“You are? Why?”
Han was friendly with the Ugarians at the station, but he’d always thought it was because she needed to have plenty of friends to help her if she ran into trouble. He didn’t understandbeing interested in meeting someone you had no connection to or political affiliation with.
“If she’s important to you, then she’s important to me,” Han said.
He was humbled by her answer. He’d been blessed by the ancestors to have refueled at the same station that Han was visiting.
“I’ll make sure you get home to your pack, uh, family once we’re finished on Misorm. I swear to you,” he said.
She grinned up at him. “Only if you come with me.” Tossing the dye aside, she looked over to Tumoro. “You’re going to have a really important job when we get planetside. You’re almost as tall as Zeph, so you’re going to keep your body between him and every vid capture you see. If we can keep the security system from fully seeing him, we might get lucky.”
Zeph hadn’t thought about vid captures. “I’m being ridiculous. Changing my color is a good countermeasure to basic recognition systems.”
Without further discussion, he retrieved the dye pack and went to the small cleansing unit. The fear of drawing attention to Han in a situation where other Talins might try to take her captive was the motivation he needed to overcome his fear of Sandar not recognizing him.
After ordering one of the walls to turn reflective, he stared at himself for a moment.
“Someday we’ll all live in a place where we no longer need to fear capture," he whispered. “And I will learn what contentment feels like.”
Han
Even with the dye job, Han instructed Tumoro to act as a shield for Zeph. The change in color would only fool the system as long as it didn’t get a full-body image.
To a lesser extent, she did the same thing. The light, flowing fabric of the thinsill helped not only to hide her figure, but Zeph’s lower outline also.
“Do you carry a thinsill with you all the time?” Tumoro asked as they walked down the ship’s short ramp. There was no port security here because why bother? There were less than three thousand individuals on the entire planet and only this one small port that also served as the planet's single town. There was nothing to steal or take over.
The planet also had notoriously dangerous wildlife, as evidenced by the tall zapper fence running the entire circumference of the port. Beyond the fence was a dense, green jungle that hid all kinds of deadly creatures.
She was really not looking forward to venturing out in that!
“Han?”
Zeph brought her focus back to her companions. “What?”
“Tumoro asked if you always carry around a thinsill with you,” Zeph said.
“Oh, yeah, I do,” she said. “It can be rolled up into a ball the size of my fist, so it’s easy to carry around. There’ve been a couple of times when being human was a disadvantage, so I pull this on and suddenly no one notices me anymore.”
She spoke a little louder than normal because the fabric was draped over her face. The thinsill was used by Mishook when visiting places outside their comfort zone. Coming from a planet with an atmosphere so thick it filtered out most UV, they’d developed the thinsill garment as a way to protect themselves when traveling. They couldn’t even handle the artificial lights used on many stations, so it was rare to see a Mishook without a thinsill on.
Because the garment covered Han from head to toe, it acted as the perfect disguise. To really pull it off, Han had learned to speak Universal with a Mishook accent. The other nice thing about the thinsill was she could see out of the fabric with almost perfect clarity but it wasn’t sheer to the outside observer.
Zeph took a bit of the shiny gray material to rub between his fingers. “It’s a good way to hide yourself. You’re a little short for a Mishook, though. Aren’t they usually as tall as me?”
Han shook her head. “You haven’t interacted with many, have you? They’re only as tall as you when they want to stand up straight, but that’s a lot of effort. Normally they keep their middle segment folded. That means I’m only a little shorter than the average folded Mishook.”
“I’ve seen plenty of Mishook this size,” Tumoro agreed.
Zeph let go of the thinsill. “Very clever,” he complimented.
“I usually am,” she agreed, causing both guys to make sounds of amusement. Something in the greenery beyond the fence shrieked, making Han jump. “That sounded big.”
“Probably,” Zeph agreed. “But the fence will keep it out.”
What would happen when they left the boundary of the protective fence? Han was used to dealing with opponents she could fight, but that was on stations and ships. This wilderness was a whole different kind of dangerous.
“Let’s get this over with,” she muttered, leading their small group to the main port building.
