Free Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two by Loren Rhoads Page A

have more hands or legs as a situation required. She would’ve liked the chance to spar with Vezali, just to learn more about how the girl could move, but she wasn’t sure how fragile Vezali's species might be. Raena didn’t want to bully the crew into working out with her, so she respected the girl’s reluctance. That didn’t make her stop wishing things were different.
    Vezali tinkered silently, then flipped a switch plate back into place. The Veracity seemed to take a breath. Then it began humming along happily.
    Vezali flushed a little greener, clearly pleased.
    “What will you do for fun once you understand how the engine works?” Raena wondered.
    “Take apart the weapons systems. Then take apart the hand weapons. Then? I don’t know. There’s always the galley systems, if Mykah will let me in there, or waste disposal, or life support.”
    “We’re gonna have to be grounded before you fiddle with that ,” Raena teased.
    “Maybe,” Vezali teased back. “Don’t you trust me?” She reached down half a dozen tools, each in a separate tentacle. Raena gathered them all awkwardly into the crook of her arm. She took them back to the wall and began to put them away. Everything in its place, Thallian used to tell her. Raena supposed that had been meant to include her.
    Vezali shifted her balance and flipped over so her tentacles could flow to the deck. “Is there something I can help you with, Raena?”
    Her voice, like Haoun’s, came over a translator she wore. Haoun’s was a necklace, but Vezali—having no neck, per se—wore hers as a belt around her midriff. Her species didn’t use their mouths for audible communication, but generated sound inside their bodies. The new translator gave her a high-pitched girlish voice, which Raena guessed must be pleasing to Vezali’s auditory system, wherever it was. Otherwise, Vezali was clearly clever enough to adjust it to any pitch she wanted, even though it was based on Templar technology.
    Now, though, Vezali sounded eager.
    Raena knew the other girl enjoyed Raena’s little technical puzzles. She was sorry to disappoint her now. “All I need today is a needle.”
    “I don’t understand the word.”
    “It’s a sharp sliver of metal for mending fabric.”
    “Let me see.”
    Raena retrieved her catsuit from where she’d left it by the hatchway.
    Vezali examined it closely. “It can be mended,” she said, “but it’s going to have a scar. The fibers have broken off so jaggedly that there’s no way to reweave it.” She handed it back to Raena.
    “I’ll just have to make the scar a feature,” Raena said, thinking of her own scars.
    Vezali’s eyestalk bobbed in an imitation of a nod. She drifted over to her tools and rummaged through them, lifting things and leaning forward to peer underneath. Finally she came up with a miniaturized awl. “Will this do?”
    “Perfect,” Raena said, plucking it delicately from Vezali’s tentacle.
    Raena found that she didn’t want to return to the solitude of her cabin. Her hands still felt slightly sticky, as if from the memory of her dream.
    It didn’t really happen, she reminded herself. She’d had blood on her hands many times, all sorts of shades and colors of blood, but no one had come into her tomb until Kavanaugh did—and she’d let those men escape. Why, then, wouldn’t this nightmare leave her alone?
    She went to the lounge and settled in on one of the carpeted benches with her back against the wall. The room was quiet now, with all her shipmates amusing themselves elsewhere. She recognized that things were peaceful and wondered why that didn’t make her happy.
    She spread the catsuit across her lap and studied the tear. Fairly quickly she discovered that mending it was beyond her meager sewing skills. She could get holes drilled through the fabric and the floss threaded through the holes, but there was no way to make it look like an adornment rather than a sloppy patch job. In the end, she chucked