B13 Touching (Patreon)

This is a whole new chapter for Executioner's Gambit and takes place after Tori and Sese interview Nija at her office. I'm really proud of the dialogue in this scene!

Also, I have A SPECIAL SURPRISE for all of you tomorrow, so stay tuned!

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Before dinner, Tori met with the Deputy Commissioner. He didn’t even have to call for her; they both arrived at his state room within seconds of one another. The krakun’s golden eyes twinkled when he saw her climb through the airlock. “How did it go today?”

“Decent, I think,” said Tori, thankful to take a seat in the office chair he rolled to her. “I may have stumbled across the guy who orchestrated these hits.”

The commissioner’s eyes opened wider. “Oh yeah?”

“May have. I can’t prove anything yet, but he checks a lot of my boxes, so he’s clearly a suspect that I’ll need to investigate,” she explained. “He’s ridiculously wealthy, and he was defending the killer, explaining how the ship needs him.”

Daskatoma drew his lips tighter in thought for a moment. In a gentler voice, he asked, “Is he wrong?”

Tori’s eyes popped open, and if she hadn’t felt so tired from the day, she’d have stood. “What? Of course, he’s wrong!” she shouted. “He’s condoning murder.”

The krakun waved his claws in the air to placate her. “No, is his theory about The Executioner wrong?”

Daskatoma opened the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle that was as tall as a geroo. He tilted it toward her as if offering it, but she just smiled and shook her head. She explained, “Well, he was saying that the murders were ‘letting off steam’ before the crew ‘boiled over’.”

“And you think he’s wrong?” he asked, after sipping from his beverage.

“What?”

“Was he wrong?” he repeated. “Do you think that the murders are deferring a ‘boil over’?”

Tori gasped and floundered a bit, trying to express her frustration. “I… I don’t know that.” She groaned and leaned back in her seat. “The crew hates how the ship is being run, and they’re excited that someone is doing something about it, but I’ve got no idea if the deaths are squelching their anger or stoking anarchy.”

He frowned. Quieter, he said, “That’s fair, I suppose. Any other finds today?”

Tori thought back on the apartment she’d investigated with Officer Sese. She said, “I’m narrowing it down, I think. Either the killer is very small—like a teen or cub—and able to slip into apartments through the air vents—”

Daskatoma nodded. “Not a krakun. Got it.”

“Probably not a krakun, no,” said Tori with a roll of her eyes. “Either the killer is very small or they have root authority from the central computer and can pass through locked doors without leaving a trace in the event logs.”

The krakun started to speak, but a thought occurred to Tori, and she added, “Or perhaps, Computer Chief Nija is erasing the incriminating log events. She’d have the authority, but…”

He waited a moment. When she said nothing else, he asked, “But?”

With a frown, the rusty red geroo said, “I hate to speak ill of anyone, but I know Nija is hated by more than a few of the crew.” She bit her lip. “If anything, I think she should be worried about becoming one of The Executioner’s victims, not helping him disappear.”

He lowered himself to the deck, and he stared in her eyes, asking earnestly, “You think she might be on the killer’s wish list?”

“She fits the profile, yeah.”

Daskatoma glanced down for a moment. “Do you think she realizes that?”

“That the killer might target her? Oh yeah, she knows,” said Tori with absolute certainty. “She’s carrying a knife everywhere she goes. I presume she hasn’t always.”

He rested his chin on the backs of his claws. Without meeting her eyes, he muttered, “Interesting.”

“Is it? You find that interesting?”

The krakun shrugged, still deep in thought, “The killer’s actions are having an impact on how the crew thinks.”

Tori crossed her arms and growled. The big lizard had been so helpful yesterday, but now, he seemed focused on a totally different problem. “Why are you acting all weird today?”

The krakun perked up at the unexpected comment. He tilted his head slightly. “Weird? How so?”

She threw up her paws. “You keep talking about what people are thinking.”

At that, Daskatoma smiled. “Well, I was a psych major in school,” he explained. “I find this fascinating—how one person’s actions impact another person’s actions.”

Druka liked to play a first-person-shooter with both a life bar and a psych meter. When he filled the psych meter up, the player-character could perform limited acts of telekinesis. Surely, the krakun didn’t mean that though. “Psych? What’s that?”

“It’s the study of the mind,” he said, opening one palm. “What people think, how they make decisions, why they do what they do.”

She stared at him through slitted eyes. “That’s not a real subject.”

“Of course, it is!” laughed the lizard. His grin showed off way too many teeth. “The psych department at my old school was huge.”

“A school that fit a single krakun student would be huge.” She grinned.

“Well, then you can only imagine how big a school is that I consider huge!”

“Weird.” Tori explained, “Aboard the ship, most majors are studying how-to: how to grow plants, how to design things, how to build them, fix them, and so on. Unless someone excels in the sciences, they’re expected to take a vocational track.”

He rested his cheek on a palm. “Yes, well, as I’ve said before, your society and mine are more different than they are similar. Most careers on Krakuntec tend to be like this job I’m doing for my uncle—telling you guys what to do rather than doing it myself.”

Suddenly, a light clicked on inside Tori’s brain, and she leapt to her paws. “If you know so much about how people think, then you can figure out who the killer is!”

But Daskatoma scowled, his furrowed brow causing the edges of his black scales to stick out. He grumbled, “And so, doing my uncle’s job isn’t enough? I should do your job as well?”

“No, I don’t mean that,” she said, craning her neck to look up at his face, “but you were the one bragging about having a ‘really big brain’ yesterday, so I just wanted to hear your analysis.”

“Ah, of course. Well, keep in mind that I studied psych, not criminology.” When she raised an ear in confusion, he lowered his head and explained, “That’s the study of criminals—why they commit crimes, preventing crime, and catching criminals.”

