Crash stood to one side with Travis as the electric forklift grabbed the engine block and pushed it up the gangplank of the Commandant’s ship, surrounded by sixteen men in black combat gear carrying nasty-looking weapons she hadn’t even known existed, all aimed directly at the lone Rifter walking docilely up the metal ramp beside the ten thousand pound mining truck engine. The forklift deposited its load in the center of the ship’s cargo hull, then the operator parked the machine well out of the way as several other men in combat gear padlocked the engine to hooks set in the deck.

Because, clearly, the man chained to the engine by his neck, ankles, and wrists was going to drag it around.

“All right,” Travis said to Crash as he watched his men work, “I’m going to let you do this, but I want you to keep six feet away from him at all times. No exceptions. If you cross that threshold, you’re done with interviews and he gets dropped into the Atlantic with a five ton anchor. Get me?

“I’m not sure I can remember that,” Crash said, thinking about all the times she got excited in the past.

Travis gave her a really long look and Crash cleared her throat embarrassedly. “I mean, you know I just get caught up in the heat of things…”

Travis continued to scowl at her a moment. Then, “Fine. Come here. We’re having a chat with your new friend.” He grabbed Crash by the elbow and went to stand in front of the black-skinned Rifter, who watched them approach with quiet, yellow-eyed curiosity.

“Translate for me,” Travis barked. He lifted his chin. “I’m in charge. See those guys with the guns? They’re my guys. They pull the trigger on my say so, and I don’t want to let you live. After what your buddy did, I was going to drop you into the ocean the moment you turned yourself in, but this autistic mental pancake right here talked me out of it.”

“Hey!” Crash cried.

“She’s a linguist,” Travis continued, unphased, “But she’s also…special. She…forgets things. Acts funny. Is sometimes a bit of a bitch. But she’s my bitch. Important to me. So you’re gonna put up with that, you’re gonna just nod at whatever the fuck crazy thing that comes out of her mouth, and let her have a nice, long chat with you. She’s going to have these guys—” he gestured to the troops lining one side of the ship, “my guys, watching you the whole time. If you make any move I don’t like—if you even twitch in her general direction—I will upend this thing into the Pacific and go slaughter as many people in your home country as I can, starting with your Pharaoh and all of her hybrid fucks like you. You just stay real calm and keep your tail between your legs and make me think you lost your nuts in that last blood sacrifice and I won’t test out your ability to survive a thousand feet of seawater after turning your head into a new kind of tomato paste, okay?”

Travis turned, raised a brow at Crash, and waited.

Clearing her throat, Crash said, “Uh, I, uh…” She hesitated, deciding how much to say.

“Accurately translate, or we’re done here,” Travis warned her.

Crash narrowed her eyes. “Since when have I ever been inaccurate in my translations, Travis?”

“Don’t start now.”

Huffing, Crash made a face and glanced back at the man, who was glancing from the Commandant to her and back. Sighing, she said, “Travis is in charge, and he says you’re going to talk to me because I’m a linguist and you’re going to tell me absolutely anything I want to know or he’ll toss you into the ocean to drown.”

Travis, who had clearly been waiting for more, narrowed his eyes at her.

“I kept all the important bits,” Crash said.

The Commandant looked like he was about to say more, but the man at the engine block nodded once and said, “Understood. He’ll kill me if I hurt you.”

Crash squinted at him. “I never said anything about that.”

“What is he saying?” Travis growled.

“Mistress,” the man began, gesturing with a chained hand to Travis. “His face—”

He stopped when every rifle in the cargo bay was shouldered and aimed at him. He lowered his chained wrist and, watching them nervously, continued, “—speaks more to me than your words.”

Crash’s mouth fell open and her heart started to pound, not knowing whether to be bone-deep insulted or spontaneously hug the man. “You read faces, then?” she demanded.

“That look needs no translation,” the man said, still watching Travis nervously.

Crash glanced back at Travis, who was apparently attempting to burn a hole in the prisoner’s forehead with his scowl.

