Basher entered the room and his partner stayed by the door with an energy weapon in his hand. Claire had been sleeping a moment ago, and she still looked drowsy. Basher squelched the impulse to give her a hand as she scooted off the lower bunk. Whatever he did, he was not going to touch this girl until he was sure she was human.

She followed him out the door.

“Wait there,” Basher said. “You have to be handcuffed when you’re not in the cell.”

She obediently stood still, but the muscles in her neck jerked with tension when his Spo partner held her wrists to secure the handcuffs.

Basher took a deep breath. For some reason everything to do with this girl grated on him, where was his thick skin?

The usual procedure was to have the fake walk in front of them down the hall to the medical quarters, but Basher felt guilty making her do it. She glanced over her shoulder once, looking uneasy. She clearly appreciated how vulnerable it was to walk with a Spo at your back.

In the medical room were two cot-like hospital beds, the standard blood pressure cuff on the wall, and syringes on the counter. A large EKG machine lurked in the back, part of a failed experiment to find another way to tell fakes from humans.

“It’s all so... earthly,” Claire said. “I thought this was a Spo facility.”

“We deal with a lot of Rik,” Basher said. “We’ve imported standard hospital supplies.” He hesitated by the door, while his partner had Claire sit on a cot.

“First, you will be fingerprinted,” the Spo told her. He removed an electronic pad from the cabinet and hit a couple things. “Right thumb," he said.

Claire pressed her thumb to the screen, and it gave slightly. The swirls of her print showed briefly orange against the black background, then it was gone.

“Right pointer. Left thumb. Left pointer. That is all.”

He held the device in one clawed hand while entering a few more things on the screen.

“Full name?”

“Claire Elizabeth Kindler.”

“Age?”

“Twenty-one. The Spo took me four years ago, during my junior year of high school.”

Basher swallowed. That fit with the data Sam and Nat had found.

“Birthday?”

“June 11.”

Basher didn't realize he was lost in thought, until his partner repeated, “Basher, are you going to finish the questions?”

He startled. "Of course."

“Basher,” Claire said. "That's an odd name."

"From Bashar," he said shortly. “It’s a nickname.”

Claire blurted out. “How can I prove I’m not an alien? Can’t you look for a slit in my neck or parasite in my stomach or something? That must be what all this is for.” She gestured to the EKG.

Basher narrowed his eyes. Even if she was human, wouldn’t she know how the Rik turned people? It was a combination of nanotechnology, inserted into the spine like an epidural, and electro-patterning. The only visible mark was the injection site on the back, and the Rik had quickly learned to erase that tiny mark.

Basher finally came further into the room, taking the tablet reluctantly from his partner. While he switched to his note-taking app, his partner had Claire turn around and raised her shirt to examine her lower back.

"No obvious scar," he said, and Basher dutifully recorded it. “Some bruising of the mid-section,” his partner added.

Basher’s eyes snapped up and he saw the discoloration on her side.

“What happened there?”

She pulled her shirt down and turned around defiantly. “I bumped into an alien and it knocked me down and kicked me. I think it thought I was Rik, also.”

"You are malnourished," the Spo said. "We will give you a vitamin injection."

 This was part of their script, and it jolted Basher back to his duties. Several Spo scientists had developed a new blood test to prove whether a person was Rik or not, but the standard procedure was to tell the subject that it was merely a vitamin injection.

"It should improve your health in the next few days," his partner continued.

When Basher and his partner first tried this blood test, they'd made the mistake of explaining it. He and his partner had to endure hours of Rik fakes pretending to be deathly ill. A few had even managed to work themselves into a fever. It had been clear they were fakes, but the resulting red tape to prove the results weren't accurate had taken forever.

Now they simply told the fakes it was a vitamin shot to avoid the whole mess. Like he told Sam and Nat, the serum was a chemical cocktail that was neutralized by traces of nanotechnology in the blood stream. Theoretically, it could also indicate how long someone had been a Rik. A more recent Rik would neutralize the serum faster than someone who’d been a Rik for several years. Theoretically.

Basher noticed the girl rub her thumb nail, and noted that it was rippled oddly. She probably was somewhat malnourished, a lack of Vitamin K would do that to her fingernails.

He cleared his throat. It was standard to also ask a series of questions that Rik usually got wildly wrong. "Where were you born?"

“Pensacola, Florida.”

“How much land did your parents own?”

“Um.” Claire watched the Spo fill the syringe. “We just lived in a regular neighborhood. It was a two bedroom house with a big back yard.”

“How did you get to school?”

