Knowing full well now what kind of threats lurked among the barnacle/tree-things, Stacia had gone straight out over the open plain until the forest of barnacles could no longer be seen. The only thing there was to see for kilometers in every direction was the alien grass and the occasional strange trail of dead earth winding among it. She would be able to see or hear any danger approaching. They also didn’t have any shelter. Stacia had no idea how cold this area of Leviathan got at night. The elements could only do so much to harm her, but her unexpected companion was another issue.
The woman got down from her perch on Stacia’s shoulders, hugging her arms tight to her breasts either to keep herself warm or in some attempt at modesty. Given what she had been doing when Stacia found her, Stacia’s guess was the former. She stripped the clothes off the dead Elite and handed them to the woman, then tossed the body well off to the side away from their meager camp. She had no idea what kind of scavengers a dead body might attract, but she didn’t have the means to bury it or otherwise dispose of it at the moment.
The woman wordlessly dressed, although the simple shirt, pants, and boots combo managed to look even more ridiculous on her slight and malnourished frame than she had when she was butt naked. There was also the fact that the shirt and pants had bullet holes and blood on them, but the woman didn’t seem to mind. Stacia figured she’d probably seen worse.
When the woman was finished, she stood stock still, still trembling slightly, waiting for Stacia to tell her to do something.
“Don’t you want to sit down?” Stacia asked.
“Is that what you would like me to do?”
“It doesn’t matter what I would like you to do. What do you want to do?”
She looked shocked by this question. “Is this a test?”
Stacia raised an eyebrow at her but didn’t respond. Instead, she sat down herself, and after several seconds of indecision, the woman followed suit.
“Okay, before we do anything else,” Stacia said, “we’re going to have to figure out your name.”
The woman shook her head. “Skins don’t have names.”
“Yeah, you said that. But I can’t just keep calling you Skin, can I?”
“Why not?”
“Unless that’s what you want me to call you?”
The woman cocked her head and thought about it. “Are you going to kill me?” She said it very calmly, as though a yes answer wouldn’t be that terrible.
“Of course not.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t have a reason to.”
“You killed lots of people at the Head House.”
“That’s because they got in my way.”
“If I get in your way, are you going to kill me?”
Stacia took a long time to respond. “I don’t want to do that. That’s why I brought you with me. After talking to you, I couldn’t just leave you there. But I have something I need to do. Something very important to me. Something I intend to do no matter what. My advice to you is, don’t get in my way, and neither of us will have to find out the answer to that question.”
That seemed to satisfy her. “So you’re not going to eat me?”
“What? No.” Stacia didn’t want to ask why that question would even occur to her.
“And you’re not going to take my skin?”
“No.”
“Then yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes, I want to be called Skin. If you promise me I get to keep it, that’s what I want to be.”
Stacia shrugged. “Okay then. I promise.”
The woman gave Stacia the first genuine smile she had seen since crashing on this gods-forsaken planet. She waved frantically in greeting, even though she was less than a meter away. “Hi! I’m Skin!”
Stacia smiled back. “Nice to meet you, Skin. I’m Stacia X-79.”
Skin didn’t seem to think there was anything strange about a woman having nothing but numbers and letters as a last name. Come to think of it, given the way people like her were treated on this world, Stacia wouldn’t be surprised if she’d never learned to even write numbers or letters.
“Okay then, Skin, now that we’ve got some time to talk, why don’t you tell me what I need to know?”
She cocked her head again. “I don’t know what you need to know.”
“That’s because I haven’t asked you yet. When Faust brought me to Hobbes, he and the rest of his people looked nervous about getting too far away from the barnacles. Given that I’ve already seen what lives among the barnacles, maybe you could tell me what could possibly be so much worse that people would prefer keeping close to the dominatrixes.”
Skin fidgeted and looked away. “Wet Lisa.”
“Who’s Wet Lisa?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me what you do know.”
“It’s not a who. It’s a what. And there’s a bunch of them, I think. I’ve never been allowed to leave Hobbes, so I haven’t seen one. But I know they’re the reason there’s no grass around Hobbes.”
“Why? What do they do to the grass?”
“I don’t know. Most of the Shellheads I worked with wouldn’t talk about them. Like it was bad luck.”
“Okay. What else do you know about this Wet Lisa?”
“I know that’s what ate the Lord Commander’s face.” She thought about it for a second. “And they only come out during the day. It’s safe at night.”
Stacia looked in the direction of the setting sun again. So they would be safe from whatever these things were. She couldn’t get complacent, though. That also meant any searchers from Hobbes would probably be out and about in the dark.
“Oh, and they’re named after the Lord Commander’s mother,” Skin said.
“Hmm. I’m not sure I want to know why Lexton called her mother Wet Lisa. But what about that wall? It seems to have worked, but I don’t have the slightest clue how.”
“I don’t know,” Skin said with a shrug. “That’s not usually what the Shellheads talk about when they take me to bed. Usually, they just complained that it was unfair that they were on this planet.”
Stacia quizzed Skin on as much as she could regarding the planet, ranging from the length of the days to what local life might be edible to humans. On some things, Skin was helpful, like where to find the little bushy structures that made up the fiber for their clothing, while on other things, like anything about extended life outside of Hobbes, she was unclear on. If it hadn’t been involved with something the Skins needed to do to serve the Shellheads, then it had never been taught to them. Finally, Stacia couldn’t keep dancing around the subject and had to ask.
“Skin, how did this society even happen?”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“I mean, the Skins serving the Shellheads.”
“That’s just always the way it’s been.”
Stacia thought back to what little she already knew. Alena Lexton had been the first person sentenced to the radical idea of a prison planet exclusively for former Galactic Marines, and since she was still in charge, it stood to reason that she’d had a large part in making Leviathan (or at least Hobbes, she reminded herself, as Leviathan was a very big planet and Lexton was just one small woman) what it was. She didn’t remember what Lexton had been sentenced for, but it had to be something horrible to introduce the idea of an entire planet set aside for people like her.
So it made some sense that Lexton would create a society where people like her ruled and others without her Galactic Marine enhancements were slaves. Sometimes a lot worse than slaves, from some of the things Skin had said. In addition to the natural born of the planet being harvested for their hides, Skin had said one or two things so far that led Stacia to believe that there might even be cannibalism. An entire group of human beings used as slave labor and sex toys at best, cattle at worst.