“I’m not sure I’ll ever get the scent out of my clothes.” I sniffed my sleeve, trying not to gag. “And don’t let her near your hair.”
Pulling her braids over her shoulder, Makenna said, “Thanks for the warning.”
With each step that drew us closer to the stables, the temptation to ask her about how things were going with Chan bubbled up inside me. But considering that every single effort I had ever made to meddle in Chan’s love life had failed miserably, I held my tongue. Or I tried to.
“How long will you be staying with us, Makenna?”
Pulling a braid the kurot had somehow managed to get in its mouth free, she muttered, “Gross,” while shaking a string of drool from her hand. “We’re here until we dock in Portis.”
“That long?”Interesting. “You’ll be here for New Year’s, then.”
“I will. Does theIgnisarcelebrate?”
I scoffed. “If you thought the Fire Ball was something…”
“Better than the Fire Ball?” Her brows rose. “Is that possible?”
With a small laugh—and a huge inward smirk—I said, “I’m glad you’re staying. It was nice seeing you and Chan out together the other night. He’s always working. It takes something, or someone, extraordinary to get him to take a break. I certainly never manage to do it.”Oops, that was definitely meddling.
Slowing, turning her head toward me, she said, “Can I ask you something, Sunny?”
“Of course.”
“Why hasn’t Chan…? Why does he still…? Why won’t he…?” She stalled out, her expression turning plaintive.
“Why is he still paralyzed?”
While her lips made a tight line, she nodded.
Modern medicine could repair the damage to Chan’s spine. But—as he’d confided in me a few years ago while we’d watched sunrise sim over an empty bottle of Venusian bourbon—his injury was important to him.
“Has he told you how he got hurt?”
“No,” she said. “I’ve never asked.”
“He’d been a lieutenant in the Asteroid Belt Wars for over a decade,” I said. “Until there was an ambush on the asteroid he was ordered to secure for LunaCorp. The fallout was catastrophic. Only he and a handful of his soldiers survived. I asked him once why he kept his injury. He told me that the soldiers he’d lost could no longer breathe or laugh or love or have children or grandchildren, and he could no longer walk. I think he feels that keeping his injury is a small price to pay so that he never forgets their sacrifice.”
“Saints,” Makenna said. “I guess I understand why he would feel that way. But still, does he honestly think they’d want that from him? Doesn’t he want to move on?”
My brows knit together, my shoulders hitching at her tone. I was sure that Chan knew his battalion wouldn’t have wanted him to carry the weight of their loss forever. I was also sure that it didn’t matter. Because Chan wasn’t ready to put that weight down yet. Maybe he never would be. Maybe it was unfair, even cruel, to expect a being to simply move on because a certain amount of time had passed. Because maybe the sun would burn out before that certain amount was even close to enough. Maybe some weights couldn’t be put down, as impossible to shed as one’s own skin. Maybe?—
The kurot blew a heart-stopping snort at a passing cleaning drone, her bushy legs jumping wide, her big, black nostrils flaring, red-brown eyes wide and rolling.
“Hush,” Makenna said, soothing the beast while I slammed my hand over my thundering heart.
Eventually deciding that the tiny cleaning drone wasn’t a mortal threat, the kurot shook herself out from nose to tail, flinging a thick string of slobber across the portrait of Brock Karlovich on the wall beside us.
“We’d better get her locked up before she sees a compactor droid and passes out from shock,” I said, forcing a laugh, forcing my memories down, back into the dark where they belonged. Where they were safe.
After leading the kurot into the stables, Makenna handed its lead rope over to a stable hand I’d never seen before. He was a young, rangy human with a beak of a nose who accepted the rope like it was a rotten fish.
“What the hell is this thing?” he asked, his accent placing him squarely from New Earth, New York. “Looks like a cow on steroids and,ugh, smells like shit.”
“It’s a kurot,” I told him. “And it will need to be milked twice a day.”
“What?” His revulsion intensified when the cow on steroids sneezed in his face.
“By hand,” I added, and because I didn’t feel like ruining this kid’s day even more, I chose not to sayfor Kravaxian bathwater.
