Текст книги "Heat"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 54 страниц)

Chapter Seven

“When do I get my tools back so that I can open my doors again?”

Tagen roused himself from the sleepy study of his near-empty bowl and looked at the human who had addressed him. He’d almost forgotten she was there. Gods, he was exhausted. “Again, please,” he said, and forced himself to concentrate.

The human only looked at him, frowning. Her eyes were the strangest he had ever in his entire life seen. One was green and yet not very green, like a tree that had begun to die. The other, blue. In them, Tagen saw concern shimmering up through the unhappy fear that he had put in her. It was the first time he had ever seen that look in the eyes of a human, and it was disconcerting.

“You look terrible,” she said bluntly.

He recoiled slightly, first stung and then irritated. He wanted very much to point out that, however bad he might look now, she had looked a damned sight worse when she was vomiting and urinating on herself earlier, but he didn’t know enough N’Glish. And once he took a breath to calm himself down, he decided it wouldn’t have been a very politic thing to say anyway. “I know,” he said instead. “It has been a long span of very long days.”

“Yeah.” She picked up his bowl, still with a spoonful of soup in the bottom, and hugged it to her chest, as though for comfort. She was still frowning at him. “You know, forget the doors for tonight. You need to go lie down.”

He scowled at her. “I am not going anywhere, Daria Cleavon, and you test my patience every time you force me to remind you.”

She was shaking her head already, reshaping his annoyance back into weary confusion. “I meant, you need to sleep. Come on. The sofa in…in the room of holding folds out into a pretty comfortable bed. I’ve got clean sheets and a couple extra pillows. It’s not much, but it ought to do for now.”

The words buzzed through him without substance, but then his mind seized and clung to one of the first she’d said: Sleep. He half-rose, his body moving him by reflex alone, before common sense sat him down again. He said, “I do not trust you.”

“That’s pretty smart, all things considered.” She edged away from him and put his dish into the sink, all without taking her eyes off him.

“You admit you will run.”

“I admit I want to,” she corrected, and showed him her empty hands. “But I won’t. I swear. And sooner or later, you’re going to have to believe me or there’s no point to your being here at all. Besides—” She gave the dish in the sink a pointed glance. “—if I was going to do anything, it would have been a whole lot easier to put Draino in your soup then climb out my bedroom window while you sleep.”

Tagen looked at her in surprise. Poison, she meant. He had not even considered the possibility. That was appalling.

“So come on,” she said, stepping towards the doorway and gesturing for him to follow. “Let me get you into bed before you fall down. You’re not going to be any good to anyone the way you are now.”

It was another insult, he was sure of it. Then again, perhaps he only thought so because he was so tired. He decided reluctantly to give her the benefit of the doubt. He stood up. “Take me to bed.”

She gaped at him for a second, making him run rapidly back through his words. He found nothing wrong in what he’d said, but before he could question her, the human uttered a nervous laugh. “We have, um, two slightly different meanings for that particular phrase. Clearly, you’re interested in the sleep one. Sorry.”

“What is the second meaning?” he asked.

“It, um…” The skin of her face began to pinken. “Never mind,” she said, leading him away towards the stairs. “You keep watching cable long enough, you’ll pick it up all on your own.”

Yes, he supposed that was true. The tee-vee was a remarkable font of information and instruction. There was one program in particular, a show that depicted the labors of officers in what passed for the On-World Security Fleet here on Earth. Tagen was astounded by the very concept. Jotan media broadcast many fictional programs for the entertainment of its citizenry, but never one based on law enforcement. Watching Earth’s officers investigate and prison criminals filled Tagen with an embarrassing sense of fascination and pride. He took comfort in the fact that it was also educational.

Daria reached the top of the steps and moved back toward the room of holding, but Tagen paused by the privy door. “Wait.”

She looked back over her shoulder at him, and the sudden tension that had entered her when he spoke evaporated, turning her a shocking shade of red. “Oh,” she said. “Um. Yes, of course. Do you know how to, um, work everything in there?

“Yes,” he said tightly. When she’d been under the effects of vey Venekus’ mild sedative, he’d asked her to show him the operation of the privy. He’d been reduced to an embarrassing mode of pantomime to make the request, but she had eventually explained the workings of the toy-let. Now, he said, “I would like to shower. Show me again, please. Which is the soap for my body and which for my hair?”

