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Tom was fingering the cuffs locked around his wrists as he
followed Da’shay into the galley. Ramsay was going to have all kinds of fits.
Not only was Da’shay holding his leash, but she’d dressed him in a shirt just
as indecent as the one he’d worn yesterday, and she’d added magnetic cuffs that
Tom couldn’t stop fingering. The metal had warmed to the touch and he kept
rubbing the etched surface. These were slave cuffs, not anything he’d put on a
prisoner.

“Tom!” Becca stood up when they came in the room and Tom
made himself leave the cuffs alone. The look of shock on her face was enough to
make him uncomfortable enough without drawing attention to them.

“Becca,” Tom answered. “Do you really get wet when—” Tom
didn’t have a chance to finish because Da’shay’s elbow found his stomach.

“Da’shay! You’re not being very nice,” Becca said, but she
sat down again without more than a frown.

“Got a question for you,” Tom said as he grabbed a piece of
fruit from the center of the table. “Someone did scan these, right?” he asked
as he looked at the apple. He sat and ignored the way Da’shay kept running a
finger over his collar.

“Of course. You don’t have to ask about something like
that,” Becca grabbed a piece for herself and took a bite out of it. “Desert
apples, taste a little like almond. Have you talked to the captain?” She stared
at her apple and Tom noticed that her eyes were puffy.

“Someone die?” he asked. Becca wasn’t one for crying, not
unless she was trying to distract someone. They’d been in a real bad spot about
a year back and she’d gone off crying until the smugglers had been so
uncomfortable they were caught between telling her to shut up and feeling bad
about making a sweet little woman like her cry. Becca playing them for fools
right up until Tom killed ‘em both.

She looked up at him. “A few somebodies. Maybe you’d best
talk to the captain.” She looked back down at her apple and Tom looked to
Da’shay.

“Indigo and blue spinning all around,” Da’shay offered. Tom
didn’t exactly know what she meant, but it didn’t sound particularly good that
the colors were everywhere. It meant whatever happened had affected the whole ship
and Eli hadn’t been with them long enough to know the same people.

Feeling as if he had a weight in his stomach, he stood up
and glanced toward the pilot’s deck. Da’shay started in that direction and Tom
didn’t have a chance to wonder what he should do because he was following the
leash. “Captain?” Tom called. Da’shay stepped into the room and Tom followed.
Eli and Ramsay were both sitting at the navigational table and even Tom could
tell they were out of sorts. “Captain?” Tom asked again. The man looked like a
rag that’d been wrung out and left to dry in the sun—all blotchy and lifeless.

“Tom,” Ramsay answered without even commenting on the shirt
or the leash and cuffs. “Brief him,” he ordered Eli.

Eli did look at the cuffs, but he just hit the play contro,
and Tom watched the newswoman appear over the star charts on the nav table. Eli
half turned away from the image.

“The explosion took the lives of six Corps members, the most
notable of which is Berley Tarby, the captain of the Ice Queen, which was working
undercover. Captain Tarby is best known as the ‘Children’s Savior’ for his
actions during the
casslit
war. Using a badly damaged ship, he evacuated
73 children from Rain 7 when the planet was about—”

Ramsay cut the volume and the woman’s voice vanished, but
the vid continued to run, showing archive footage of a young soldier in the
green uniforms Earth had used during the
casslit
wars. Tom looked at the
captain. The
casslit
war was a faint memory for Tom;
Beauteous
had been too far from the front to really be bothered much, except by the lack
of supplies from the inner worlds. However the captain had survived one war
already, and he was pale at the thought of another.

“We should show him the last part, sir,” Eli said. Ramsay
didn’t react.

Da’shay leaned into Tom. “Blues and blues, washing through
the gray,” she whispered. Tom was glad he couldn’t understand her much because
whatever bad the captain was feeling, Tom figured he had a right to his
privacy. Tom didn’t need to know it.

Eli moved the slider to the end of the broadcast and turned
the volume up. “This whole transmission was coded—buried in the stream. So far,
it seems like the Corps is keeping this from being broadcast outside the inner
planets. Most of the docks in-system have shut down, and the outer colonies and
slave worlds are shutting down their docks in response, but all I’m seeing on
local channels are a lot of rumors—no one knows about this.”

