“The departure code.” Mazhet tool touched skin, and pain cut through her palm deep enough to sear the bones. Rahel barked a short scream and this time tried to yank herself free in earnest. Even throwing the whole weight of her body into the pull didn’t break the dohke’s grip, and mazhet hands at shoulders and elbows discouraged her from fighting further. She clenched her eyes and her jaw, barely noticing the tears that stung her cheeks while the dohke etched seven numbers into her palm so precisely she could see their shapes carved in fire at the back of her brain.
“Now,” the mazhet said at last, releasing her with chill indifference. “You will remember.”
I’ll never forget. Rahel hugged her fist under her chin until she choked up enough courage to crack her eyes and peel her fingers away. Seven shiny, black figures marched with ruler-like alignment across her unburnt palm. Like a freshly printed flimsy, or calligraphied ink. Except these numbers didn’t rub off when she smudged at them with her thumb.
“After all that…” She closed her fist with a shaky sigh. “This number had better be a good one.”
The train doors shushed open onto the corridor tracing the foot of her docking bay. “The mazhet do not lie. Nor do the mazhet dishonor a barter.” Mazhet and duacs moved gracefully aside to open a kaleidoscopic path toward the exit. “But move quickly. The tlict may do both, and do both with equal facility.”
Her hand still throbbed while she waited for the airlock on her jumpship to admit her. First thing after casting moorings, she’d poke and prod whatever she could reach in her palm with the ship’s smartdoc. Maybe she could find out how she could have no cuts or bruises and still hurt so damn bad. But not before I’m moving, she advised herself when the door finally slid open and let her inside. Odds were nobody complained much about pain from inside a tlict Gertrude’s belly, so it really wouldn’t matter if she didn’t first make good her getaway.
The clitter-skitter-scatter of toenails all over decking announced the approach of Toad’s greeting dance. Rahel laughed as the puppy galloped over in an ever contracting sequence of spirals and bounds. She finally snugged herself up against Rahel s legs tight enough to blow wet snorts into Rahel’s hands at the same time as she thumped her butt and wagged her tail in alternating rhythms of worshipful joy. Puppy hair and breath smelled strongly of dog food grease, and Toad’s belly looked round enough to hide a casaba melon.
Rahel shook the dog’s big, ugly head and drummed her hands against Toad’s ribcage. Toad raised her nose with a grunt, then belched indelicately. “Someone’s been a piggy with the dog food.” Rahel grapped a double handful of loose skin and moved it back and forth across Toad’s shoulders. “What’re you doing in the storeroom, anyway? I thought I left you—”
In the lounge. With the feral boy.
Swinging around the doorway to find the soft-cuff and tether intact but empty didn’t surprise Rahel nearly as much as finding out the boy had opened the lounge door with nobody to help him but Toad. Her own damn fault, she admitted with a curse. Feral or no, he was still one of the brightest species to ever grace the Galaxy, and this jumpship had been designed to accommodate people with a lot less motivation than he had. She should never have made the mistake of expecting him to accept his captivity so readily.
“Boy!” Stumbling over Toad to get back into the hallway, she trotted with the puppy on her heels into the passenger sleeping area, Toad’s playroom, and the lab. “Come on, boy, don’t do this to me! Where are you?” Because she couldn’t leave unless she knew he was on board. The thought of ruining humanity’s relationship with the tlict, running up a lifelong debt with the mazhet, and getting Noah’s Ark kicked off the Interface without at least going home with the one thing she’d legitimately paid for was a little too crazy-making, even for her. “Boy!” Please, God, let him still be on board.
“I have the results of the gene spin and cross-match you requested for Feral Aral #1,” the testing station AI informed her when she darted through the lab to glance into the back sampling area. “Would you like a visual display or an audio summation?” Both. Neither. She didn’t have time to pore over the genetics of a specimen she wasn’t even sure she still possessed. Still, she couldn’t make herself run off without getting at least the most basic of answers. Pausing to fidget guiltily in the doorway, she called, “Give me the short version. Where’s he from?”
“Unknown. Feral Aral #1 displays no genetic affinity with any Homo sapiens population currently cataloged by Noah’s Ark.”
Shock jerked her back into the room when she would have dashed away after only half-listening. “But that’s impossible.” As if the AI would lie. As if genetics could lie. “He is Homo sapiens, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Then he’s got to have a closest ancestor in the database.”
“Feral Aral #l’s closest ancestor falls outside my genotype modeling parameters by greater than 25,000 generations.”
“Oh, my God…” This little boy, with his childish stature and narrow build, came from a bloodline that hadn’t crossbred with Terran humans for better than 750,000 years. When Nadder said she didn’t carry genuine animals, she was lying—this boy was more genuine than anything else Nadder could have sold her.
Rahel knew with sudden, bitter certainty that there was no way she could leave the station without the rest of Nadder’s cargo.
“Come on, Toad. I—Toad?” She looked up and down the empty corridor with a growl of frustration. It must be an annoying feral thing to wander away when no one was watching you. “C’mere, Spud! Toad?” She clapped her hands and whistled. “C’mere, you replaceable little tub of trouble!”
Echoing adolescent yaps rang out from the rearmost storage compartment. Where the dog food was kept, of course. A four-month-old terrier was nothing if not self-indulgent. Rahel jogged to the end of the hallway, already planning how she would explain to Saiah Innis that she’d somehow misplaced the greatest biological discovery of this century.
Too gorged to feed herself, Toad sat atop a spill of crunchy dog kibble and contentedly watched her friend chew on a handful with cautious uncertainty. Not the most nutritious fare, even given this boy’s past history. Maybe dog food smelled good when you’d been raised by wolves. Stepping over the boy, Rahel grabbed a few seal-meals at random, then bent to take hold of his arm. “You can eat all the dog food you want once we’re off of this station, but right now we’ve got to haul ass.”
The boy lunged away from her grip, barking with surprise. Rahel dropped hard onto one knee to keep from having to loosen her hold. “Listen to me…” She balanced the stack of meals across her thigh and reached out to gently stroke his arm. Toad wiggled in between them to pursue her hand with sloppy licks. “I wish I could explain to you why everything that’s happening is important, but I can’t. I wish you could explain to me how you and a bunch of extinct Terran animals ended up out here before mankind had even invented the wheel, but you can’t. You’re just gonna have to listen to my voice the way Toad does and understand that I’m not gonna hurt you. Look—she trusts me.” Rahel fondled a hand across the puppy’s face and folded-down ears. “Can’t you?”
Eyes the same dark chocolate as Toad’s watched while the puppy squirmed and wiggled in response to Rahel’s petting. A little of the angry hardness seeped out of the boy’s tense muscles. When he cocked his head to aim a suspicious glare up at her, though, the naked intellect reflected in his eyes slapped Rahel’s face with embarrassment.