Page 15 of Crush
Ollie beamed at her. “Cool. I’m really good at screaming.”
Kinsley shuddered. “I’d rather not do ghosts right now, thanks anyway.”
Unreasonably piqued that the other woman wasn’t entranced with her son but also a little worried for her, Adeline frowned. “Are the whispers that bad? Maybe you should go back to Sil and have him remove the translator until we get to Luster Station.”
Kinsley shook her head. “I don’t want to be lost out here, not knowing what everyone is talking about.”
“Sometimes I don’t know what people are talking about either,” Ollie supplied helpfully. “So I just ask them.”
Kinsley gazed at him, then sidelonged a glance at Adeline. “Must be nice that people in your life are so nice.”
Again Adeline had to squelch her exasperation with the other woman. “I’ve always wanted Ollie to know that the world can be a kind place when we are kind.”
A faint smirk quirked Kinsley’s lips. Which Adeline noticed were slicked with a deep red lipstick first thing in the morning, so as much as the woman said she wanted to know what other people were saying, it seemed like she wanted those people paying more attention tohermouth. “Is that why you left Earth? Because it was such a kind world?”
June was watching them both with an air of anxiousness. “We all wanted something new? Didn’t we?”
After a heartbeat of silence, Kinsley nodded. “Something borrowed, something bold, something new, and something…” Abruptly, her sharp gaze wandered away from them. “Something…”
“Cold,” Ollie whispered. “So cold. So dark. I don’t want to sleep anymore. I want…”
He slumped to the floor in a heap of star-studded flannel.
***
“That must’ve been very scary for you,” Sil told Ollie as Adeline forced herself not to pace around the small but horrifyingly well-stocked infirmary. She’d already accidentally glanced around at the various drawers and—thanks to the translator implanted in her head—had read asphyxiation, severed limb, toxic dust inhalation, crush injury…
She forced herself to look away at that last one. Teq called himself a crusher. Had he ever been in this room with that drawer open, hurt and scared?
Ollie, looking very small on the orc-sized exam table, shook his head. “I wasn’t scared,” he objected. “It’s just that I went to sleep for a second even though I wasn’t sleepy.”
Adeline bit her lip hard enough to taste blood. Her baby had passed out, not from a tiredness or excitement or anything else; he’d fallen unconscious for some other reason.
Sil glanced at Kinsley who was perched on the very edge of one of the other five exam tables—six total! Which left Adeline fretting at just how dangerous space mining and salvage actually was. “I wasn’t sleepy either. In fact, I’d been up awhile and just drank some coffee. But I did get dizzy.” She shrugged, scooting ever closer to standing. “I feel fine now.”
Sil eyed her. “According to the IDA handbook, the gesture you make with your shoulders”—he imitated a shrug—“could mean many things, from uncertainty to dismissal to prevarication. Which one do you mean to convey?”
Kinsley gave him a hard look, then looked down at her hands, clenched in her lap. “I don’t know what to tell you. I was thinking about that wedding saying, and then those other words just…”
When she trailed off, Adeline prompted. “What you were saying, and what Ollie said, about it being cold and dark and you not wanting to sleep anymore. What was that?”
Without looking at them, Kinsley touched the temporary translator behind her ear. “I told you I was hearing weird echoes.”
Adeline clenched her jaw again, wincing at the pain that reverberated up into her own skull. “I have a universal translator, and I didn’t hear anything.” She glanced at June. “You?”
June shook her head, brow furrowed in concern. “Nothing,” she said apologetically. “No echoes, no whispers, no nightmares.”
Kinsley squared off to Sil, all but bristling, and at the moment Adeline appreciated the other woman’s blunt prodding. “So where is the voice coming from?”
The orc lifted all four of his shoulders in an obvious attempt at conveying…something. “When we signed the IDA contract, the Big Sky outpost sent over an extensive medical template for Earthers, adults and children, as well as records for all of you individually. I have some experience with overseeing med services onboard as part of my duties, and according to what I can tell, just as the IDA promised, most of your biological systems are similar to ours. And the scanners say everything is fine.”
“It’s not fine,” Adeline objected between gritted teeth. “This didn’t happen before we got here.”
Sil tried another shrug which was smoother but no less infuriating. “Keep a datpad with you and activated,” he told Kinsley, and Ollie perked up at the thought of having extra screen time. “It can note any anomalies that it perceives, and you can update it with your own experiences as needed. Unless you would rather be fitted with an automated tracker?”
Kinsley shook her head hard. “I’ll tell you if it happens again.”
“And I won’t let Ollie out of my sight,” Adeline said.
