“I’m glad to hear it,” was Kay’s response when Enn admitted to lacking experience in hostage situations as well, making no effort – and seeing no need to do so – to hide her true feelings on that subject, which were that it genuinely was a relief. Taking people hostage and such was not something anyone from Eighfour, aside from the odd soon-to-be exiled criminal who was reckless enough to turn to methods like that, so the fact that Enn did not come from a background where taking hostages was something commonplace was a relief.
	Beside that, though, Kay was not quite blind enough not to realize the implications of the statement when compared to the things he had already told her, about being a soldier, being in war and doing a lot of fighting, and overall she was not entirely sure whether the lack of hostage-taking was a commentary on Enn as much as it was on his old faction. If they were in war a lot but did not take hostages – that is, they did not take any prisoners – that meant that the people who might under different circumstances have been prisoners would have been killed instead.
	[I]These people,[/I] Kay thought, her smile fading for a moment as a shadow of fear crept over her face, [I]are the ones who may soon end up attacking Eighfour. They don’t take prisoners and don’t care about the lives of their own soldiers... Enn is lucky to have gotten away from there, but if they catch him, he won’t live long enough to realize that there are other ways to coexist than to destroy one’s competitors.[/I]
	Not that the fact that Enn and his faction had killed people – Eighfour had taken its share of lives over the years, making no effort to avoid killing would-be thieves and raiders that found their settlement – but... well, at least Eighfour had never been in an actual war before. And Eighfour allowed even their enemies to retrieve their dead and wounded once they had been repelled; somehow, she doubted that the Anderekian or Trenian soldiers would be as merciful.

	Kay offered a chuckle when Enn commented on her mechanical glove, allowing herself to be distracted from the business of retrieving her drone to look at the device covering her hand for a moment. The glove did not even offer that much protection, at least not to anything with teeth; the design of the mechanical part of it was actually more akin to an exoskeleton than a piece of armor, with gaps between the metal bars and bands that wrapped around and interconnected with each other, shaped with more of an emphasis on shielding the mechanisms, wires and sensors that tracked the position and movement of the joints more than the hand. The glove-part of it was just cotton that had been dyed black, and was not liable to offer much protection against anything. If someone smashed her hand with a hammer or the like the metal exoskeleton would probably take the brunt of the impact and save her hand from being broken, but against something capable of slipping into the gaps in the metal, like teeth? It would mostly depend on luck at that point.

	When the time came for Enn to be introduced to Aitch Cee, Kay could not help it but to burst out laughing at his reaction; her laughter shook her so much that she nearly dropped the little drone, and quickly grabbed it with both hands to avoid actually doing so.
	“Don’t worry,” she told him through a wide grin. “The only one in here -” she tapped the spherical drone twice with a fingernail, “- is me. I’m pretty good at building and copying stuff, but I’ve never even seen a thinking machine before, so obviously I can’t make one. Besides, the others don’t say that I shouldn’t go near any advanced AI... that they can apparently get in my head or something, because of this.” She raised her gloved hand to the right side of her face, where she tapped a finger on the little dark-gray metal box that contained her brain-machine interface.
	Taking a deep breath, Kay closed her right eye – the cybernetic one – and turned on Aitch Cee, replacing the image in her head from the aforementioned eye with the image recorded by Aitch’s camera. Manipulating the mechanical glove by moving her fingers she sent the little fellow flying skyward – buzzing like a swarm of angry wasps as it went – where it would have the best view of the surrounding area, to allow her to orientate herself properly.
	At the same time as she was controlling the drone, Kay went – slowly, as it was quite distracting to almost literally have to be two places at once – to the front of her cart, where she opened a different compartment to retrieve half a dozen scraps of dried mutton and a couple of pieces of crispbread, which she handed to Enn. “It’s probably better if you throw some of that on the ground around here, so that the birds know it’s coming from you; maybe it’ll get them to forgive you. Just eat the rest. Oh, and I have some water if you get thirsty, too.”