by Raven Dark
Words were exchanged as the men gathered their weapons. Raul hefted his axe and issued what sounded like orders as he cleaned his axe on the front of his poncho. Then he headed for his hepta, grabbing the end of my leash and dragging me with him.
I expected him to hand me over to Z’pheer, since most of the time he didn’t seem to want me with him. Instead, he rumbled something at Z’pheer, and without waiting for him to reply, lifted me up onto his mount. He swung on behind me.
I looked back at Z’pheer on his own mount. For some reason he was chuckling, his eyes twinkling as Raul caged me in his huge arms.
I twisted in the saddle and glanced at the grey-white-skinned creatures on the jungle floor, then up at my golden-eyed giant of a captor. I furrowed my brow hoping he understood my question.
What were those things?
His chest rose and fell hard, his nostrils flaring with the unmistakable intensity of a man feeling extreme hatred for an enemy.
“Rith,” Raul gritted out, answering what I couldn’t ask, his arm imprisoning me against him. “Sul falt Rith, nayna.”
I swallowed, pretty sure I understood enough, even if I didn’t understand the words.
Those were the Rith.
My own breaths came out fast and hard, and suddenly, I was as afraid of Raul as I was of the Rith he’d just killed. He looked like a beast on the verge of claiming a prize.
As we headed deeper in the jungle and made our way to points unknown, two things became painfully clear.
His world was in trouble…and so was I.
5
Nayna
We rode in silence.
As the minutes crawled by, a frightening anger pounded off the men, animosity I could all but feel on my skin like an unseen energy. The emotions hung like a cloud, thick and inescapable.
It was hatred for those creatures. For the Rith.
As on the ship, a hundred questions hammered at my thoughts, each as unanswerable as the last, what with the muzzle keeping me gagged and the communication barrier that still lay between me and the men.
In the wake of the battle, nearly mind-numbing fear permeated my thoughts once again. I wished I could have found comfort in these three barbarian strangers, but I didn’t. Instead, I felt as unsafe as I had during the battle itself.
Raul kept me imprisoned in his arms, his warm chest almost burning through the thin cloth of my poncho and that ridiculous red garb. Once in a while, he’d put his nose in my hair or run it along the side of my neck and hum with satisfaction deep in his throat. Everything about him indicated dark dominance and a predatory desire that hovered just under the surface of his trained warrior self-discipline.
I couldn’t ignore the notion that he seemed always on the verge of doing me some kind of harm.
To make matters worse, Malek seemed to get a kick out of his behavior with me, but I couldn’t have said what that meant. Z’pheer was no better, watching the two of us with amusement.
We kept a slow, careful pace through the jungle, alert for danger, but none appeared. Without dismounting, the men took care of their wounds, cleaning and patching them up from supplies in one of Z’pheer’s packs. About twenty minutes after the confrontation with the Rith, we arrived at one of those towering obelisks. Malek insisted on going in alone, ignoring Raul when he ordered him back.
Z’pheer stayed back with us, bringing his hepta up alongside Raul’s and watching Malek disappear through a set of double doors at the front of the structure.
A short time later, Malek returned to us and looked up at Raul.
As he spoke, a heaviness dripped from every word. Something was wrong inside that building.
Raul cursed and dropped his head like a man offering a moment of silence. He swung down from his hepta and pulled me down into his arms, then set me on my feet. Z’pheer dismounted as well.
The men made their way to posts near the front entrance and tied their mounts there. Raul tugged me along by the leash, winding it around his wrist to keep me close, Tarku at his side. After what had just happened in that jungle, I wouldn’t have argued with him even if I could have.
As soon as we stepped inside the massive front hall of the building, I knew what was wrong. Aside from the eerie silence that lay over the place, where nothing and no one moved, there was no light except from the sunlight streaming through the high windows. A sheen of dust lay on the floor.
And the whole place reeked with the pungent smell of death.
