by Tammy Walsh
“It’s the creature’s stomach fluids.”
Agatha’s face screwed up in disgust.
“Stomach fluids?” she said, peering at the stuff on her hands and chest from where she’d hugged me.
“I convinced the creature I was her child who needed to be birthed and… well, here I am.”
She just stared at me like she didn’t understand a word of what I’d just said.
“Your mom?”
“Well, not exactly like a mom—”
Her eyes bulged and she stabbed a finger toward my leg.
“Look out! The vine! It’s trying to grab you!”
“No, it’s not. It’s the Desert Flower. She’s cleaning me off, the way she would with one of her newborns.”
“Oh.”
She wore a frown. I doubted she would ever fully understand what I was trying to tell her.
The vine stretched out and reached for Agatha’s leg.
“So, I guess it’s no danger to us anymore?” she said.
The vine snapped around her ankle and set to dragging her along the sand again.
“It’s no longer a danger to me,” I said. “But it is to you.”
I smothered the vine in the goo and once more, it let go.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Agatha said. “I don’t want this thing to be my mom.”
I was about to explain to her that couldn’t happen unless she went through the same birthing process I had but she didn’t much look like she was interested in learning that.
I took her by the hand and led her away.
I glanced back at the vine.
It rose and swayed side to side. I could almost have mistaken it for a wave of goodbye.
Or was it a wave of hello?
We returned to our camp and packed up.
Agatha moved faster than I had ever seen her.
She kept glancing at the floor and hopped when she thought she felt something slithering around her feet.
Her skin crawled and she didn’t stop checking over her shoulders until I told her the Desert Flower’s tendrils couldn’t reach the distance we’d traveled.
I didn’t tell her that we would almost certainly be within the territory of another Desert Flower by now.
“How much further to the shuttlecraft?” she said.
“About a day’s walk if we don’t stop too often.”
We watched as the twin suns rose and pirouetted across the sky, dancing in each other’s everlasting embrace.
It was mid-morning by the time Agatha began to wheeze and struggle to breathe in the oppressive rising heat.
She would have removed her shirt but it provided her with some much-needed protection against the blistering suns.
For me, the temperature was about right for a nice stroll through a desert.
I kept my focus on the sky for any blinking lights or signs of the guards’ drones that could be circling overhead.
I didn’t want them to get the drop on us the way they had last time.
It was blind luck they hadn’t discovered us instead of the other prisoner.
I really had no idea how the other prisoner had managed to escape Ikmal.
He couldn’t have come through the same gate we had.
The guards wouldn’t have made the same mistake twice and allowed it to remain open.
There must be another way out but for the life of me, I couldn’t think what it was.
Hopefully, I wouldn’t need to know.
I had no intention of heading back to that place.
Especially not when I was so close to escaping for good.
“There’s something I’ve been wondering,” Agatha said.
“What?”
“You’re the captain of your crew, right?”
“Right.”
“So, why were you the one to get caught and sent to this place and the rest of your crew got away?”
“They didn’t get away. I did.”
She frowned at me.
“So, how did you end up here?”
“I handed myself over to the bounty hunters.”
She came to a stop.
The beads of sweat gathering on her forehead broke rank and abseiled down her face.
“You did what?”
“I handed myself over.”
“Why would you do that?”
I shrugged.
“My crew got caught.”
“What’s that got to do with you? They should have been more careful.”
“They got caught because my plan didn’t work. It’s every captain’s duty to protect his crew. Besides, the bounty out for me was far larger than what was on their heads.”
Agatha shook her head.
“So much for you being mutinous pirates,” she said, resuming her walk.
“We are pirates.”
“Not if you believe in honor and duty and all that jazz. Pirates on Earth are out for themselves. They would never hand themselves over to protect their crew.”
“It’s the Vulcarian way.”
“Well, it’s not the traditional pirate way, that I can tell you.”
I didn’t know how human pirates operated on their planet but out here, there was a certain code of conduct.
“You really handed yourself in to save your crew?” Agatha said.
“It was my duty as their captain. Besides, breaking one member out of prison is a lot easier than breaking out six.”
She smiled and shook her head in disbelief.
She coughed and barely managed to turn her head to one side before she let rip with a full-throated bark.
It was the lack of oxygen in her lungs, making it difficult for her to breathe.
I slapped her on the back but it didn’t help.
There was only one thing that would.
I spun her around and pressed my lips to hers.
She stiffened in my arms and pushed me back, gasping for air.
“I can’t breathe!” she said. “Kissing me now isn’t going to help!”
Except she was no longer gasping.
She sucked oxygen in through her nose and mouth, her passageways already clearing up.
She frowned at me.
