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several shades lighter, an unnatural-looking yellow, and it was very short. She’d colored her face earlier, and her crying had made a smeared mask all across her eyes. Her blunt human claws were bright pink. She looked fit enough. She bruised easily, but then, so had every other human he’d ever known. Their skin was just too thin.
    When the computer chimed, Kane brought out his scanner and gave her arm a pat. She didn’t open her eyes.
    Patience.
    “This is probably going to hurt,” he warned her, and shrewdly noted that her face puckered slightly. “I need to look at your blood.”
    She made no response, not even when Kane pushed the sharp tip of the scanner into her arm. He drew out blood, rich and red, and fed it into the analyzer. The computer began to think.
    “Where do you keep your food?” Kane asked, his eyes running over the screen. Not that there was anything to see until the timer finished counting down, but it made him feel useful.
    She continued to ignore him.
    Kane considered her, tapping his claws idly against his knee. “What’s your preference?” he asked at last, bluntly. “Arm or leg? No reason to let your male go to waste.”
    It was a bluff. After half a day in the sun, the human’s meat was soured, but the threat had the desired effect. A trickle of water appeared at the corner of one eye. Humans did that, he knew, even when their eyes weren’t damaged. Finally, she looked at him.
    “Food,” he said firmly.
    She sat up, moving as though her bones had become brittle as straw, and slid onto her feet. She looked at him again, her face crumpling in on itself, and began to stagger toward the groundcar.
    The computer chimed, its screen filling the results of the human’s scan. Kane read, well-aware that he’d been very lucky. Apart from a congenital sugar imbalance, some toxic residue (probably related to the canisters floating in the cold-storage crate), and a nasty bone-thinning disorder lurking in her future, the female was clean. She had nothing that could be passed along to Kane, but he thought he’d ought to fix her up anyway. That sugar imbalance could get to be a problem if he didn’t.
    The female was returning, weeping openly now. She had a bag of dried meat in one hand and a package of biscuits or something in the other. She put these on the table before Kane and lowered herself shakily into one of the chairs, covering her face with her hands and rocking back and forth.
    Well, at least she was moving. Kane chewed on the meat, which was very tough but extremely tasty, and began to construct a program to purify her of her detrimental conditions. After a while, the female rose from her chair and went to kneel by the male’s body. Kane let her; he was an old hand at designing nanozyme codes, but this was the first he’d ever done without Urak looking on. Besides, if it made the female happy to grieve, who was he to argue? At least she was doing it quietly.
    Kane double-checked his program, ran a quick cross-filter reaction check, and when the gold light turned green, he loaded in the blank nanozymes and initiated them. It would take fourteen hours before the human’s problems were completely solved, but there was nothing wrong with her that he could catch, so he didn’t care. He had only to make sure she got enough water while the filters were working, and in the meantime, he could fuck her all he wanted. He filled his dermisprayer with the prepared nanozymes and turned to get his female.
    She was gone.
    So much for a gentle hand. When he found the bitch, he was going to hobble her.
    Dermisprayer in hand, Kane started walking, his eyes picking out her tracks easily in the dry earth. He followed her away from the corpse of her mate, down onto the path he’d come by earlier, and into the forest. He didn’t hurry. The distance between the human’s footprints showed she wasn’t running, and anyway, there was nowhere for her to go. In a way, the fact that she was fit enough to