My eyes watered with the smell, and I covered my nose with the side of my hood. The men were doing the same. Tarku’s ears went back on his head, and he let out a low growl from deep in his throat.
The men whispered among themselves, the tones urgent. Not for the first time, I wished I could have understood them. What had happened here? What was this place? People had died here. Had the Rith killed them?
Malek stopped us at the entrance and went back outside. When he came back, he had a thick branch in his hand, the end of it wrapped in cloth and lit for a torch. The flames cast the long, dank hall in a haunting orange glow.
I initially thought we’d entered a tower that didn’t have electrical power, until I looked up at the ceiling. Thirty feet above me, large domed light fixtures identical to those in the ship glared down like white eyeballs in the shadows. Those were electrical lights, or at least ones that used something comparable. I assumed the Rith had hit this place, and the attack caused a power outage.
Malek cast the torchlight around the hall. I gasped, shirking away from what the shadows had been hiding.
Fuck. Bodies lay everywhere. Some were dressed like my captors, in those reptilian leather pants. Warriors killed in battle, some with weapons still in their stone-cold grips. Others wore the forest-colored ponchos, and others, long dark cloaks or robes.
“Rosht.” Raul’s curse echoed softly in the hall.
Rosht indeed. I hated that I’d pressed against him like some fragile, shrinking violet.
Making his way across the hall and down a set of steps on the other side, Raul kept me close, his hand gripping my shoulder. I refused to think he held me that way out of protectiveness. It felt more possessive. Malek followed along with Z’pheer, letting the fire from the torch illuminate the darkness.
At the bottom of the steps, an open doorway led into a room the size of an airplane hangar, with a high ceiling and a dusty floor. There was no power in here, either. Wide computer monitors lined the back wall, desks scattered with books and papers and some kind of tech equipment. All the monitors were black, the papers and books dusty.
This place had been hit some time ago.
Two bodies were slumped in chairs in front of the monitors. My stomach turned looking at them. There wasn’t much left but dusty clothes draped over skeleton and sinew. Nothing moved. I covered my nose again, holding off the sickly-sweet scent of decay.
Raul said something to his companions and pulled me toward the monitors, the others following. He tried turning the monitors on, but they remained black. Malek pushed one of the bodies out of a chair and took the seat, speaking to Raul as he tried to work the keys on the control panels.
My gaze inevitably went to the body on the floor. In the firelight of Malek’s torch, the skeleton’s red and gold robes stood out, clothes that had once been elegant. I caught sight of a circular patch sown onto the breast of the cloak. In red and black, the insignia on the patch looked like a series of planets around one larger world. The same alien lettering I’d seen on the ship’s screen earlier were stenciled in black around the edges of the symbol.
I wished I could have understood what those letters meant.
Malek was still working at the keys, turning knobs and fiddling with wires. None of the equipment appeared to be working.
There was a sharp, distant cough.
Raul’s head snapped around, his gaze on the entrance to a hall across the room to his left. He gave Malek an order, but the purple-eyed alien was already striding across the room to
the hall, Z’pheer hurrying after.
Both men disappeared before Malek called out.
“Raul!”
Raul pulled me and Tarku into the hall and found Malek kneeling in front of what looked to have been a well-hidden panel in the wall. He’d opened it and was in the middle of pulling a thrashing, wriggling creature out of it.
Only when we came closer did I realize it wasn’t an animal. It was a woman, the only one I’d seen since I’d been taken from Earth. Malek pushed her back up against the wall, one hand tangled in her thick, matted hair.
I gasped. The woman didn’t have strange eyes like the men, and she was a lot smaller. She was my size, but a lot thinner, her face emaciated and drawn, and much too pale.
She was about my age or a little older.
And human.
She was also dressed in the same obscenely red, too short cloth I wore under my poncho. A collar like mine encircled her neck, a leash hanging from the silvery loop at the front.
