Epiphanies

Seeing no threat, he looked back to the young woman and said, “What did you say?”

She was thin, though not frail, and though she was dressed in a manner by no means too outré for Olkney, the details of her costume said she had acquired it on some other world. Depending from a chain around her neck was a yellow stone carved roughly in the semblance of a human face.

She swallowed and looked straight at him with wide-set, pale eyes. “I said I need your help.” She swallowed again and added, “Uncle Luff.”