6. Salvage
Mina
I wasn’t sure why Aldo had insisted on working on the new containment chamber in my room instead of his. Neither of us was in any heightened danger of a*******n, I was no great assistance when it came to engineering matters, and he was even less fond of the smell of all my mismatched herb sachets than I was. I asked him four times if he and his parents were having one of the “rough patches” that usually caused him to shelter at my place, but he insisted that they weren’t, and I couldn’t catch even a hint of the nervous little tic in his left anterior auricular muscle that those “patches” always gave him.
I’d tried to talk him out of it. I wasn’t eager for company while I was dealing with the stomach pain Ben’s outburst had given me. It had since spread to my throat, and
