She put the box she’d been carrying down on the table along with a knife from one of her arm sheaths. She then walked to the end of the table and removed a stack of trays from the antique walnut sideboard. She fanned them out on top of the sideboard—two sterling deco-designed pieces, three that matched Megan’s Wedgwood china service, and one carved from a rare wood found on Cyclad Arik’s home planet. It was a rich brick red with golden metallic flecks of iron pyrite through it—one of the prettiest adaptations to heavy metal concentrations in the soil ever discovered. This one she placed on the table; the rest she returned to the shelf and closed the sideboard doors.
Jade pulled an orange from the box she’d brought and split the skin with her knife. In a moment the sections were separate a
