by Ruby Dixon
Harlow’s eyes widen and she chuckles, patting her heavily pregnant belly. “I do, huh?”
“Oh yeah, at least a pound,” I say cheerily. “So, what can I help with today?”
She looks at the scatter of broken components spread out on a table, a helpless look on her face. Some of them are larger—one even looks like a hair dryer—and some are so small that they’re no bigger than my pinky nail. Given that there’s literally a hundred of them neatly spread out before her, it looks like the world’s crappiest jigsaw puzzle. “Let me think. Not this—it’d take more time to explain this than it would for me to just do it myself.”
“Darn.” Secretly, I’m glad. I’m not good with puzzles.
Her expression brightens. “You can go check on the pods. It’s about time for the morning rounds anyhow.” She turns and moves to Rukh’s side, caressing his shoulder as she picks up another tablet on the table near him. I don’t miss the way he softens when she approaches, or the way he strokes her fingers lightly as she touches him. There’s so much fierce love for her in his eyes that it hurts me to look at it.
Well, that and it makes me envious, too. I’d love for someone to give me a look as hot as that one, especially years into a relationship.
Harlow turns away from him and waddles toward me, holding out the pad. “You remember how to operate this?”
“No? Wait.” I make a jerk-off motion in front of the pad. “Huh, didn’t turn it on.”
Harlow snort-giggles. “Very funny.” She does a double finger wiggle in the corner, and the screen changes. “Here are the notes. You remember—”
“I do, yup,” I tell her before she can launch into the explanation. I immediately feel bad for cutting her off and give her a smile. “Sorry. It’s just not my favorite chore.”
“Oh.” She bites her lip. “Well…maybe I can think of something else.”
“It’s okay,” I tell her as Rukh starts to glare in my direction. I know what he’s thinking—don’t stress out the already-stressed pregnant lady. I don’t want to, either. I just need to suck it up. “It’s something I can do, and I’m glad to help. I guess I’ll head out.”
“Thank you, Brooke. It really is appreciated.”
“Just send someone after me if I don’t come back in an hour,” I joke. Sorta.
Except I’m not joking all that much, I think, as I head out of the med bay and down one of the dark, twisting metal halls of The Tranquil Lady. The cargo bay creeps me out. It’s like something out of a horror movie. But Harlow can’t do everything herself, and I did stay behind to help. And I’m an adult. I shouldn’t be scared of people sleeping in coffin-like things. They’re harmless. They’re asleep. They won’t even know I’m there.
The more I tell myself that, maybe I’ll start to believe it.
For all that the ship looks massive outside, on the inside it’s a lot smaller. There are a lot of passageways, but the actual rooms themselves aren’t very big, except for the cargo bay. It’s clear that’s where most of the room is allocated, and going from the normal-sized tunnels to the big, yawning cargo bay is always a bit eerie. Add in the fact that it’s atmospherically dark, and it’s really not helping my horror movie ideas.
“You stayed behind to help, you ninny,” I tell myself, the closest thing I can get to a self-pep-talk. “So quit your bitching.”
Since we discovered the twenty pods of unconscious people that the slavers had with them, one of the focuses of our group—in addition to dismantling or removing any signals, traces, or records of our planet that might be stored—is keeping them safe.
Safe, and still securely in storage, asleep.
The consensus is that they’re slaves, after all. Slaves being carted off by slavers to take to the black market. Just what kind of slaves, though, we don’t know. There are four men, and they all look fierce and terrifying. Of course, I thought the sa-khui were fearsome when I first saw them, too, and now I’m no longer scared of them. The other sixteen are human women. All of them pose a problem. They could be innocent women dragged from their beds in the middle of the night—like me—or they could be humans who have been in the “system” so long that they’ve half forgotten how to be human, like Elly. And the guys? None of them are human, so no one knows anything about them. For now, it’s kinder to leave them asleep, where they don’t know what’s going on, until the sa-khui chief, Vektal, arrives.
