Hotbloods 6: Allies

Her spines shook. “You can shove your inflation up your scaly little—”

Navan put his arm around me and steered me away from the stalls before the old woman could finish. “I think that’s enough of this hall,” he said, as we moved through a corridor into another part of the compound.

Seeing the old woman made me nervous. She said she’d been here for twenty years, trying to fix her ship. What if we got stuck like that? I supposed, with the Fed threat looming over us, we were more likely to get arrested and taken away in a Fed ship than be left to rot here. In that, perhaps, there was a small mercy.

“So, what’s really up with you and Angie?” Navan asked, as we entered another hall, which seemed to be arranged like a supermarket. Everything was divided up into sections: fresh produce, dried goods, pharmacy, blood banks—something to suit every taste in the universe.

“Nothing. I told you.”

“I know when something’s bothering you, Riley. You can talk to me, you know,” he pressed. “I’m here for you.”

“I know, but I really don’t want to talk about it. Honestly, it’ll all be fine,” I assured him. “Anyway, we’ve got other things to think about right now. First things first, what are we going to eat, and what can we afford?”

He smiled. “I say we start at dried goods.”

“Dried goods it is!” I chirped, slipping my arm around his waist as we headed for the stalls.

There were rows and rows of tiny packets on the shelves in the dried goods section, each one no bigger than a sticky note, with pictures on the front of what each one contained. They seemed to be miniature meals, way too small to satisfy human hunger, but Navan assured me that, once water was added, they expanded to the size of a full meal. Intrigued, I flicked through to see which ones looked interesting and picked a load of them up while Navan counted how many we could afford. Here, at least, it turned out we had a decent number of credits to play with. We could make what we had stretch.

Moving on to the blood banks, Navan picked up several sachets of freeze-dried blood, which were cheaper than the vials. There were large bottles, too, though I couldn’t read what was in them. They were tucked away on the top shelf, presumably to keep thieves from stealing them. Although, considering the security in this place, it would have taken a ballsy thief to go after them. There were security cameras everywhere, keeping a close eye on the compound and everyone who passed through it.

“What’s in the sachets?” I asked, curious.

“It’s a mix of blood from all over the place. They don’t taste too good, but they’ll keep us alive,” he explained, picking up some bottles of water, before moving over to the trader to pay for the goods.

With the serious part out of the way, we wandered through the rest of the marketplaces, enjoying one another’s company while we had a spare moment to breathe. Here, with such an eclectic mix of species, we could be together without fearing disapproval. Nobody seemed to care who we were or what we did; they just wanted to get on with their own lives.

I was looking at one of the stalls in the pharmacy section, wondering if they had anything like the Vysanthean herbs, when I heard Navan shout, “Catch!”

I turned in time to see a box hurtling toward me and caught it deftly in one hand. There was a picture of a blue-skinned alien on the front, with long red hair down to her knees. I didn’t need instructions to know what this was—I’d had enough ill-advised experiences with hair dye to know a box of it when I saw it.

“What’s this for?” I asked.

He smiled, brushing a strand of my hair behind my ear. “I thought it might be a good idea, given that your face is on a wanted poster.”

“Do you have a thing for redheads? Some secret fantasy you’ve been hiding from me all this time?” I joked.

He looked horrified. “No, absolutely not! I love you just the way you are. There isn’t a single thing I’d change about you,” he insisted, leaning down to kiss me on the lips. Holding me close, he whispered in my ear, “The moment I saw you, I knew you’d always be the most beautiful creature in the room, no matter where you were, or who you were with. To me, you are perfection.”

I grinned, leaning up for another kiss. “To me, you are impossibly smooth.”

“I don’t want you worrying, that’s all. No matter how you look, you will always be beautiful to me,” he replied bashfully.

“I love you,” I said, holding his face in my hands, my heart feeling full.

As I wandered over to the trader to pay for the dye, I briefly contemplated slipping the box into my waistband. I didn’t want to spend money on it, not when I knew we could use those credits on something more practical. The only problem was, with all the cameras watching from every possible angle, there was no way I wouldn’t get caught. So, I did what I had to do, paying for the hair dye with the credits we had left.

“I hate wasting credits,” I muttered, rejoining Navan.

“It’s better than being thrown in a port-planet brig, believe me,” he assured me, putting his arm around my shoulders. “Where to next?”

“I’m going to need a restroom, to make my full Jessica Rabbit transformation.” I chuckled, though I was actually starting to feel a little bit nervous about going ginger. There was a reason I’d only ever used dye once before.

Navan frowned. “Who’s Jessica Rabbit?”

“You’re going to find out very soon,” I teased. He led the way across another open courtyard, toward an outbuilding made of rusting ship’s wings, where the restrooms were housed.

It wasn’t glamorous in the slightest, with the pungent scent of stale bodily fluids lingering in the air and the buzz of strange insects thrumming in my ears. Breathing through my mouth, I left Navan outside to guard the entrance as I stepped into the bathroom and locked myself in, sliding the bolt and wedging the handle with a tall trash can, just in case someone got past Navan.

Walking up to a row of questionable-looking sinks, which were strewn with all kinds of mess—none of which I wanted to dwell on—I took a long, hard look at myself in the cracked mirror. I looked older than I had the last time I’d stopped to check my reflection, the dark circles prominent under my eyes, my lips cracked, my eyeballs bloodshot. Given my current state, I supposed being a redhead couldn’t exactly make me look worse.

Opening the box, I looked at the instructions, which were all laid out in picture form for universal ease. Inside, there was a strange plastic shower cap with a button on the front. I took it out, and the cap started inflating as it hit the air. Glancing down at the pictures, I realized I was supposed to put this thing on my head—there was no liquid, no mixing, no fuss. Following the instructions, I removed my hairband and bundled every strand into the shower cap, before pressing the button at the front. It lit up with a blue light, and the elasticated plastic suddenly sucked to my scalp, every atom of air being vacuumed away.

Relax, I’m sure this is normal, I told myself. I could feel something happening under the shower cap, but I didn’t know what to make of it. Something felt cold and wet, and deeply unnatural, but then again, I was using alien hair dye for the first time. I looked down at the pamphlet, but the instructions pretty much stopped after the steps I’d just gone through. All I could do was wait for the blue light to go off, as per the pictures, and hope for the best.

As I waited, I thought about what had just happened in the market hall. It had been playing on my mind, but I’d managed to shrug it off until now, staring myself down in the mirror. Somehow, this ridiculous-looking young woman in a shrunken shower cap had become a criminal, willing to steal anything, even when she had the money to pay. I couldn’t believe how quickly the shift had happened, and it made me feel a twinge of shame.