Nyx climbed the ladder from the Donati’s cargo deck to the one above and stuck her head through the hatch and stopped and stared.

  Green greeted her.

  Dominating the very tall deck was a spiral walkway, and suspended on the supports by thick wiring and tubing were hundreds of plants, each in a tub of water. Each tub had as much water as she could drink in a week. And the smell… Until now, the ship had no actual smell other than some cleaner and Cai. But here… she didn’t know how to describe it. The smell of plants? She wasn’t sure, but whatever it was, it made her feel relaxed.

  Then she heard the noise just as she caught an unfamiliar smell. Both were odd. The noise was a quick clucking noise, and the smell was vaguely of feces.

  “Come to see our guest?” Cai said to two small things she didn’t recognize.

  Nyx hissed in fright and nearly fell off the ladder as she took in the strange things. Their small eyes on the sides of their heads unnerved her. That weird sharp thing that she guessed was a mouth, as that’s where the odd noise was coming from. The skinny yellow legs with long and sharp toenails. The strange puffy white… hair? It was too wide to be hair. Finally, there was this creepy red skin hanging from their chins and the tops of their heads.

  They also didn’t have arms on their fat bodies. Why didn’t they have arms?

  Cai cracked a grin, “Ah, I guess you’ve never seen chickens before? I guess Trevor keeps his in a safe place you can’t see through the station’s observation deck.

  “Ch… ch… chicken? What the spark is dum chicken!?”

  “Have you at least heard of a bird?” He chuckles, “And ‘dum’? Really. That’s a swear word now?”

  Nyx shook her head slowly as she tried to think if she’d ever heard that word before, ignoring his comment about her swearing.

  For some strange reason, as she looked at them she felt hungry and her stomach growled again, causing her ears to flatten and tail to curl in embarrassment, “Goddum it…”

  “I’ll teach you later. For now, meet Grace and Felicity. I have them for their eggs.”

  “Eggs? The spark is an egg?”

  “I think I’m going to have lots to teach you.”

  Nyx crossed her arms, “Yer talkin’ like yer gonna be keepin’ me here for a while.”

  Cai nods, “Trevor has bugged me since the Donati’s other two crew members left after Earth disappeared. And considering you snuck onto the Donati, it means you’re at least good at fixing things or the pirates wouldn’t have kept you or sent you. And I figure, why not? You’re here, and you’re two missed meals away from starving. I may not produce enough food to feed everyone, but I can make another for another.”

  She’s still suspicious of him, but there’s no way she’s passing up food as her stomach reminds her with yet another growl, “Yeah, I can be fixin’ things. Ya gonna have me crawlin’ through the goddum ship fixin’ stuff fer ya? Yeah, I’m sparkin’ small an’ can fit in places ya can’t.”

  “I’ve got drones for that. I mean, this ship could run itself if I wanted to. I’m here more in case the computer goes down.” He looks off to the side, “Oh! There’s Alice coming to greet us.”

  Nyx hisses again as another strange thing approaches them. It’s covered in hair and has eyes on each side of its head. Like the chickens, it had no arms, though this time it had an extra set of legs. Its face was wide and long with a large, flat black nose. It smells of feces too.

  Cai smiles, setting Nyx’s heart fluttering, “Alice is a miniature cow. I get milk from her.”

  More words she doesn’t know, “Mini… miniature? Cow? Milk?”

  The cow lets out a deep, guttural moaning sound.

  “Oh! Blackie should be around here somewhere. You’re gonna love him.”

  Nyx just frowns. The cow is making her hungry looking at it too. Why are these strange things making her hungrier?

  Cai motions for Nyx to follow him, “Let’s get you something light. How about beef and potato stew?”

  Nyx’s ears twitch at the word beef, “Mya? Beef?”

  She knows beef.

  Cai leads them to some cabinets and machines off to the side, “All long-range exploration vessels are self-sufficient for food, including a meat synthesizer.”

  He opens the door of a cabinet with insulated doors, and Nyx’s eyes go wide. She’d never seen so many kinds of food before. Pieces of meat, weird oval white things, blocks of white and yellow things, plants that are green and even orange, brown oval things, bottles filled with a white liquid, and round red and yellow things. No Nufuud in sight.

  Cai pauses and checks his wristband, “Hmm… maybe not enough time to make soup.” He closes the insulated cabinet. “I’ve heard it’s not good to give starving people food that’s too rich, anyway. End up throwing up.”

  Nyx feels herself getting impatient but holds her tongue, though she’s sure the violent swishing of her tail shows him she’s getting impatient.

