my tail blades, growing impatient. “Repeat what you said.”
Isla crosses her arm over her chest, still clutching her coffee, and folds her short arm under her other, tucking it with practice under her breast.
My glare loses some of its intensity. I can hardly glare at all when her breasts are firmly in my scope of attention as they are. She’s touching herself.
Isla snaps her fingers under her breast, and my eyes obediently shift to focus firmly on this breast. “I said that I don’t have cooties,” she repeats. She sounds… amused.
I raise my eyes from her chest to meet her sparking gaze. “And what else did you say? The second half.”
Isla’s lips thin. “You’re a jerk.”
Just like the first time, my translator provides me an image of a painfully bright pink-furred… thing. It has a scooped bill for a mouth, round bead eyes, clawed paws, and… flippers with thorns on its heels. I’m not certain what it is or what it is supposed to be. I’m not able to determine what the connection is to this alien creature and myself. “Why do you call me this? What is a jerk?”
Off to the side, two of Beth’s Na’rith pirates suddenly start laughing uproariously.
In a hissing, threatening whisper, their mate asks, “What did you do?”
The Na’rith’s wave to the hobs and Rakhii amassed in this quarry, all of whom are looking as nonplussed as I feel. “Everyone who got a translator upgrade from us gets the same image definition for the word ‘jerk,’” one snickers.
“And what’s the image?” Beth asks, eyes darting worriedly to me, then guiltily around to everyone else.
The other male grabs his side, doubling over, still laughing. “A pink platypus!”
Beth begins blinking rapidly. “A what now?”
“A pink—” her pirate is guffawing. “Fluffy! Platypus!”
Beth scratches the top of her head, pressing her lips together, looking more dumbstruck than afraid now. Then she starts to look outraged. Rapidly so. “Wait, don’t you give yourself all the same translation upgrades?”
Catching her eye, apparently reaching the heart of their hilarity, the males begin wheezing as they nod.
“So every time I’ve called you guys jerks?” Beth demands. “You’ve popped a pink fluffy platypus into your heads every freaking time? No wonder you smile at me like idiots!”
“EXACTLY!” the first Na’rith cries. “It’s hilarious!”
Isla clears her throat, making my gaze swing back down to her. “I’d like to amend my insult. Bash? You’re a rude cow.”
My translator supplies me with a large-framed bony alien land animal with horns. “Acceptable,” I decide. I stride past her, intending to head for my workbench. “Follow me, Isla.”
“I’d rather not,” she replies.
Ah. She hasn’t yet forgiven my offense. “Fine,” I allow. “Try not to scrape yourself while you gather stones today.”
“I’ll do my best with that,” she calls to my back, and I can hear her sarcasm plainly.
It will be nigh to impossible for her not to scrape herself, especially when her soft human skin is likely already surface-damaged from quarry work.
“I’ll find you when I’m ready for you,” I inform her.
There’s silence for long enough that I separate from her by a considerable distance before she shouts, “Whatever!”
She shouts it so loudly everybody can hear her response again, and again, and again—because it’s ringing around the stone walls for what seems like a small eternity.
Now if the quarry were singing with a hundred workers busy at work—no one would be able to discern the echo from the general cacophony. That there is no general cacophony can only mean one thing.
Not one person is yet working.
A disgusted scan of the crowd and I see all eyes on either Isla or me, like we’re here for their entertainment.
Oh, enough of this.
I fan my tail blades, my tail swaying back and forth behind me in a deadly dance. “Would the counsel truly blame me,” I ask no one in particular, “if I began strangling a human at the beginning of each shift? Surely the rest would find this proper motivation to fall in line, and mind me, and be steadfast in their duties. Perhaps I’ll institute a rallying song. ‘Strangling one a day keeps idleness away.’”
No one responds to my question verbally, but suddenly all of the humans are scrambling to get to work.
...Precious coffees clutched in their hands, of course.
CHAPTER 12
ISLA
(Crying Counter: Nobody has cried today… Yet.)
“Isla,” Bash calls from behind me.
I keep my back to him. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
Smoke blows past me, and I know it’s because Bash exhaled one of his smoky Rakhii breaths.