Chapter Twenty-Five

 

I’m sitting on Brill’s sofa, with a cup of coffee, checking out the news – both public and with the disappearing facts app. Now that I’ve got my phone back all to myself, I’m not sure if Brill expects me to delete the contacts he’s saved, or his apps. Unless he asks, I’m not going to. I might need to talk to Gavin or someone someday. Not that Gavin ever replied to my text – pero he might if it was important, no?

We’ve been on Watuza for almost an hour. I’ve already reviewed the bumpclip of Mamá interviewing the chef and customers at Semolina’s a couple of dozen times. It’s almost like she’s walking me through this.

Tawny sits next to me. “Are you sure you want to confront Kaliel in a restaurant? One Earthling murdering another in a setting this public – after everything else that has happened – I’m not sure if we can control the fallout.”

“You think Kaliel would kill me for sitting down and talking to him?”

She pulls a tube of moisturizer out of her pocket and rubs it on her hands. It smells floral, with a hint of cherry. “If you are distracting him, and Brill darts him from a distance, there is a significant period between him getting hit and passing out. And that’s when bad things could happen.” She offers me the tube.

I take it and rub cream on my own hands. It feels cooling. “You think I don’t know that? Pero, honestly, it’s like ten seconds.”

“Are you ready, Babe?” Brill’s loading darts into the little silver gun. He gives Tawny a skeptical look.

She answers for me. “As ready as she’ll ever be.”

 

Kaliel’s not at the restaurant when we arrive. Brill spends a hundred local money units verifying that he hasn’t already been there and gone before we take a table in the bar with an unobstructed view of the door. Chestla moves to cover the rear exit.

We both sit on the same side of the table, hiding behind the table-mounted holo – which is showing a news and sports Galactacast – waiting for Kaliel to show.

Waiting for a long time.

What if I was wrong? What if this isn’t the pattern he’s been following at all?

The two celebarazzi Galactacasters, Blizzard and Feddoink, start talking about the repercussions of the bombing. Blizzard is a Myska like Tyson, Feddoink a tentacled blob with a huge head. They sit side by side at a desk that seems to grow out of the center of our table, speaking crisp Universal.

Blizzard says, “Eart’s position in te galaxy is still precarious. While te borders have opened a crack, it won’t win tem enough allies to halt invasion.”

“I know,” Feddoink replies. “A prolonged war would shut off the chocolate supply to the entire galaxy – and risk damaging the source. My wife is addicted to the stuff – and she’s pregnant. What am I supposed to do about her midnight cravings? Men of my species have been killed over less.”

“You’re braver tan me, Feddoink.” Blizzard laughs, fangs visible, secondary eyelids closing over his whiteless brown irises in reflex. He’s mostly gray-green, like Tyson, pero there are a few black scales lining the edges of his blade-like face. “But not all of te factions involved are ready to commit te resources needed for an instant crushing defeat of tis planet.”

My planet. Earth.

The feed shifts to a Zantite holding up a hand-lettered sign reading MIAG, in Earth Roman script. Ni idea what that means. He’s speaking Zant, pero the feed’s putting subtitles in Universal underneath his face. “So they’re preparing to defend themselves? That’s fair. It’s not like they’re building a doomsday device or anything…”

Brill grabs my arm. “He’s here.”

The hostess leads Kaliel to a table.

He takes a chair facing away from us. Good. I stand up and walk toward Kaliel’s table.

Brill argued against this plan, pero it’s our best shot. Shaking with nerves, I force my rubbery legs to keep moving. I’m almost to the table when Kaliel notices me.

I gesture towards the chair opposite him. “Can I sit down? Por favor.”

Kaliel’s on his feet, scanning the room, putting me between him and the center. “How did you find me?”

“That’s not important.” I step closer, moving to the side, so Brill will have a clear shot to dart him.

Kaliel moves in front of me again, just as a dart hits the wall where he was standing a moment ago. He gives me a dirty look before he turns and runs.