“What’s he saying?” Travis snapped again.

“That you’re making him nervous,” Crash replied.

“Good. Tell him I’ll use any excuse to throw him overboard. I’m done with second chances. I want to see this fucker burn, and all the ones like him. It’s a burning need, like the kind of itch that can only be scratched by putting my fist through his teeth and watching the life seep from his eyes as he chokes to death on his own blood.”

The man cocked his head at Travis, then glanced curiously at Crash.

“He says I’ll need a full list of all your transitive verbs, beginning with the most common and ending with ones only used in archaic settings, like scholarly texts and religious parables, and if the list isn’t fully complete, he’s going to immediately dump you in the ocean for the fish to eat so your volcano god turns from you in disgust for not committing your body to the fires of the Earth as he has clearly dictated in his commandments to all his faithful.”

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The man’s eyes widened in horror.

That seemed to satisfy Travis. “He seems to be getting the memo,” he said, with a pleased nod.

“He certainly is,” Crash agreed, also pleased.

“Tell him if he plays it really, really nice, I might even let him off his leash as an ambassador.”

“What’s he saying now?” the man whispered.

“That we also need a complete verbal lexicon of all nouns that have been in use in your country in the last two hundred years, and if you can’t produce that, you’re going for a swim.”

The man paled further.

Travis, however, frowned. “That’s not what I said.”

“Yes it is,” Crash said innocently.

“I heard the word for ‘nouns’ in there, Crash. You’ve used it like four hundred times in the last three days.”

“Right, because you told him to talk to me, and ‘discuss’ is a very similar word to ‘noun’ in the old languages and you just misheard me.”

Travis narrowed his eye further. “I thought you can’t handle lying.”

“I can’t handle other people lying,” she corrected. “Gets on my nerves.”

Travis gave her a really long look, seemingly considered arguing with her, then scowled back at the man, then said, “Figure out what he knows. I’ve gotta deal with finding Quad and get my wounds disinfected again.”

She had—accidentally—grabbed him by his maimed hand in the middle of their fun, and his scream—and the subsequent blood that had followed—had pretty much ended their liaison just as surely as the call a minute later by his captain to say the prisoner was ready for transport. He’d wrapped his stumps with a rag, but the stitches she’d torn out had been oozing for the last hour.

Taking one last look at Crash, then at the prisoner, Travis turned, issued some last-minute orders to his men that included airlocks that Crash didn’t care about, then stormed off with a flurry of technicians and medical personnel following closely behind, dabbing at his wounds.

“Sweet,” Crash said, immediately grabbing a fold-up chair and dragging it over to sit beside the prisoner. Or she tried to. She got halfway when one of the men in black grabbed the chair and said, “Sorry Miss Evans, but Commandant Belkin said not to let anything he could use as a weapon get within ten feet of him.”

“It’s a chair,” Crash snorted.

“Yep,” the man said, gently pulling it out of her grip and carrying it back to the wall, where a trio of guys immediately gathered them all up and carried them from the room, to some undisclosed location deeper on the ship, along with all the smaller boxes, crates, ammo cases, and other odds and ends.

“You just want me to sit on the floor?!” Crash cried.

“Yes, Ma’am!” the man said.

Crash narrowed her eyes, but then glanced back at the quiet Rifter who was watching her carefully.

“They respect you,” he said, looking confused. “But also don’t.” He cocked his head at her like he was expecting her to answer a question in his mind for him. “Are you a prisoner too?”

Clearing her throat uncomfortably, Crash sat down cross-legged on the steel.

The man looked almost hopeful. “The way you speak—you must have lived with us. Did they capture you when they invaded three decades ago?”

“Yes,” Crash said. Then she frowned. “Well, I mean, yes, I lived with you, but it was only last night and I haven’t been able to do it again because your buddy blew up the base.”

The man’s smile faded with a small frown. “Last…night?”

“Yeah, while I slept.”

