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CHAPTER ONE

Talia

Numbers were honest.

People lied. Governments lied. Records could be altered, rewritten, buried, or conveniently misplaced when the truth became inconvenient. But numbers, on their own, were usually honest.

That was probably why I trusted them more than almost anything else on Zuna.

I leaned closer to the glowing screen built into my worktable and frowned at the specimen record.

“No.”

Across from me, Sera’n lifted his head from the tray of sealed vials he was sorting. The muted yellow glow beneath the gray skin of his forearms pulsed once as he glanced over.

“What is wrong?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“That is not the same as nothing being wrong.”

I looked over at him. “I’m aware.”

He held my stare for a second before returning to the samples.

After months of working around Zunatorians, I had learned that some of them considered prolonged eye contact from a human woman confrontational. Sera’n had learned that I didn’t care.

That seemed fair.

Sera’n turned back to the sample tray, a low, grumbled stream of Zunatorian following him.

“I caught that.”

His head lifted. “Impossible.”

“You said mayul.”

“There was more.”

“I know. I only picked up the rude bit.”

His mouth twitched. “That was not the rude bit.”

I stared at him. “There was a ruder bit?”

He returned to the samples. “Your Zunatorian remains inadequate.”

My Zunatorian was nowhere near fluent, but after months in the lab I had collected enough of it to survive a workday. Bap’ŭn for no. Mak for yes. YǼvim when Sera’n wanted everyone quiet and somebody had ignored the first warning. A handful of medical terms. Several commands. More profanity than anyone had intentionally taught me.

Language had sneaked up on me that way. Not through lessons. Through repetition. Through hearing the same words while someone handed me a specimen or shouted across a room or complained because a machine had stopped working.

Sometimes I understood a Zunatorian before I remembered I wasn’t supposed to.

That still felt strange.

I turned back to the screen.

Specimen number: 771-4A.