Page 58 of Meteor Storm

What was wrong with me? She’d only just woken from a dangerous ordeal and we’d both only just escaped imprisonment. I should have been analyzing my time on Mekah to improve the outcome of future confrontations. I should have been purging habits from that place and reconditioning my body and mind.

“I must depart for a while to eat and bathe,” I said. “I will fetch Sunhai. She knows very well where the mess hall is and how to get food on this ship. You should eat. Your body needs the nourishment.”

Penny blinked again as if I’d startled her, but I needed to clear my head a bit before I could objectively care for her the way Yuros intended.

As I was walking away, Sunhai was waltzing down the hall looking drowsy and bored.

“Take Penny to get some food,” I ordered her.

“She is supposed to be your—”

“I will return later.”

She sighed like a child trying to get out of her training session, but I did not have time for her complaints. She did not have to take care of Penny for long. She only needed to show her where to get a meal and perhaps a bath. She could at least do that.

19: Penny

Thilar left me in Sunhai’s hands and he did it rather abruptly. I couldn’t blame him. There seemed to be a bit of tension on that ship and he was certainly feeling it.

God, I had so many questions and no idea how to get answers to them. But answers would have to wait. I knew I was deficient and needed to catch my body up after Mekah. Sunhai gave me some kind of wrapped cracker first before proceeding to tell me how much I needed to bathe. And it didn’t take an acute alien sense of smell to know she needed a shower herself.

Finding out a monrian ship did in fact have quarters for washing was a blessing. They even had soap shaped into round bars similar to Earth, though it wasn’t scented and it didn’t turn to those pleasing suds. It did leave me feeling clean afterwards, though, and the sandy texture scrubbed away most of the filth I still felt lingering on me from that prison.

I wasn’t sure I would ever feel fully washed of that place.

The water of course was freezing, but my clothes helped to alleviate the chill once it was all said and done and the discomfort was worth the results. I’d almost forgotten what a good shower felt like.

Sunhai, unlike me, seemed like everything she did was second nature. Using alien bathing rooms. Wandering an alien ship. Wearing alien clothes. Nothing seemed to upset her and for some reason it was comforting.

When it was time to get something real to eat, we ate alone in something of a mess hall. There was no ambient noise. No crew wandering the halls. No AI constantly relaying notifications across the ship. It was all rather… boring. But I would take boring for the rest of my life if it meant I didn’t have to participate in another blood bath of a game on that damn station.

Already, the food on the ship was doing wonders for me. It lacked taste, but my body responded like it was made of super vitamins. My muscle soreness was quickly fading. My energy was up and my lips weren’t perpetually chapped. And it only got better as time passed… which it did… with no visit from Thilar. I assumed he had other duties at first, but after a while, I was beginning to think there was more to it. The guy stood outside of my room for who knows how long while I slept. I had a hard time believing he would then forget I existed.

Unless that was a monrian thing…

Sunhai and I were in the quiet mess hall for the third or fourth time in what I thought might have been equal to three days and while she folded a silver wrapper into an abstract shape, I started to wonder what was going to come next. Since leaving Mekah, there hadn’t been much news about what they were going to do with me. No one had come to talk to either of us and I was getting antsy.

“Has anyone spoken with you?” I asked.

She shrugged a shoulder, still focusing on whatever strange piece of art she was working on.

“No one has said anything? How long have we even been here?”

She looked up with a sharp sigh. “This is new for you, but traveling space takes long time.”

“Do you even know where we’re headed?”

“Tallian territory.”

“What happens to us at that point?”

“I am valerian. There are many ports in Tallian space. Many places for me to get on a trade ship.”

“Where to?”

“To where I was taken from.”

“Where were you taken from?”