He cocked his head, his yellow eyes clearly confused. “Perhaps I don’t understand as much as I thought I did…”

She waved him off. “Tell me about your transitive verbs.”

He paled, which was impressive for a man whose skin was almost as black as obsidian. “I…” He swallowed really, really hard. “I don’t know what those are.”

Crash sighed, hugely, and stared at the ceiling in disgust. “Of course you don’t.” She’d been hoping to a quick patch-up to her lexicon, but she’d have to do things the hard way—by just talking. Ugh.

“I can learn,” he said quickly. “I am sure it’s simply a misunderstanding in translation—”

Crash held her hand up suddenly, her face going cold. “There is no mistranslation. Not with me.”

The man glanced down at his hands, bunched into fists against the cold steel against his wrists, and swallowed hard. “Um.”

“Anyway, we’ll overlook your misdeeds for now,” Crash said. “Tell me what happened between you and that Sabbaht douche to make him turn on you like that.”

The man’s head came up sharply. “He turned on me?”

“You look a lot like him, come to think of it,” Crash said. “Are you brothers?”

For the first time, the man looked wary. “What did Sabbaht do? The way your men captured me… One would think they thought I was a monster.”

“Sabbaht and his men killed about eight hundred folks, ate a few hearts, sacrificed the rest to a volcano god, and then when Sabbaht was being interviewed back at base, he got loose, killed a bunch more people, blew up the base, and captured someone very important to the Commandant, assumedly to sacrifice him to that same volcano to regain enough favor to usurp the Pharaoh’s place as Burkan’s Champion.” She cocked her head. “But don’t tell Travis that. I think he’d lose it and toss you in the ocean, and I really need that lexicon before they expect me to do any political peace talks.”

The man seemed to ponder that a moment in silence before gingerly settling down on the floor in front of her, to the clatter of heavy chains against the metal grating. Clearing his throat, he said, “I was instructed to gather information about what lies on this side of the Divide,” he said. “Sabbaht and I disagreed on whether or not we still owed the Pharaoh our loyalties, as she is so far away and it was so difficult to get here.”

“And your take was…?” Crash asked.

He tensed, but lifted his head and said, “I am still loyal to my Pharaoh.”

Good, she thought. Then I can work with you. “Your Pharaoh is in a lot of shit,” Crash warned. “Travis is going to annihilate her and all of New Cairo if he doesn’t get Quad back.”

Sabbaht cocked his head with a slight frown. “Quad?”

Crash waved a dismissive hand. “A really irritating tech-obsessed interdimensional immortal from some subset of humanity that passed through a wormhole when everyone with the cash to hire a spot on an interstellar colonizer abandoned ship sixteen hundred years ago. Looks like a little kid, but I think he’s like a hundred and eighty. I’m not really sure because he’s not really sure. Gets wishy-washy when I ask.” She shook herself. “Anyway. Travis wants him back. He’ll probably let you go if you can tell us where Sabbaht would take him.”

The ebon-skinned man considered that with a frown. “Sabbaht doesn’t know this place. He wouldn’t hide…”

“Sabbaht has a spaceship,” Crash corrected. “And he ran for it.”

At first, the prisoner’s yellow eyes showed confusion, but then they lit up in surprise and he glanced at the ship around them. “You mean…” He gestured slowly upward—careful not to trigger the guards nearby—to indicate the spaceship around them. “He mans a ship like this?”

Crash nodded.

“And he flew back across the Divide with it?” the man demanded.

She nodded again.

He cursed under his breath, looking down at his hands as he clenched them into fists.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but he’s not going to hand his prize over to the Pharaoh, is he?” Crash asked. “He struck me as a true Believer, the zealot type. The kind who would take the best shit he owned and drop it in a pit of lava just to see what would happen.”

The man’s yellow eyes flickered back to her and he nodded, slowly.

“Where’s that volcano, Khayu?”

But the man shook his head, his voice filled with reverence and a little fear. “He’s trying to fulfill the prophecy.”