He’s going to decide if we wake them up, and what we do with the ship.
I move down the long row of pods in the cargo bay, thinking about the people sleeping here. Was I in one of these when I was kidnapped? If so, how long was I under? I don’t remember anything like this. I just remember going to sleep after a party and waking up and finding myself in a holding cell, surrounded by aliens. I had no clothes, and for a while, I thought it was just a really vivid bad dream. After a few days, when I didn’t wake up, I had to accept the fact that it was reality, and a waking nightmare. I shudder, thinking of the aliens that poked and prodded me, exclaiming over my hair and my boobs. Oddly enough, I thought my large boobs were going to paint a target on me, like they did back when I was in middle school and grew into double-D-cups long before the other girls filled out A-cups. Turns out that aliens aren’t much fans of big boobs, and I got rejected by more weird-looking alien buyers than the small-breasted girls.
God bless my great big tatas.
I move to the first of the coffins—excuse me, pods—and tap the button on the top corner of the control panel. A bright flood of weird-looking characters covers the small screen, looking like nothing more than a bunch of dashes, wiggles, and dots. Space cuneiform, I decide, comparing the message to the one written on my tablet. I can’t read alien writing, but Harlow has walked me through enough to show me what the screen should look like when I punch the button, and so I compare the characters, wiggle by painstaking squiggle, to make sure that everything matches up. If something doesn’t, I have to go get Harlow or Mardok because there’s a problem of some kind.
As jobs go, this is a pretty easy one. Time consuming, but easy. I compare writing, check each pod, and go. But because I’m a chicken, it creeps me out. It’s so quiet in the cargo bay, and the room’s so big. And I’m so alone with a bunch of “dead”-seeming people. Maybe that’s why it freaks me out. Or maybe it’s their expressions, I decide as I lean over the pod to stare into the sleeping face of one of the strangers. They look dead, or like mannequins. No breath fogs the glass on the pod, and they don’t twitch or move like people do in sleep. They’re completely and utterly still, like dolls waiting to be taken out of the box to be played with. The analogy creeps me out, because it’s far too real. I gaze down at the face of the guy in the pod, wondering about him. He’s a strange shimmering gold all over, with a pattern on his skin that looks almost like scales, and his hair is thick and sticks up like an animal mane—
“Buh-brukh,” a voice says, and I yelp, jerking backward in surprise.
I nearly drop the tablet in my hands, scrambling to hold on to it. “Jesus, you scared the shit out of me, Taushen. Don’t fucking do that!”
“Do what?” He leans to one side in the doorway, the picture of insolence. His expression is hard. “Address you by name?”
“Sneak up on me,” I snap at him. “I realize you blue dudes have catlike stealth, but I’m a human and I can’t hear when you sneak up.” I clutch the tablet hard and move on to coffin number two. “And don’t think I didn’t notice that little jab about my name, dickface.”
He snorts. “I came to ask if you needed assistance with anything.”
“If I want your help, I’ll tell you,” I say, giving him my sweetest, fakest smile, and lean over the second coffin and jab the button. Wiggles flood the screen, but I’m not going to be able to compare the two until Taushen leaves and stops distracting me. I stare at the screen anyhow, doing my best to look busy.
“Like that night we were trapped together?”
I jerk upright, gasping at him. “Ho
His jaw flexes and he looks pissed. “Perhaps I did not wish to be saved.”
“Really? I didn’t notice you protesting when I touched you. Or when you grabbed my tits and pushed my thighs apart. Or when you groaned my name as you came. Twice.” I give him a tight smile. “During which of those times did you protest? Can you refresh my memory? I must not be remembering correctly.”
Taushen’s eyes narrow and he straightens. For a moment, he looks like he wants to say something—and it’s not something nice. Instead, though, he just whirls on one foot and storms away in a cloud of black hair.
“Fuck you, too,” I mutter, and try to get back to work.
Of course, I can’t. I’m trembling as I think about that night.
