Page 5 of Red Scale Daddy
Still, the ship is not what keeps my eyes on her.
She stands under a half-broken ceiling light, shoulders set beneath that ridiculous coat, small hands braced near the projection like she can hold the whole damn room in place by force of will. She is short, even for a human, which makes her decision to insult half my customers either brave, stupid, or a symptom of some interesting brain injury. Her voice does not rise much, but it carries, clipped and precise enough to cut through whiskey laughter and engine-room music. She does notplead. She does not charm. She does not soften one syllable to make these vultures comfortable.
That is new.
Most people who come into Shot in the Dark looking to hire trouble have the same stink on them: desperation wearing perfume. They slap credits on the counter, flash guns they should not own, and pretend they are the sort of people who can command predators. This one is desperate, sure. I can smell it under the grease and old fabric, sharp as scorched copper. But she has packed it down so tight it looks like discipline.
Loklo leans against the back counter beside me, arms folded over his lean chest, his mouth curled in the shape he gets right before he says something that makes me consider firing him again.
“She’s going to get herself killed,” he murmurs.
“Probably.”
“You going to stop it?”
“Not yet.”
“That is the sort of answer that explains why our insurance premiums have a religious following.”
I glance at him. “We have insurance?”
“No, but if we did, several underwriters would be in prayer.”
The drunk at table seven shoves his chair back.
Ah. There it is.
Varkun. Yellow-scaled, half-blind, mean as a cracked tooth, and full of whatever fermented sewer runoff he has been paying for with coin I suspect he stole from someone smaller. He has been quiet too long, which in his case means violence has been marinating. A quiet drunk is either asleep, dead, or planning to make noise. Varkun is too stubborn for the first two.
The hooded woman hears the chair. I see the tiny shift in her posture, the fraction of weight moving from heel to forefoot, the angle of her left shoulder changing just enough to free thearm nearest her sleeve. She does not turn fast. Good. Fast turns make prey look like prey. She looks into the mirror behind my bar, catches his shape coming up behind her, and keeps her face calm.
Loklo’s brows lift. “Oh, I like that.”
“You like trouble.”
“I like competent trouble. It has better posture.”
Varkun comes up beside her and slaps a hand onto the bar hard enough to make three glasses jump. The human with the mining harness flinches. The Alzhon with the silver hair quietly moves his drink away from the splash zone. Smart man. I make a note to overcharge him less next time.
“The core,” Varkun says, dragging the words out. His breath is bad enough from here to qualify as chemical warfare. “Did I hear that right, little hood?”
“You heard correctly,” she says.
No tremor. No flutter. No little human heartbeat I can hear over the room, though I know it has to be beating fast. She is afraid. Of course she is afraid. Fear is not the issue. Everybody with a working brain gets afraid. The question is what a person does with it.
She turns it into a blade.
Varkun leans down over her. “Then you’re either stupid, suicidal, or too rich to understand numbers.”
“Those categories are not mutually exclusive.”
A few patrons laugh. Not loudly, because Varkun is still Varkun, but enough to bruise his pride. That is when I know the night has chosen teeth.
His good eye narrows. “Careful.”
“I am being careful,” she says. “That is why I’m still talking instead of estimating how long it would take you to bleed out from a severed femoral.”
Loklo makes a strained little sound beside me. “I want that embroidered on something.”
