by Loki Renard
One of the other huntresses grabs it off my lap. The stitching comes loose and the two bits of fur hang limp and bedraggled. They’ve broken it! I could cry, but I won’t give them the satisfaction.
“They say the tightness of the stitching is the tightness of the holes,” one smirks at me. “Are you this loose, star girl?”
“Zion likes me the way I am.”
It is precisely the wrong thing to say, though it feels good to remind them of what they have lost. There are other warriors, but I have gathered that Zion was regarded as the most desirable of all. Tyna thought he would be hers. Her jealousy burns brighter than the sun. I can see the hatred in her eyes and I feel real fear. She could hurt me.
“He won’t be yours. You’re just the new thing. You won’t be new for long. You don’t know how to sew. You can’t hunt. You will not make a good mother. You will not provide for your young,” she hisses. “You are an abomination, and you should have been put down.”
“Well, you’re not the first person to say that.” I try to keep things calm. I try not to antagonize her, even though it would give me nothing but pleasure to do so. I have to try to fit in here. I have to become like these women, so when the inevitable happens I will have a chance at staying hidden. As much as it twists me up inside, I have to befriend them, somehow.
“Why did you come here?” She cocks her head to the side, folds her arms over her chest and questions me.
“I was sent. It was a punishment. Apparently, looking at you was the worst thing my boss could come up with.”
Tyna’s hand moves faster than I give her credit for being able to move. Her palm and sharp nails whip across my face, knock me sideways, put the taste of blood in my mouth.
“Don’t you ever talk to me like that, bitch,” she hisses, standing over me. She’s a female brute, a bully, and worse, a coward. She knows I can’t hurt her the way she can hurt me. She knows I didn’t even ask to be taken by Zion. None of this is my fault, but she still blames me.
“Zion’s going to beat you for touching me.”
“Good. I’d like that.” She smirks in triumph and I see how neatly she has played me. If she hurts me and I tell Zion, she gets his attention. Even his hatred is probably better than his utter indifference.
I get up and I take my skirt back from the huntress still holding it.
“I’m sorry he doesn’t want you, but...”
I have barely started speaking when another harsh blow knocks me down. My head is ringing. She is getting angrier and hitting harder.
“Tyna...” one of the other huntresses tries to intervene. “We can’t actually hurt her.”
“Yes, we can. I took her down once. I should finish the job. Right here. Right now.”
“What do you mean you took me down once?”
Tyna smirks at me.
“Tselia? What’s going on?”
Zion’s rumble make the huntresses scramble into the darkness. No longer a pack of wolves, they disappear more like a bunch of cockroaches.
He comes around the corner and gives me a look. “What are you doing out here?”
“I was just...”
“Come inside.”
I follow him into the hut. The light is low and I keep the side of my face Tyna scratched away from him. He didn’t see what they were doing to me. He heard their voices, but that was all.
“You’re speaking with the huntresses,” he says. “That’s good. You should make friends.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m making friends,” I mutter to myself.
“Good.” He falls into bed and pulls me down next to him. I could tell him what Tyna did, but I don’t want her name in his ear. He is mine. She may hate it, but she will have to live with it.
I curl up into his arms, and I breathe his scent. I will fix Tyna. I may not be as strong as her. I may not have her brutality, but I do have several thousand years of evolution on my side.
* * *
“What happened to your face?”
Morning comes. With it comes light, and with light comes a troublesome question.
“I don’t know,” I lie.
Zion takes my chin in his fingers and turns my head to the side. “It looks like you were scratched, attacked by some kind of animal. What have you been up to?”
“Nothing.”
Those blue eyes sink into me. “You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Tselia, tell me how this happened.”
Now would be the time to tell him what Tyna did. I can tell by his tone that he is starting to grow impatient, and when Zion gets impatient, I get punished. But if I tell him, I bring her back into his orbit. I make her a thing in his world, and I won’t have that. I’d rather him punish me than so much as think her name.
“Have you been wandering off on your own again?”
“No.”
“Then an animal came into the camp and attacked you.”
“Sort of, yeah.”
He quirks a brow at me. “Tselia...”
“I’m not telling you anything, so beat me, fuck me, get it over with, I don’t care.”
Zion draws himself up straight. “I don’t like the attitude.”
“Yeah?”
I don’t like being the victim of these backwards people, but it would seem it doesn’t matter what I like. And it doesn’t matter what he likes either. Maybe I’m taking a kind of sick perverse pleasure in defying him. I know this is going to hurt me, but it’s also a moment of power. I don’t want to tell him, and I’m not going to. I’m going to get my revenge on Tyna on my terms.
* * *
Zion
It’s not the fact that she’s lying to me.
It’s not even the fact that she’s lit with rebellion—my star girl is glowing with it. She lifts her chin and she looks at me with that silver gaze and I know how much she is enjoying this moment.
It’s the fact that she’s hurt and she doesn’t trust me enough to tell me how it happened.
