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’em big and mute, do you?”
    “Just because the man doesn’t let bullshit roll off his tongue in a steady country-fried stream, doesn’t mean he can’t use his mouth.”
    “Don’t need you to share quite that much, Lia. Especially right now.”
    “Still on the celibate kick? Captain not coming around?” The humor left her voice.
    “That’s not a subject open for discussion either.”
    “You started it. Have it your way, but maybe if you’d listen to my way, you’d make a little more head way with the stubborn man.”
    “Lia,” Anders warned.
    “Okay then, back to what Bucho can do with his mouth—”
    “I love your bawdy sense of humor, but I so profoundly don’t want to know what that man does with his mouth.”
    “You love everything about me.”
    Anders’s laughter this time was loud. It made my stomach feel funny. Made me want to find ways to make him laugh, find ways to make him turn that wonderful smile on me.
    “I do, Lia, I do.”
    “And since you like men, I figured you wouldn’t mind a few extra details.”
    “No thanks. Don’t like all men, just the one.”
    They moved away from my door, but the shouts and laughter went on for another hour. I lay in the dark, too afraid they’d hear me if I spoke up for lights. Then I remembered there was a touch control panel for everything in the room by the bed. I turned toward the low shimmer of light and lightly touched the section that worked the built-in lamps high in the walls. Then I looked around the room that would be my home for a time. I’d been too out of it to pay attention to my surroundings earlier. Brown cabinets were bolted into a row over the bunk and at its end. A built-in vidscreen had been installed into the side of the one above my feet. A pair of earplugs hung on the wall by the panel, so I slid them into my ears and reached toward the control panel…then stopped to see my hand was shaking.
    There wasn’t anyone to punish me for turning on a vidscreen.
    I jumped and sat up when the sound came on, then leaned back to watch.
    Whatever I wanted to watch.
     
     
    Thirst forced me out of my bunkroom the next afternoon. I’d spent the morning looking for any piece of news on Para Lashin and what had happened to the ship, but there was nothing. No mention of his arrest and that should have been top news. I had found a documentary about Kithra and my eyes still ached from the tears when I’d seen the repaired pods and the smiling Gwinarian family who’d been off Kithra at the time of the blasts and recently gone home to work in the new major greenhouse pod. My mouth had fallen and stayed open as I watched a beautiful Gwinarian named Yaira explain what she and her mothers were doing in the greenhouses. How they’d cultivated Kithran plants off planet like others.
    The captain and Anders hadn’t come by to see me, but they’d made it plain I was free to go anywhere on the ship, so I finally ventured out, still wearing the baggy pants and long-sleeved beige shirt from the night before. The healing gel had worked well and there was only a faint twinge of pain left in my thighs. I’d tied my hair into a tail at my nape and washed my face, but didn’t bother to use any of the makeup Anders had included in the box of “lady stuff” he’d given me. The face that had stared back at me from the mirror had been pale, eyes red-rimmed, and my lips looked swollen from me biting them.
    Now I just desperately wanted something to drink and this was the third time I’d started toward the galley. The last two times, the voices had made me turn back. And this time, again—though there were still voices—I was too thirsty. I stopped a few feet from the open door and listened.
    “So, I think I have some time, you know? I mean, when a woman goes into the bathroom to get ready for you, it usually takes some time. Last thing I wanted was to pass gas when we were in the bed together, so I let ’er rip. But this woman had to be different—she