I said, “I know as much as you do about what is happening on this ship.” Which was why I put the unknown corporate human who was dying anyway in the possibly compromised MedSystem and not, say, Amena or myself.

I didn’t like that Eletra had nearly died, despite the fact that we had followed all the instructions carefully. I didn’t like that Ras had died before we could do anything. I especially didn’t like that the Targets had killed him. He wasn’t my human but he had popped off right in front of me and I hadn’t been able to do anything about it.

They’re so fucking fragile.

Amena glared, then eyed me speculatively. “Are you sure you’re not hurt? You did get shot in the head, again. And didn’t that gray person shoot you before you tore their lungs out?”

I hadn’t felt any lungs while I was rummaging around in Target Two’s chest cavity, but I’m sure they were in there somewhere. “It was just an energy weapon.”

“It was just an energy weapon,” Amena muttered to herself, in a very bad imitation of my voice, while determinedly trying to fit the mask attachment with the oxygen nodules into the wrong slot. “If you weren’t so angry at me, you’d realize I was right.”

For fuck’s sake. “I am not angry at you.”

Okay, that’s a lie, I was angry at her, or really annoyed at her, and I had no idea why. It wasn’t her fault she was here, we were here, she hadn’t done anything but be human and she wasn’t even whiny. And her first reaction to another human shooting me had been to jump on his back and try to choke him.

Amena gave up on the mask and gave me her full attention. “You look angry.”

“That’s just something my face does sometimes.” This is why helmets with opaque face plates are a good idea.

Amena snorted in disbelief. “Yes, when you’re angry.” She hesitated, and I couldn’t interpret her expression, except that it wasn’t annoyed anymore. “I should have said more, when they were talking about you. It was just like my history and political consciousness class. I didn’t think the instructors were making things up, but … it was just like the examples they used.”

They had been talking about me as a SecUnit the way humans always talked about SecUnits, and it had been pretty mild, compared to a lot of things I had heard humans say. If I got angry every time that happened … I don’t know, but it sounded exhausting. Talking about this was exhausting. “I’m not angry about that.”

Amena demanded, “If you’re not angry, then what’s wrong?”

I was definitely glaring now. “How do you want the list sorted? By time stamp or degree of survivability?”

Amena said in exasperation, “I mean what’s wrong with you!”

There’s that question again, but I assumed she didn’t want to discuss the existential quandary posed by my entire existence. “I got hit on the head by an unidentified drone and shot, you were there!”