“What do you mean, again?” She came towards him with a puzzled look on her face. “Um, okay. Let’s see. Here’s the shower. Here’s how you turn it on. This is the hot water tap, by the way. And here’s the soap for your body and a sponge you can use if you want to. Don’t use the yellow one, it’s mine. In fact…” She removed the puffy yellow object from the shower stall entirely, an insult Tagen withstood in silence. “And here’s the stuff for your hair. It’s called shampoo. Actually, it’s a two-in-one with conditioner, but you don’t need to know that.”

“And that?” Tagen asked, pointing to a canister and accompanying instrument on the far corner of the shower stall.

“Oh. That’s for shaving. You know, if you want to take your beard off. Not my beard. I don’t have a beard, but I use it for…never mind. You can use it if you want.”

Tagen followed little of her disjointed words, but fortunately, she had made a scraping movement across her cheeks as she explained, which made her meaning clear. He touched his own face, feeling the roughness of stubble growing in thick on his jaw. “Thank you,” he said.

“The towels are right there for drying off after. Just don’t drop them on the floor,” she added anxiously.

“Of course not.”

“Okay, then, you…carry on in here and I’ll get your bed ready.” She ducked out of the white-tiled room and half-ran down the hall.

Tagen shut the door behind her just long enough to use the crude and incredibly unhygienic toy-let in privacy. Then he leaned out into the hall again, listening to the human move around in the far room. She was having to shuffle quite a number of crates.

Leaving the door open, Tagen stripped out of his uniform. It was stiff with grime and clammy with sweat, and removing it freed a great cloud of unpleasant odor. There was a mirror over the sink, inescapably positioned to catch occupants. In it, Tagen saw a man he would not trust to repair his waste reclamator, much less invite into his house. His heart thawed a few degrees toward the human.

Just a few.

He stepped into the shower and knelt to work out the controls. Hot water, she had said, but he only wanted enough of that to take the ice out of the spray. Coolness streamed over his body, blessedly welcome. Tagen braced his arms against the wall and bent his head, letting it pour over him.

He could be right back on Jota. Not in the Fleet Barracks, which, like most of the civilized world, used vaporizing disinfectants, but on any of the carrier ships, this shower would be right at home. Or, for that matter, he could be back in the country, in the house where Kolya Pahnee had raised him. That neat, sterile house…much too big for just the two of them. It had only the most minimal furnishings, only the most basic necessities, and if there were any decorations within its walls, Tagen had missed them. But he had bathed beneath aquatic jets there, and he had trained on hard white tiles, and worked his body to exhaustion in the orderly gardens Kolya grew. Nostalgia was all around him here in the human’s house, leading him inexorably back to his first, true home.

Without question, those were the worst years of his life.

Kolya Pahnee had been a Fleet commander, decorated no less, a veteran of the Kevrian conflict. His name was still spoken around high tables. His combat methods were still taught at Fleet Academy. He was a hard man, not given to words or to patience. He had bred many young among some very high-ranking houses, but he had taken only one son, and he had waited until he was retired, his two hundred years of service behind him, so that he would have the time to train up a child.

Tagen supposed he should be grateful. He was ten years old when Kolya Pahnee brought him out of the Child Halls, and at that age, he’d known his time was running out. Graduation, unadopted, won a man a lifetime of menial labor and the inescapable stigma of having Male Live Birth and a number as his primary identifier instead of a name. But Kolya had wanted a ten-years boy. Had demanded one. At ten years, a boy could feed himself and put himself to bed. At ten years, a boy knew enough to keep quiet and not irritate his elders.

And so at ten years, Tagen had been sent out of the city and into the middle of wind-blowing nowhere to live in that horrible, aseptic house. He could still remember having to stand in the receiving room, his few possessions in a box in his arms, surrounded by old men who poked at him and discussed in loud voices how his eyes were too close together and his feet were slightly splayed, wondering which of them he would have to call ‘father’. All of that, just for a half-year trial, not even a true adoption.

But in the end, Kolya had accepted him, named him, and put him on the path that led unswervingly to the Fleet. There was never any discussion on that subject, never any doubt that Tagen would obey Kolya’s wishes. Even after the old man died, there was a certain expectation.

