Serendipity (Book 1 of the Dana Halliday series)

OFF THE CLOCK. EMOTIONAL WEATHER. LANGUAGE GRAFT.

Adrian went off toward the bar. Flynt took me to the opposite end of the Commons, where most people were sitting at tables and conversing at a less headache-inducing volume.

"You don't like the Sturv?" I said, in a low voice.

"The Sturv aren't all bad. A Sturv family lived on the ship that found me," Flynt admitted. "But they have different ideas about humor than some species." We found a table and sat. "It would have been perfectly acceptable to that one to make a fool of you, maybe even see you hurt, for his own entertainment." He glanced round and spoke more quietly. "And, like Adrian implied, many Earthers wouldn't have intervened. You notice no one did."

"We're not always the most compassionate things," I agreed. "You were very gallant, Flynt. And freaking scary."

"Was I?" He smiled, finally looking back to himself. "Just doing my job."

"You're not off the clock?"

"On my homeworld," Flynt mused. "If I lived in a small enough community, anyway, my role would be as a protector."

"Because you're a guy?"

"Because I'm young, I'm not pair-bonded, and I don't have children," he explained. He flexed his prosthetic fingers. "Females are the better fighters. If I were female, I might not have lost my hand."

I tried to imagine a Fenn woman and couldn't do it. My overwrought brain presented me with a smaller version of Flynt, perhaps with breasts, and that didn't seem quite right. Technically, they weren't mammals, after all.

Ali and Khalid arrived, bearing a pitcher of beer, and apologized all over themselves for leaving me unsupervised. We managed to put them at ease, then sent them off toward the noisy side. 

"So," I said. "That was a Sturv. This is a dumb question, but how could you tell it was male?"

Flynt chuckled a little. "Experience. It's hard to tell. Unless you're another Sturv, I suppose."

"I thought maybe it was his scent."

"No." Flynt shuddered. "They don't have much scent, and I can't feel any emotional weather from them. It's creepy."

Emotional weather. I liked that description. "And you can sense my, um, emotional weather?"

"Earthers are very open that way, yes."

I narrowed my eyes. "Could you stop?"

He sighed. "I try to, but it's one of my senses. Besides, Earthers are noisy." He waved a hand vaguely at the crowd around us. "I can tune it out now, but it used to be exhausting. Could you stop broadcasting so loudly?"

I hadn't thought of it like that. "Okay, good point."

He sipped his beer, which was black and strong. "It's...empathy, not telepathy. I don't know any of your dark secrets."

"Remind me not to play poker with you."

"I'm very good at poker, yeah." Flynt traced a claw along the ornate iron surface of the table. "And don't play anything with the Sturv. They like to gamble, and their stakes are usually very high."

I digested that for a few moments. "You know what?" I answered my rhetorical question. "The Sturv. I just figured something out. There are stories about alien abductions on Earth—people getting sucked up by flying saucers and such—and the drawings look kinda like that guy, his face anyway."

Flynt was amused. "I wouldn't be surprised if there was a connection. Don't say alien out loud, though, okay?"

"Why not?"