Speak Easy

Chapter 4: Speak Easy

There was a knock at the door. Shada glanced at the monitor�"just Pyos, shifting eagerly from one foot to another. With a press of a button Shada unlocked the door.

 

Pyos bounded in and planted himself before Shada’s desk. “Hello, Shada, how are you today?” he said in Lachan, giving a proud smile.

 

Involuntarily, Shada smiled back. “Fine enough, kiddo,” he replied. “Just got done with your lesson?”

 

“Yeah. It was good. W�"” Pyos hesitated. “W…we learned…”

 

Shada put up one hand. “Gimme a sec, I actually got something here.” He opened a drawer and rifled through it for a moment. What he pulled out was a small silver machine about the size of his hand, with a little glowing screen on one side. “Translator,” he said. Pyos tilted his head in confusion. Shada fiddled with the touchscreen, picking settings, and then repeated himself. This time, the machine rattled out a word in Leskiy.

 

Pyos gave a sudden bark of laughter, hopping excitedly in place. “Does it do it back to Lachan?”

 

It did. Pyos leaned toward it, tipping his head to one side and then the other, like a cat or a puzzled bird. He was grinning from one ear to the other. “Hello, Shada!” he chirped, giggling as the words bounced back in Lachan he recognized.

 

“You still gotta learn, of course,” Shada said. The translator spat out half the words and then buzzed in confusion. “Have to learn,” he amended, speaking with exaggerated clarity. “And it’s not perfect or anythin’. Anything. Obviously.”

 

Pyos nodded. “It’s cool, though! I can understand you! How does it work?”

 

Shada grimaced. “Honestly, du�"I don’t know. It just does. I know how to use the tech, not how it works.”

 

“Talka always liked�"tech stuff, a lot,” Pyos said. “Once, Anulan gave me an old watch as a present, and I gave it to her. She took it apart to see how it worked.”

 

“Talka?” Shada frowned.

 

“My big sister.”

 

Shada did not immediately respond. He knew relatively little about Pyos’s past; he knew Anulan was the one who had trained him to fight, and he knew the training was done on behalf of Pyos’s mother. He knew that Pyos’s mother was dead�"how, Pyos seemed reluctant to say. He seemed to have no other family. No mention of a father…and until now, no mention of siblings of any kind.

 

Shada had always been reluctant to press him. He felt in his gut that Pyos’s past was not a sunny one, and he was not sure he wanted to know the details. Pyos looked terribly young sometimes, and one way or another, he had been left all alone. But with the translator resting in his palm, Shada chose not to let the opportunity pass. “I didn’t know you had a sister. Where is she?”

 

If Pyos noticed the pause between his response and Shada’s answer, he made no indication. “She’s dead,” he said. He spoke matter-of-factly.

 

“What happened?”

 

Pyos placed two fingers in his open mouth. Cocked his thumb. Mimed recoil.

 

Oh, f**k. Again, Shada fell quiet. . He watched Pyos across the desk. He didn’t bother to ask why; he had friends who had done similar things, and he knew there were never any answers. There was no understanding it. Pyos’s face was composed, but there was something in his eyes�"Shada was not good with words, but he supposed ‘haunted’ worked.

 

“…I’m sorry,” he said. The words were rusty with disuse. Shada was not good with sympathy either.

 

Pyos lifted his eyebrows slightly, as if surprised, and said something in Leskiy that the translator butchered into a mechanical buzz. Then he said, “It was a while ago.”

 

“How long?”

 

“I don’t know.”

 

Shada steepled his fingers together on his desk. “How old are you, anyway?” he said. He had asked this before, in a roundabout way, but he could never get a straight answer.

 

Pyos gave the same response he always did. “I don’t know.” He threw in a shrug, and this time his nonchalance was genuine.

 

“How the hell do you ‘not know’ your own age? When’s your birthday?”

 

Another shrug. “I don’t know!”