And now look at him. Not the youngest to ever achieve fourth-rank, but still damned young. And sek’ta, assuming he survived it, was a true springboard to greater things. He would see command of his own ship before he hit his century mark, he was sure. There would be crona for the taking. Females would come to mate with him, even to breed with him. And perhaps one day, when he was retired and had the time, he would adopt a half-grown son to mold as his replacement.

Gods, what a depressing thought.

Tagen straightened under the spray of cool water and picked up the human’s soap. He washed thoroughly, scouring life back into his body with the thing she called a ‘sponge’ and replacing the hot stink of his flesh with something flowery and feminine. He cleaned his hair with a viscous green fluid that, despite its unhealthy appearance, stripped the sweat and grime from his hair with admirable speed. Finally, Tagen’s long years aboard-ship began to prickle at him, reminding him unreasonably that there was only so much water and it would all have to be recycled before the crew could bathe again tomorrow, and as illogical as the feeling was, he still had to obey it.

Tagen shut off the flow of water and dried himself briskly with one of the human’s white towels, then tied it around his waist for modesty’s sake as he exited the shower stall. He took the canister and the device the human had indicated to be a shaver with him and stood in front of the mirror.

Good so far, but now what? The shaver was nothing but a triple-row of naked blades partly-sheathed in some synthetic material, with a handle too small for him to comfortably use. The canister did nothing; he shook it, brought it to his face, touched it to the shaver, and even tried speaking to it in the event it were voice-operated, but there was no response. Hesitantly, knowing he was using the thing wrong, Tagen put the canister down and gingerly touched the shaver to his face.

He cut himself immediately.

“Shu-ra,” he muttered, pressing a fingertip to the wound. Inexplicably, his anger targeted vey Venekus, the far-distant Human Studies scientist, who had not only inundated him with badly-outdated information, he also had not packed a shaver in the supply pack he’d sent off with Tagen. He peered closely at the shaver, tried turning it the other way, and promptly gouged himself another hole as he attempted to neaten his face. “Shu-ra!”

“Okay, it’s all ready. Oh.” The human stood in the doorway, still pink in the face as she looked at him. “Sorry. Your bed’s ready anytime you want it. I’ll go now.”

“Wait.” Tagen held out the shaver, defeated and disgusted by his helplessness. He supposed there was not much wisdom in giving her something that could cut, but the blades were small and so was she. It would take no little effort for her to do him any real damage. “Show me. Please.”

Daria hesitated, but did take the shaver. “It’s not really that complicated,” she said, picking up the canister he had been forced to disregard. “But I guess there’s a certain amount of familiarity that comes into play. Sit down so I can reach.”

Tagen lowered himself onto the side of the shower’s short wall and tipped his head back, offering his jaw to her.

She pressed a button on the top of the canister and filled her palm with clear, blue gel. This she rubbed into a lather and used it to paint his lower face. “Just relax,” she murmured, and drew the shaver down his cheek. She rinsed the blades in the sink and came back to him, smiling. “I never thought aliens would need to shave,” she said.

What an odd thing to think.

“Why not?” he asked, clenching his jaw to keep it still.

“I don’t know,” she said, rolling one shoulder. “I guess it’s because it seems like such a human thing to do.”

“You think humans alone have hair?”

“Well…sort of.” She finished one half of his face and moved around to the other side of him to continue. “We have…stories, I guess you’d say, about aliens. Made-up ones, you know, or at least, they’re supposed to be. So everyone knows what an alien is supposed to look like, even though no one really believes in them. And they’re supposed to be little, grey, hairless guys with huge heads and no noses.” She laughed. “You don’t look much like one.”

Sounded like a So-Quaal drone to him, but he refrained from saying so. Contact with a Jotan was enough of an adjustment for her. He did not need to further complicate her reality.

“What does E’Var look like?” she asked.

“I do not know.”

She finished with the shaver and handed him a small towel, disbelief etched all across her face. “You don’t know? How do you expect to find him then?”

“I expect,” Tagen said dryly, “that he will be the only other Jotan on Earth.”

She blinked, comically surprised, and then eased into a smile. “Yeah. Obviously. That would make sense all right.”

Tagen cleaned the foam from his face, stroked the smoothness of his jaw experimentally, and smiled. He felt so much better, less threadbare and lost.

