Tagen passed her, his arm just brushing her shoulder, and then stopped. He shifted the dead weight of his prisoner and, glancing awkwardly over the lump of E’Var to see her, said, “Would you…like to see my ship?”

She blinked at him, blinked again, and finally faintly smiled. “Sure.”

Tagen went ahead of her, bending to carry his prone burden through the tight airlock, and then again through the narrow door to the holding cell. He set E’Var down, rolled him onto his back, and strapped him into the prisoner’s flight harness. After a moment, and not without a sour sense of obligation, Tagen brought out a fluid pack and raised a vein in E’Var’s limp arm.

He heard a soft step behind him and moved to allow Daria sight of his actions, but it was the other female, Raven, he saw when he turned. She had Grendel clutched tightly in her arms as she leaned on her brace and a Jotan chemist’s pack slung over one bruised shoulder. E’Var’s, no doubt. She never let it go far; there was something of hers in it, he thought, something E’Var had been keeping, tormenting her with its absence. Raven’s face was pale and blank and still damp from tears, reminding Tagen strongly of the seashore once the fickle tide had washed out and erased the day’s activities there. He did not trust this female. Which was an appalling reflection of his character, perhaps, but nonetheless.

Tagen returned his attention to his prisoner, inserting the line that would keep E’Var hydrated for the travel back to Jota and securing it with bonding paste. “You should not be walking,” he told her.

“What’s going to happen to me?”

“I do not know.”

The answer was cruelly laughable. He was a man of law. He knew very well.

Tagen activated the drip, checked the instrument panel, and finally stood up and turned to face her. Raven’s eyes remained on him, solemn, helpless, unblinking. He gestured to her and she backed out of the cell with a broken obedience all too familiar to him after recovering so many slaves. Tagen followed her, shut the door and sealed it, and then stood, staring down at her.

No, he did not trust her, but neither could he get his teeth into just why. She was not the twin of the blonde human Tagen had apprehended at the fair, not the bitter and raging accomplice he had expected. His eyes told him this was a victim, taken through no fault of her own and molded to E’Var’s sadistic whims. Freeing her when he knew the human Fleet was already seeking her for E’Var’s crimes would only condemn her to imprisonment and perhaps death.

His gut, though, his gut told him an entirely different and darker tale. His gut told him to be wary of the face that never showed emotion and the eyes that had a way of lingering on E’Var’s body when they had nowhere else to go. His gut told him that this was perhaps not so much a beaten human as it was a terribly sly one.

But then, he knew already the limits of his gift for insight. And after so much time on Earth, so many days of relentless summer, and so many conniving humans on episodes of Daria’s despised law program, he was aware that he couldn’t be very objective. And, as was beginning to feel disturbingly like habit these days, when he felt the need for wisdom, he found himself seeking Daria. She was standing in the doorway between the main bay and the pilot’s pit, hugging herself as if for warmth and gazing back at him with her eerie sympathy.

Tagen looked back at Raven, his talons flexing on the floor, resisting the urge to tak them even though she, as a human, couldn’t possibly read anything meaningful in the gesture. “If the choice were yours alone,” he said slowly, “what would you choose?”

She did not answer. Her eyes fell from his, stared at the floor between her feet. Her hand passed through Grendel’s fur, nearly in exact tandem with the cat’s contented rumbles, but she looked to be a thousand years detached from her physical self. A slave-look.

“Understand that I cannot offer you a return to the life you knew before. Not in any way. I could perhaps take you elsewhere here on Earth—”

“What good would that do?” she asked strengthlessly. “They’ll find me anywhere I go. They’ll arrest me.” She pulled Grendel up and drew a cat-scented breath, hiding her face from him. “They’ll kill me.”

Tagen frowned. His eyes sought Daria’s. She looked away and nodded once.

“How was I supposed to stop him?” Raven was saying, still without emotion. “I couldn’t even stop him from hurting me.”

Slave-words, and all the right ones. Tagen’s talons flexed again and again, he stilled them. In all his years of service and after all the encounters with recovered humans from every form of slavery, he had never met one so evocative with all the things she said…and didn’t say.

“Can’t I come with you?” Raven asked suddenly. She still did not look at him and her shoulders were bowed, without hope. “I don’t care what you do with me, I just can’t…stay here. Please. Can’t I just come with you?”

E’Var’s blonde human had asked virtually the same thing, albeit in a cruder fashion. Tagen’s doubts itched at him.

Raven’s eyes peeked at him behind the masking strands of her hair. “Please, don’t leave me here. Please. I can…I can be nice.” She cringed as she said it.

Tagen’s jaw clenched and this time it was his claws that flexed, wanting the visceral and wholly unprofessional satisfaction of ripping E’Var open. His doubts did not disappear, but they were diminished. No one could fabricate such an unhappy offer.

“I will,” he said finally. “No, do not mistake me, human. I will not harm you.” He started to say more, sighed, and pulled down a jump seat and gestured for her to sit. He took the cat from her arms and once Daria had come to collect the protesting animal, half-knelt to put his eyes more on level with Raven’s and said, “We need to have an understanding,” he said.

Raven’s face underwent a buckling of unmasked anguish and she clapped a shaking hand to cover the eyes that welled with water.

Tagen looked helplessly back at Daria, but she merely touched his shoulder in silent commiseration and went outside.

Tagen waited, searching the corners of the star cruiser’s ceiling for hints on how to proceed. Slaves did a lot of crying. In the past, however, he’d been able to simply move on and leave them to it while he dealt with a fresh one. He’d never had to console one before, and in light of her offer to be…nice, he was loathe to even touch her. Fortunately, Raven’s tears abated on their own. She swiped at her eyes with bruising force, and then picked up the chemist’s pack that had been sitting at her side to hold on her lap in Grendel’s absence. She gripped it until her knuckles whitened, staring fixedly at the floor as unhappiness still twisted her features.

“I can take you away from Earth,” he said, still addressing the main bay’s ceiling. “But you must understand that you will never be permitted to return.”

“I know,” she whispered. “What…what will you do to me?”

“I expect you will be detained at first, for medical purposes. I am sure you will be made as comfortable as possible and no one will harm you. Afterwards…” He hesitated, risking a sidelong glance that showed him only her spiritless profile. “You will be moved to a…facility…forgive me, I do not know the correct word. A place for humans we have recovered from others like E’Var.”

She nodded dully.

“It is the place you will live thereafter,” he continued. “There will be many other humans and no Jotan. You will be assigned a room at first, but you are, of course, free to move when and where you will. The moon is—”

“Moon?” She raised herself to look at him. “Aren’t I going to live on Jota?”

“No.” Again, he hesitated, trying to see through the face she showed him and gauge how much of the truth she needed to know and how much would only upset her further. “It is well within our space and is monitored to preserve the stability of its inhabitants, and to provide medical services and other aids when necessary, but it is not on Jota. We wished to prevent escape.”