Chapter 1
Patty
I hadn’t meant toset him on fire, it was only that my hand slipped and the torch fell. How was I supposed to know that he’d been doused in some super flammable oil? I mean… I’d poured it on him, but he’d gone upfast.So, really, this was the fault of whoever had manufactured the oil. It should have come with a warning label — ‘Will cook victims in seconds’.
Amee had been glaring at me for well over five minutes now, her voice a constant drone of disapproval, rising and falling inpitch as she got more and more heated. If she thought I would break, she was in for a long wait. I was innocent… sort of… maybe? They couldn’t prove it anyway, there’d been no evidence left.
Either way, I wasn’t going to take the blame for this. “I don’t know why you’re so mad. It was only a single Unity scout. Spy?" I blinked at her. “Is it a scout or spy? I can never remember.”
The white-haired Korsal elder had that look in her eye that said she wanted to strangle me, but couldn’t, and it pissed her off that she had to pass up on murdering me today. I've seen it a lot. Jack often had that look, bless her heart. I knew she loved me too much to smother me in my sleep, but she thought about it. Joke's on her, I was into that shit. Wonder if I could sweet talk Rema into choking me?
“Patty, are you even listening?” Amee sighed, closing her remaining eye to take a deep, cleansing breath before opening it again to stare in my general direction. The burn scars she’d received from her battles on Korsal pulled at the left corner of her mouth, giving her a permanent scowl. Her dark skin was a stain of lighter brown with the growth of new skin around the scars. One of her curving black horns was cracked down the center in a hairline fracture that didn’t seem to pain her at all, though she touched it almost absently every few minutes or so. Miraculously, her sharply pointed ear had escaped damage, and her silver hair hadn’t been scorched. She’d escaped with only the missing eye and melted side of her face.
Apparently, plasma burns could sometimes take weeks to heal but Dr. Ghix had said the eye would never come back. I’d been a little shocked to hear that the nanos couldn’t repair lost limbs. Anu had scoffed and mumbled about inferior tech. The AI that wasn’t actually AI told us that once the orbital station was finished, she’d set about making more medical pods for us thatwere far more capable than the limited nanos that the Korsals had received through their Rijiteran armor.
It was a real shame we couldn’t be injected with pure Rijiteran nanos, but apparently they’d eat us up from the inside. Our bodies weren’t strong enough to keep repeatedly healing the damage the nanos caused just by functioning. Rijijteran nanos took cells for energy and since Rijiterans already had super advanced healing capabilities, they were able to withstand the constant energy drain from their nanos. It was a confusing symbiotic relationship that I didn’t fully understand. They healedfromtheir nanos, but their nanos also healed them? Technology was so complicated.
“Patty.” I shifted my focus back to Amee to see her narrowed eye trying to light me on fire. Was she blind or not? I didn’t get the white eye staring. What did she even see?
“We know you did it, Patty. You were standing at the scene… laughing. I believe the words you were singing were “roasty toasty” over and over again.”
I flashed her my sane smile and Amee leaned away from me in her seat. Must not be as sane as I thought it was. I’d practice more in the mirror later. “Maybe I was just cold?”
“Phrasing it as a question doesn’t exactly give me confidence that you are being truthful.”
Of course, I wasn’t being truthful. But in my defense, they'd left him unattended. Jack said all mercs should die, so I was only following her orders. That the Unity crispy fried critter had been a maybe spy instead of a mercenary was just a really small detail. It hardly mattered in the grand scheme of things. Plus, my vines had eaten him afterwards. I’d cleaned up my mess, which was polite and perfectly normal behavior.
Sam stood up from her seat, her smile a little stiff, and waved her hand in my direction. “Look, we had already questioned him. He didn’t have any new information for us, and withouttorturing it out of him, which Istilldisapprove of,” she said, fixing Amee and Izari with a cross look, “he had no further use to us besides being a prisoner of war. And I would like to point out that there should have been a guard outside his tent. So perhaps Patty was just trying to secure a security threat… and I’m sure shewon’tbe setting anyone else on fire.Right?” she said, with an exaggerated amount of emphasis, her voice sounding like a mother scolding a naughty child.
I was frowning at the restriction when I realized she was talking to me.
Wouldn’t count on it.
“Patty!”
Oh, I’d said that out loud.
I smiled again and tried harder to look innocent. It just made Sam wince and Izari grin at me in crazy person solidarity.
“Right. Sorry. I won’tallegedlyset any more Unity spies on fire. Probably.”
Sam clapped her hands together. “Great. Now, with that settled, what’s next?”
Sam’s emotions tasted a little bitter, like eating too many almonds at once.
On the outside, she appeared eager, but calm. I could taste how nervous she was inside, and there was also a sour aftertaste to her nervousness. Fear, but not the fear of pain or dying, this was more subtle, and mixed with the nervousness. I thought maybe it was the fear of failure. She didn’t want to disappoint anyone.
I was starting to slowly understand all the emotional flavors I was tasting every time I stepped in close to someone. Being in a tent like this with Amee, Sam, and Izari had the emotional outputs jumbling together, so I had to sift through them to catch the nuances of each one. Not to mention that most people don’t just experience one emotion at a time, but several. Separatingthem was a major pain in the ass. I tried to focus on the bigger emotion someone was feeling, like nervousness, instead of the underlying happiness, or even fear. It reminded me a little of whiskey tasting back on Earth. Swishing the cool liquid in your mouth to detect each individual note of flavor.
The crispy spy had tasted like sour lemons at first, which I was coming to understand was arrogance, and then when Iallegedlypoured oil all over him the lemon flavor had turned rotten. Fear tasted like rot. I didn’t understand how Jack enjoyed the smell so much. She’d told me it was sweet and delicious.
Though, therewasa deep sense of satisfaction when the Unity spy’s fear taste had coated my tongue, so maybe I did understand my furry friend. But then, she was a homicidal maniac and I was an unhinged sociopath so maybe it was that more than anything else that made me understand her.
“The Ilarians are landing in a few hours. Do we have their camp set up fully yet?” Amee asked, turning her attention from me to Sam and Izari. Her emotions were like a crisp winter morning, all cool calm and focused. There was a very small, lingering taste of tart cherries, which I hadn’t figured out yet. It made my cheek twitch, my jaw clenching at the irritation of trying to remember something I’d forgotten. That’s what tasting emotions was like, like remembering the beat of a song but not the lyrics, or smelling a scent that tickled a memory, but you could never quite grasp it. It was frustrating as hell.
The hologram flashing into place over the table I was standing in front of drew me from my internal investigation, and back to conversation. Sam and the other two females were sitting in chairs on the other side of the table with tablets in their hands. Sam was scowling at hers as holographic ships circled the floating Korsal like orbiting satellites. There were hundreds of the little yellow ships, all vying for landing approval.
So far, three out planets had sent us their support, whether that be soldiers or supplies, and there were almost daily shuttles landing on Korsal.