“So that’s what you are, huh? A…Jotan?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your planet’s name?”

He regarded her closely, and said, “Jota,” in a tone that was half-question.

She looked faintly insulted. “Like I’m supposed to know that? Hey, I’m a human, but the planet’s name is not Hum.”

“I know.” He stood up. “I always thought that very strange. And when you do not call your planet Earth, you call it Terra, Tor, Chikyuu, Di, Aard, Jord. You call yourself human, but you are also menneske, essere umano, jiyuujin, homid, homo sapiens, ningen, and many more. It can be very confusing.”

“I’ll be sure to pass that on to my congressman.”

Tagen didn’t know the word, but it sounded like sarcasm. He changed the subject. “I do not expect this, but I must ask. Do you have any…” Vocabulary stopped him. He bent and took his soiled uniform and held it up before her questioningly.

She stared at the clothes, her expression running through many degrees of ‘no’.

“I might,” she said.

So much for his ability to read human expression.

“In the meantime, I can wash these for you,” she added, reaching out for them. “Gosh, I hope they don’t shrink.”

Tagen removed his holsters and guns, and gave the rest of the uniform into her hands. The sight of his weapons halted her muttering examination of his clothes and when she looked up again, she was pale and subdued.

“Let me look around and see if Dan left anything you can wear. You’re kind of huge, so…” She rolled her shoulder in that curiously evocative gesture, suggesting the fates alone would provide.

He mimicked it, and she smiled faintly.

“If nothing else, I can order something. But of course, I’ll need to be able to open the door when the UPS guy comes.”

She had lapsed back into babble and the clarifying effects of the cool shower had faded. Tagen tried to lock his jaws against a yawn, but the human noticed.

“Sorry,” she said. “You’re exhausted. I’ll take care of these. You go to bed. And don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere.”

He chose to believe her. Whether motivated by trust or weariness, he nodded and moved past her and into the hall. He went into the room of holding, still crammed full of crates and swimming with disturbed dust. She had transformed the large seating place into a bed, and it looked almost long enough to allow him to fully sprawl.

Tagen shut the door and pulled the towel free of his waist. He slung his gunbelt over the back of an unused chair piled tall with crates and sat down on the bed. It was very soft and lumpy, but the bedding was light and cool and clean. He lay back and stretched, feeling every muscle groaning in protest, before rolling onto his side.

He was asleep almost at once.

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Eight

Tagen opened his eyes before his ears had finished processing the quiet rustling sounds that had wakened him. The first thing he saw was the mess—crates and dust and junk spread over every flat surface like sauce over dry bread. He could not look at it without thinking of the exhausting effort it would take to try and put the place in order and even after a full night’s sleep, he was still too tired for that.

Next, he saw the human. She was over by the door, gathering objects from among those he’d deemed too dangerous to leave in her reach yesterday. Judging from the space she’d cleared already, this was not her first trip.

Tagen sat up, holding the bedsheet at his hip, and watched her. She was nibbling at her lip, every muscle straining with the effort of being so quiet. If she were collecting the knives from the box in which they now rested, he would be concerned by this level of stealth. However, she was taking tins and jars of food. He supposed he was safe enough, although she’d proved to have a wicked aim with far lighter fare.

She glanced his way as she finished stacking things in the crook of her arm, and promptly uttered a shriek and dropped everything.

Tagen started to get up as she dropped to her knees, then remembered he was naked beneath the sheet and settled back down.

“Sorry,” she said, scooping food hurriedly into the improvised basket of her shirtfront. “I didn’t mean to wake you, I was just trying to put my house back together.”

She was nervous and talking fast. Every word but the first had been a near-meaningless babble of sound. “Slowly,” Tagen said, frowning. “Please.”

But she did not repeat herself. Instead, she went on with a whole new babble. “I’ve got your clothes out of the dryer now and it doesn’t look like they shrunk any, so I’ll bring those right up. Sorry.” She backed up and fled, banging the door shut behind her.

Tagen swung his legs over the side of the bed and leaned forward, rubbing at his face. He still felt drugged by exhaustion, for all that the Earth’s sun was well-risen. He blamed the heat, which was already cemented into the air and tickling sweat out of his pores. The heat…gods, would it never end?

