Indentured (Book 2 of the Dana Halliday series)

MORNING AFTER. ESCAPE. TRANSPLANTATION CEREMONY.

I sat on the sofa, sipping at a glass of water Liti pressed into my right hand. She gently examined my other one. There was dried blood along the wound, but it looked all right, much less bruised and inflamed than I would have expected. She dripped some oily fluid onto the wound from a vial from her bag, then wrapped my abbreviated hand with some of my diminishing supply of bandaging material. I remained in my blanket of numbness, only clinically aware of the pain.

Liti touched my face with one rough fingertip, making me wince. "You're going to have a black eye again."

"Awesome." I rolled my eyes ceilingward, where the camera drone was hovering. The movement made my swollen eyelid hurt.

"Why did you provoke him like that?"

"Who, Bob? I dunno, it'd just be nice to talk to another Earther, I guess. I mean, other than Fischer. Wouldn't you like to see your people?"

"I understood that. I meant Crae Kez."

I gnawed on a green food cube for a few moments. "I tried to tell you what happened to Flynt. You know, my sillettrao? You understood most of that, didn't you?" Our communication had still been pretty stilted when I told her about Flynt and Cua. "You'd think I'd understand what can happen here. And I thought I did."

I felt like I was drifting somewhere far above myself, observing, as if I were making a documentary about wildebeest migration. "But we were doing so well. I figured out how to talk to you." I shook my head slowly. "I thought I could handle this. I can't."

Liti pondered me for nearly a full minute, her eyes like chips of green ice. Idly, I wondered how long she could go without blinking. Then she leaned forward and touched her temple to mine, like Flynt did, and said, "Have you never lost a patient before?"

"I...sure, of course I have." Probably hundreds. Veterinary medicine is like that. I didn't have the will to try explaining the difference in losing a patient that could talk to me, however.

"And it won't be the last time. If you give up, you won't be helping anyone. Isn't it better to help the ones you can?"

Her tone was firm, matter-of-fact, practical. Had I been able, I probably would have told her to piss off and stop talking to me like I was stupid. Instead I thought idly about my bottle of Terminal Ultra.

"I'm never going to get out of here," I whispered.

"And neither am I." Her voice hardened further. "We have to make the best of this and do what we were intended to do. It doesn't matter how we feel about it."

I wanted to argue, wanted desperately to be angry, but either she was wicking it all away like telepathic spandex, or I just didn't have the energy. I was reminded absurdly of an old piece of veterinary wisdom: You shouldn't care more about your patient than its owner does. Phim and the Qir weren't equivalent to pets, of course, but certainly the idea of maintaining some distance had merit. The problem comes when you distance yourself too much; then you feel like I did at that moment, only with no assistance from a Fenn.

Liti turned her head, seeming to study the door to the sidewalk. Then she rose and extended a hand. "Come with me."

I sighed and let her help me up. She led me out of the cottage and up the sidewalk, out of the zoo. I followed her in a haze, grateful only that it wasn't as much an ordeal as walking back the night before.

The plaza near the arena was quiet, just a few Sturv tourists milling about. I hoped the rest of them were incapacitated by hangovers and regretting what they'd done the previous evening, but that was probably too optimistic.