by Amanda Milo
Enjoying the heat in his eyes now, I put my hands on his chest. “I don’t speak in tiger. What was that order you just snarled at me?”
He releases one of those man-growl breaths and it would sound super sexy if it wasn’t me that he was aiming it at. I eye the width of his broad shoulders, taking in his pissed-but-still-hot look.
Hm. Maybe sexy aimed at me after all.
“You’re starving. You two are starving to death right before my eyes.”
You two.
I check my hand before I can touch my stomach.
“And don’t eat anything else,” he warns me.
I give him the look that this asinine order deserves. “And when they move to shoot me, you’ll take the bullet?”
“YES.”
“And when you’re dead?”
I get another man-growl for my trouble, but I also get a bicep squeeze that hopefully looks like he’s doing his duty and bossing me around, because it sure feels reassuring and very… fond.
I can tell from the killing glares I’m getting from my fellow inmates that whatever it looks like, they think I’ve got it better than them.
I’m so going to get shivved.
I give Drogan a moment before I pull away, and walk ahead of him. When I return to the rest of the inmates, I am yet again disgusted with the part of my brain that is happy for an honest-to-God group-based activity, even if we are facing certain death stranded on a strange planet with creepy creatures and trigger happy guards.
Maybe it’s the cold turkey off the project treatment cocktail that my body has gotten used to being provided by now, but I feel very strange. I feel myself space out, just for a second, an image of Charlie popping up front and center in my mind. I can almost hear her voice. Being distracted could get me eaten by a facehugger or something; I need to stay sharp, but I can’t force myself to stop from spinning around anyway, even as I’m thinking, this is exactly how I’m going to get grabbed, it’ll be by some deadly creature while I’m busy looking for—
“CHARLIE!” I shriek.
Two things: I’m not crazy, because Charlie really is right here, she is not a figment of my overactive or overstressed imagination, and when she throws her arms around me, her cuffed hands hooking the back of my neck, I smugly think; I wasn’t wrong—this IS a deadly creature.
After all, this is my badass sister.
Grinning, squeezing her hard, I’m jarred by the sudden realization that I’m feeling. Warmth, relief, worry, affection, and sadness—this last one because if Charlie is here, in prison, she wrecked her life—her career—heck, with what they’d have to do in order to crack a person as strong as Charlie?—her sanity in order to save me.
And oh how entertaining she’d have been; a shiny, tough, brave, fascinating toy. Of course they’d want to play with her.
Aw, Charlie.
When she pulls back, I know exactly what she’s seeing, and I know she’s going to worry, so I’m compelled to jump in with sisterly love. I peer at her raccoon mask. “How’s your side of the accommodations in Alphapod? My room service doesn’t fold the towels into swans and I’m going to write to the head of the company about it.”
She goes in for another hug, and I know shit’s serious. Sure, my underfed appearance isn’t helping, but another lesson our dad taught us? Everybody can be broken. Charlie is so strong.
Right now, she doesn’t look it.
It’s killing me.
I aim to tease her out of this mood. I start by eyeing her suit. “You look like a fucking radioactive pumpkin.”
The sadness and pain in her eyes flickers for a brief beat as her lips twitch. “I think what you mean is I look like I’m fucking a radioactive pumpkin.”
I let my brows climb. “It does look like the orange thing is on you. And with your hair—damn, girl. I’d say you look good in blaze orange, but I’ve heard there are good things in the afterlife. I don’t want to be barred from the fun for telling an untruth of these proportions.”
She glances down at herself. “For your information, I believe this shade is more politely referred to as ‘saffron.’”
“Like… ‘sorry I’m affronted by that eyesore-shade?’ ‘Saffronted, saffron; I can see it,” I say, smiling even as I mock contemplate—because Charlie’s whooping with laughter now, and it’s good to hear, and for now, for just this moment, it’s normal again. Everything’s okay. She’s not hurting, and I’m not… not what I’ve turned into, and she didn’t just fuck up her life to rescue me, and we’re not both stranded on an alien planet right now.
