Page 63 of Fighting Gravity
Quinn was a canvas of the events that had happened since I first saw her and carried her onto the Argos. But she was also a canvas for other things. The inked images covering her skin inspired new curiosity and I found myself trying to interpret them. I stared until the last moment before she slipped on the final piece of clothes and turned to face me. Her brows lifted and she shook her head.
“Get an eyeful?”
“You continue to speak to me with such disrespect as if there won’t be consequences.”
“I continue to speak to you like I don’t care. I’ve been through the wringer, Norm.” She paused, rubbing a finger over her brow. “Rhone,” she corrected.
“What does that mean?”
“What does what mean?”
“Being through the wringer.”
Her body went a bit rigid like I said something that disturbed her. I wasn’t sure how that was possible considering I only repeated her words.
“Nothing,” she finally said, biting her bottom lip in a momentary display of discomfort.
She headed toward me, a familiar, rebellious look on her face. Before she passed me, I sidestepped to block her path and drew her eyes.
“How is it you take so much abuse without breaking?” I asked.
She hesitated, her eyes peering into mine for so long that I was able to recognize the tiny, gold flecks in her otherwise green irises. I’d never seen them before…
“Look,” she said with a veiling smile. “You may be responsible for most of my physical scars, but you have a long way to go to catch up to the ones you can’t see.”
“What does that mean?”
“Why do you care?”
I didn’t…
IthoughtI didn’t…
28: Quinn
I had nowhere to go. I knew it and Rhone knew it, so he kept the cuffs off of me. I walked behind him through the ship, keeping quiet as he headed toward a room on the top floor. When the door slid open, the gek woman from the arena stood abruptly from her bed, nudging her young son behind her. She still looked fierce as ever and as untrusting as she did on Tao Prime. She was a mother, after all, and Rhone didn’t exactly have the friendliest face.
“Jjuli ka rohk na,” he said to her.
He said some other things that I couldn’t even begin to interpret and then the woman began to relax and enter a timid conversation with him. While they spoke, my eyes went to the young child peeking out from behind his mother’s leg.
The woman and the child looked vastly different from the woman and child I saw in the arena. Rather than being covered in dust and filth, they were both cleaned and given new clothes. Ill-fitting clothes, but clean clothes. The woman had a slightly bluish-green tint to her rather than the true green that Rhone was. Her son had even more blue tones in him and rounder eyes in contrast to Rhone and his crew’s heavily almond-shaped ones. I wondered if they were a different race. Humans looked so different from each other, so why not aliens?
When the boy’s big eyes met mine, I stilled, watching him bristle at the sight of me. The fleshy extensions on his head barely went past his chin and stuck out a little like a kid with bedhead and his nose was flatter than any of the other gek I’d seen. When I caught him staring, I tried not to think about it. I wasn’t good with kids, human or alien. But… I had to admit, this one was cute. Glancing up at Rhone’s chiseled, harsh features, I questioned if he’d ever been that cute.
No… he was probably born with a scowl.
When the woman’s eyes shifted toward me, I straightened, listening to Rhone’s gibberish as he gestured in my direction. I knew I was being talked about and suspected he was talking shit until the woman took a deep breath and inclined her head at me. I furrowed my brows, inching toward Rhone.
“What’s going on?” I muttered.
“I told her you are the one who aided us in the arena,” he said. “She did not recognize you. But you have her thanks.”
“Oh… well… tell her you’re welcome I guess?”
“Tell her yourself.”
I scoffed, cocking a brow.
