Chapter 23

Tired, and not sure what to do with myself, I continued to sit in the gunner's seat on Icaan's ship and tried to work out how I could get Icaan to talk more. There had to be some way to get him to open up. But he ignored me, not even flying the ship, but sitting in the pilot's seat anyway.

"So, what makes a slave valuable?" I asked. "If certain qualities make me worth more and your culture places value on what a slave can do as humans do on their free people, then it sounds like I should know what I can claim to be good at and what skills I might want to get better at."

Icaan swiveled the seat around, his eyes a little wider at the question I'd asked. Had I surprised him?

"There's a lot of different things," he said, rubbing his chin with his hand while he looked into the distance, thinking.

I waite