A flicker of some unhappy emotion showed in Caj’s face. Allie decided that a question for a question was a fair trade. “What does it mean, culturally speaking, if he lets me speak for him?”
Caj took a deep breath and seemed to weigh his answer carefully. Allie wasn’t sure if that meant the answer was more or less likely to be true. “It means he’s publicly declaring loyalty to you. It means he would stand against me or against his mother if you asked him to.”
The words hit Allie so hard that she reached out for the wall. She leaned against the cool metal as her mind sorted through a million thoughts...a thousand words, but she couldn’t get one coherent idea to form in her head. Shank had declared his loyalty to her over his mother and family?
On the one hand, Allie felt an overwhelming urge to go back to the room and hold him until he understood how much she valued that loyalty. On the other, Shank’s mother was going to kill her. Slowly. Painfully. The woman distrusted anyone who wasn’t a pirate, and from all Shank’s stories, Allie also knew she had been very invested in the idea of him marrying a Wichiyena woman. Added onto that whole mess of tangled fears, Allie didn’t know how to feel about Shank making that kind of commitment. Terror. She definitely felt some terror. And pride, because he’d picked her, and more fear, and a touch of anxiety that she wasn’t worthy of this. In the past, her commitments had been limited to her horses, for God’s sake.
“Are you worth it?” Caj’s words sounded like an honest question rather than an accusation, but Allie might have been wrong about that.
“I risked everything to follow him on this mission. The chances are that I can’t go home because the military will list me as a deserter,” she pointed out. “So the loyalty goes both ways.”
Caj nodded. “I hope that’s true.”
“Trust me. Dishonesty is not one of my many faults.”
Caj gestured to her to continue down the corridor, and Allie started walking again. “You do seem rather straightforward.”
“I am.” Allie didn’t mention that she also felt like she was drowning in the deep end. Worse, she was going to plan strategy with Shank’s mother when she didn’t have her head in the right place. Shank often talked about how his father’s quick smile would make Shank’s mother soften her positions on certain issues, but he had died, and now Allie was wondering just how strident his mother might be. They needed help—a ship, supplies, fuel. If this whole plan worked, they needed a safe harbor or a plan for getting back into Command’s good grace.
Allie grimaced. Even if they did find a way to avoid court-martials, Shank and Becca and Ben would end up having to guard facilities from refugees rather than bats.
“Shank thinks highly of you.”
“And you’ve spent a lot of time talking about me and Shank, have you?” Allie demanded since she knew they hadn’t.
“No, but a lot of women and a few men tried to earn Shank’s loyalty back when he was on the ships. And I know he had some women who liked him a lot at that government school his parents sent him to. He never came close to making a commitment to any of them.”
Allie gave a vague hum. She had no idea what she was supposed to say, but she felt another unfamiliar twinge of jealousy as Caj brought up Shank’s former lovers. Possessiveness had never been part of her dynamic in the past, but she was starting to understand that something had shifted.
She had come into her sexuality early. She’d never dabbled or struggled to understand what her body told her. She’d gone through puberty and promptly decided that attraction based on a person’s genitals was stupid. She respected the sexuality of people like Shank who were heterosexual, but she didn’t understand it. She was attracted to a person. She’d never questioned that.
And she’d never struggled with her hypersexuality. Some people preferred to get to know a person before sharing intimacy, but she never felt like she could know someone without having sex first. Sex opened a window to the soul, and only after gaining a peek inside could she relax around that other person. She’d watched classmates suffer through adolescence. They’d spend years trying to find some niche where they fit. She’d always felt above it all. Of course she’d tried hard to hide that because it seemed cruel and arrogant to be at peace with yourself when everyone else was wildly flailing.
But now... She’d thought she understood Shank, and he’d gone and done something inexplicable.
Worse, she couldn’t decide how she felt about it. If that dork Petrov Bolson, God rest his soul, had made a public declaration of loyalty, she would have ritually disemboweled him. Shank definitely hadn’t inspired that sort of resentment, but Allie was uncomfortable. Sex she knew. Relationships? She’d never been particularly good with those. For the first time in years, she felt like she was the one flailing while everyone else seemed to understand how the world worked.
Caj interrupted her thoughts. “Here we go.” He gestured toward an open door.
Vi turned around in her chair, but Allie kept her gaze on the central screen and the empty chair in front of it. The woman on the screen had large dark eyes and black hair that framed her face. She was older, with wrinkles at the sides of her mouth and a few streaks of gray in her hair. She frowned.
“Where’s Chankoowashtay?” she demanded.
Allie stepped forward. She was killing Shank for this. She really was. “I’m Allie Grah,” she said in her best “pleased to meet you” voice.
The woman’s gaze was so cold it was arctic. Then she looked to the side of the room that was empty, and it took Allie a second to remember that Anpaytoo would see a mirror image of the actual room. She looked right, so in reality, she was looking left toward Caj and Vi. “Where is that youngoh-min’nee cha?”
“He says that Allie speaks for him,” Caj said.
Allie watched as Anpaytoo’s face twitched. It was the slightest downturn of her lips and narrowing of the eyes, but it was definitely there. Then all emotion vanished, and she raised her chin in a gesture that reminded Allie so much of Shank that her stomach did a little flip of recognition.
Anpaytoo’s voice was tightly controlled. “Did he?”
Allie could hear the fury simmering just under the surface. However, she never had been one to run away from conflict. She sat in the chair directly in front of the vid screen and raised her own chin, intentionally mimicking Anpaytoo before announcing, “Yes, he did. He asked me to negotiate for access to a ship because two of our friends were abandoned by Command. They gave up their berths to save children, and Command turned them over to the bats.”
“Holy mother of God,” Vi said, her voice shaky. “Are you talking about Zeke Waters and Jacqs Glebov?”
Allie spun her chair to face her. “How do you know about them?”
