomfort was worth the results. I’d almost forgotten what a good shower felt like.
Sunhai, unlike me, seemed like everything she did was second nature. Using alien bathing rooms. Wandering an alien ship. Wearing alien clothes. Nothing seemed to upset her and for some reason it was comforting.
When it was time to get something real to eat, we ate alone in something of a mess hall.
There was no ambient noise. No crew wandering the halls.
No AI constantly relaying notifications across the ship.
It was all rather… boring. But I would take boring for the rest of my life if it meant I didn’t have to participate in another blood bath of a game on that damn station.
Already, the food on the ship was doing wonders for me.
It lacked taste, but my body responded like it was made of super vitamins.
My muscle soreness was quickly fading. My energy was up and my lips weren’t perpetually chapped.
And it only got better as time passed… which it did…
with no visit from Thilar. I assumed he had other duties at first, but after a while, I was beginning to think there was more to it.
The guy stood outside of my room for who knows how long while I slept.
I had a hard time believing he would then forget I existed.
Unless that was a monrian thing…
Sunhai and I were in the quiet mess hall for the third or fourth time in what I thought might have been equal to three days and while she folded a silver wrapper into an abstract shape, I started to wonder what was going to come next.
Since leaving Mekah, there hadn’t been much news about what they were going to do with me.
No one had come to talk to either of us and I was getting antsy.
“Has anyone spoken with you?” I asked.
She shrugged a shoulder, still focusing on whatever strange piece of art she was working on.
“No one has said anything? How long have we even been here?”
She looked up with a sharp sigh. “This is new for you, but traveling space takes long time.”
“Do you even know where we’re headed?”
“Tallian territory.”
“What happens to us at that point?”
“I am valerian. There are many ports in Tallian space. Many places for me to get on a trade ship.”
“Where to?”
“To where I was taken from.”
“Where were you taken from?”
“Juni’ikara. A trade station.”
Every time I asked a question, it appeared that Sunhai was giving me the shortest possible answer.
“Do you have parents?”
“We all have parents,” she chuckled.
“Of course. I mean, parents you know.”
“No.” She crossed her arms, leaning forward on the table in the first guarded posture I’d ever seen from her. “I was part of the Thinning reserve.”
“What’s that?”
“When the gek attacked my people, taking our ability to breed away, all women holding child in womb were forced to transfer babies to monitored environment. We were in freeze. Frozen. Kept safe.”
“Valerian babies were literally put on ice? And then what? You were born in a lab?”
“I was born with number, in a pod, many cycles after the Thinning.”
“Then you don’t know your parents.”
“Valerians do not care about who gives life. It is all a challenge to create life in the first place. I worked on trade ship. Soon, settled on a station. Made extra credits fighting. Then caught notice of Pek-Tol. He take me with him. He never let me go.”
“Jesus,” I said under my breath.
“Do not feel sorry. There is nothing for me to go back to. Just to look for work. I am only free now. That is what matters,” she smiled.
I cleared my throat, trying to wrap my head around how different humans were from the rest of the civilizations we were coming into contact with.
Humans couldn’t stop having children. Valerians couldn’t have enough.
Monrians created children to their liking.
And gek? I wasn’t sure I wanted to get close enough to them to understand how or why they had offspring.
“So, valerians have a beef with the gek’tal. Monrians are an army for hire. Why haven’t valerians hired them?”
“That is not my thing to know. I am a rat from a trade station.”
“Makes sense. I’m a rat from the Nexus.” I looked around, contemplating the empty mess hall again. “For a ship filled with military personnel, this place almost seems abandoned,” I said, chewing on another tasteless piece of a nutrient bar.
“Because we are in overflow wing,” Sunhai said. “I checked because I thought the same.”
“An overflow wing?”
“Yes, to keep us out of the way.” She gestured, drawing circles on the table’s surface. “The crew wing is the middle front. The off-shift crew is the middle. They rotate. We are under eye, though.”
“Under eye?”
“Being watched.”
“So, we are literally just here alone?”
“Yes.”
“Are we prisoners?”
“No. I went to crew wing. But they all work hard there. I was in the way and besides, I like the quiet.”
Something about that sounded sarcastic. Sunhai, as I’d come to find out, enjoyed excitement over stillness.
“Well… can I go to the crew wing?” I asked.
“I suppose.”
I stuffed the last bit of my bar into my mouth and stood from the metal stool I was sitting on. Sunhai looked at me, still chewing, and furrowed her brows, her color fading to a faint, greenish hue.
“Now?”
“Sure.”
I was more than eager to see how the ship ran, but more than that, I was already missing Thilar.
I felt like a fifteen-year-old me after finding out Peter Nieks wanted to ask me to the school dance… only this was completely different than that. Peter was a dumb boy who actually liked my friend, Emily. Thilar was an alien who’d killed for me and held my hand through surgery.
Some would joke we were practically married.
But then he disappeared…
My cheeks caught fire and before I could cover them, Sunhai was already staring.
“You are sick?”
“No.”
But I was.
I was sick for feeling things toward a man like Thilar.
No, not a man. An alien. And the real reason I wanted to find the other wing was because I was hoping I had a higher chance of seeing him there.
Considering he hadn’t tried to return to my side of the ship after I found him standing outside of my room, I had to think he’d been ordered not to.
Or… perhaps he had other reasons. Either way, I missed him.
I missed him?
I sounded ridiculous.
“Come,” Sunhai waved, lazily dragging herself from the lonely mess hall.
I followed her out into the passage and down through a long corridor until we came to a curving stairwell lit by blue floor lights. Already, I was seeing more of the ship than I had the past few days.
We came to another hallway that stretched onward to a metal barrier with a seam down the middle. We stopped in front of it and I watched the seam light up blue from top to bottom as if quietly scanning us. Sunhai glanced over her shoulder at me.
“We are not crew. It is scanning for weapons and electrical devices.”
I glanced down at myself as if I might find something hidden on me that I didn’t know was there and then the door parted, opening into a much more active section of the ship.
I found myself staring at a large, open central area that extended three stories.
Ramps encircled it, leading to the upper floors, and crew members were walking about, some in two-piece uniforms like Thilar’s and others in long, coat-like attire with symbols or badges lining the collar.
I immediately assumed they were ranks or job titles.
The floor was reflective and polished to perfection. Not a single speck of dust littered it and upon its reflective surface were faint designs and symbols. Designs and symbols I soon realized were a galactic map filled with routes and planetary systems.
“Come,” Sunhai said, walking across the map like she belonged there.
I straightened my shoulders, trying to appear the same, but even with my life and experience, I wasn’t prepared to be on a ship filled with super-soldiers, each of them as lethally beautiful and dangerous as the next.
All of them had silvery-gray skin, strong features, and a solid build.
Some had no hair on their heads and others kept it long and braided tightly down the middle of their head like Thilar.
Some even had meticulously trimmed facial hair.
And, some were female. Their features were marginally softer and their builds slightly less prominent, but they wore the same uniforms and they walked with the same purpose.
As I passed, some turned their heads, but only for a moment.
None of them let distraction overtake them, but they all remained acutely aware of us both.