Tori nodded. She reached out and touched his scaled snout with her palm. “There had to be a lot of overlap though, didn’t there, Dask?”

“I suppose?” He shrugged. “We learned that people kill out of passion, hatred, or desperation, because mental illness blurs the lines between right and wrong, because the killer views the victim as inferior and inconsequential, or because they want something so badly that they’re willing to commit an immoral act to get it.”

With a tiny push, he shoved his snout against her paw. “There’s also cases where religious zealotry convinces the killer that murder is good instead of evil and psychopaths that enjoy hurting others rather than hating it.” He shrugged. “Not sure if that helps any.”

Tori frowned, feeling more disappointed than she cared to admit. She’d been hoping that he could offer her a name instead of something she could have read from a book. She leaned her forehead against his nose. “It’s … less specific than I’d hoped.”

Daskatoma whispered, “Sorry.”

The silence stretched as she ran her palms slowly across Daskatoma’s black scales. In a quiet voice, she asked, “Should we talk about yesterday, when I was thanking you for helping me out? I didn’t mean to embarrass—”

“You didn’t embarrass me.”

“I’m glad for that. It’s just…” She drew a deep breath and released it slowly as she picked over her words. “I sensed that things got very awkward after that.”

Daskatoma pulled carefully away and sat back on his haunches. “Who’s your best friend, Tori?” he asked.

“Kaz.” She sat back down and explained, “You wouldn’t know her. She lives on my previous ship. We grew up together.”

“Did you and Kaz touch often?”

Tori’s eyes opened wide, and the insides of her ruined ears heated to a molten red. She stammered, “I-if you’re asking whether we have sex, no! Kaz and I are just friends, not lovers.”

Daskatoma chuckled, and his huge golden eyes disappeared into crescent moons. “No, I don’t mean that.” He dipped his head toward her, bringing his snout closer to where she sat. “The geroo are a very ‘touchy’ people—at least from a krakun perspective. So, did you and Kaz touch much?”

She squinted her eyes at him. “You mean like holding paws and hugging?”

“Yeah, like that.” He grinned even wider. “Did you hold paws and hug often?”

“Well, of course, we did! She’s my best friend,” laughed Tori, as if his question had been ridiculous. Her smile faded somewhat though, and she explained, “I would have said that I couldn’t imagine not hugging her, but since the accident, even casual contact is painful. Hugs are out of the question.”

“I see. That would be especially hard for someone like you—a geroo, I mean.”

She lowered her eyes, staring only at the deck between them. “Yeah, it is.” If only he would turn a blind eye, omit her surgery from the reports he gave to his uncle, perhaps it didn’t need to be this way.

Daskatoma smiled. “Well, my best friend is named Sutzir.”

“Sutzir?” asked Tori. She’d never heard the “tz” consonant cluster in Krakun before. “That’s a curious name for a krakun.”

“He’s not krakun. He’s a ringel,” Daskatoma explained. “Sutzir is on my cleaning crew.”

She shook her head slightly, as if to clear her ears. “Your best friend is a ringel … on your cleaning crew?”

“Why are you surprised?” He smirked. “I have many friends who aren’t krakun.”

“Of course. I didn’t mean to be rude,” she said, waving her paws. “I just figured that your best friend would be… I imagined it would be someone you’d known for thousands of years.”

“Krakun are too competitive,” said the reptile, batting the notion away with one claw. “It’s hard for a krakun to be friends with other krakun. You can’t be yourself around them. You have to always watch what you say, make sure you don’t give them something they could use against you.”

Tori lowered her ears, feeling mildly annoyed at how dumb the big lizard was being. “Friends don’t do that, Dask.”

“My ringel friends don’t. My geroo friends don’t, but then again, how could you?” he asked. He opened a palm toward her. “If I were to confide something really damning to you—like I told you I was addicted to drugs or something—what would you do with that information? It’s not like you could use that to get a promotion instead of me.”

“No, I couldn’t, but even if I could, I wouldn’t.” The geroo raised both her palms to shoulder height. In frustration, she explained, “Friends don’t do that sort of thing!”

“Well, perhaps the geroo word for friend and the krakun term don’t mean precisely the same thing.” He shrugged his mighty shoulders. “But that’s not important. My best friend is Sutzir, and I’ve never touched him.”

She raised one ear high. “Never?”

“The ringel are a very touchy race—far more than geroo are!” The krakun lowered himself back down to his elbows and tapped his snout between his eyes with a single talon. “Sutzir likes to sit on my snout when we hang out. He tries to hug the bridge of my nose when he thinks I need cheering up. That’s probably my least huggable feature, but it’s the best he can do.”

Tori smiled the widest, warmest smile she could manage. “You sound a lot more touchy than you care to admit, Dask.”

“But we’ve never touched, you see?”

“What?”

Daskatoma extended a talon toward her, stopping just centimeters before reaching the midpoint of her chest, where the green cloth covered her largest scar. “The atmosphere on my planet is deadly to ringel, just like it is to geroo. When Sutzir hangs out with me, he has to seal himself inside a plastic environment suit. My apartment isn’t like this stateroom,” he explained. “I can’t pump an oxygen atmosphere into my living room.”

“Oh, I understand now!” But then, her heart dropped, and she tried to picture the lonely existence of living thousands of years without ever touching your friends. “Was yesterday… Was that the first time anyone had—”

“It was…” The krakun pressed his lips together into a thin line for a moment. “Let’s just say that I wasn’t prepared for how intimate that was, okay?”

———

Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gHZjYykqM1rcMTik-n8X0iIpfPEP896OBtqzNDe7DzY/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?