Turning the sound back on, Eli watched Ramsay.

“Earth Command has no comment, but sources at the medical
center say this is actually the second ship targeted by smugglers moving out of
the slave colonies. The first was a freighter registered in Aribella, but the
latest attack—”

Ramsay reached out and hit the kill switch on the broadcast
and the navigational table went black. Aribella—that’s where the
Kratos
had her papers. At least Command hadn’t ruined their cover. “There’s going to
be war over this. Tarby is a hero. Command is going to want to make the slavers
pay.” Ramsay’s voice was dangerously quiet.

“You think it was Hou?” Tom asked. He moved forward until he
was standing by the nav table.

Ramsay ran a hand through his hair. “Who knows? If we’d
reported back before the dock shut down, that’s what Command would conclude.”
Ramsay didn’t say he believed it, but then the captain was smarter than
Command, as far as Tom could see.

“Illogical,” Da’shay said. “Profit means more slaves, more
slaves means more control.
Genta
build worlds around control,” Da’shay
said softly. “Control and command. Who you follow, who follows you.”

Ramsay truly looked at Tom and Da’shay for the first time.
“New outfit, Tom?”

“Yep,” Tom agreed without getting upset. He couldn’t even
imagine how it must feel to survive one war and see another one coming right at
you, so he was giving the captain some slack.

“Slaving seems to agree with Da’shay,” he said, still
talking to Tom.

Tom looked over at Da’shay, not understanding what Ramsay
wanted. “Indigo flashes in blue,” Da’shay told him, as though that made any
sense.

“Or maybe it doesn’t. She’s still sounding crazy,” Ramsay
said with a sigh. “I just wish I knew why. Why would Hou do this?” Ramsay
thumbed a control and a picture of Captain Tarby came up. He was an older man
with deep wrinkles and pure white hair, but he still looked like someone who
could take care of himself. Actually, he looked a little like Ramsay, only
Ramsay’s nose hadn’t gotten that big, bulbous old-man look to it yet.

“Da’shay, this make any sense to you?” Tom asked.

She shook her head.

“You’re asking for advice about sense from someone who
doesn’t make any? Tom, that’s not one of your better moves.”

“She makes sense,” Tom said in her defense. Who knows how
long she’d been trapped in her own head with other people’s feelings pressing
so close that they’d made her lose herself? She didn’t deserve to have Ramsay
pressing on her with his certainty that she was helpless and crazy.

“Prisms of orange,” Da’shay muttered.

Ramsay looked at her and then back to Tom. “So, does that
make sense? Are you so good at understanding your new owner that you can read
her mind?” Ramsay’s tone made Tom grit his teeth.

Tom spent a good minute glaring at Ramsay and trying hard
not to throw a punch. “It ain’t about me reading her mind. It’s more about her
being able to read us. She says Becca is yellow and orange most of the time, so
I think she’s either calling us overly smart or overly excitable.”

“She…what?” Ramsay looked at Da’shay and then back to Tom.

Da’shay leaned into Tom’s shoulder. “Can’t think some days.
Diamonds cutting all the flesh, colors darting everywhere,” she admitted, and
from the tone, she was ashamed of it.

Becca came into the room and sat in the chair Eli had left.
Tom hadn’t even seen her behind them, but then he’d been a little distracted
with being pissed at the captain. “That just ain’t possible,” Becca said.

Tom looked over at her, trying to judge whether she was
saying that because she thought he was wrong or because she didn’t want to
think about what that might mean. He couldn’t tell. Da’shay smiled at Becca.
“Yellows through all the teal.”

Ramsay leaned on the table. “Tom, I know you seem to be
better at figuring her out than most, but this…”

Tom licked his lips and tried to think where to start. “She
said diamonds were always distracting her and it seemed like the only time I
really got a reasonable answer out of her was when we were in the desert. She
said there were fewer diamonds out there and she sure didn’t have any reason
for dragging us deep into the desert. We camped for one night, she told me
about the doctors cutting on her brain and then she has us come back. I think
there were too many people around for her to focus unless we went out there.”

“Or she was isolating you,” Ramsay said. Tom thought about
that. It was a reasonable tactic if you were trying to make a captive
emotionally dependent on you. The fact was, he’d started feeling softer toward
Da’shay after that night, but it was reasonable to have kinder thoughts about
someone once you understood them.

