“Do you feel the wriggling sensation too?” she asked.
“There’s some kind of fluctuation,” 1491625 said. “I don’t have sensitive enough internals to tell you exactly what’s going on.”
She’d have to ask Jedao about that later, if he ever regained the ability to speak. Which was up to her, at this point. She turned her back on him, trusting 1491625 to keep an eye on him—like most servitors, it could see in all directions at once, and not just in the human-visible spectrum—and opened up a locker. Within it was a stockpile of Kel field rations.
“You’re not about to do what I think you’re about to do,” 1491625 said, glowing, if possible, even more virulently red. It would have shifted to the infrared for emphasis if she’d been another servitor.
Cheris shrugged with one shoulder as she began retrieving stacks of ration bars, balancing them expertly. “I have a feeling that we’re going to need to stop somewhere to resupply.” Given that Jedao had been ravenous enough to try to ingest a fellow Shuos, she doubted that the notoriously terrible taste of Kel rations would deter him.
“If you feed that thing—”
“Listen,” Cheris said, “the reason he’s turned into a gibbering wreck is that he’s hungry.” He’d told her that he healed into the same shape; ironic that the one he wore now was, however grotesque, less fear-inspiring than that angular face with its tilted smile. Mass murderer. Arch-traitor. He must have crossed some threshold beyond which instinct drowned out his humanity, which raised the question of what he had been before Kujen tampered with him.
Cheris kept half an eye on Jedao’s snapping jaws as she peeled off the wrappers as quickly as she could. Judging by his attempts to gnaw off the unlucky Shuos’s suit, he would down the wrappers without hesitating if she let him. She doubted that indigestion would improve his temper.
“Suicide hawks!” 1491625 said in vexation.
Cheris shook her head in mild reproof and paused long enough to waggle the fingers of her ungloved right hand at it. “Not for over a decade,” she said. Even after all this time she wasn’t precisely used to going ungloved, but she no longer cringed from every chance touch against the skin of her hands, either.
Jedao hadn’t worn gloves when he’d come to see her. They had that much in common: cast out by the Kel. But the Shuos had claimed Jedao, whereas she was an ordinary citizen, or as ordinary as she could manage to be. Which, it turned out, wasn’t very.
Once Cheris had amassed a sufficient pile of peeled ration bars, she hefted one. It didn’t weigh much, and she could smell the flavor: dried roasted squid, one of her favorites, although many of the Kel she had known had hated it. “Here goes nothing,” she said, and lobbed the bar at Jedao.
1491625 had the good sense to duck. Jedao might not have eyes anymore, but whatever senses remained were acute, and the restraints left enough play that he could snap the bar out of the air. It vanished down his gullet. She wasn’t sure he’d bothered to chew it, if he had teeth. It was hard to tell.
1491625’s lights dimmed all the way down to an ember pittance.
“Well,” Cheris said philosophically, “if it was just one ration bar’s worth of hunger”—and never mind that it was supposed to be equivalent to an entire meal for active-duty Kel, minus the water—”I don’t think he would have been resorting to cannibalism.” Did it count as cannibalism when you weren’t human yourself?
She tossed another ration bar, with the same results. Considered throwing them two at a time. It wouldn’t be any hardship, as she still had excellent reflexes. On the other hand, she didn’t want Jedao to choke to death on a Kel ration bar. Of all the ways to go...
“You’re taking this awfully calmly,” 1491625 said as it watched her feeding Jedao.
“We’re not in immediate danger,” Cheris replied. Jedao’s thrashing had quieted as he concentrated on catching the thrown bars. As long as she kept up a steady pace, he seemed disinclined to go after her.
“You mean I’m not in immediate danger,” 1491625 said. “I doubt even... whatever it is can get much in the way of sustenance out of me, unless it’s running some kind of mineral deficiency.” It flashed red again. “Of course, who knows what minerals it needs to recover...”
“Well,” Cheris said, “when I knocked him out”—great euphemism for I needed headshots to slow him down; carrying even an unconscious monstrosity to the refuge of the needlemoth hadn’t been fun—“he was concentrating on getting to the, er, meat.”
“You’re made of meat.”
Cheris massaged her knuckles, resumed throwing ration bars. Too easy, too routine to keep her attention, really. Any differences in mass between the bars and their varied flavors was so minuscule as to be undetectable to her merely human senses. She could have done this with her eyes shut, and never mind the fact that she didn’t want to take her attention off Jedao in case the dregs of cunning returned and he was lulling her into a false sense of security. Unlikely to work on her of all people, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t try.
The pile dwindled. Jedao showed no sign of slowing down.
And yet—
“You might be right,” 1491625 said in reluctant yellows flecked with orange. “You still don’t want to parade him around the public, but he’s starting to coalesce into more of a manform and less of a what did the void vomit forth.”
Cheris couldn’t see the difference, but 1491625 had more acute senses than she did, even when she patched into her augment for additional analysis. In days past she would have had access to a Kel field grid or mothgrid and its computational power; she’d given that up years ago. 1491625 had cautioned her as soon as she’d boarded not to attempt to connect to the needlemoth’s grid, because the upgrades included defenses against grid-diving. She had taken it at its word.
“You’re going to have to leave yourself enough to eat, you know,” 1491625 said.
“I know,” Cheris said. It would take twelve days to reach resupply at one of the smaller starbases that didn’t ask too many questions of travelers, and where Pyrehawk Enclave had a treaty with the local servitors. “A little fasting won’t kill me.”
She thought wistfully of the meat pasty she’d left behind, and of the bakery’s offerings. Once a week the baker would deliver snacks to the school, including pastries with poppyseed filling, which Cheris especially liked. The pastries were a Mwennin specialty, and she doubted she’d find them where she was going. While she could dig up a recipe and have them made to order, it wasn’t the same.
Make up your mind, Cheris told herself. She couldn’t have galaxy-spanning adventure and a quiet existence at home at the same time. In particular, she worried about the fate of the settlement she had left behind, and the penalties its people might face. Mikodez was usually fair if it benefited him, but she didn’t know about his deputies.
The mass of undulating shadows drew her attention again. 1491625 had been correct. This time even she could discern the way the tendrils were collapsing in on themselves, knitting themselves into a semblance of a man. A specific man, given enough time—and nourishment.
The mindless hungry snapping had stopped. She had no illusions that this state of affairs would last. She needed to restore the human mind that had dwelled within. Horrible thought: had Jedao regained awareness of self, only to be trapped in that inhuman body of black squid tentacles and shadows and gaping mouth? And if that was the case, how would she know?