I could not remember now, though, if there was an appropriate response I was supposed to make. Even if I had remembered, I was not sure I would have been capable of it. I was struck speechless, motionless, by what she’d just said. By the kindness in her. That she would offer her condolences to me when she did not know me and likely did not care much about me.
Maybe they were just words. Maybe they meant nothing at all to her but the completion of some cultural necessity.
But they meant something to me.
“I guess we’re both used to being on our own,” she said, saving me from having to reply. “But…” She passed me the final dish – the tray. “I have to admit. This is nice.”
“Nice?”
“Yeah. This.” Her eyes went to where my hand and forearm held the tray, my tail running the rag over the surface to dry it. Then, they went to my face. “Just having somebody beside me. Somebody to do the dishes with. I hadn’t really…Hadn’t really realized how much I’d been missing that until now.”
She bit her lower lip, drawing my gaze to her mouth and, inexplicably, heat to my loins. She looked as if she might say something else, but then abruptly turned and emptied the sink of water. She busied herself wiping down the edges of the sink and the counter as I began to put the dry dishes away.
“You have hot water.”
“I…Yes?” It seemed an odd observation for her to suddenly make, when she’d just had her arms near elbow-deep in it. “Not all the men do. But it is necessary for cleaning the kitchen equipment I use. When Warden Hallum and I built this place, he helped me fashion the system from scratch.”
“Wow,” she leaned her hip against the counter, crossing her arms over her chest. This emphasized the mysterious human softness there. Her breasts. I did my utmost to focus solely on her face and her words. “You guys built this place?”
“Yes,” I replied. “After my injury, it became clear I would not be able to run a ranch as the others did. Warden Hallum had to come up with something for me to do that would support the way of life out here enough to satisfy the Imperial Justice Committee of Zabria.”
“Your injury?” Her gaze stole to my right wrist. I raised it so that she could have a better look.
“Some time after I arrived here, I was gored by a male bracku. Luckily, I was quick enough that it only caught me by the hand and not the chest or belly. But there was no saving it.”
I could speak of the event, nearly detached. Just talking about or remembering what had happened did not gave me thesame chest-seizing panic as actually being near a living male bracku.
“My God,” Shiloh breathed. A flicker of some raw emotion moved through her eyes. She clenched her right hand into a fist. “That must have been terrible. To go through that as a child.”
“I was lucky to have had Warden Hallum,” I said. “He was younger, then. We all were. He’d only just begun his duties on Zabria Prinar One. He had accompanied Xennet here, and had just taken up his role as the provincial warden, replacing the individual wardens Dorn and I started out with. But before arriving here, Warden Hallum had extensive military training in the Zabrian Imperial Guard. This included emergency medical training. He was the one who performed the amputation.”
The muscles of Shiloh’s slender throat moved. Her small jaw tensed.
“Out here?” she asked in a croaking voice. “You weren’t brought to a hospital, or…”
“No. Once we are brought here, we are not allowed to leave. There used to be medical facilities on this world, when a larger, non-criminal population lived here. They are all abandoned now. But Warden Hallum got me through it. He tried to save as much as he could. But there was infection, and…” I let my right arm fall back down to my side. “And there was not much else to be done.”
“Did you have pain management, at least?” she asked.
“Medication? No.”
Her mouth thinned at that. I wondered if it meant that she was now worried about accessing medication for herself in this world. If she was reconsidering her choice to come here.
“But things are changing!” I said hurriedly. “Zohro, who lives just beyond the border of this province, is a trained surgeon. He has created a surgical suite on his property using funds from the program, and he has access to pain medication and equipmentthat is calibrated for humans. His wife was pregnant when she arrived here, and he delivered the baby through surgery. And, of course, you are not a convict. You would be allowed to leave any time you required any sort of substantial medical care. So you need never worry about your access to those things!”
“I wasn’t worried about me.”
Then who…
The answer struck me like a fist.
She was worried about me. The childhood version of me. Under the cut of Warden Hallum’s blade without anything to numb it all away.
I wanted simultaneously to run from her care, her kindness, because it was all too sweet, too much…
And to sink into it.
“You need not worry about me, Shiloh,” I told her. My voice came out rasping. Quiet and warmly rough, like smoke. “You need never worry about me.” I raised my arm once more, so she could see the scar tissue. “It was not as bad as it could have been.”
