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I remembered Jax laying me on one of the beds in the room where the Thorzi doctor had looked us over weeks earlier, where I’d gotten the interpreter chip, and looking me over with some kind of scanner in his hand, frowning and shaking his head.
I remembered rolling halfway over to throw up as he held a container in front of me, apparently having expected my violent illness.
And then I woke up alone in the dark, on my side, my now bandaged head on a cushion. It was almost like a pillow, but as we’d learned in our time in Crux’s cells, Thorzi didn’t believe in pillows. Or maybe they just didn’t believe in pillows for human prisoners.
My head felt like someone had used it as the bowl for an electric mixer, but it was more jumbled than painful. Just... like there were a few dozen blurry images of the last hour—or was it a day? More?—that fit together like a club scene with a faulty strobe light.
“Jax?” I asked, lifting my head, and my voice was raspy with abuse and disuse.
Probably at least a day, then.
Somewhere nearby, there was a thump, then rushing footsteps. “Are you ill again?” Jax asked as he came rushing around the end of the medical bed I was lying on. I tried to push up, but he put a hand on my shoulder to hold me in place. “Try not to move yet. I can work the medical equipment, but I am no doctor. I believe I healed your head, but you should be careful. The crack in your skull might have felled any warrior.”
He was humoring me, sure, suggesting that I was anything like a warrior, anything like him, but it was nice.
His fuzzy face reminded me—“My glasses fell off in the crash. I need them.”
I could just make out his squint of confusion. “A—a drinking vessel?”
I tried to shake my head, and a wave of dizziness hit, forcing me to pause and breathe for a moment, which only made his face go more distressed, his trademark smile completely inverted, lips pursed into a small downturned moue I could barely make out.
He looked more like the other Thorzi that way, and I didn’t like it. So I took a deep breath, and very pointedly not moving my head, tried again. “Glasses. They’re round pieces of glass in a wire frame. Well, pieces of plastic.” I lifted my hands to mimic wearing glasses in the way of all childhood bullies. “I can’t see without them.”
He blinked in astonishment, his mouth falling open. “You are blind?”
“No! No, not blind, just...” I stopped and considered for a moment. “Can some Thorzi see better than others?”
“Of course. The best warriors must have keen eyes, to be able to see danger.”
Yet more proof I wasn’t any kind of warrior, great. “Well, I’m not a warrior. I have less than keen eyes. So my people have glasses, to help correct the problem.”
“Why do they not simply give you work that doesn’t require you to see as well?”
Interesting. Simplistic, but interesting. There was a sense of equity in it that humans often didn’t possess, a lack of judgment for the lesser sense of sight. But also—“What if I want to do work that requires excellent sight?”
“Are your people able to medically treat your eyesight?”
I snorted. “Not really. Are yours?”
“Perhaps.” He shrugged, and finally sat down on the medical bed next to me, his posture going casual. “I am not aware of anyone having poor eyesight but for an elder warrior who lost his eyes in the light of Lyr. The sacred star gifted him with much in recompense, but nothing could be done for his vision.”
Freaky.
I’d become aware, over the weeks of our captivity, what he was talking about. Their second, smaller star had special properties. Thorzi warriors exposed their skin to it for long periods of time, and if they survived, they came away with one of those silvery tattoos that looked sort of like my grandmother’s lace doilies. Jax had four, I thought, though I hadn’t made a point of counting them.
Not that I wouldn’t like to.
Anyway. The tattoos gave them powers. I didn’t know much about the powers, but that was the gist of it, if I’d understood correctly.
I wanted to turn the conversation to that, ask about his tattoos, and whether maybe a human could get one because how cool would that be? But my glasses were too important to put off. “Okay, maybe Thorzi can fix messed up vision, but humans can’t, so we wear glasses. And I need mine, or else everything is blurry. And mine came off in the crash, so I need to—”
“I will retrieve them,” he offered instantly. Then he reiterated, “You should not move.”
“Don’t you have better things to do?”
He sighed and slumped forward. “I have done much of what I can.”
That didn’t sound great. “What you can?”
