Page 29 of Command

“Apertures are only on our upper bodies,” Renza said.

Alina exhaled a sigh of relief, wiping excess moisture from the opening she’d been working on, just below his hip.

Having gone through it once, Alina realized it wasn’t going to be so bad. She could do this. And the treatment had a marked effect on the alien. He just looked…better. More vibrant.

She just wasn’t sure if that was a good thing yet.

Renza had dismissed the uhyre guard patrolling her hallway and allotted himself in their place. It was a strange kind of relief to be watched at gunpoint by one uhyre over another. But it did allow Alina more breathing room, Renza being gone a lot of the time. With Threxin “missing,” it was up to his brother to keep things under control as best he could and not rouse suspicion among both the humans and the uhyre.

But apparently, two days after Threxin landed on her floor, someone hadn’t gotten the memo.

Renza was there when it happened, monitoring her work on redressing his brother’s wound. When the chime sounded, his spikes went up and he turned toward her slowly, crimson eyes narrowed. Accusatory crimson slits glared in her direction, as if Alina had anything to do with it. “Explain.”

“It… it’s my doctor,” she muttered when the feed projected who was outside. Dr. Pertin waited at her door with the same female uhyre who’d escorted him before looking bored behind him.

Renza hissed through his teeth when the female shoved the doctor out of the way to bang a fist on the cabin door.

“Ignore it,” Renza instructed in a quiet monotone, flexing his talons on the grip of the pistol he had extracted.

Alina slumped with a sigh when, after a few minutes, they walked away. She’d never forgive herself if this whole mess got Dr. Pertin killed too. Luckily Threxin hadn’t distributed access devices to allthe uhyre yet. If he had, they could barge into human cabins unannounced any time they wanted. So far, only Renza had that privilege.

The missed calibration visit was for the best. Talking to Dr. Pertin now would be useless with everything going on. And frankly, she was way too exhausted to think about her feelings.

Only later that day, Renza came and told her to go to the medbay for her “head correction.”

“That’s not what it is, and it’s really not a good time,” Alina tried to protest. But debate was not on the table as Renza herded her toward the door. For creatures who had no trouble fucking with their heads back on Old Earth, the uhyre seemed surprisingly concerned with her people’s mental state.

At Dr. Pertin’s office, Alina’s foot worried at a little divot between two tiles in the floor.

“Alina?”

“Huh?” She looked up. “Sorry, what was the question?”

“How are you?”

“Oh. I’m fine.” She drummed her fingers on his desk. The peach paint on her knuckles had long since chipped and repainting them had been the furthest thing from her mind.

Dr. Pertin twined his hands together on his tabletop and sighed. “Fine, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Alina.” He leaned forward. “You know just because we’re rationing medication doesn’t mean you have to pretend to be okay.”

“I’m okay!” Alina snapped, bringing a hand up to run through her bangs. “I’m sorry. It’s just been… a lot. But it’s a lot for everybody. How does this work now anyway?”

Calibration relied on a precise Neurosync link in which a medical specialist carefully tweaked her hormone levels for optimized internal flows. Everything else—coping strategies and meds like Harmonapam—was just a bonus. The real treatment was enabled entirely by the NS and the practitioner’s familiarity with relevant physiological structures. Now that their Neurosyncs were disabled, what the hell were they even going to do here?

“We do what we can with the tools we have left,” Dr. Pertin said.

“Like what?Talkabout all my problems?” Alina chuckled, but the joke fell flat, which was… worrying.

“Have you kept count this week?”

“Yes…” Alina picked the toe of her sneaker into the floor divot. “Three.”

Three times that her brain wouldn’t stop ruminating on something stupid she had done to the point of near-incapacitation.

“But I’m better now,” she offered and it was true. Since Threxin showed up on her at her door, she had no time to panic about much of anything except keeping him alive. She had even kept her mind off that tarp, most of the time. Focusing on something—someone—else helped her stop from fixating.

---