He sent her a look of amusement. “Against a male cyborg, who is fully aware of your training?”
He had a point. Even her cybernetics didn’t make her stronger than a male and he had the advantage of a good deal of reach and weight besides. The only way a female hunter could bring down a male cyborg toe to toe was to outwit them, or catch them off guard. She doubted, under the circumstances, that she could manage either.
She fell silent. They passed, after a time, through a large room filled with supplies. Dante released her long enough to select a number of articles, which he placed in her arms, and then led her out once more and down a short passageway.
It was immediately apparent when he led her into the next room that the showers were indeed of the primitive variety. Amaryllis was so surprised, so caught up in nostalgia, that she merely stood stock still as Dante took the supplies from her, settled them on a bench and removed the bandages.
After explaining how the showers were operated, he took up a position near the door.
She studied him in silence for several moments, but she wasn’t the least surprised that she would not have any privacy. “You could guard me from outside the door just as well,” she pointed out coolly.
“I could, but I won’t.”
Her lips tightened. Finally, she moved to the bench and found what she needed.
There was heated water. Within moments of submerging herself in it, Amaryllis had almost completely dismissed the cyborg, Dante, from her mind. Those who’d grown up on Earth and Earth’s well established colonies seemed revolted by the very thought of having water on their skin, but she’d known nothing else until she’d left her own world. She knew that the particle baths were not only more hygienic but almost as importantly, they conserved a precious resource, but she found them very unsatisfactory.
This was almost pure heaven and brought memories of her family crowding into her mind.
She hadn’t actually seen her parents but once since she’d decided on a career as a soldier. Her parents had been horrified by her choice and she had been so reluctant to face their disapproval that she’d pretty much cut herself off from them.
She supposed she could see their point. They’d scrimped and saved for years just to earn the credits needed to make her ‘normal’. They loved her, and she knew they’d done it out of love, but there was also the unspoken and unacknowledged obligation of debt—that they considered she couldn’t possibly appreciate their sacrifice properly if she was willing to risk throwing it away by her choice of career.
Maybe that had played a part in her choice. Maybe, deep down, there’d been some resentment on her part toward her parents. The decision had been far more complicated than that, however.
A large part of it had been because she wanted to show everyone that had ever looked at her with pity, revulsion, or fear that she was just as normal as anyone--better even because her cybernetics allowed her to do things they could never do. Some of it had been sheer desperation to escape the world and people that had represented as much misery to her as love, and some a desperation to fully live life, if she had to do it on the edge, because she’d missed out on so much of life when she had been confined by the limitations of her defective body.
Some of it had been anger, and the need to find a release for her pent up frustrations.
She’d hated the reproach in her family’s eyes, though, and except for that one, uncomfortable trip home on leave, she’d avoided them.
She wished now that she hadn’t. She might never see them again and she wanted them to know that her choice had been a celebration of the gift they’d given her, not a reproach for the birth defects and the hell she’d been through because of them. She wanted them to know that she didn’t blame them for something they could not have prevented short of not conceiving her at all.
“Enough!”
The sharp command jerked Amaryllis out of her abstraction and back to the present. “What?” she asked blankly, trying to think how long she’d been in the shower. It didn’t seem to her that she could possibly have used that much water, but then she had no idea what sort of rationing they had.
Dante, she saw uneasily, had strode across the room toward her and was standing no more than two feet from her now, an angry scowl on his face.
Amaryllis’ lips tightened in irritation. If he’d given her a specific length of time, she would have complied. His anger seemed unfair, to say the least, when he hadn’t indicted anything of the kind.
Sloughing the residual water from her hair and skin, she shut the shower off and moved past him toward the bench. Lifting the length of cloth she decided must be for drying, she quickly dried herself and then studied the garments he’d selected for her. A wry smiled curled her lips when she lifted them to study them. There wasn’t much to the garments … only enough to cover her breasts and genitals.
She’d seen such garments plenty of times, of course, but she’d never worn anything like it. Soldiers wore garments designed to protect them as much as possible from injury. They had no concern for current styles and they worked in less than favorable conditions anyway. This was the sort of thing women of leisure wore, not working women—unless they made their living on their back.
Shrugging mentally, she slipped the garments on. She was still the next thing to naked when she’d dressed, but for the first time in her life, she actually felt a sense of her femininity. She felt—pretty.
The look on Dante’s face when she turned to face him at last was only marginally better than before.
“I underestimated you.”
Amaryllis blinked at him in surprise. “What?”
“You are not above using your femininity as a weapon. They taught you to seduce and destroy, did they not?”
Her jaw went slack with surprise for about two seconds before a wealth of conflicting emotions flooded her. Anger took the upper hand and she spoke before she considered the consequences. “You’re a cyborg. Why in the hell would I bother trying to seduce you?”
His eyes narrowed. His face grew taut with suppressed anger. “I feel everything any other spawn of humanity feels,” he said through clenched teeth.