“Yeah, well, it still doesn’t give you the right to kiss me whenever you want!”
“I was the victor, remember? Technically, you still belong to me.”
She poked her tongue at me.
It was a strange thing. In my culture, it meant she was sick. It clearly meant something else to humans.
“I don’t belong to anyone,” she said.
“That kiss I gave you won’t help you for long. If you want to pass through this planet’s atmosphere for longer periods, we’re going to have to do a lot more than that.”
“You would say that!”
I shrugged.
“It’s the truth.”
I couldn’t bring myself to believe she hadn’t enjoyed our sex the first time we did it, nor did I think she disliked the kiss from the night before.
I wondered why she was resisting me.
“Kiss me more,” I said, “and you won’t have to kiss me again. By the time we get to the shuttlecraft, we can program the computer to create the right atmosphere for both of us.”
She screwed up her face.
She might not like it but she didn’t have much choice if she wanted to reach the shuttlecraft in one piece.
“Fine,” she said. “But remember, it’s purely for medicinal purposes.”
She puckered up her lips and stuck them out.
She had her eyes shut and I couldn’t help but smile.
I wrapped my arms around her and, taking her by surprise, she opened her eyes and pulled back.
I buried my lips on hers.
She struggled but I was intent on enjoying myself, so I added a little tongue to the mix.
She slapped me ineffectively with her hands but her attacks weakened.
Her lips pressed against mine harder, and she sucked in oxygen
through her nose and gave herself to the kiss.
She even made soft “Mm” noises, though I was certain it wasn’t voluntary.
I reached down and grabbed her ass with one hand.
It was soft and I squeezed hard.
She slapped my hand but it wasn’t angry or aggressive enough to stop me.
I swelled in the front of my pants and ground hard against her.
“Mmmm,” she said once more, involuntarily.
Her arms felt at the muscles on my back and her tongue came out to play.
I meshed it with my own.
I couldn’t get enough of that thing.
She took my tongue in her mouth and sucked on it, licking it slowly and seductively.
She made me rock hard and I wanted nothing more than to dive deep inside her right then and there.
Strictly speaking, we didn’t need to kiss like this, or for this long, but she didn’t know that.
And I sure as hell wasn’t about to tell her!
I was never one to pass up a good opportunity.
And she was a better opportunity than I’d had in a very long time.
When we parted, I was the one gasping for oxygen.
Agatha seemed none the worse for wear.
“What’s wrong?” she said, arching an eyebrow at me. “Need a kiss to help you survive out here?”
And with that, she turned and sauntered into the desert.
I growled in the back of my throat, watching that ass as it sashayed through the endless desert.
It deserved to be ridden day and night and I tried to think of a way I could do that before this whole adventure was over.
I hustled after her and we walked side by side, casting the occasional glance at each other.
The smile on her lips matched the one on mine, even if she didn’t intend for it to come across that way.
We encountered no guards and, thankfully, no drones as we completed the final leg of our journey.
The twin suns were beginning to set on another long day on this moon when we rounded what I thought should be the final corner.
No problem, I thought. The shuttlecraft will be around the next corner.
I thought that four times before growing worried.
The problem with the shifting sands of the desert was they, well, shifted.
There were no landmarks that would not disappear.
The tallest sand dune would become the smallest, given enough time.
And this moon had nothing but time.
Ikmal prison would be buried beneath the sands too if the supervisors didn’t keep the area around the prison clear.
It’d been six months since I memorized that map.
But how old had the map been when they showed it to me?
They must have made sure to find the most recent map they could, didn’t they?
The sands couldn’t have changed that much…
Unless there had been a storm or two that completely rewrote the map…
My stomach fell through the soles of my feet.
What if the shuttlecraft was buried beneath a deep and impenetrable mound of sand?
There was no way for me to know where it was, never mind how I might dig it up.
We rounded another corner.
My breath caught in my throat at the sight of a statue carved into the shape of a Desert Flower.
I ran to it and ran my hands over it.
“What is it?” Agatha said. “What is it?”
“My crew left this here for me to find.”
“They did? Then where’s the shuttlecraft?”
I didn’t know but it wouldn’t be far away.
I moved behind the rock, circled it, and then ran to the top of the nearest sand dune.
Agatha remained below in the valley.
All the way here, we’d avoided the tips of the sand dunes to ensure we didn’t run into any Desert Flowers or drones.
Now, I flaunted that rule.
I peered at the rolling dunes and the valleys that sawed between them.
I knew any moment, I would see something, a flickering of sunlight off the pristine white roof of a shuttlecraft.
It would be right there.
But I saw no shimmering white rooftop.
I saw no isolated chip of modern technology.
Only the empty rolling hills of endless sand dunes.
My shoulders slumped.
