Page 103 of Blightfall

Dayan snorted. “And you picked a scion?”

“Not my finest moment.” Still, the thing hadn’t been as aggressive as I’d expected. I wondered how much of their violence was only because they were cornered.

Stars, I knew the feeling.

“Are you worried about the others?” Dayan asked.

“Yeah, of course,” I said. “Gilaf didn’t have a hyperslug. I have no idea if he got out.”

“And he had that alien girl in his ship.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Alanik. She’s a cytonic, but she can’t have hyperjumped them out if she was unconscious.”

“So you’re worried about her, specifically,” Dayan said.

That was…an odd question. “Why do you ask?”

Dayan shrugged. “I thought you might be involved.”

Dayan had been with the flight for all of a day. Was I that transparent?

“What made you think that?” I asked.

“I heard some things.”

“You heard some things?” I asked. “As in, the flight is gossiping about me?”

Dayan shrugged again.

“Come on,” I said. “You can’t casually drop that you’ve heard things and then not elaborate.”

“I think I can,” Dayan said. “Though if you want to elaborate, I’m all ears.”

I groaned, sitting down on a log facing the direction the scion had fled. “You hate aliens,” I said.

“I don’t hate aliens,” Dayan said, settling down beside me, though they kept their light-whip at the ready. “I don’t know anything about aliens. Until I met you all, I assumed they were all trying to exterminate us. And apparently some of them are! But Alanik seems…nice.”

I laughed. “I don’t think a lot of people describe her that way.”

“Okay, well she seems nongenocidal, which is a good start.”

That was a good quality, if a dismally low bar. “Alanik is amazing,” I said. “And yeah, I’m terrified for her.”

Dayan nodded, but didn’t say anything.

“You’re really not going to tell me what the flight was saying about me.”

“No one was saying anything disrespectful,” Dayan said.

That was good, I supposed. Though I didn’t love people talking about my personal life.

“But you guys aren’t dating,” Dayan said.

“No,” I said. “It’s…complicated.”

Dayan laughed. “Good to know that’s a universal constant of the human existence.”

“That’s the thing,” I said. “She isn’t human. And yeah, our cultures have some things in common, but other things not so much. And dating is complicated enough without adding in a bunch of cultural misunderstandings, isn’t it? Plus, people on both our planets would judge us. Maybe even the people closest to us.”