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Is she being deliberately annoying? Knowing her as I do, I’m going to venture with “yes.” Fighting back a wave of irritation, I follow after her again, holding out my lead. She keeps forgetting to hold onto it and it’s going to ruin our cover story. I think. “Please don’t change the subject. You mentioned back on the ship that you needed to check in with the guild. Can you please just tell me what I missed without being coy or dancing around it so I can learn to spot these things?”
Bethiah slows down just enough to sling her arm over my shoulders, tugging the material of my cloak against my throat hard enough that I make a choked sound. Not that she notices. She just slides her other hand under my hood and strokes my hair like I’m a favorite pet. Leaning in, she whispers, “Did you not hear me ask earlier if there was fruit to be had? And fruit vendors?”
I furrow my brow. When we were ordering food? “I…yes? What does —”
She moves closer, her lips brushing against my ear. “I’m not going to ask outright if slavers are lurking, little fluffit. That seems foolish, don’t you think? And I’m many, many things, but rarely ever foolish.”
Oh. I turn my head, and our noses practically touch. I wait for her to pull back, to draw away, but she doesn’t, and my breath speeds up. “How was I supposed to know?”
“You weren’t. That’s the point.” Her grin is wicked. “But if you ask me nicely later I can spill all my secrets.”
I may not have memories of sex or intimacy, but even I know she’s flirting with me. I study her face, so close to mine, and wonder if she’s trying to scare me off. Is this another Bethiah moment where she’s pushing hard to see if I’ll push back? Or is she being genuine? It’s so hard to tell. “So you’re telling me…you’re a squawker?”
Bethiah blinks in surprise, and then throws her head back and laughs. She squeezes—okay, crushes—me against her chest again, but it feels affectionate. “Oh, I like you far too much, fluffit. It’s going to be a shame to hand you over.”
Hand me over? Oh, right. Because of our cover story. “You can always keep me,” I reply, leaning into the story. “I can be really, really good for you.”
Her eyes flare, and then her tail swats me on the ass. “Flirt.”
She’s calling me a flirt? Pot, meet kettle. I snort. “So what is this body shop guy installing on the ship?”
“On the ship?” She chuckles, her arm still around my shoulders, and walks across the narrow hall. Tugging open the door of the junk shop across the way from the dancer, Bethiah continues. “Nothing at all, fluffit.”
“Then what’s the body shop for?”
Her grin when she looks down at me is positively feral. “Why, bodies.”
Thirteen
BETHIAH
Dora makes a little squeak of alarm and looks as if she’s going to run away from me. “We’re buying bodies?”
She would jump to that conclusion. “Do I look like I deal in corpses?”
Her jaw drops. “You mean they’re alive?”
I snap my fingers in front of her face. “Focus, fluffit. I said we’re going into the body shop, not that we’re buying people. Calm down.” I steer her inside of Zakoar’s junk shop before she starts screeching about corpses any louder. The fluffit’s cute, but she really doesn’t know when to hush.
Of course, I know that a lot of the station is new to her. I suspect that whoever brought her here the first time—when she was held in the worst pit of the station itself with the rest of the flesh traders too unsavory to ply their trade on the regular levels—didn’t exactly show her around the place. I’m warring with the temptation to do so myself, but it’s smarter for both of us if we keep things brief until she’s got some equipment to defend herself.
Which is why we’re here.
Dora presses herself against my side as we move into the front of Zakoar’s shop. It looks the same as it always does—cluttered from top to bottom with every kind of junk and broken part known to civilization. He caters to those that prefer to fix their own equipment, from ships to environmentals to cybernetics. I’ve never seen him actually sell anything here, at least not from the front office. But he must do enough business that no one asks questions. Behind a glass counter in the back, a mesakkah male who still has a baby face looks up from the old data-pad he’s hunched over and jerks in surprise at the sight of me. “Oh no,” he says. “You.”
“Where’s the big daddy?” I ask cheerfully. “Spanking that sweet little human of his?”
Dora gives me an aghast look. “So it is a slave trader?”