Everything changed that night, and I don’t know if I’m ever going to forget how it felt.
2
BROOKE
One Week Ago
“A ship’s landing,” Gail calls out, surprised. “Come and see.”
I rouse myself from my furs, but just a little. I’m supposed to be sick, after all. Summer would kill me if she knew that I’d bailed out on our fruit-gathering run just because I wanted to avoid a man.
One man in particular.
Taushen.
I don’t know what to make of that particular sa-khui male. The married—sorry, mated—ones are all very nice and super devoted to their wives. The single ones are a lot harder to make heads or tails of. I’ve tried flirting—and flirting heavily—to test the waters. Being a pretty girl can be powerful. Considering I’ve got no skills except hairdressing, I’m at a distinct disadvantage here in the wild. If the only things I’ve got going for me are a vagina and boobs, I’m going to have to use them to the best of my ability. It doesn’t work out so well, though. Of the single men, Harrec is clearly enamored of Kate, and Warrek might as well be a statue. Only Taushen replies to my flirting, and it’s usually with a scowl. It’s clear that he doesn’t find me attractive and doesn’t like me in the slightest.
So when I heard that Warrek, Summer, me, and Taushen were all supposed to go to the fruit caves overnight to gather supplies? I feigned cramps…and then a migraine, just to cover my bases. No way am I going on that trip. Maybe that makes me a jerk, but the thought of Taushen glaring at me all day when I try to be friendly just makes me shrivel up inside a little.
“I’m serious,” Gail says, standing in the doorway of the Elders’ Ship and gazing out into the snowy sky. “It’s a ship. I know you feel lousy right now, but come look and tell me I’m not crazy.”
She’s not going to let this go until I come and check it out. With a groan, I drag myself out of bed and stagger over to where she’s standing. “What? Are you sure it’s not just a big bird?” I peer past her shoulder and then pause in surprise. Huh. It is a ship. “Doesn’t that look like…”
“The ship we got here on? Yup. Unless all alien ships look the same.” Gail looks worried.
“Doesn’t look like this one,” I point out. It’s all sleek-looking, whereas the one we’re on is more blobby and rounded. Of course, that might be the heaps of snow covering it or the fact that it’s falling down around our ears.
“No, you’re right.” She presses her fingers to her mouth and then glances over at me. “You don’t think they’re coming back to get us, do you?”
I clutch at her arm, sick at the thought. The people that brought us here bought us as slaves and then dumped us as a “favor” to the tribe here. While I’m grateful I’m not a slave anymore, I’d also rather be back on Earth. But there’s no reason for them to come back…unless it’s what Gail’s saying. They’re coming back to grab us. “Should we hide?”
“Is that one of the flying caves?” a voice booms out. It’s Vaza, Gail’s blue boyfriend. He’s older than the others, though you wouldn’t know it based off of how he looks. Other than a few gray streaks in his black hair, he’s just as built as all these other guys. “Shail, did you see?”
“I saw,” she tells him. “Vaza, what if they’re here to take us back?” She puts an arm around my shoulders, and I’m not sure if it’s because she thinks I need the support, or if she needs someone to hang on to.
“Never,” he says staunchly. “You are here now. You have a khui. It cannot be stolen from you.”
Vaza may be sure about that, but I seem to recall a lot of medical technology on the ship, and I’m not sure he’s right. Either way, it doesn’t ease my fears.
Nor Gail’s, it seems. She still casts worried looks at the doorway. “Should we go out and say hello?”
We watch as the ship settles onto the snow close by. The ramp lowers, but no one gets out. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle.
“Did you hear something?” Harrec pushes his way into the main living area of the ship, a fur blanket wrapped around his hips. He’s naked otherwise, and behind him, a disheveled Kate follows, almost as nude. Clearly the ship landing interrupted some hanky-panky.