Da’shay looked at the captain. “Diamonds turning, new grays
out of old, orange and blue in the dark. Cat’s cradle drops a strand.”

“You really think that means something?” Ramsay asked. It
was funny—Ramsay had always been telling him to give Da’shay a chance, but he
didn’t seem to be willing to do it himself. Then again, up until this moment,
Ramsay could pretty well call her a woman and a victim and just carry her from
one planet to the next while trying to keep her safe. Tom didn’t think that’s
what Da’shay wanted, but the captain did have a bit of the frontier chauvinism
to him. Women died in greater numbers in the colonies, victims of childbirth
and lowered immune systems after giving birth, and that led to some coddling
them more than women really wanted. Certainly Da’shay didn’t need any coddling.

Tom nodded. “I think so. It’s not that different from
learning code. Cat’s cradle is that kid’s game with the yarn. It’s real easy to
get all tangled up in it—ruin the yarn and end up with fingers knotted in it to
boot. She uses cat’s cradle to mean that something is confused. Prisms and
colors seem to be some sort of emotion that come from diamonds. I’m guessing
she’s saying that something’s going on that’s confusing all of us.”

“She’s got the confusing part down,” Becca agreed softly.
Tom blew out a breath, more relieved than he’d expected that someone believed
him. “Captain, now that I think on it, she does seem to talk colors in a
certain pattern. She always tells me the engine room’s teal when we’re getting
ready to drop down on a planet and I’ve painted out about every bit of teal in
the room because it made her so sad to talk about. I’ve got yellow and pink and
blue and orange down there, but no teal.”

“Teal staining the air now,” Da’shay said as she looked
around at all of them.

“But how could she…not unless…” Becca stopped. “Oh sweet
saints and gods of every color.” She breathed the words so reverently that Tom
almost expected her to start crossing herself. “Captain, don’t go getting all
upset now, but I need to ask Da’shay something and I need you to not go
completely unreasonable on us.”

“Me?” Ramsay sat up. “Tom’s wearing slave cuffs, you’re
buying the idea that Da’shay can read minds and you’re worried about me being
unreasonable? Eli, you seeing any problem with this?”

Tom gritted his teeth. He’d been with the captain longer
than Eli had been in the service, but Ramsay was turning to him and that cut
deep. Da’shay’s fingers found his arm and held tightly. “My mate. Never letting
go,” she whispered so softly that only he could hear, her breath stirring his
hair and tickling his ear.

“Listening doesn’t do any harm,” Eli said.

“Da’shay,” Becca said quietly. She waited until Da’shay was
looking at her before she continued, “Do you have any
casslit
genes?”

Tom could almost feel everyone in the room holding their
breath. If she said yes, the captain was going to toss them out the ship, no
question, and Da’shay wasn’t particularly good at lying. She shook her head.
“No.”

Becca sagged in her chair. “Oh. I thought maybe… We know
casslit
communicate through touch, through neurotransmitters on the skin, so I thought
maybe if she was part
casslit
, that might explain it.”

“And explain why she lacks the bulk of a
genta
,” Eli
added. “It was a logical question.”

“Ask another question,” Da’shay said. She stared at Becca,
but Becca only looked back in confusion.

“Like what?”

“She can’t go talking about the bits the doctors took out,”
Tom pointed out. “Asking her what to ask about ain’t likely to be much good.”

“If there even were doctors,” Ramsay said firmly.

“Vultures picking at scabs, pulling out words and skin,”
Da’shay said firmly. Even if Ramsay ignored the words, the tone made it clear
she was agreeing with Tom. Da’shay turned to Becca again. “Ask another
question.”

“What kind of question?”

Tom frowned. “You were talking to her about genetics. Maybe
try something genetic.”

Becca sighed. “I swear. Just because I’m the only one of us
that got through university tech, that does not mean I know everything about
all sciences.” She sounded aggravated, but she also looked as if she was trying
to think up questions. “Okay, do you have
genta
genes?”

“Yep,” Da’shay agreed, as if her blue skin didn’t give that
one away already. That was slightly stupid. The captain was looking at Becca as
if he was thinking the same thing.