Free Crossing the Line by Karen Traviss

said.
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    Shan’s world was silent except for the numb ringing in her own ears.
    Faces—wess’har and ussissi—that were clustered in a circle above her jerked back and parted.
    For a few moments all she could see was their mouths opening and closing erratically. Her eardrums felt as if someone had shoved a rod through them. A few moments later the sound suddenly rushed back in.
    â€œLi sevadke!” said a reedy child-animal voice with its own echo. “Ur, jes’ha ur!”
    Shan struggled to sit up. She could see properly now: Vijissi, Chayyas, and a wess’har male she didn’t know, and they were giving her plenty of space. Chayyas was shaking her head occasionally, as if trying to dislodge something: the close-quarters discharge must have hurt her ears too.
    Shan tried to put her hands back behind her to prop herself up but fell back on one elbow. The back of her head hurt like hell. She reached around, expecting to feel an exit wound, sticky blood, gritty bone: but it was all in place.
    Chayyas had put a bullet in her. Shan just couldn’t quite work out where yet. That was the problem with custom-enhanced hollow-tip rounds: terrific stopping power, the very best she could get made. She just hadn’t planned on one stopping her .
    â€œCan you hear us?” Vijissi asked. “You hit your head when you fell back.”
    That explained a lot. Her left shoulder hurt too. She fumbled, feeling for wounds, and realized the shot had penetrated her upper chest. It had probably clipped her lung, judging by the taste of blood: she’d seen enough bodies in postmortem to work that out.
    But c’naatat was practiced at injuries. It had played this game before, when an isenj round had penetrated her skull and Aras had bled his hand into her open wound to repair her. This was just meat, nothing as complex as a brain injury. Easy peasy . The symbiont flaunted its skill. It was patching her up before their eyes.
    â€œI can hear you,” Shan said at last. She tried to stand up but thought better of it. Her audience rustled further away from her. Chayyas smelled scared, but she didn’t say anything. Shan turned her head with painful difficulty.
    It was a scene she’d seen many times before as a police officer. But it had always been someone else’s blood sprayed over a wall, never hers. She stared at the spatters: the matriarch and her diplomat stared too.
    So they were afraid of her blood.
    Vijissi edged round her, bobbing his head, apparently staring at her jacket as if he didn’t quite believe what was going on beneath it.
    â€œSo it is true,” he said, then looked away. “I mean no offense. But it’s one thing to know this can happen and another to see it with your own eyes.”
    Shan scrambled onto all fours and her sense of balance kicked in. All she had now was a headache, a stiff neck, and a strange smell of dust in her nostrils. Her gun was on the table. She reached for it and shoved it back in her waistband. And her jacket was ruined; that pissed her off. She could repair herself, but she couldn’t get a new jacket out here.
    Chayyas kept her distance, shutter pupils snapping from open petals to slits. “An astonishing thing,” she said at last, very quiet, almost distracted. “Extraordinary.”
    â€œYeah, terrific. It’s my party trick.” If Chayyas was testing the efficiency of her c’naatat , it was a bloody stupid way to do it. But it had shaken her, that was clear. Shan examined the singed hole in her jacket for a few moments then gave up. She stared at her hands: there were no flickering lights. “Had your fun now? Can I go?”
    â€œI had to see.”
    â€œYou’ve seen.” She gestured at the wall, suddenly more concerned whether the bioluminescence had stopped for good than the events of the last few minutes. “Are you going to clean this up, or do you expect me to do