“Mostly my dad took me on his way to work. I took the bus home. My dad worked for the forestry service, so he took me out in his boat on the lakes sometimes too.”

Basher filled in her answers quickly. Was it just him, or was his partner moving in slow motion with that syringe?

“How did you get off Earth?”

“I told you, the Spo took me for their cadet program. I was there for nearly a year and then my mentor sold me to the Merith you met today, Faal. Actually, there were two of us, sort of. The other girl died.”

The Spo tapped the syringe.

“What’s your favorite book?”

“For heaven’s sake, does that matter?” she snapped.

“Just answer the question.”

“I wasn’t much of a reader. I liked romances sometimes, a few mysteries.”

The Spo brought the syringe to her and stuck it in her arm without preamble.

“Ow. Are you sure you got a vein?” she asked him.

“Reasonably.”

“Favorite food,” Basher said.

Claire tore her eyes away from the needle and looked at Basher.

“What are you trying to get at? Do the aliens not know this stuff, or are you just curious? Because I can tell you anything you want to know. When I was little my favorite food was macaroni and cheese, in middle school I loved tacos, and in high school I loved my dad's shrimp gumbo.”

Claire watched the Spo remove the needle and press a bandage over the red dot. “Every year on my birthday my parents would take me to Disneyworld in Orlando and we’d stay with my grandparents there. My grandma would make tapioca pudding which I also loved. When my mentor sold me, I had just eaten something that tasted like onions and I had a bad taste in my mouth for weeks because I had no toothbrush.”

The blood bloomed into the bandage, making a darker and darker mark. “I guess you did hit a vein," she added.

Basher cleared his throat and looked away. “If you are human, I’ll apologize for not believing you in the morning.”

“In the morning?”

The Spo put the syringe into a plastic bag on the counter. “Figure of speech," he said, with a curious glance at Basher, obviously wondering why he'd almost told her the truth.

Shoot, he shouldn't have said that. What was wrong with him? Basher tried to regain his footing. "On the other hand, Faal may have gotten approval to arrest you by morning. If you did steal that animal from him, he has a clear case.”

Claire paled. "But on the ship you said he couldn’t have me until you were sure!"

Basher shrugged. He felt bad threatening her, but squashed his impulse to take it back. He needed to distract her from his slip of the tongue about tomorrow morning.

It worked. She couldn’t seem to breathe right after he mentioned Faal.

"Can I at least have another room while you make up your mind about me?" she finally said. "The Rik don’t want me in their cell. They know I’m human and they... They were talking about me while I was sleeping. One of them said something about not having me in there tonight. I don’t know why, but I really don’t want to find out. See, I'm telling you the truth. I'm on your side."

“There are no other empty containment rooms,” Basher said. “Or I would consider it.”

“Well, who’s in the other ones? I’ve shared cages before, just not with people who might kill me," Claire said.

They walked her back down the hall, and Basher paused at the first set of containment rooms. “This cell contains normal Spo criminals who are under arrest for everything from petty theft to assault. I wouldn’t go in there if I was you.”

Spo skin changed colors like a chameleon, showing their emotion; and this room was a watercolor of frustration and barely controlled aggression. No way would he put her in there.

The other room looked empty.

“How about that one?” she said.

“Look at the ceiling.”

 “Are those... sentient?” Claire gasped. “They look like giant wasps.”

“Not sentient. They’re native to the Spo planet, and we aren’t sure how they got here. Perhaps they stowed away in a cargo hold, like rats on a ship. We’ve been rounding them up, but we didn’t have a large enough cage for them.”

“Why don’t you just kill them? I would.”

“Just between us, I would too – ” Basher caught himself on the expression, and he gestured curtly for her to keep walking. “They’re endangered on Spo. We’re not allowed to kill them.”

In the next section, there were also two rooms – the one with the Rik she’d been with, and another room with Rik.

Basher watched her look back and forth, a guarded expression on her face.

“I don’t care what you do," he said, untruthfully, "but I’d suggest your previous cell. They’re crazy, no doubt, but I’ve never seen them fighting. I can’t say the same for these.” He jerked a thumb at a military-looking crew of Rik in the other room.

Claire sighed. “Will you at least check on me tonight? Or, I mean, maybe not you... But could you have someone come by and make sure they haven’t killed me in my sleep?”

"I'll tell the night guard to keep an eyestalk out for you."

Claire half smiled and raised her hand as if to touch his arm, just as she’d done before. Basher took two steps back and opened the door to her cell.

He was actually beginning to wonder if she might be human, but he would know for sure in the morning. In the meantime, Basher would not allow himself to feel or do anything based on that possibility.