Ay, no! My heart breaks a little more. I chase him. “Por favor, wait. We want to help you.”

Brill flashes past me, moving Krom-fast to intercept Kaliel. Mi vida tackles Kaliel, who pushes Brill hard enough back against a table, which collapses on top of Brill.

Kaliel scrambles to his feet, pero by that time I’ve caught up to him. I get a hand on his arm.

Kaliel leans over a table where a bunch of kids have just gotten a fresh pizza. He grabs the pizza and throws it at me. I fend off the tray, pero my hair and face get covered in pepperoni and cheese. Egh. By the time I can see again, Brill’s blocking the exit, and Kaliel is changing trajectory back towards me. There are two darts in his jacket – one dead center for his heart and one in the sleeve where he must have brought an arm up to shield his face – pero neither seem to be having an effect.

Kaliel has a gun. He levels it towards mi cabeza. My heart pounding, I duck behind the table. There’s a whisperpop, and a hole explodes in the chair back, not far from my ear. Oye!

I stare at that hole, ice dancing down my spine, and by the time I look back up, Brill is taking the gun away from Kaliel using that same leverage motion Chestla had used to take the broom away from me. Brill drops the gun and kicks it over towards me. No y nunca. I’m not picking it up.

Brill chases Kaliel towards the kitchen. People are ducking under tables, screaming, moving back out of the way.

“Hey!” one prep cook shouts. “You can’t come back here.”

Kaliel pushes him over and grabs the guy’s pizza cutter. Brill tries to take it from him, pero Kaliel slices Brill’s hand deeply, splashing orange blood on both of them.

Mi vida cries out, holding his hand to his shirt, while Kaliel escapes out the back door. I hesitate. Brill’s in pain.

Yet, if I stop to help him, I will lose Kaliel. Giving Brill an apologetic look, I chase the fugitive. “Stop, Kaliel! Por favor!”

Out in the alley, Kaliel hesitates, looks back with an expression I can’t read.

Chestla comes up from behind him. “Where do you think you’re going?”

Kaliel drops the pizza cutter, frozen by her alpha-predator vibe. Before he can recover, Chestla whips out a pair of handcuffs and secures his hands behind his back.

I rush over to Brill, who is standing still while the thin-fingered prep cook twists a long strip torn off a tablecloth around mi vida’s forearm. The guy has rounded ears at the top of his cabeza, with shell pink interiors, and the fuzzy hair on the back of them blends into the sand-brown hair covering his head. His nose is small and flat, his black eyes oversized, whiteless and beady, his lips thin and pink, his arms improbably thin. The guy’s grim frown deepens as he sticks a pasta fork into the knotted cloth and turns it tighter. Brill’s jacket is crumpled on the floor.

“Mi vida, are you OK?”

Brill gestures towards Kaliel with his uninjured hand. “I thought this su was an Earthling.” He’s holding a balled-up napkin in his other fist, and orange blood is seeping through it. Mi vida’s shirt’s navy, pero even so, I can see the front of it is soaked and sticky. “I hit him twice. How is he still conscious?”

“He needs a doctor,” the prep cook says. There’s no question which guy he’s talking about. Brill’s lost a lot of blood already, and he’s leaking more. Which is even worse for a Krom than for an Earthling.

Brill takes hold of the makeshift tourniquet, so the big-eyed guy can let go of the fork and tie it, pero the bleeding hasn’t entirely stopped. “Wal. I’m not about to stand here and bleed out over a kalltet cut hand. I think Kaliel nicked a vein at the edge of my wrist.”

Brill looks reproachfully over at Kaliel, pero Kaliel doesn’t react.

Mi vida’s trying to act casual, pero his eyes are a deep, worried gray. Krom cardiovascular systems are their weak point, and they don’t rebound well from massive blood loss. My heart jolts. I could lose him, like he just said, over a cut hand.

