The liquor must have been stronger than Sayeeda had thought. Her lips moved but no sound came out of her mouth. Emotions surged and eddied. Saxon was interested in her? Neil had feelings for her. Woods had been some sort of rebound for him? The idea that he would somehow fight Saxon for her tinged the whole cocktail with a touch of hysteria. She remembered their very short lived date back on Dar’mond, it hadn’t really had a chance to go anywhere, Aiden had arrested her before the evening really started.

“Neil I…” but he was already heading into the other room clearly embarrassed by his outburst. He grabbed another bottle and pulled the cork with his teeth. 

“Neil I’m not going to sleep with Saxon… I mean if that is a thing that Hexs do.” She wasn’t certain if Hexs worked in a way mammals would appreciate. The whole evening was rapidly spinning out of control.

“I’m certainly not going to sleep with anyone that might be planning on killing you… I mean…” she trailed off uncertain of exactly how she wanted to finish the sentence. It was a confusing mass of feeling emotions and imperatives. Neil was alot of things, including her first officer. Instincts that had been drilled into her for years told her that opening the door on a relationship with her first officer was a terrible idea.

“Look, I need some air,” she finished uncertainty before pushing her way through the beaded curtain and heading out into the street. There were still crowds moving about from the bazaar, spacers and citizens returning from bars and clubs or just heading out to them. Without particular bias as to direction she struck out down the street, she pulled a cigarette from her pocket and tried to spark it to life. It took her three tries to get the strike plate to click and then it fizzled and failed to ignite. Hissing in frustration she pitched it into an alley. 

Without any plan whatsoever she walked through the bizarre, slowly making her way up the canyon towards the sections of the city not frequented by spacers. The women she saw grew more conservatively dressed and the mismatched garb of sailors was replaced with the cotton garments of the locals. Slaves grew more numerous as well, though they kept their eyes down cast and didn’t trouble her. Her thoughts spun in confused half circles as she reached the Pasha’s palace, sectioned off by a wall that was carved with ornate scrollwork and well tended gardens. 

She stopped walking, trying to decide what she was going to do about Neil. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the turbaned official who had greeted them at the Highlander. He walked stiffly with another man in the traditional cotton garb. Walked very stiffly. He had a gun to his ribs. She walked over towards the two men as they disappeared into an alley. She stepped into the darkness behind them. 

The alley ran down between two sandstone buildings, there were no windows or doors at the ground level though narrow arching windows could be seen higher up. Piles of trash, old cardboard cartons and wooden crates were stacked along both sides, restricting the walkway to a narrow strip of foot polished stone. The only light was the starlight that filtered in from above and the reflected splendor of the palace.

“I swear by the suns I don’t have what you want, I cant, I have tried…” the turbaned man was saying, he was sweating profusely as his assailant pinned him against a wall. Although the attacker wore the traditional garb and turban, Junebug’s keen eye detected the tell tale bulge of body armor beneath it.

“I am not a man of letters and I am not a…” whatever else the official might not be Junebug never found out as something hard and dense cracked over the back of her head, sending her tumbling into unconsciousness.