“Preta,” she gasps, still bent at the waist, her hands still on her knees from where she was slapping them a moment before, enjoying the briefest spark of hilarity.
“Don’t,” I whisper. My throat is already tight.
She nods and straightens. “Yeah.”
Not ready to return to the grimness of our situation yet, I eye her. “Since when do you know fancy names for fashion colors?” I can tell I drive her nuts, and I love it. I miss it. I don’t like how haunted she still looks. “And what’d they do to you during your stay at casa de torture chamber? Fun things?”
“It was the vacation I’d never dreamed of.”
A hand lands on her shoulder and yanks her backwards, and just like that; reality gives us the bum-rush.
It provides a learning opportunity though; Charlie’s expression doesn’t flicker as she nails her guard in the face using her elbow, and I can hear his nose break, and this is why my sister is my hero—she’s just cool.
“Impressive!” I call to her, but she’s in the zone and I don’t think she hears me.
Apparently, I should have stopped gawking and paid more attention to our surroundings—'Points off for lack of situational awareness,’ as our dad would tease—because I don’t see the two guards until they’re nearly on top of Charlie and she’s up on the balls of her feet, her muscles coiling, shoulders squaring as she prepares to take them head-on. I see more of them spilling from the ship—baton sticks out. My heart flatlines. Bullets might be permanent but I’ve seen enough prisoners die to know that at least most of the time it’s as close to instantaneous as any death gets. Voltage though? You can’t fight against it, and unfortunately, these guys are pros: they’ll make us wish we were dead.
I hate these sticks.
If Charlie had a distraction, she could take them and we can—
A guard pulls out his pistol.
Okay, I hate the sticks, they make us wish for death, etcetera, etcetera, so on and so forth but no matter how much I complain, bullets are worse. It’s the whole permanency thing. I don’t want my sister dead!
This time, I only whisper, but this time, she does hear me: “Charlie, don’t.”
She looks torn, confused even, and in that moment the men perform a tackle worthy of taking down a four hundred pound quarterback.
Assholes!
“Don’t hurt her!”
They rub her face in the damn dirt like a bad dog on carpet.
I slam my fist into the throat of the guard that’s kneeling on my sister’s back.
“That’ll be enough!” a guard almost jerks me off my feet.
I wish it had been Drogan that had found us. He’d have been able to break this up and mitigate the damage. The guy who holds me is riling up the guard with the broken nose, and the way that guy’s glaring at Charlie says he has a grudge and a major score to settle. Not good. I sit down meekly, hoping they won’t hurt her any worse, and then I see her smirk.
I breathe the biggest sigh of relief. Charlie may have taken a beating here.
But she’s not broken.
***
Sighing and grumbling, I spit on my knuckles, and wipe them on my suit. It’s supposed to be self-cleaning. The government commissioned the design, trying to save money considering the water filtration needs of a spaceship of this size would be horrendous, but incidental bonus? This has probably saved most of us from a traumatizing Shawshank scene: no washday
s, yay! But it’s self-cleaning, not magic. Maybe in a few days the nanofibers or whatever makes it so it never has to be washed will be able to combat the worst of it, but until then? I’m covered in blood and dirt and honestly, all I want is a decent meal, a clean change of clothes, and a hot shower—and not in that order.
“What the hell happened to your hand?”
Tipping my head back and seeing Drogan’s stormy expression makes me smile. “The way you just asked me that? I know that it was really manspeak for, ‘Aww, baby, you’re hurt, and it makes me concerned.’”
He huffs, and I think it’s a laugh.
He surprises me when his voice pitches lower, and it still comes out rough, but it’s tender when he tries again. “Awww, baby. Your hand is fucking hurt. I’m pissed. What happened?”
I don’t huff. I do laugh. “I want to hug you right now, you dork.”
He tugs me until we’re standing off in the dark, just slightly apart from the group, and growls into my ear, “I want to do more than hug you.”