“Come on, Killer,” Chestla tells Kaliel. “We’re going back to the Fois Gras.” She turns to Brill, holding her hand out for the keys. “Hopefully I’ll have some information for you by the time you get back from the doctor.”

I pick up Brill’s jacket. I think I can get the bloodstains out.

Brill pulls out his keys, pero, he hesitates about handing them over. “You’re sure you’re going to be there when I get done?”

Chestla rolls her eyes. “You’re wearing a proximity band. Which may well have saved your life.”

I look closer at the metal band, peeking out above the napkin edge. A deep scratch in the surface matches where the cut up his wrist abruptly ends.

“Sorry.” Brill drops the keys into her hand. “I’m not used to working with people I can trust. I forget you gave Bo your claim on Jack’s bounty.” Brill closes his eyes, sways on his feet.

“You OK, mi vida?” I reach out to steady him.

“Wal, Babe. I’m just going to sit down for a second while you find out about that doctor.” Brill looks up at me. His eyes are a dark, muddy gold. He holds up his injured hand. “Whatever happens, Babe, remember, this wasn’t your fault.”

Tears bite at the back of my eyes. “You’re going to be fine.”

“But if I’m not. I want you to know that you mean all the worlds to me. You’re mi vida too. And mi corazón.”

I wipe at my eyes. “So that’s what you mean when you say Babe?”

“Pretty much.” He cups my chin with his good hand, drawing me towards him and kissing me. For someone who says he’s half-gone from me, he sure has a lot of strength left to do it with.

 

Six hours and one close call at the hospital later, we’re back on the Fois Gras. I’m going to have to start carrying healing foam if I’m going to continue dating a Krom.

Brill doesn’t seem to be thinking about how he nearly bled out in the cab, passing out in my arms.

He seems more concerned about the flexible coating on his cheek, where the doctors had sloughed away the frozen cells, then applied a pack over the raw flesh that’s supposed to stay on for twelve hours to encourage generation of new cells.

They gave him a lot of pain drugs.

From the sofa where he’s lying, he looks over at me, his eyes still unfocused. “Don’t give up on me, Babe. We can make this work. Especially now that they’re going to make me pretty again.”

I keep thinking about how the nurse had explained it to him: “You can’t regenerate frozen cells. No matter what the galaxy’s cryostasis salesmen say, you can thaw a frozen humanoid cell, but they’ll never figure out how to make it live again, even if it’s not damaged.”

I’d never thought about it before, but what had happened to him was pretty close to cryostasis.

Tawny’s watching the news in the ship’s holofields. “Guys? You hear this yet?”

Feddoink, the blob-monster, says, “Ambassador Grong, who was visiting Earth with a provisional tourist visa, has been declared dead, after being taken from the site of the Greene Memorial Snowboarding Extravaganza by ambulance and admitted to Martin Memorial Hospital.”

I gasp. I know him. He was aboard Layla’s Pride, for the conference. He was from Mardgar, the planet known for the best Kona coffee in the galaxy. They’re on the hot-list for anything that comes out of a Krom First Contact. Claro está, they’d been interested in chocolate. Pero, he’d been one of the most likely delegates to change his mind about the invasion.

Feddoink continues, “Representatives from Earth are claiming the death was an accident, that Grong’s injuries resulted from an improper understanding of Earth gravity. Many of our sources feel like this is one accident too many for a planet who exonerated a man who subsequently set off bombs on Zant.”

I force myself to breathe. We finally have Kaliel. We were starting to get things under control. Pero, the media’s going to malcast Earth so bad, it might not matter.

“To get a feel for Earthling psychology, we’re going to interview–”

Brill sits up suddenly. “Shtesh! A su passes out for a couple of hours, and look what happens!”

 

It’s another hour after that when Kaliel wakes up. According to Chestla, he’d made it back to the ship, realized he wasn’t going to escape, then passed out. Whatever he’d done to delay the effect of the darts couldn’t last forever.