He opened his pack and took his day’s suppressant. They were more than half-gone now. Surely the season was nearly over. He hated to think what would happen if he actually ran out. He’d have to return to his ship then, wouldn’t he? His superiors would have to understand that. How could he be expected to complete his mission if he was in Heat?

On the other plate, it was highly unlikely that Kanetus E’Var was doing anything productive if he was in Heat, either. Collecting dopamine didn’t take a lot of effort, considering the fragility of humans in general, but it still took a modicum of concentration and skill that would be utterly eroded by the effects of Heat. So even if he had come to Earth initially, he might have turned around and gone home as soon as the weather sank in a little. Tagen could probably leave right now, secure in such knowledge.

“I hate Earth,” he muttered.

The human’s footsteps were returning. Tagen made sure his loins were covered and then straightened up and tried to look as dignified and professional as possible while wearing a sheet.

She tapped at the closed door and then cracked it open and peeked at him. “I ordered groceries because I thought you might like to eat at some point, and they’re going to be here in a few hours, so we really need to be able to open the doors, or at least the front—”

“Please!” Tagen said, more sharply than he intended, and her voice switched off at once. “Speak more slowly.”

She backed up into the hallway, looking anxious, and then crept forward and put the folded articles of his uniform on the edge of the bed. “Sorry,” she said.

And then she left again, damn it all.

Tagen dressed in quick, angry jerks. He reminded himself that the human was badly frightened and coping very well, all things considered. Yesterday, she had probably woken up with the understanding that hers was the only race in all the known universe and now there was an alien holding her prisoner in her own house. There were rescued slaves in preserves back in his corner of the galaxy who never recovered from that little shock, so he needed to go easy on her. He lectured himself severely on the human tendency to resist obedience, and counted himself fortunate that this human, at least, limited herself to throwing food and ignoring his requests to repeat herself, as opposed to, for example, poisoning him or stabbing him in his sleep. He warned himself to remember what it had been like to wander in the forest outside, and that his one human here in this isolated house was the best circumstance he could have hoped for and that he was as responsible as much as she for not ruining it.

By the time he had his pips on and his gun belt tightened, he was calm again. Yesterday had been a good beginning, but there was work yet to do.

He went in to the privy and used it with great confidence, then shaved successfully and set his hair in order. He’d lost his binding band somewhere in the woods, but he found one in the human’s cupboard that worked just as well. The face looking back at him from the mirror was an officer, a man and a commander of men. Tagen tugged his jacket straight, smiled grimly, and went back into his room.

The human wanted her doors opened. Very well. Tagen would make a gesture of trust. He found the tool by which he had sealed the doors and took it downstairs.

The human was in her kitchen, standing on the counter and scrubbing out her empty cupboards. She looked around guiltily when he came up behind her, hugging her cleaning water as though she feared he would take it from her by force. “I figured, when was I going to get the next chance?” she said. “It’s been a long time since these were cleaned.”

He doubted that, but then, time was relative when one had too much of it. Besides, if it relaxed her to spend her mornings scrubbing cupboards, who was he to stop her?

Tagen held up the tool and then laid it on the table. “For you,” he said.

“Thanks.” She looked at it longingly, then at her cupboards, and finally began scrubbing again. “I’ll finish up here first, though, but I appreciate that you probably think you’re making a big step. Was the bed okay?”

“Yes.” His one word was a hammer whose killing impact even Tagen could sense. Public relations had never been one of his talents. “Thank you,” he added awkwardly.

“Are you hungry?” She finished wiping the last shelf and then put her cleaning water aside without waiting for an answer. She climbed down from the counter with a nimbleness Tagen admired in an abstract sort of way, dropping to her knees and then kicking out and onto her feet with a light thump. “I could fix you something,” she offered. “Cereal or something.” She eased around him, pressing herself flat against the counters until she’d passed, just as though there were not an arm’s length of distance between them.

Tagen seated himself at the table as she busied herself with food preparation. It was very strange to watch her move; even in her obvious anxiety, there was a freedom about her. She was so different from the recovered slaves he had known. Even though she was not relaxed, just being in her own element gave her a kind of confidence he was not accustomed to seeing in her kind.

