As far as my threat assessment was concerned, running off and never seeing her again was an excellent result. I was pretty sure Amena wouldn’t want to hear that, though.

She continued, “I thought he was nice. I’m not … I know at the time I said I knew what I was doing, but I’m actually not very good at meeting new people.”

I knew from threat assessments on Ratthi’s associates that he had a lot of relationships with all genders of humans and augmented humans and he and they all seemed very happy about it. Amena should ask him for advice. I didn’t think she wanted to hear that, either.

Then Amena said, “Do you love my second mother? Thiago thinks so.”

I should have known this was going to turn into an interrogation. I said, “Not the way he thinks.”

Her face went all dubious. “I don’t think you know what he thinks.”

He doesn’t know what I think, either, so there. I was distracted converting a dumpload of raw log info from a visual image back into searchable data and if I got the fields wrong it was going to be a giant mess. I probably should have just stopped talking, but I didn’t want to hurt Amena’s feelings. I said, “Your second mother is…” Client wasn’t the right word, not anymore. “My teammate.” I could see I had to clarify. It was really hard finding the right words. “Before your second mother, I had never been an actual member of a team before. Just an…”

Amena finished, “An appliance for a team.”

That was it. “Yes.”

“I see. Thank you for letting me ask you questions.”

ART must be recovering because it had to butt in with, Tell her you care about her. Use those words, don’t tell her you’ll eviscerate anything that tries to hurt her.

ART, fuck off.

The thing ART has in common with human adolescents is that it doesn’t like to hear the word “no,” either. It persisted, Tell her. It’s true. Just say it. Human adolescents need to hear it from their caretakers.

I’m not a caretaker, I told ART. I finished the log conversion and checked my drone view of Amena. She was leaning in the hatchway, her head propped on the seal buffer. (That isn’t a good place to put your head, just FYI.) From her expression, she was either falling asleep or deep in thought. Or possibly both. I said, “You need to sleep.”

She yawned. “Okay, third mom.”

Arada finally ordered the others to take a rest period, though it took her a while to really understand that ART and I would still be active and there was no reason for the humans to take shifts. (I finally had to tell her that I had a list of things I needed to get done and it would go much faster if they would all stay in one place and shut up for a while and sleeping was the most efficient use of that time.)