A sickening dread crawled its way into my gut. Why the hell was she dressed like me? And how come I had a horrible feeling I knew her? Her heart-shaped face and jade green eyes looked stunningly familiar.
Malek snarled a bunch of alien words at her, but she turned her face away, jaw set. Determined. I could see the hate in those eyes. Hate for the aliens with me.
God, I knew those eyes.
Malek ripped her face around to his and spat more words. Raul squatted on her other side and did the same, but in a more controlled tone.
When the woman still refused to answer whatever they were asking her, Z’pheer caught Raul’s attention. He spoke, gesturing to me.
Raul sighed and stood. He took the muzzle off my head and turned me to face the woman. “Faus,” he ordered.
I glanced at him, working my mouth and flexing my jaw. “What?” God, it felt good to speak again.
“Faus,” he repeated coldly.
Somehow I understood. “You want me to talk to her.”
“Daz.”
Maybe it was out of some sense of solidarity with her—either as a human trapped on this world or a female—or maybe it was just out of sheer dislike for Raul, but I had a sudden strong urge to refuse. She was hiding something, and some part of me wanted to keep her secrets in order to maintain a last sense of freedom for her.
Except a selfish need to have my own questions answered overrode all of that. Plus the memory of Raul’s hand across my face. Fuck, I was a coward. A traitor to all female kind.
I squatted in front of her. “Hey,” I said gently, catching her attention. Hoping to calm her down and engender trust. Shit, Raul was using my connection to her as a human—and probably as a woman—to get what he wanted from her.
And I was letting him.
The woman turned her face to me, but she seemed to be looking right through me rather than at me. I moved closer and was about to speak again, but I froze, staring at her shoulder in the light.
The red dress she wore was ripped at the shoulder and down her arm, exposing a bloodied gouge. The blood had dried, leaving a trail that ran down her arm. My own blood ran cold. The gouge was right where the translator was on my shoulder. It looked as if she’d cut the translator out of herself, but why?
“Hey,” I said again, waiting until her eyes focused on me.
As if seeing me for the first time, the woman blinked at me, her eyes huge. “Dan…” She coughed, her voice raw with disuse.
I licked my lips. “What’s your name?”
Did I want to know the answer? Where the hell did I know her from?
She gave a wry smile, looking over my collar and leash, then at the muzzle in Raul’s hand. “I see—”cough “—I see you’ve gotten the same treatment already. When did they take you?”
“What? You mean when did they kidnap me? I have no idea.”
“Because you were in cry…cryo-sleep.”
So that’s why I’d felt like I’d slept for a thousand years. Jesus. “How about you? How long for you?”
She gave a wracking cough. “Two…two years.” Her eyes flicked to the men and grew dark with hate. “Did they…did they take you yet?”
I had the sinking feeling she meant a different type of take than kidnap. “What?”
“They will, you know.”
Malek seized her hair again. “Vak nan, nayna,” he snapped.
“Malek, back the hell off,” I said. “You want answers, let me get them. What’s your name?”
She swallowed heavily, but when she lifted her head, her eyes locking on mine, I already knew. Recognition hit me like a ton of bricks.
“Gwen,” I rasped. “Jesus. You went missing two years ago.” She’d said that, but the impact only hit me now. I pushed down the dread that choked me and touched her arm. “Gwen, what happened here?”
Malek’s hand snaked out, pushing my hand away from her and growling a few words at me. I ignored him and focused on her.
“Ri—Rith. Attacked.” She descended into coughs.
The firelight caught her arm, and I saw a beautiful tattoo there, wending its way like thin vines along her arm until it disappeared under the red cloth that covered her shoulder.
“They cut the power,” she went on. “Took out most of the planet’s infrastructure. Took the women from this place. And half the warriors. In cages. I hid…don’t know how they didn’t find me.”
“Why did they attack? What do they want?” I asked.
“Everything. They want everything this world has. And they came for… him.” She nodded to Raul.
