Page 14 of Time Traveling Space Bastards

I generally loved watching a woman who liked food. What I didn’t expect was also enjoying watching Enix eat for the first time. Kuka and I stole him from his owner because he was being mistreated. We let him do what he wanted and never pressured him. When we needed his help, we asked. If he didn’t want to do something, we never made a big deal about it.

Baxter just met him, and yeah, she tried to hit him, but after she found out why he said the things he did sometimes, she was pretty great with him. He’d tell you that he wasn’t programmed to feel anything about what his owner did to him, but I’d been around him long enough to know that he was. I knew she knew that, too. I had a feeling she’d find a way to help him deal with it.

We’d finally moved to the part of the conversation where we discussed saving her life, but she really wanted us to try her food first. It appeared to be fried dough. We had something similar back home, but I was a little wary to try it. She seemed to be handling our food okay, but that didn’t mean we wouldn’t react to hers.

I’d never been able to stop my sister from doing a damned thing. If she wanted to do something stupid, she was going to do it no matter how closely I watched her. Omi and Enix were the first to try the donuts. Omi took a delicate bite. Enix had never eaten before and hadn’t really learned table manners, so he just shoved the entire thing in his mouth like he did with the kebabs and tacos.

It was honestly adorable.

Kuka tried it next. There were all kinds of embarrassing stomach problems I was worried about and I wasn’t sure how archaic the plumping was on this planet. I couldn’t exactly run to Big Daddy to use the facilities in an emergency if there were humans around.

Everyone was eating, and I really didn’t want to be rude. Especially since she was so excited to try food from our planet. I took a bite, and it was good. The brown stuff on top smelled similar to the milk I told Kuka not to use, so I asked what it was.

“You don’t have chocolate on your planet?”

I saw Enix’s eye scanning as he struggled to chew all the food he had in his mouth.

“No. Chocolate is only possible with cacao trees and we have nothing similar in our galaxy. We do have regions that could grow it if we brought seeds.”

“You should do that because knowing an entire galaxy doesn’t have any form of chocolate makes me a sad panda.”

“We should probably talk about the whole murder thing now that everyone has eaten.”

“Someone grab my Everclear.”

“Oh, no,” I said, snatching the bottle.

I knew what she was doing. We could do that after she was safe. And she was adorable when she was pouting. I was pretty sure the gesture she gave me was considered rude on this planet, but she was smiling at me.

“I mean, what’s there to talk about? You can’t look into the future to save me because the police never figured out who did it. If you figured out who I was, then someone on your planet could do. I’m guessing it has to do with taxes.”

“It was,” Enix said. “I found where your book was sold, got into it, and found the name on the tax information. Any Enix could.”

“No, they couldn’t,” Kuka said. “A lot of them have been beaten down and think they are only capable of being clever if they’ve been programmed. You can’t program someone to be clever. You either are or aren’t. Everyone is the embodiment of their experiences, even the Enix. Just because every Enix could look that up, doesn’t mean they would think of it. And the rest of us might not think to ask.”

It was true. Enix’s owner was missing out using him to make money with sex. That was all he’d ever been programmed for, but he was so much more than that. We didn’t tell him that enough because it made him uncomfortable, even though he’d swear he couldn’t feel that way.

“I mean, I’m low key pissed you used the IRS to dox me, but since you did it so I didn’t get murdered, I forgive you. And Kuka is right. I just met you and I agree with him.”

Enix just shoved another donut in his mouth because cyborgs couldn’t blush.

“Men are hopeless,” Omi sighed, stretching. “Remember Yamil, Torrek? You beat his ass and told him you’d kill him unless he stayed away from me, but he used to talk about his work with me.”

Yeah, Omi was going to forever be mad about that and keep bringing it up until the day I died. I didn’t like how Baxter was looking at me after my sister brought it up either.

“For the record, Yamil was a forty-five-year-old, and you were fourteen. Yamil was also high enough up in the Intergalactic Police to know me beating his ass was letting him off lightly. I could have had him arrested because that’s illegal.”

“ Anyway, the human police might not have solved the murder, but Enix can access their entire investigation and we have one thing they don’t. Baxter is still alive and she can tell us what they might have gotten wrong.”

Ugh. My sister drove me fucking crazy sometimes, but she’d been accepted into the surgeon program for a reason. Omi was brilliant. She could have gone either way—surgeon or crime lord and thankfully, she didn’t break our mother’s heart.

But first things first. The excitement from our arrival was starting to wear off. She had a lot of alcohol and food. Her eyes were starting to droop.

“You need to sleep. We shouldn’t discuss this when you are sleepy.”

She yawned. Even sleepy, she was a little spicy.

“Only if you tuck me in.”

We couldn’t let her die because I was getting slightly attached.