YES. I want this too.
I want this very much.
One of the guards begins addressing everybody.
My vagina is silently crying ‘DAMN IT!’
I shift my weight, preparing to rejoin the suicide squad. “It looks like he’s pontificating on important things we should know before they send the prisoners to forage.”
Drogan catches my wrist and kisses my owie. Germs and all. My heart kind of goes melty.
“Before you trot back there, how hot you feelin’? Scale one to ten.”
He’s not talking about a Miss America scale of hotness. He’s talking about my out of control libido. He doesn’t wait for my answer, he simply tows me along, and when I see that Charlie’s got her eyes locked on the ground and that we’re not going to be allowed to chat, I follow Drogan as he picks his way back to the ship, keeping just outside of the floodlights.
“My sister is here,” I blurt, but I feel my excitement… dulling. Like the barred doors that roll down at night to protect shops in the mall. Charlie came to save me but I can’t see a way for us to get home. She gave up everything to try, but we’re both stuck. We don’t even know what planet we crashed on, or where Earth is from here, which’ll be kind of an important thing if the Alphapod can be repaired enough for the rigors of takeoff and space travel.
Unlikely.
Drogan’s pace stutters, but he doesn’t break from guiding me along. “Your sister? Both of you are here? What the…?”
I force him to stop within the lit area so that I can see his face when I say, “What do you think I did to get here?”
Drogan has nice eyes. They look incredibly sad now as he gazes down at me. “Nothing that earned you this.”
I feel my lips tip up. “You sound so sure.”
The longer he stares at me, the less sad he appears, and the hotter his eyes get. “Get moving before we give everyone a show.”
“Oooh. Yes, sir!”
He gooses me and when I slap a hand over my mouth in shock, he tosses me a smirk. “Oh yeah, hardened criminal.”
He urges me forward and instead of taking us up one of the well-lit ramps, he sneaks us through the dark cargo doorway. I do trust him enough that I don’t ask questions—at least, not until he seals the big door behind us, plunging us into complete blackness. “What are you—”
“Shhh. Relax,” he breathes into my ear as he nuzzles my hair with his nose. “Or this is never going to work. And call me Ryan.”
This shuts me up. Ryan? Ryan Drogan. I didn’t know his first name. I didn’t know the father of my baby’s name.
“What’s your middle name?” I ask, suddenly fighting a sense that we’re running out of time.
He laughs softly into my suit as he lowers himself in front of me. “Later. For now, shut up, and let me take care of you.”
As I spread my fingers over hair that is regularly acquainted with electric clippers, I take advantage of a sense of relaxation that I haven’t enjoyed since pre-Concord as he delivers on his promise and provides me with assistance in reaching that orgasm that I’ve desperately needed.
“How do you feel?” he asks quietly.
“Like I don’t need to kill anyone,” I slur, and he rasps a chuckle.
“I meant with you being… how’s our Drogan-Sol?”
I jolt. “Cute!” I shake my head and try to make him out in the darkness. “Fine. I’m fine. As far as I know, we’re fine.”
My skin jumps when my stomach is bared, his big rough hand sliding up to block my undershirt before I feel his lips pressing softly against my abdomen, and for the first time, it isn’t sexual. How… odd.
Blink.
“Preta...”
I try to figure out what just happened. We’re at the door—I brought us here. My hand is tightly wrapped as far around Ryan’s thick wrist as my fingers can span, and I realize I dragged him here.
“What are those instincts urging you to do right now?” he asks, and I can hear unmasked curiosity.
“What do you know?” I counter.
There isn’t even a pause. “I’m a grunt. They don’t pay me to think, and they didn’t care what I overheard. I think I know a lot. And I think your maternal instincts are coming online, manifesting and tweaking with that military strategy playbook in your head.”
“Sounds about right,” I start slowly. “My sister, Charlie... I want to grab her, and you, and… I want to be safe. I need all of us to be safe.”
“And you’re feeling threatened. And when I kissed your skin, near the baby, what happened?”