I glanced at him, but his face was expressionless, giving me nothing. Why was he so important to the Rith?
“What happened to everyone?” I focused on Gwen again. “Are they all dead?”
Gwen nodded weakly. “Everyone. My masters, too.”
“Wait. Masters?”
She grinned horribly. “It will happen to you, too.”
“What? What will happen?”
She put her head back, defeated, her eyes listless on me. “It happens to all of us eventually, after they take us.”
“Astak, nayna,” Raul drawled in a tone of warning. She ignored him.
I was beginning to wonder if I wanted to know what the word nayna even meant.
“The hard part is coming for you soon, Danika.” Gwen’s eyes suddenly looked pitying. “Way of the world, that’s what they’ll tell you.” She gave another half mad laugh, glaring at the men accusingly. “Welcome to your new life. Welcome to Xandar, Danika.”
That single word speared through me like a knife. I could hardly process the implications.
Xandar. As in the fucking Xandar Home for fucking Girls.
I was about to round on Raul and demand to know what the hell was happening here, but Gwen’s next words caught my attention as she turned her eyes to Malek.
“Kill me, alien. Please. You’ll be doing me a favor.”
Without the slightest change in his expression, Malek clapped his hands on either side of her head.
“Malek, wait no!”
It was too late. His hands gave a hard jerking twist.
Gwen slumped against the wall, her eyes open, unseeing.
I covered my mouth, trying not to scream. Or puke.
Rational fled from me. Rage and horror welled up, both boiling in my blood for Gwen and however many other Xandar girls had ended up on this damn planet. The next moment, I was on my feet and punching at Malek’s chest.
“Why did you do that!” I screamed, sobbing. “Why did you kill her! You didn’t have to kill her, you didn’t have to do that…” For Christ sake, I was crying like a baby. For a girl I didn’t even really know beyond news reports and stories.
Malek shrugged and stepped back, unaffected by my assault. A darkly playful, knowing smile toyed with his lips. At the same time, Raul swung the muzzle over my head. His fingers shoved the rubbery tongue piece into my mouth, past my teeth. His huge hand covered it, keeping it in place, and then he yanked the buckle c
losed at the back of my head.
Silencing me.
I wailed helplessly into the gag, huffing huge, frightened breaths.
Raul caged me against him, and his mouth brushed my ear.
Alien words fell from his lips, dark and insidious and full of danger. I had no clue what the hell he said, but his tone mocked my rage while he stroked my hair back off my forehead.
Perhaps he was reminding me that Gwen—Gwen Donnel, missing from Xandar Home for fucking Girls—had asked to be killed. That it was a mercy killing. Or perhaps he was telling me the same thing would happen to me if I didn’t pipe down. If he’d said it was a righteous killing, I didn’t believe him. If he’d told me I’d meet the same end if I didn’t toe the line, that, unfortunately, I did believe.
I deflated against him, unwilling to risk that I wasn’t right about his words.
Raul made a soft, shushing noise in my ear, his palm cupping my forehead. “Nist, nayna. Nist. Damka, nayna.”
I let my eyes close. Tears splashed, hot on my cheeks.
Gwen’s words whirled through my mind.
Did they take you?
My masters are dead.
Masters.
Nayna.
She wore the same clothes as me. With a fucking collar.
Two understandings hit home then. One, the place I’d called my home for four years had been involved in my abduction. Not just Sauders and Shelly, but the organization itself, and I wasn’t even the only one they’d sold to an alien race. And two, I was pretty sure I knew what these men wanted from me and what the word nayna meant.
These barbarians, these men who’d just killed an innocent girl in front of me, wanted me for sex…and the word nayna was their word for slave.
6
The Price of Defiance
What I’d done was incredibly stupid.
Beating on Malek and screaming at him like a banshee had been the epitome of stupidity; I knew that in the deepest part of my soul, but I couldn’t make myself care.