It wasn’t here.
We were trapped on a prison moon with no way to escape this damn rock.
Fuck.
The walk down the sand dune was a lot harder than the one up.
I needed some time alone and I wasn’t up to the task of having to tell Agatha she’d teamed up with a loser.
How could my crew have left me out here in the middle of nowhere with no way of escape?
They gave me their word.
Maybe they had a change of heart and decided the best option was to keep the ship and the booty we’d amassed for themselves.
They were pirates after all.
Maybe we had more in common with the human pirates than I realized.
Or maybe they assumed the ship would only have gone to waste if they left it here for me.
Or maybe they never thought I would escape Ikmal in the first place.
My good for nothing crew.
I’d been certain they would help me, certain they wouldn’t leave me high and dry like this.
Instead, they left me on a desert planet with nowhere to run and nothing to cling to.
Almost nothing.
I had Agatha and in a slightly better setting—a secluded island out in the middle of nowhere, for example—it might not have seemed so bad.
But here and now, while we were trapped on a Creator-forsaken desert rock in the middle of nowhere?
Agatha waited patiently at the bottom of the mountain dune, hand raised over her eyes to block out the worst of the sunlight.
“Well?” she said expectantly. “Did you see it?”
I growled under my breath, unable to tell her the news.
I wasn’t sure even I believed it.
If it was true, I didn’t know what we were meant to do now.
I stalked past her and fell into the shadow cast by the Desert Flower statue.
I ran a hand over my face, having begun to perspire from the descent down the sand dune.
I wiped my palm on the leg of my pants.
Agatha stood over me.
“Well?”
I didn’t say a word and didn’t look up at her.
Agatha’s arms flopped to her sides.
“It’s not there, is it?”
There were so many ways to respond to her, so many things I wanted to say.
But only one word could form on my lips.
“No.”
Agatha fell to her knees and stared at the shadows between my feet.
“Then what happens now?”
“Now? Nothing. That’s what happens now. A big fat nothing.”
“I thought your crew was supposed to leave a shuttlecraft here for you?”
“Yeah, well, they didn’t,” I snapped.
“Maybe the guards found it and took it away.”
“If they had, they would be all over the place now, knowing we would come here looking for it. We would already be in their custody.”
“Then what happened?”
“My crew lied to me,” I said, biting off the words one by one.
“But you said they were a good crew.”
“They were. At least, I thought they were.”
Agatha was on the verge of tears and the sound of her being so upset—because of me, no less—drove a spear through my heart.
“I’ll find another way,” I said. “I’ll figure something out.”
“We’re on a desert moon in the middle of nowhere,” Agatha said, heat rising to her cheeks. “You said this would be our chance to get away from here!”
“I was wrong.”
I
reached up to run my hand through her hair.
She slapped me away.
“You forced me through the door! You grabbed me!”
“You didn’t have to follow me through!” I spat.
“I thought you were my ticket out of here!”
“That makes two of us!”
“Do you have any idea what they’ll do to me? Back at the prison? They’ll sell me to the lowest bidder and I’ll get sent to a pleasure house.”
She was afraid, scared.
She needed comforting.
But I couldn’t see that through the red mist that descended over my eyes.
I saw only her disappointment in me.
“Come off it,” I growled. “You’ve been working at a pleasure house ever since you arrived here.”
“It’s not the same,” Agatha said defensively.
I knew it wasn’t the same but my own sense of disappointment had dulled my mind.
“Nothing will happen to you,” I said softly. “You’ll tell them I kidnapped you and forced you to come with me. There will be no way for them to prove otherwise. I grabbed you, remember? So what’s to say I didn’t pull you through the doorway too? They’ll put you back in the Prize Pool with the other girls. Things don’t have to be that bad for you.”
“Not so bad? Not so bad? I was abducted and brought here. They forced me to become this… this thing.”
She wrapped herself in her own arms.
She needed comfort and warmth but I couldn’t be the one to give it to her.
Not after I had let her down so badly.
“And you…” Agatha said. “What’ll happen to you if they catch you?”
“They’ll put me in solitary. If I’m lucky.”
Solitary was the very worst place to be.
A single cell with nothing to keep you engaged.
Even if you had the strongest mind, eventually solitary would strip you of it.
Being completely cut off from everyone else had a terrible effect on the mind.
I wouldn’t get to socialize with the other prisoners.
I wouldn’t get to fight in the pits.
And I would never get to see Agatha ever again, and that was the greatest pain of all.
What would I have to think about each night in solitary?
The idea that each time the moon rose, another fighter would be taking his turn with Agatha.
It was enough to drive a Vulcarian insane.
The best I could look forward to was hope I would lose my mind quickly.
