“That you know of,” Dante said in triumph before he descended into mad giggles.
Regi waited. Dante had too much facility with manipulating the translator, so getting information out of him was like tying a bow on a freio.
After many long moments of silence, Dante said, “Vk is good with numbers.”
“Is she?” Regi would compliment Vk on her interrogation technique, on her ability to de-escalate conflicts, on her encyclopedic memory of various species, and her calm under pressure. However, he had never known her to be good with numbers. That was more Ter and his crew.
“Yep.” Dante raised one finger into the air and pointed at the ceiling in a gesture Regi had no hope of interpreting.
“What numbers does she show skill in manipulating?”
“Did you know that our day on Earth and your day on this world are about the same length?”
“Are they?” Many inhabited planets had similar orbits and similar sizes, leading to similar planetary rotation and length of day because the viable zone in a solar system was narrow. Most solar systems had no planets at all—only uninhabitable planetoids that were too small and close to the sun or too large, cold and distant from it.
“Yes,” Dante said, the word exploding out of him. “When I first got grabbed, I couldn't sleep on the ship. There was no sense of day or night or morning or sunrises or... What was I saying?” He blinked in confusion.
“Vk and her numbers.”
Dante looked startled. “Oh yeah. I struggled with sleep cycles. But since I've been here, I can sleep through the night for the first time in forever.”
Living in captivity was, no doubt, inimical to a healthy sleep schedule. “I don't understand what this has to do with Vk and numbers,” Regi said.
Dante sat up fast and then clung to the edge of his mattress with both hands. “I don't feel good.”
Regi tensed. “Do you need to go to the doctor?”
“No, but I should not be vertical.” Dante swung his body around in the opposite direction and then dropped back down so his head was in Regi's lap.
Regi froze, horror keeping him immobile when decency mandated that he flee. To make matters worse, Dante started stroking Regi’s arm. Those long, delicate fingers tickled Regi’s skin for a time before he stopped, and his single thumb traced circles that sent shivers through Regi.
“So, Vk and her numbers,” Dante said, oblivious about the effect he was having. “I asked Vk to take the numbers that I know. There are thirty and a half days in a month and there are twelve months in a year, and I asked her to look at the ship’s data and tell me how long I had been on the ship if we assume a Kowri day and an Earth day are close enough for government work.”
“‘Government work’?” Regi scrambled for anything to distract himself from Dante’s warm touch against his body.
“Government work,” Dante said again, but this time the syllables were so slurred that the translator could not interpret them properly. Regi could only tell what he had said because the mouth sounds mimicked the ones Dante had just pronounced.
“I have been on that ship for nineteen months,” Dante said in a tiny voice.
Regi winced. That was a significant period of time. “I am sorry you have suffered so much. I wish Divashi could have ledus to you sooner.” The goddess had helped Regi find the pirate ship, but she had not done so until the other huuman slaves had self-killed and Dante had suffered far too much.
Dante shook his head once and then grabbed Regi's arm with both hands and breathed for several minutes. “Don't say that. If you had come earlier, it might not have worked out. Maybe the pirates would've come back sooner and your whole crew would have died and I would be in space until I couldn't do it anymore and I asked Peaches to stab me. Do you think Peaches would've stabbed me if I'd asked her to?” Dante looked at the fat dop currently licking her own belly.
Given that dops carried out the will of the goddess Divashi and the goddess favored Dante, Regi expected she would have if death had been the last escape. He was endowed with infinite gratitude that the Lady had found another way to save all of them, even if it meant their original Coalition ship had gotten sucked into a black hole.
“So anyway,” Dante said, “nineteen months. I had my twenty-first birthday, and I can now legally drink. Getting drunk on your twenty-first birthday is a rite of passage.”
That explained the situation. Dante might not indulge in mind-altering substances normally, but few individuals eschewed their species’ rites of passage. It was reasonable for Dante to hold to his people’s rituals.
“Is there any way I can assist in this rite?” Regi asked. He understood this was the final boundary between growth years and adult years, and he mourned that the moment had passed on a slave ship with no one to mark such a momentous occasion.
Dante’s chest spasmed and his breathing made an odd cut-off sound that terrified Regi for the half second it took Dante to start speaking. “I think I'm a bad person.”
“You most certainly are not.” Dante had stood beside Regi in a radiation-soaked section of the ship and when they’d beentracked by Gavd monotheists. He had defended Regi’s religion to the Coalition crew and risked his life against their enemies. He was unequivocally good.
“I am bad, bad, very bad. Do you know what I miss most about home? Do you? Marengo!”
“‘Marengo’?” Regi did not know this word.