Rukh and Harlow appear out of another passageway, Rukhar holding his mother’s hand. Behind them are Farli and Mardok, and in the space of a breath, Bek and Elly appear as well. Well, crap. Everyone’s here now except Taushen, Warrek, and Summer, who are off at the fruit cave. At least Taushen’s not here to bug me.
“What was that?” someone asks.
“They have returned,” says a voice behind me. Oh no. I look at the ramp into the Elders’ Ship to see Taushen coming inside. He looks slightly sweaty, as if he ran all the way here.
Vaza exclaims at the sight of him. “Taushen? Why have you returned?”
“It is not important.” He flicks a quick look at me and then focuses on the others. “Suh-mer and Warrek continued on to the fruit caves. I did not, and came back just in time to see the new cave land.”
“It’s a ship,” I correct him crabbily. “It’s not a flying cave. It’s a spaceship.”
“It’s fine,” Gail says in a soothing voice, patting my shoulder. She casts another worried look at Vaza. “But shouldn’t we go out and say hello?”
“Of course,” Vaza booms, ever-cheerful. He gives Gail another adoring look. “Anything for you.”
“Not just for her,” I mutter, crossing my arms, but Gail nudges me.
“I will go with you,” Harrec says, knotting the fur at his waist and moving to Vaza’s side. Rukh surges forward, too.
Bek touches Elly’s cheek. “Stay here, safe with the other females. I will find out what is happening.”
She nods, and I can see she’s trembling, her shoulders hunched. Poor Elly. I have a sick knot in my gut at the thought of the Tranquil Lady returning, because I don’t want to be taken back. I can’t imagine the hell that she’s going through right now, given that she was a slave for a lot longer than the rest of us.
Gail must sense how Elly’s feeling, because she immediately crosses over to her side and grabs one of the furs from my bed, wrapping it around Elly. “Come sit down, honey. You’re pale.” She pulls Elly toward the fire, clucking over her.
“No, no,” I mutter to myself. “I’m fine now, Gail. Really. I didn’t need that blanket.”
Taushen snorts, the only person close enough to hear my grumblings.
I shoot him a quick look, hoping he doesn’t expose my crankiness to the others, but he says nothing. He’s watching the other hunters head down the ramp, led by Vaza with Mardok not far behind him. “Shouldn’t you go join them?” I ask him, hoping he’ll leave.
But he only shakes his head and grips his spear tightly in one hand, gaze on the snowy plain that the others are crossing. “Someone must guard the females.”
I’m about to point out that we shouldn’t need guarding from the crew of the Tranquil Lady when Vaza stumbles and falls down. It’s so unlike one of the graceful sa-khui that I gasp in surprise. But when Taushen flings himself in front of me, a growl in his throat, I realize Vaza didn’t fall down by accident after all.
He’s been shot.
“What’s happening?” I whisper, trying to peer over Taushen’s shoulder. He’s well over a foot taller than me, and I can’t see, so I grab his brawny blue bicep and try to peek around him.
Taushen growls low in his throat, and for a moment I think he’s mad at me for trying to get around him—but then I see a bright flash. There’s a man standing on the ramp of the other ship, a long, thin weapon propped at his shoulder just like a rifle. At least, I think it’s a man. It’s two-legged, but he’s got an orange bubblehead and round, fishlike eyes. He stands over Vaza’s fallen body and nudges it with the end of his gun. I realize with horror that Vaza’s not the only one on the ground, and there are others scattered in the snow. As I watch, another orange alien comes down the ramp, too. He’s got a gun as well and waves it at the wreck of the ship we’re currently standing in.
Someone moans behind me. It’s Gail. “Are they dead?” she whispers.
“They are twitching,” Taushen says, voice cold. His grip is tight on the door jamb. “But they do not move otherwise.”
“Maybe…maybe they shocked them?” I ask. I can’t look away. The sa-khui are scattered in the snow before the newcomers, and it’s clear they tried to race away the moment they started shooting. “I didn’t hear gunshots, but maybe they’re not regular guns…”
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