Her eyes drifted back up to his face and stayed there. The overhead light wasn't kind to a broken nose on a good day, and this was obviously not a good day for him. She winced. The bridge was all wrong, and blood had dried dark along his jaw and in the crease of his upper lip.
And the leathers. She'd been trying not to look too closely at the leathers since the stairwell, because they stank.
"What happened to you?" she said. "I mean… apart from me."
He looked down at himself, and his expression shifted. It wasn’t quite a sigh. Somewhere between that and resignation. More like a man who, in the last several hours, had made his peace with a shitty day and had stopped expecting it to improve.
"Your street attacked me," he said.
She blinked at him. “How did the str—Oh, shit. You fell in a sinkhole?”
“Well, more like the ground opened under me. But, yes."
"They're all over this district." She shook her head. "The entire district’s sitting on infrastructure that should've been replaced thirty years ago. Water mains, drainage, half the sewage system… it's all ancient, and the city just keeps patching instead of actually fixing it. People have been raising hell about it for years and no one?—"
"I have updated my opinion of your planet accordingly."
She opened her mouth to argue, then shrugged and shut it again. Honestly, that was fair.
He shrugged his jacket off, and she got an eyeful of just how ripped he actually was.
Oh. Okay.
His body was definitely not gym-built. That was not the kind of body that came from lifting weights in a climate-controlled room three times a week. It was the kind that came from years of actual use, the kind where every muscle had a job and did it, where there wasn't a spare inch of fat like… anywhere.
Her brain immediately went to whether the rest of him was proportional, and she told her brain to shut the entire fuck up.
He reached for his trousers.
She spun around so fast she nearly went through the wall.
Behind her, a laugh rumbled through the air.
"Sorry, little kelarris." He absolutely was not; the amusement in his voice told her that. Whatever kelarris meant. It had sounded soft, almost fond, and she didn't trust that one bit. "I'm used to barracks. You can change behind the screen if you like."
She hadn't seen the screen. She saw it now, standing in the far corner, floor-length with three folded panels and amber cloth stretched across it. Ornate. Of course, it was ornate; everything on this ship was ornate. She could probably have used the screen as a down payment on an apartment.
She walked to it with her chin up and did not look behind her once.
Behind the screen, she stripped off fast. The under layer went on, and the warmth hit immediately. She sighed in relief as she rolled the pants waistband twice, knotting the drawcord until it held, then pulled the shirt down over the top.
Then she looked down.
Okay… She looked like she was wearing a tent. A warm one, though, so she wasn't going to complain. It smelled like him too, leather and something warm underneath. Great. Now she was wearing the kidnapper's underwear. Fantastic.
She edged out from behind the screen to find him dragging a damp cloth over his chest and throat, scrubbing the last of the sinkhole grime off bare skin. The clean leathers were folded on the trunk, waiting. Right. She was absolutely going to look at the wall behind him. The wall was great. A good wall. She liked walls. Looked at them all the time.
“You can look now.”
When she turned around again, he was dressed in clean leathers, identical to the ones he'd taken off. Standing at the wall opposite, he was feeding the ruined uniform into a panel she hadn't noticed was there before. When the panel closed, it disappeared. No seam, no edge, nothing. She stared at where it had been. Whoa, an invisible laundry chute… unless it just led to the furnace or the engines or something, and that’s how they got rid of their dirty clothes.
He turned and held his hand out to her.
"The ship will deal with them," he said, nodding at her things.
"Right…” She looked at the wall. “What does that mean, exactly?"
He looked at her as if she'd asked what gravity was.
