The commander sighed again, and waved her toward the door. Jane couldn’t get out fast enough.
Laurian was waiting for her on the other side, sitting on a bench opposite the door. ‘H-hey,’ he said, speaking Sko-Ensk. He chased after her as she strode down the hall. ‘I-is, um, are – a-are you—’
‘I’m so sick of this,’ she said. ‘So sick of all this stupid shit.’ She walked faster and faster, nearly breaking into a run. Her muscles wanted to run. She wanted to run away from the station, away from all these stupid binding rules, away to wherever they’d taken Owl.
Laurian kept up. She could feel him watching her. She had nothing to say to him, but she felt better with him there. He was the only thing on the station she recognised.
They came to a railing, overlooking the wide commons below. She leaned against the cold metal, looking down, looking at nothing. Dammit. Of course there’d been a third camera. The hall outside that cargo hold was a weird junction, and she’d just assumed that it had the same camera setup as everything else. Stupid. They’d taken her tools – again – and they knew she was going for that particular cargo hold, so she’d have to be real careful the next time. She’d have to plan it just right so that . . . that . . . She kicked the railing, so hard it made her toes curl in. Her body was strong enough to kick now. It could kick and punch and yell real loud, and those were the only things she wanted to do these days.
‘She’s not here, is she?’ Jane whispered.
She hadn’t meant the words for anyone, but Laurian answered – not with words, but with a hand on top of hers. He looked at her with his grass-green eyes, a hue Human eyes could never be without some help. No, his eyes said. And I am so, so sorry.
Jane watched the busy commons down below. It was full of aliens, not another Human to be seen. They were spacers, most of them, except for the vendors selling food the doctors hadn’t let her eat yet. Your body isn’t ready for heavy foods, Jane. Come on, take your supplements. Fuck off. Supplements were just meals crammed into a pill instead of a cup.
She looked at Laurian, looked right at him so he couldn’t look away. ‘Do you want to get out of here?’
He looked back at her, searching her face. He took a deep breath. ‘Yes,’ he said.
She felt something stir in her, something sure and final, the same something that had made her step out of the hole in the wall, that had made her decide she would never, ever leave her bones in the scrapyard. She nodded at Laurian, grabbed his hand tight, and headed down to the commons.
Scales and claws and tentacles surrounded her, all headed to places she could barely imagine. Without much thought at all, she climbed up on a bench, pulling Laurian with her. ‘Good afternoon,’ she called out in Klip. A few heads turned. ‘We are looking for passage off this station. If there’s anyone here could use a skilled tech, I’ll be happy to work in exchange for a trip to seriously anywhere.’
There were a few laughs, a lot of eyes averted. She imagined herself as they must have seen her. Some scrawny bald sickly thing and her silent, hairy friend. Yeah, she wouldn’t come up and talk to them either.
Something approached through the crowd – a Harmagian, heading for them on her (her, right?) wheeled cart. Jane quickly studied the tentacled body coming toward them. Yes, yes, it was a her. Thank you, Owl.
‘How skilled of a tech?’ the Harmagian said, her eyestalks stretching forward.
‘I’ve done nothing else my whole life,’ Jane said. ‘I can fix anything.’
The Harmagian rolled her front dactyli, pierced all over with shimmering jewellery. ‘And you?’ the Harmagian said, speaking to Laurian.
Laurian visibly swallowed. Jane stepped in. ‘He doesn’t know Klip, and he has trouble speaking,’ she said, ‘but he’s smart and hard-working, and can do whatever you need him to.’
‘But what does he do?’ the Harmagian said.
Jane looked at Laurian. ‘He draws,’ she said. ‘He helps. He’s my friend, and he has to come with me.’
Laurian didn’t understand the bulk of it, but he caught friend. He smiled at her. She couldn’t help but smile, too.
The Harmagian laughed. ‘Well, I have no need for someone who draws. And I don’t need a tech, either.’
Jane’s stomach sank. ‘But—’
The Harmagian fanned out her dactyli. Jane didn’t know what the gesture meant, but it shut her up all the same. ‘What I do have,’ the Harmagian said, ‘is a cargo hold full of sintalin. You know what that is? It’s a top-shelf spirit, and they don’t make it in Central space. I’ve got barrels and barrels of it, and every one of them needs to be turned over three times a day, so that the sediment doesn’t harden. I know my crew isn’t looking forward to that task, and neither am I.’ She looked Jane up and down. ‘It’s a lot of heavy lifting. You’d need to be strong to do it.’