She brought him a bowl of flaked food with a thin, white sauce poured over it. The texture was abrasive, the taste very sweet, but it was cold and so Tagen ate it all. She watched him, standing off to one side and shifting her weight restlessly. ‘This is what it must feel like to have a personal slave,’ Tagen thought idly. Not an entirely unpleasant feeling.

“You look a lot better this morning,” she remarked.

He wasn’t sure how to answer that. It hadn’t exactly sounded like a compliment. “As do you,” he said at last.

She colored and looked away, so clearly that had been the wrong response. “Thanks,” she said glumly, and went back to her cupboards. She wiped at the shelves with a dry cloth and began replacing food in very neat, very deliberate arrangements. “So…do you have any more questions or are you leaving?”

“What I require most at this time is N’Glish,” he told her. “That may take some time.”

“Oh.” Her shoulders hunched. “So…so what am I supposed to be doing? To help you, I mean.”

“Talk slowly when you speak. Allow me food and sleep. Answer questions when I ask them.” She nodded after each command, furthering Tagen’s mild sense of power over her. Slavery was still abhorrent and indefensible, of course, but he was beginning to see why it was so popular.

“How long do you think you’ll need before you can go look for your guy?”

“My…guy.”

“The guy you’re looking for,” she amended. “I mean, once you have your N’Glish down, how long before you…?” She shrugged.

“Leave?”

She nodded, not looking at him.

“It would depend on many things.” He studied the back of her as she finished putting her food away, trying to think of a way to alleviate some of her persistent fretfulness. “I can promise not to stay solely to prolong your misery.”

She flinched and then turned on him. “I’m not miserable!” she shouted. “I’m just a little uncomfortable because there’s an alien in my damn house!”

So much for trying to calm her down. “And there is going to be an alien in your damn house for some time,” he told her evenly. “So you should learn not to be uncomfortable.”

She glared at him. “I need to take the boards off my doors,” she said in a tight voice. She threw down her cleaning cloth, and marched out.

Tagen sighed and resisted the urge to go after her. The skill he would need with the language to make her mind easy was well beyond his current reach. Best to leave her be for now. He picked up his empty bowl and took it to the sink.

The human marched back into the kitchen and snatched the tool he had brought down for her off the table. “I forgot my hammer,” she snapped and took herself out again.

Tagen tried to get his teeth into his good intentions, and gave up. “Wait.”

She didn’t.

Tagen followed her, annoyed. “It is not my meaning to offend you,” he said.

“I’m not offended!”

It was nearly a shout. Tagen stopped in the hall and gave her rein to get well ahead of him. He watched her dig the teeth of the thing she called a ‘hammer’ under the restraining board and pull ineffectually at it. Her whole body was coiled like a spring. He needed to start over. He said, “Do not fear me. I mean you no harm.”

“I’m fine!” She planted her bare foot on the door jamb and heaved back with all her little might. “I’m not scared of y—oh!”

The board pulled free with a snap and a splinter and the human went flying. Tagen darted forward instinctively and caught her; she fit neatly into his open hands, as light as a child.

And she shrieked at the very instant of contact, bucking her hips and kicking so violently that Tagen was startled into letting go. She dropped onto her backside and was scrabbling away from him at once, the hammer raised and blindly swinging until her back struck the side of the sofa. “You leave me alone!” she screamed.

“I am,” he said, baffled.

She stared at him, breathing hard, clutching her hammer in both hands. Tagen kept back until he saw lucidity re-enter her mismatched eyes. She looked at the hammer and then put it down.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

Tagen picked up the hammer and tucked it into his belt. Then he hunkered down to put his eyes on level with hers and waited for her to look at him.

She avoided his gaze.

One of Tagen’s talons began to tak out the passing time on the wooden floor.

She hunched her shoulders. “Don’t touch me,” she said finally, still staring fixedly at her empty hand.

The urge, however childish, to reach out and poke her was very strong. Tagen restrained himself. There was a fear in her, but it was not for him, and as an officer, he had a duty even to her. “I will not harm you,” he said again. Much as he may be tempted to at times.

She mumbled something.

Tagen cocked his head to one side. “Repeat, please?”

Now she looked at him, her expression helpless and horribly sure. “Yes, you will,” she whispered.

He honestly could not say what he felt more in that moment as he stared back at her: regret for the storm he had brought into her orderly little life, or just profound irritation. However, it was obvious what showed more, because she flinched and looked away.