  He pulls out a container, “How about some oatmeal? I can put apple slices and sugar in it to sweeten it?”

  Nyx feels herself going from anger to interest as he continues to list off more foods she’s never heard of and replies with a nod. She doesn’t know what any of that food is, but at least it isn’t Nufuud.

  Cai takes out a cup from a different cupboard, “You must be thirsty too. Do you want water, or do you want to try milk? I believe Felis can drink lactose, unlike cats.”

  “Sparks is milk and a cat?”

  “Milk is the white drink that was in the fridge. A cat… Blackie is a cat. I’ll show him to you later if he stops being lazy and comes out. He’s going to hate or love you.”

  Nyx is interested in whatever his ‘milk’ is, “‘Ya beeter be hookin’ me up with some o’ that dum milk.”

  She cringes at how harsh she sounds when she says that. And it appears a cat is another one of these weird fluffy things. Chicken and cow. Cai’s last comment set her on edge as she looked around for this ‘cat’. Her ears moved in different directions as she listened for anything else that might come.

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  Cai doesn’t seem bothered by her command and heads back to what she now assumes this fridge thing is and pours her a glass of milk, “Here. Fresh from Alice. Nice and creamy.”

  Nyx takes the milk and stares at it, then looks at Alice, then back to the milk, “Goddum, is this cow blood?”

  Cai lets an amused smile slip, and it sets Nyx’s heart aflutter, “You know how babies drink from their mother?”

  It clicks in Nyx’s head. She’d seen mothers breastfeeding babies among the slummers, but they were rare and not on the Az Gaper.

  She looked back at Alice and noticed a large pink bulge between its back legs and noticed four long tubes that she realized were nipples. Subconsciously, she imagined milk coming out of herself. Would Cai drink hers?

  She blushed and felt her tail swishing as the thought agitated her. This was creepy, having anything other than a baby drink it.

  The smell of the milk hit her, and it made her stomach grumble, “Mya?”

  It smelled divine, and her misgivings quickly changed to need.

  Taking a sip, a rich and thick taste assaulted her tongue and made her shiver in delight. This cow's milk was the most delicious thing she’d ever tasted, “Mya!”

  She heard Cai chuckle.

  Nyx drank deeply and then slammed her empty cup onto the counter, her ears folding back at Cai’s chuckle. Thankfully, she held back from saying anything.

  Cai still seemed amused, “Let me get that oatmeal going. If you want more milk, feel free to get more from the fridge.”

  Cai took off his gloves and washed his hands, then started peeling one of the red and round pieces of food, and she smelled a fragrant sweet smell that made her want to purr.

  Nyx picked her cup back up. He was just letting her drink as much milk as she wanted? She then eyed Alice. How could something so delicious come from something that looked so weird? And she wasn’t a baby.

  Should she be stealing its baby’s food? She then looked around, “Alice is havin’ a baby?”

  Cai didn’t look up as he peeled the apple, “Oh, she keeps producing milk as long as you keep milking her, and any I don’t drink, I turn into cheese.”

  More words she didn’t recognize, though she assumed ‘producing’ was some fancy Never Dyin’ way of saying ‘make.’

  She opened the fridge and sniffed. The smell of the meat made her drool. So did the smell of the milk. There were the white oval things that smelled like the chickens, and she guessed these were the eggs? There were the plant things that smelled musty and… fresh. The orange and white blocks smelled like milk, but more sour and… She sniffed again. Her feet? Why would he eat stuff that smelled like feet?

  “Why the spark do ya have food that be smellin’ like goddum feet?”

  Cai was now slicing the peeled thing… the apple she guessed, “Found the cheese, huh. Yeah, it does smell a little like feet, doesn’t it? It tastes great, though. I’ll teach you how to make some later.”

  Nyx is about to grab some cheese when she notices her filthy suit gloves. This place is so clean and smells so nice. Cai must think she’s so disgusting. Yet he’s being so nice, though she has noticed when she gets close that his nose twitches.

  He really must be after something from her if he’s pretending to be so nice to her like this. Every time in the past someone’s been nice to her, it has always been to get her to let her guard down.

  The half-Felis man, Wrench, whose real name she never knew, flashed into her mind. He’d been kind. Taught her things. Helped keep the men off of her. Taken beatings for her. The only member of the crew the pirates hated more than her. The only one she really trusted on that ship. Could she trust Cai?