I know no animal did that to her. Those are a woman’s marks. Those are the nails of a huntress, and I have a pretty good idea which one. I will deal with Tyna later. Now, I know that the time she has spent with me has not created a real bond. I saved her, but she is still wild. She is still of the stars.
I may have her body, but I don’t have her heart. That is the problem with taking a woman captive.
“What are you going to do to me? Whip me with a branch? Fuck some part of my body that was never made for intercourse?”
She’s goading me.
“You’d like that,” I growl, taking her in hand. I wrap my fingers around the back of her neck. “You’d like me to spread your holes and take each of them one at a time until I have no cum left to spend.”
I feel the quiver that runs through her body. She does want it. The dirtier, the harder, the better. It’s what I want to. But it isn’t what she needs.
This is going to be a lot more difficult than breaking her body. But I think I have an idea.
I pick her up by the waist and I throw her over my shoulder. She curses and screams as I carry her out of the house and the village. I can’t do this down in the valley. We have to go up and into the mountains, back to the ancestral caves.
She curses and swears the whole time. It’s a very long walk, but she doesn’t stop. She will fight me to her very last breath, and I am sure I know why. It’s difficult to keep her in my grasp. Even when I begin to carry her up the heights and the drops start to become more severe and steep, she keeps kicking and bucking. She likes fighting. Every chance she gets to defy or to rebel, she takes it. That’s why she’s down here. It’s why she fell from the sky. Shot down or not, it was her behavior that brought her to our skies, and it was her insatiable curiosity that got her close enough to become a target.
I bear her weight up the mountain. I carry her into the ancestral cave. This time I go well past the outer chamber. I carry her deeper, into the places where our oldest secrets are hidden.
“This is a... ship.”
“This is the ship.”
I put her down and I let her walk around it. Many people today could not understand the significance of it, but she does. She walks around it slowly, touching it with the tips of her fingers, a gentle, reverent touch.
“This is ten thousand years old,” she says. “It’s so well preserved.”
“It is the cradle of our civilization.”
I can see awe on her face and respect in her eyes.
“When this was made, you and I were the same thing,” she says. “I mean, genetically. And then your people came all the way here and mine kept going their way and... so many things have happened in between. So much has changed.”
She’s not angry anymore. She’s whimsical.
“The odds that you and I would ever stand together in the same place at the same time... they’re impossible. But we’re both here.”
“You came here. To me.”
“I didn’t come. I was sent. And then I was brought down.”
She looks at me from across the ship. “I haven’t made a choice in my life. Not one. Men make decisions for me. And sometimes, I guess, women. Why are you showing me this?”
“To teach you something.”
“What?”
She is so intelligent, but she needs everything explained in explicit words.
“You told me your people live long lives. You told me you don’t get sick, or pass away from illnesses. We’re here because of a rebellion. We live the way we do. Get sick the way we do. The people who piloted that craft disobeyed orders.”
“Oh. I see. This is some kind of...” She shakes her head at me. “What point are you trying to prove? That I should never have disobeyed you? Or never have disobeyed the Patron? Are you trying to say I should be a good little girl?”
“I’m saying when children rebel, disaster follows.”
“Now you sound like him.”
“Maybe he’s right.”
Her eyes narrow. “Maybe you’re both the same. Maybe I came lightyears across the universe, got shot down, nearly died, and all to end up here. Your captive. So maybe, in the end, there’s no escape.”
This is not doing what I hoped it would. I hoped it would bring her to her senses. I hoped she would see what we lost. It is all I see when I look at her. I understand her stories better than she understands mine. I am the brute. The animal. But she is the one who seems so slow to learn.
* * *
Tselia
I can tell Zion intended on this being a moment of some kind, a grand lesson to teach me to behave myself or some such thing, but that’s not what I’m thinking about right now.
This is a ship. It is a ship inside a mountain, but I don’t need to fly it. I just need it to communicate with mine. That is a tall order, but if it is capable of communication, if it has any power whatsoever left in its cells, it may be able to do what my broken, buried shuttle can no longer do. It could call my ship down from the stars. And I could be free. Truly free. I could come and go from this planet as I pleased. I could take trips to other star systems. I could go rogue. I could be a pirate... I could...
Zion’s hand closes firmly around my arm. “I want you here. With me. I will keep you here if I have to. But I want you to want it too.”
I stare at him and let out a derisive laugh. “You want me to want to be your captive fuck slave? You want me to want to be beaten when I break one of your rules? You think I’m going to want those things because you show me a wreck?”
I throw the questions in his face, laughing at his arrogance. Now I see what this is truly about. It’s not enough that he can make me submit to him. He wants me to do it for him. Just like the Patron wanted me to be an obedient slave, Zion desires the same thing, but even more. If even one of these men, for a single moment, gave a thought to what I might want, maybe I would care what they want.
