“Just” Another Adventure with Jex and Ticca
Now I’m happy to report that another prose story about Jex and Ticca is now slated for volume 6 of that series. “Just: A Tale of the Jitney” begins like this:
Mama doesn’t usually bring prisoners home.
As magistrate here on Chamulna, Mama keeps prisoners in jail until trial season. Even with all the zirnium miners making trouble on this moon, the jail wing of the Magistracy isn’t full. But I guess she figured this prisoner was too small to stay with the rest.
“I think he’s young,” she told me.
“But he’s a different species,” I said. “We don’t know how his people age.”
Most of Mama’s prisoners are normal Polatians, but this one had smooth, doughy, mahogany skin. His little fern-green eyes were sunk into his face, and his cornsilk hair covered the whole round top of his head. “If he were a Polatian girl like you,” Mama told me, “his crest would be turning light twell—”
“Mama!” I’m sure she could see my cheeks shine.
She wiggled one eye to signal she was joking. “That’ll remind you, Yari, not to assume your mother’s forgotten how alien species work.”
Mama steered the boy into a spare room on the second floor of the Magistracy with a hand on the back of his neck. Half that space was filled with old, mismatched furniture from the squad room downstairs. I moved a broken screen off a crimson sofa, and Jex sat down, his little eyes moving in tandem to take in the mess. On his left wrist, just past his ragged navy shirtsleeve, I spotted a saffron-orange detainment bracelet.
Mama turned to me. “You know how you’re always asking to help with the Magistracy cases?”
“Only a thousand times!” I wanted so much to be an investigator, the way Mama had started out. But she never let me.
“You can help me right now. This boy’s a witness to a crime. I need to question him, and he doesn’t speak Polatian—only Stelpidge.”
Stelpidge was one of the courses I’d chosen from teleschool, but I didn’t think it would come in handy this fast. “Of course I’ll help investigate!” I said.
“Translate,” Mama said.
I let that go and asked, “What are your questions?”
“Let’s start by finding out his basics.”
I’d watched enough investigatory dramas to know what that meant. I pushed a chrome chair in front of the boy and sat down. “Greetings,” I said in Stelpidge. “My name is Yarilotta. This is my mother, Magistrate Squoryvotta. What is your name?”
He said, “Jex.”
“Just Jex?”
He nodded his head. I repeated the name to Mama.
She tapped the name into her handscreen. “We’ll ask Interstel if he has a record. Keep going.”
I asked the boy, “Where do you live?”
“On that space flyer your mother made me park outside.”
“How old are you?”
His narrow eyes peered warily through his fringe of tawny hair. “How young do I have to be to go free?”
Dreaming Robot Press is gathering preorders for this volume through Kickstarter. The higher funding levels bring not only this book in digital and/or print form, but also the previous volumes, so you can own both prose stories of Jex and his jitney and dozens more besides. The press also likes to seed the fondness for science fiction by making its books available to schools and libraries.
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