The woman dipped a spoon into the stew, brought the spoon to her lips, blew gently, swiped her tongue slowly around the edge.
“What’s the bad news?” he asked.
“Your ankle is fractured. Fairly badly. That’s going to take some time. The rest . . .” She shrugged, sipped the stew, pursed her lips. “Needs salt.”
He watched her dig into her rucksack, searching for the salt. “Grace,” he said softly. “Your name is Grace.”
“One of them,” the woman said. Then she said her real name, the one she bore for ten thousand years. “I have to be honest. I like Grace better. So much easier to pronounce!”
She swirled the soup with the spoon. Offered him a sip. His lips tightened. The thought of food . . . She shrugged and took another sip. “I thought it was debris from the explosion,” she went on. “I never expected to find one of the escape pods—or you in it. What happened to the guidance system? Did you disarm it?”
He thought carefully before he answered. “Malfunction.”
“Malfunction?”
“Malfunction,” he said louder. His throat was on fire. She held the canteen for him while he drank.
“Not too much,” she cautioned him. “You’ll get sick.”
Water dribbled down his chin. She wiped it for him.
“The base was compromised,” he said.
She seemed surprised. “How?”
He shook his head. “Not sure.”
“Why were you there? That’s the curious thing.”
“I followed someone in.” This was not going well. For a person whose entire life had been a lie, lying did not come easily to him. He knew Grace would not hesitate to terminate his current body if she suspected that the “compromise” extended to him. They all understood the risk in donning the human mantle. Sharing a body with a human psyche carried with it the danger of adopting human vices—as well as human virtues. And far more dangerous than greed or lust or envy or any of those things—or anything—was love.
“You . . . followed someone? A human?”
“I didn’t have a choice.” That much was true at least.
“The base was compromised. By a human.” She shook her head with wonder. “And you abandoned your patrol to stop it.”
He closed his eyes. Perhaps she’d think he passed out. The smell of the stew made his stomach roll.
“Very curious,” Grace said. “There was always risk of a compromise, but from within the processing center. How could a human in your sector know anything about the cleansing?”
Playing possum wasn’t going to work. He opened his eyes. The crow had not moved. The bird stared at him, and he remembered the owl on the sill and the little boy in the bed and the fear. “I’m not sure she did.”
“She?”
“Yes. It was a . . . a female.”
&nbs
p; “Cassiopeia.”
He looked sharply at her, couldn’t help it. “How do you . . . ?”
“I’ve heard it a lot over the past three days.”
“Three days?”
His heart quickened. He had to ask. But how could he? Asking might make her more suspicious than she already was. It would be foolish to ask. So he said, “I think she might have escaped.”