Zion’s expression closes. His face becomes as hard as the rock that surrounds us. He does not say another word. He reverts back into the animal silence that is his customary way of being and he drags me out of the cave. I keep careful note of where we are, the twists and the turns. I’m coming back here.
When we get outside again, the sun has begun its journey toward the far horizon. He tugs me back into the place where he first took me, the outer chamber where the fire is and he ties me up the same way he did that first night he took me. The vine rope slides around my flesh, reinforces my weakness. It touches the tender parts. It exposes my delicate spots. He pulls my hands behind my back and he loops them together and he makes the rope run under and over my breasts so they are presented for his gaze and his touch—even though he doesn’t seem inclined to touch me now.
He puts me in these sensual bindings and he sits me in the corner while he lights the fire. I know he is angry at me. I know I have disappointed him. That is what I do. I disappoint men.
Two can play the game of silence. He lights the fire and we sit there, me bound, him as quiet as the rock itself. Unable to move, and without conversation to take refuge in, I am forced to think.
The worst part of all this is, at my core, I do want him. I am attracted to him. I am even attracted to his dominance. My body reacts to him in ways it has never reacted before and the pleasure he brings me is beyond compare.
But when he evokes the thought of my father, when he and the Patron become the same tyrannical thing, I cannot help but rebel and run. These are instincts I have given into again and again, and I don’t know if I could ever stop.
“Zion.”
He looks at me.
“The people who came to this planet. The ones who set their heading here. They weren’t bad people. They were good people. The best people. They didn’t want to live life as they were told to. They wanted to make their own way. That’s what I want too.”
“You want to leave me. You want to follow no rules. You want to be above the world, in the stars, where nothing can tether you.”
“Don’t tell me what I want!”
“Then you tell me what you want.”
“I want you, you idiot.”
His eyes flash. “Do not speak that way to me, Tselia.”
“I want you,” I correct myself. “I... like you.”
“You like me,” he rumbles doubtfully.
“I do. Most of the time. When you’re not beating me.”
“I beat you because you need it. You have no discipline. You are a danger to yourself. And others. You don’t want to follow the rules of the sky, or the rules of the ground. You want all things your way, all the time.”
“So?”
He throws back his head and lets out a dark laugh. “You were left alone for too long. Nobody has all things their way all the time, you spoiled little star girl. Nobody lives the life they want to live. They live the life they must. The best they can.”
“Except when they don’t. Except when they veer off-course and land far enough away to be free.”
“My ancestors didn’t find freedom here. They found work, and danger and death. Their descendants suffered because of their arrogance. I was born on this dirt and this rock because of their decisions.”
“Well, you could have been born on a shiny star ship and be an ice block now. Is that better? Zion? Would you want to spend your life doing everything some old Patron says under threat of frozen death?”
“I want to spend my life with you, star girl.”
“And I want to spend my life with you!” I shout back at him.
I am shocked to have said that. I didn’t even know it was true until it came out of my mouth. I could have sworn I wanted escape. I wanted to head for the stars and do as I please forever and forever, but that’s not what I said to
him just now. I told him I wanted him.
“Is that true?”
“Yes,” I admit, to him and to myself.
“But I have rules. I have punishments. I make you angry and rebellious...”
“Yes, you do, but not the same way,” I say, squirming in my bonds. “You bring heat and life. You make me more of a human. More of a woman.”
That is the difference. Every order the Patron ever gave me took me further away from life. Everything Zion has ever asked of me has brought me closer to it.
“Please, Zion.” I am tearing up with emotion I don’t fully understand, but nevertheless overwhelms me. “Don’t hate me for what I am. I can’t help it. I have been trying to survive for so long. I have had to break rules just to feel real, just to be able to tell the difference between myself and my ship, to know I’m not just a machine that does another being’s bidding...”
“Come here,” he says, grabbing the rope at my waist and pulling me into his lap. There is no more cold rock. There is the heat of his hard body. There is the caress of his lips, the flame of his kiss. There is redemption and forgiveness and connection. There is everything I need.
“Mine,” he says, slapping my ass hard. “Mine. Always mine.”
His fingers curl under my cheeks, spread them apart, and give his cock entrance to my pussy. He pushes deep inside me, spreading my inner walls wide. His lovemaking is urgent, his cock surging inside me over and over. My wetness increases with every stroke. The rope keeps me bound in place, my holes vulnerable and open for his use as he pulls me up and down on his dick.
This feels so good. Bound and fucked, I am free. My body races with energy, my pussy quivers and clenches with need. Somehow, the conversation, the fight, the anger, it has made it all more intense. Every throb of his hot cock inside my pussy makes pure lust flow through my veins.
“Break all the rules you want,” Zion grunts. “I will punish you every time. I will fuck you and use you until you scream for forgiveness.” His big hands work me up and down on his cock, using me like a toy. He thrusts inside me, making the slick wet tunnel of my flesh surrender to him.