I feel my cheeks heat, and I’m glad he can’t see. I try to break down what occured between the moment his lips tenderly skated over my skin, and he’s right—it’s the baby. It stopped being sexual, and all I wanted to do was protect little Drogan-Sol… and Drogan-Sol’s daddy. And aunt.
Drogan is following along without me voicing a thing, and his next words give me pause; he seems to have quite a grasp on motivations—my motivations—that even I don’t fully understand. “It initiated like a protect-mode, and you want to move your unit away from the threat.”
“Tell me something you know,” I urge. “One thing.”
Calloused fingers cup my chin. “I’ll tell you everything I know,” he promises.
“Now?”
His breath smells like me when he exhales a soft laugh against my face. “Your survival instinct is supposed to be higher than normal—you are supposed to absorb loss better, without the trauma. But yet, in theory, you’ll retain your loyalty to your surviving unit. That said, the thought of self-sacrifice doesn’t bother you, does it?”
The thought of it does not. “No.”
He’s hugging me now, and I can feel his chin booping the top of my head softly with his nod. “Right.”
A little self-examination, and I can sense what he’s talking about. I’d push Charlie down to take a bullet meant for her—but if it was a random inmate? Not ‘part of my unit’?
I’d let her eat it, and I’d live another day.
It feels like it should feel cold; but I don’t feel anything for the inmates—not the ones left here—there’s no loyalty, no love lost, so there’s none given.
“Someone with that trait would have an easier time during real war,” Drogan offers. “And part of your research was to provide programming for soldiers so they could make the transition from active duty to civilian easier to cope with. Obviously, the research team will never get a chance now to see this side, but someday you’ll be out of this, and safe, and your extra instincts will tone down. For now though, this is good.”
“...Why is it good?”
“The odds of us getting out of this alive—”
“Don’t say it.”
“Preta, let's be real. If it comes down to me or you two?”
He’s not talking Charlie.
“Pick you two, no matter if your instincts try to tell you otherwise.”
My nails dig into h
is back, and Drogan’s arms tighten around me, but I don’t make him any promises.
I don’t have to. He whispers into my ear, “Your head is telling you to be Team BabyDrogan-Sol, isn’t it?”
I nod into his shoulder, and he hugs me tighter.
CHAPTER 5
PRETA
The only good news about the darkness is that even when we catch up to my group, it hides Drogan’s proximity to me. His voice is low and hushed when he asks, “You know what would have been helpful?”
I squint off into the distance as if I can actually see through the black. “Being able to determine if questions were rhetorical?”
I get an amicable shoulder-slam before he continues over me. “Popping the plans into your head for things like ship repair.”
“Wow, that would have been great. Thanks. Now I wish they’d have given me that instead of a set of phrases that turn me into a psycho killerbomb, ready to detonate on the unsuspecting.”
I slap at whatever just stung my neck. It squishes between my fingers, and I add it to the collection of nasty that covers my jumpsuit. This is a hostile planet. And it’s only getting more hostile the farther we’re forced to walk into it. “That roar sounded way close,” I groan—but quietly—I don’t want to die—and Drogan’s moved to my side, so he hears me just fine.
“You’re not really a psycho,” he defends absently.
Gee, he’s too kind. I purse my lips at him, and I think he doesn’t see until he squeezes my fingers.
“The head asshole doesn’t want to pack this expedition up just yet.” He sounds majorly pissed off about this. Probably because we can barely see the lights from the ship now, the noises of the wildlife are getting louder, not to mention closer, yet we haven’t found a damn thing for food or water because it’s dark.
All in all, this is a bust. “Because he thinks whatever beast can make sounds like that,” I stab a finger in the direction of the scary creature-noise, “won’t be able to find us without a flashlight? Speaking of: despite us having them, we’re literally stumbling around out here. It’s pretty much impossible to forage at night. What exactly does this head asshole expect us to do?”
“I don’t fucking know!” he explodes in a furious whisper.