 

An hour after that, I’m still sitting across the table from Kaliel, trying to get answers. Tawny and Chestla gave up half an hour ago. I feel bad for the way Kaliel’s hunched over, pero it was the only way to attach his wrists to the table.

“Por favor. Who really set those bombs?” I’m getting frustrated.

Kaliel’s been uncooperative. Now, he just sneers.

From where he’s lying on the sofa, Brill says, “You’re making a lot of allowances for Dork Face’s behavior, if you don’t love him on some level.”

Brill lost a lot of blood, and what’s left has been laced with iron replacement drugs and painkillers. He sounds alchafuzzed. I should just let it go.

“Maybe you and I should run away together.” It’s the longest sentence Kaliel’s said since we came aboard. He winks. It’s smarmy, not sexy.

“Por favor.” I can’t hide my exasperation. “That’s not helping.”

“After all.” Brill holds up his wounded hand. “He did this to me, shot at you… and still, you can’t give up on him.”

“A lot of people would have given up on you when you left me for dead,” I snap. I take a deep breath. This isn’t helping anything either, just bringing a color of pain to his irises. “Lo siento, mi vida. Mira, I believe you can care for someone as an amigo, even if you’ve been attracted to them. It’s like your pendants. You can hold more than one heart in your hand.”

“As long as that’s all you’re holding.” Brill shakes his cabeza, careful not to disturb the gel covering half his face. “It so rarely stays that way. Unless Earth girls are that different from Krom girls.”

There’s a story there, pero it’s not fair to ask him for it while he’s in that condition. Maybe not a good idea to bring it up at all. I know he’s had a couple of previous relationships, pero I never asked for details on the break-ups.

I turn back to Kaliel. “We know you bought massive amounts of salt and baking soda at that grocery store. Put that together with the fiber optics cable, the broken glass and the black whoosie-whatsits – and I got nada. What were you doing with all that stuff?”

Kaliel shrugs.

“I told you, Babe,” Brill says, “we won’t figure that out unless we find his ship.”

I know what he said. I ask Kaliel, again, “So what did happen to your ship?”

He shrugs, again, the gesture so awkward in his hunched position. “Ditched it.”

“At what point will you be ready to turn him over to Tyson?” Brill asks, like Kaliel’s not sitting right there. “That was the deal, right? Tyson finds him a doctor and offers legal support? Then we can backtrack and look for the ship.”

I bristle at this, even though it’s what I originally agreed to. “The minute that happens, we get cut out of the loop.”

Brill sighs. “Then what do you want to do?”

“No lo sé. I thought he would tell us something helpful, and then we would know what to do.”

Chestla steps out of the galley, a sandwich in her hand. “Take him with us to Evevron. I have a friend who is a doctor. He’s won Galactic awards for having developed new treatments for brain trauma. I can get him to do a work-up on Kaliel.”

“That sounds promising,” I agree.

Brill raises an eyebrow. “You told her I would fly us all to Evevron?”

Heat flushes my face. “Unless you want me to call Uber or something.”

“Again, you could have asked.” He pushes himself up off the sofa with his good hand and moves over to the command chair. “But I understand. You couldn’t say no to a friend. I’ve been there.” He’s talking about the friend who had died in his arms, demanding one last promise – which gave it the same weight as the promise Brill had demanded of Gavin, on my behalf, when he thought he was going to die. “And I can never say no to you.”

“De veras you’re in any condition to fly this thing?”

“I’ve flown the Fois Gras with a concussion and a bullet in my leg before.” Brill starts pushing buttons. He closes his eyes for a second, obviously woozy. “We should leave before news spreads about what happened in that pizza place. Until we announce intent to turn Kaliel over, anyone could still snatch him and claim the reward.”

Which means I’ve put some of my closest amigos – and Tawny – in incredible danger.

“Of course,” Brill continues, “your casual bounty hunter isn’t going to be kalltet enough to follow us to Evevron.”