Page 224 of Light Leech

Naoma laughed. “Did you shock him?”

Kuni nodded. “Want me to do it again?”

“Piss the zeg off!” Boyband backed away.

“Calm down, calm down.”

We turned to the new voice approaching.

Abbas.

I smiled. It felt good to count him among us again, despite some protests.

He stepped into our circle with arms akimbo. “I heard the end of it. What did you make the kid do?”

“Eat teeth.” Kuni said.

“No, no, no,” Boyband sighed. “Everyone take a second to breathe. You all listening now? Really? Petya? Idol? Pulse. He took a second to look at us, fighting a smile.

“Happy to see us, aren’t you?” I asked.

“Pissed that you called us back before our ‘week of rest’ ended.”

“It was one day. That doesn’t matter. Talk.”

“Okay, okay.” Boyband glared at Kuni and put his finger over his mouth to hush the kid. He turned back to the rest of us with a smile. “You know how a boy gets. Hungry. Tired. So I thought back to the advice Ral always gives me. Work smarter, not harder. Wait, where is–”

“She’ll be here soon, with Akna,” Abbas said. “On with it.”

Boyband held his hands up as if he had done nothing wrong. “So I got hungry. We were in the Blue, and I didn’t want to cause a scene, so I had him shock some du and he passed out for me to feed without problem.”

“Why not just coerce him?” Naoma asked. “Having him turn into an eel is hardly a less noticeable alternative.”

“I’ve… had some problems… with that.”

Naoma looked back at me. “You’ve been struggling to use your mod, right?”

“Really?” Boyband asked.

I nodded. “I’m still faster than I was before all this, but I can’t do much more. There’s a bug with my system. You too, Abbas?”

He nodded. “I can make someone’s bones more brittle with a high burn pulse, but I can’t suck the bones like I used to.”

Naoma gagged.

Boyband shrugged. “Probably a simple tech problem for Ral.”

“That still doesn’t explain why Kuni ate teeth,” I said.

Boyband looked at him, then groaned when Kuni didn’t answer for him.

“The kid stared at me while I was eating teeth, so… I asked him if he wanted a taste.”

“Without him asking,” Naoma said.

“Yup.”

“Without even–zeg. Without even a sign that he wanted a taste?”