  She took her gloves off. Her hands were filthy too as oil and other dried fluids caked her hands and claws. Below the layers of filth, scars covered her hands up to her forearms. Most from sticking her hand through holes in jagged metal or from burns from sparks or hot metal. The longest, starting at her left wrist and stopping at her forearm, made her shiver as she remembered something from before. That one dark night. When it was that or...

  She looked at Cai’s hands. No scars, no filth. Soft. As pretty as his face. He’d even used precious water to clean them. Now he was even using water to fill up a metal bowl with a handle on it, which he then placed on a shiny part of the shelf and turned a dial. A stove?

  Nyx went over to the place where he’d washed his hands, “My dum hands are covered in shunk. Gonna be scrubin’ ‘em.”

  She cringed. Why couldn’t she ask politely? She loathed that living with pirates her whole life made her so crude and used to demanding things instead of asking. It was the only way she got things most of the time.

  Cai nodded, “Sure. Feel free to use as much water and soap as you need. The water recycler can handle it.” He pauses, “Actually, after we refuel and make the FTL jump, I’ll show you to the shower. There’s a bath too, but that’s pretty awkward in zero G.”

  The captain’s room had a shower. She wondered what it was like to use so much water to clean oneself, “Goddum I am.”

  Cai looks like he’s holding back a laugh as he adds some pale, flaky food into the now roiling water, “Okay.”

  Nyx washed her hands using her daily allotment on the Az Gaper like it was nothing. The soap cut through the grime, and soon her pink and scarred skin came out mostly clean, with oil only in the creases of her skin and base of her claws. Was it really okay to use this much water? It felt so wasteful.

  Cai nonchalantly stirred the oatmeal food, “Oatmeal will be done in a few minutes. Why don’t you look around? Oh, and I won’t give you any until you give me your name.”

  Nyx looked at him. He had asked her a few times for her name, and she’d never given it. How rude was she? “Ya can call me Nyx. Just Nyx.”

  “Got it, Nyx.”

  Nyx needed to get away from him and the smell for a few minutes, so the offer to look around was welcome.

  The pirate part of her mind wondered what would be the most valuable to steal, or what she could use to fix up the Az Gaper. All the lighting worked properly. The steady hum of the air moving instead of rattling, which meant the air system could go down at any moment. So much water one could feed it to plants and those weird creatures and wash hands as if it was natural.

  Nyx turned to the spiraling walkway that led up to the next deck to look at the plants.

  The plants smelled refreshing and helped clear her head. Each had a clear cover that was open now and allowed her to smell and touch them as she pleased. Each plant was different in various ways. One had skinny wire things clinging to a mesh and had bunches of small, round, sweet-smelling food. Another had large oval brown things growing in the tank below the exposed green area. Another had a strange orange thing growing below the green part.

  There were even larger plants. Two of them. These had a thick center where the smaller wire things branched out before the green flat parts grew. On one of these she saw apples, the other had a sour-smelling yellow fruit that tickled her nose pleasantly as she sniffed it.

  “Nyx! It’s ready!”

  Nyx sniffed the air and saw Cai placing a bowl of steaming oatmeal on the table.

  She used her catlike grace to jump and climb back down to Cai.

  The smell was heavenly, and she had to control herself so she didn’t attack the food right away, “Sparks… Uh… thanks…”

  She did it! Saying thanks felt good.

  Cai sat and smiled, “Go on. Let me know what you think.”

  Nyx sat. The oatmeal looked like a much friendlier Nufuud if she’d crushed it and mixed it with water. But the smell… Sweet. And the apples mixed in… What did apples taste like? She was so used to Nufuud and only Nufuud.

  She took the spoon and scooped some oatmeal. She had to be dreaming. This ship. The food. The strange creatures. Cai.

  She blushed as she saw him looking at her expectantly. How could such a man exist? This was nothing but a pleasant dream, or he was going to betray her when she let her guard down. Well, she’d have to find ways to betray him first or manipulate him to help her find her friends.

  The smell.

  She slowly lifted the oatmeal to her mouth.

  Flavors she never thought possible exploded in her mouth. The soft texture of the oatmeal. The crunch of the apples. It was sweet and felt smooth as she guzzled it greedily, “Mya!”

  Nyx started purring, forgetting about everything other than the food in front of her.

  Until she noticed Cai. He was looking at her with an amused, but radiant look. Still, there was something deeper. A sadness as he watched her?

  Nyx felt her weariness of him crack a little. Maybe he really wasn’t out to take advantage of her? Maybe she could be safe here, with him?

  She shook her head, then continued to eat, only pausing as he placed a cup of milk next to her.

  If this were a dream, she hoped she’d never wake up.