Page 12 of Smart@ss Cyborg

“Ma’am?” I ask, feeling like I’m interrupting.

She bolts upright. Or into an upright sitting position rather, seemingly struggling under the weight of her unwieldy belly. She sucks in another one of her watery breaths. If I didn’t know she was human, I’d think she had gills. With a sound like that, water should surely be filtering out of them. If she’s going to keep inhaling like this, she could use gills, which are a much more effective breathing system than the one she’s been born with.

Since she hasn’t said anything, I tamp down my instinct to do as I please, which is acceptable where I’m from but not here. I try to act as one of her people would act: civilly. “Which horse?”

Her brows, pinched with some emotion, become more pinched. “What?”

I force patience into my tone. “Which horse is the dead man’s?”

Her gaze strays to her mate’s, so I clarify, “The other dead man’s?”

Her mouth drops open and her gaze swings up to mine. It seems to take effort for her to force words out, and I wonder if her throat has been damaged somehow.“The chestnut.”

“Thank you,” I tell her, and turn to go. But then I stop and swing around to her again. “I’m sorry to bother you again, ma’am, but what color is—”

“Red!” she snaps.

I blink at the shift in her tone. It seems… sharp. “Ma’am, have I upset you?”

I don’t know how to classify the noise she makes, but she erupts to her feet at last. She’s shorter than I am, although that’s a common disparity even between human men and women—the latter of the species is typically slightly smaller. She’smuchsmaller than I am though, my eye telling me she’s five heads, five and a half at most. Her dress is stained with an alarming amount of blood.

Her shoes clack hard on the floor as she storms to me—and then she looks up at my face as I’m staring intently down at her, and she shrinks back, her whole manner changing as she edges around me, eyes wide.

Mystified by her unusual behavior—nothing I’ve ever caught on a Traxian vid although I’ve watched an extensive amount—I follow her.

Behind me, I hear the clopping hooves of my former mount. Paco is brazen enough to shove into my side, and since we’ve both reached the doorway at the same time, we find ourselves momentarily stuck. One of us needs to back up, and I wait politely for him to do so.

Instead of doing that and allowing me to exit first, the animal pushes hard against me with his narrow shoulders—then his excessively wide girth.

The fool doesn’t stop. He forces us both through the door, extruding us together as his excessively wide stomach crushes into my back and scrapes on the other side of the door.

When we’ve successfully made it through, I huff down at him in disapproval, but he ignores me, pacing back and forth on the porch, not using the steps to go down like he used them to get up in the first place.

I step past him and take them easily with my C-legs, then walk over to the woman, stopping a few feet away from her when she starts to shy away from me much like the closest hitched horse does.

“It’s this one,” she says quietly. The horse is not red, not like I know the color. It’s duller. Like dirt. And dark as a Rhincodon’s liver.

“Thank you,” I tell her. Then I push my hands into my pockets and rock back on my boot heels. “I confess I was hoping it was the middle one.”

“That’s a buttermilk,” she says dully.

“Oh.” Its coat is the metallic, glowing sandy white of the shore at low tide, when the moon is overhead.

“He’s my husband’s,” she gasps out, doubling over and sinking to a crouched position on the ground, attempting to hug her knees. Impossible around her swollen belly.

Uncomfortable, I gaze down at her for a moment before looking back to the fine-colored horse. “Well, since he’s dead, can I have his horse?”

This works as an incredible pause on her tears. Her neck cranes back and she gazes up at me in what I am sure I can identify as astonishment.

I point to the horses. “May I trade you the dead man’s chestnut for your dead husband’s buttermilk?”

She explodes into sobs even worse than the ones she was suffering inside when she was bent over her mate’s body.

Unsure how to deal with her if she can’t act like a normal person, I back away from her. My former mount makes a plaintive honking noise, and I’m almost relieved to turn my attention to him.

To my confusion, he's still on the porch. “What is it?” I ask him. “And what are you still doing up there?”

He stops pacing and honks at me. When I do nothing, he shifts, looking agitated. The porch boards creak with his weight as he picks up his hooves and trots from one side of the structure to the other.

---