She wiped at moisture dripping down her cheek, winced at the sting, and looked down to see her hand covered in fresh blood.
“Sophie, take port-side buoy watch, would you?”
“Aye, Captain.” Sophie scurried off, as if to avoid being party to whatever sense Talis might try to beat into the alien.
“With me,” she said to Scrimshaw, and stalked her way below deck. Scrimshaw followed, meek as a child behind its mother. She tried to catch her breath while on the move, to calm the blood that had finally caught up to the renewed signals and was waiting for another fight.
They reached the crew quarters, where Talis dug through a cabinet and found herself a towel. She bundled up her hair, looped it up to get it off her face, then used the trailing end to dry her face and neck. She had forgotten about the cut, and left a red streak across the pale cotton. It didn’t help her mood.
She led Scrimshaw toward their med cabin, commanding xin to follow again with no more than a look.
“Talk. What was that thing, and why did the mermaids want it so bad?”
“The ancient texts of the Bone people refer to the creatures as zalika,” the alien told her as they reached the cabin that served as Wind Sabre’s medical bay. Xe was avoiding the first question. Avoiding the Yu’Nyun side, as usual, to talk about her world. “Not a Bone word, evident from the sound of it. It is a name they chose for themselves.”
“Huh,” she said as they reached Wind Sabre’s medical facilities.
The cabin was opposite the galley, and roughly the same size. But the table in the center was higher, meant for surgery. Along the forward bulkhead, instead of a stove and icebox, was a recovery bunk, neatly made and rarely used.
She crossed to a mirror hung on a locker door, and wiped the bloody rainwater from her face with cotton gauze from a drawer beneath it. Blood welled up as fast as she could wipe it away and, in the reflection, she saw it ran down her neck. The collar of her rain-soaked shirt was irreparably stained—once cream, now pink and crimson where the blood and water wicked off her skin. Scrimshaw stood to one side, out of her way as she tended to her wound. Watching xist reflection in the mirror, she saw xin trace the scratches in xist carapace with xist fingertips. Saw the light trembling in those fingertips. Something in xist demeanor had changed. She didn’t figure that the Yu’Nyun had much room for things like regret, but xe did at least seem cowed.
Sophie had boasted to Scrimshaw during their first Yu’keem lesson that Talis was fluent in the five main languages of Peridot, plus the Common Trade, and the dialect of Dug’s village. But she’d never heard the word ‘zalika’ or fathomed that the mermaids even had a language. But the Yu’Nyun had admittedly spent a lot more time trying to learn about Peridot than she ever had. What did she really know, aside from flying, dealing, and smuggling? Well, and fighting.
“That’s a new one to me,” she admitted, then hissed through her teeth as the gauze stuck at the edge of her cut and tugged.
“Onaya Bone created them before she made your first officer’s race. She promised them their share of the source, but she never fulfilled that promise.”
“‘Source’?” She put down the gauze and turned to lean against the counter and fix xin with her full attention. “This source have anything to do with what you had in that vial?”
Scrimshaw bowed xist head, as much of an admission as xe seemed willing to make. But at least xe kept talking, instead of shutting down on her like she feared xe might. “That which gives you reason, cognition. The force that allows you to act on more than instinct.”
“Sentience?” she offered, though that couldn’t be right. That wasn’t a thing that could be bottled.
Scrimshaw considered it for a moment. “That will suffice,” xe said. “Without it, the zalika are in continuous agony and rage. They are inconsolable, and blame those creatures who they believe carry the quintessence that was meant for them. Specifically, the sailors who fly through the storms they inhabit. Unfortunately, they seemed able to sense the sample I carried. It was my expectation they would perhaps only sense that I was a being from this planet and of no more note than you.”
“In the future,” she said, turning back to the mirror, “I’m going to have to ask you to test your scientific research on your own time.”
The blood ran a rivulet down her cheek and around her chin again, as though she had never wiped it off.
Scrimshaw was silent a moment. Seemed to process her sarcasm and understand she was not going to hurt xin. “Of course, Captain. I would like to apologize. I was unprepared for their uncivilized response to my presence.”
“Uncivilized, huh,” Talis said out of one side of her mouth as she pressed gauze to her cheek.
That night they grappled Wind Sabre to a small island along the buoyed path through the storm cloud, out of sight in case other ships approached. Dug, least likely to fall asleep no matter how tired, took first watch so the others could get a short reprieve. He was armed for a battle, ready in case they had any more zalika visitors.
Talis would have the third watch, after Tisker. Ten blessed hours to sleep and get some food in her. In that order.
The cuts on her cheek were just deep enough that she could have stitched them if she wanted. It was a choice between a messy line of scars if she wanted the guaranteed heal of sutures or tape strips that might come undone and let the wound reopen. No one on board was a particularly
