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“You should go to the infirmary though.”
“But I’m already so behind.” She stares with glassy eyes over my shoulder at the bloodied fabric.
“You’ll be even more behind if you keep trying to work while bleeding all over the place. Besides, the fabric needs to be cleaned anyway. If you go, I’ll finish the seam and wash out the blood, okay?”
She stares at me, tears still gathering in her brown eyes. “Thank you. I’ll be right back.”
Taking her chair, I put my foot on the sewing machine’s pedal and carefully finish the line of stitches. It may be an old seamstress’s superstition, but many of us believe that once a machine has tasted blood, it discovers an insatiable thirst for it, and the next person to use it will suffer the same fate.
I do some backstitching and detach the fabric, a pant leg for a pair of pants. The good news is that the stain is on the inside of the pants, so it’s harder to see. The bad news is that the garment is white, so it will still show through, and if it doesn’t get completely cleaned, Sathior will notice and punish Petra accordingly.
Heading over to the laundry area, I rinse it in cold water, apply some spot stain remover and toss it in the cleaner. With the press of a button, the two in one washer and dryer cleans and dries clothes in about twenty minutes. While I wait, I return to my machine.
Alice is busy attaching the bodice and skirt, so I get started on the veil.
“That was kind of you,” Alice says, not looking up from the garment.
I shrug and begin stitching the veil together. “It was the least I could do. Besides, we’re close to getting caught up with everyone else. I could help someone out for a few minutes. I mean, it was either that or living a really pissed off Sathior Havani, and I know none of us want to deal with that.”
Alice huffs, her lips curling in amusement at the thought of Sathior finding blood on one of the outfits for the show. She’d probably have an aneurysm. “Fair point. You really took one for the team.”
“A noble sacrifice of five minutes.”
“Oh, but Tania, dear,” Alice begins in an impression of Sathior’s posh, high-pitched voice. “Time is money, darling. And if you’re wasting my time, you’re wasting my money.”
We both snicker at that. “I’d hardly say helping someone else out with her tasks is wasting our boss’s time. If anything, I saved us from falling behind. I mean, unless you want to change your style from the virgin aesthetic to battlefield chic.”
In no time, I have the veil completed and we are ready to move onto the next outfit, a jumper with a chastity belt. Alice and I stare baffled at the specs for a minute.
“I swear, sometimes the obsession with virginity and chastity becomes so intense that it swings all the way back around to horny kink. And this right here is exhibit A.”
“More like exhibition A,” I mumble. “This was designed right before she went back to visit her boyfriend, so I think we know where her mind was at with this one.”
All forms of art are, in some way, reflections of the artist’s psyche. As such, I can tell a lot about Sathior’s moods at the time of designing by what she creates. She has a pattern of designing in bright colors and pastels in a good mood and darker, cool colors in bad moods. That said, it doesn’t take someone intimately familiar with her work to know what mood she was in when she made this.
The cleaner dings, and I’m spared from having to start this monstrosity for a few more minutes. I grin and wink at Alice. “Saved by the bell.”
By the time I’m setting the pant leg on the table, Petra has returned. Her thumb is wrapped with a thin layer of gauze. The goal seems to be more about not limiting her range of movement than actually dealing with the injury.
But when she sees me, she still smiles. “I owe you one.”
I shrug. “We all have to look out for each other down here, right?”
And there’s that guilty look again. What is she hiding?
“Right. Thank you.”
Sensing that the conversation is over, I head back to Alice, who is already cutting the fabric for this monstrosity. I quickly put Petra’s caginess out of my mind, not bothering to dwell on it.
I have way too much work to do.
CHAPTER 12
GARET
We land a couple of klicks from the facility where they’re keeping Dalex Arn. Any closer and we’ll trip the perimeter alarms, so we have to trek through enemy lines into their stronghold. And if they know anything about Kaleidians, they will have buried Arn deep in the prison, keeping him out of the light.
Not a bad challenge for a first mission.
