by Roxie Ray
Atlanta had been right. The pie was beyond good. The crust crumbled perfectly, then dissolved on my tongue luxuriously. The apples were sweeter and juicier than any I’d ever tasted before. Every bite sent off little pings of pleasure in my half-starved brain, spikes of rare dopamine that I hadn’t felt for a long time.
“Thank you so much,” I told the woman again. “Really, this is…it’s…”
I frowned as my brain struggled to find the right words. Maybe all the sugar was making me stupid or something. I’d never had a hard time finding the right thing to say before.
“It’s my pleasure,” the woman repeated. But this time, when she smiled, her teeth seemed strangely…sharp.
My pulse picked up immediately. I’d never seen teeth that sharp before. Before, they’d looked normal, but now, it was like they’d each been filed to a deadly point.
Something was wrong.
I looked to Atlanta again. She was licking her lips and sucking her fingers clean, but her eyes were closed. She couldn’t see the woman’s teeth. On top of that, though…
“Mm. So sleepy now. Wow…” Atlanta’s lips parted in a massive yawn.
I glanced down at my half-finished slice. Now that she mentioned it…I was sleepy too. My head felt like it was spinning all of a sudden. And even though I felt panic in my chest, my heart wasn’t racing anymore. If anything, the beat felt slower. Sluggish. The way it felt right before I drifted off to sleep at night.
Crap.
This wasn’t right. Nothing about this was. If we hadn’t been so hungry, maybe we would have realized it. The steam coming off the crust, even when there would have been no way to have kept the pie warm from the woman’s kitchen to the venue. The way it had all played out, with this woman appearing just as our guards went outside. For the first time all day, we were entirely undefended.
And for the first time all day, wandering hands of creepy old men aside, we were actually in danger.
I opened my mouth to yell for help, but no sound came out. The muscles of my throat were too relaxed. I couldn’t even scream. Beside me, Atlanta stumbled forward slightly. She looked drunk. I felt drugged. As Atlanta’s knees dropped out from under her, she reached out to me with wide, confused eyes. I grabbed her hand and tried to pull her back up, but all that got me was an unwelcome meeting with the floor too.
I twined my fingers with Atlanta’s as she closed her eyes. Now, I had to hope we were drugged, but deep in my heart, Atlanta looked so still that I was afraid she might be dead.
I tried to scream one more time, but only a whimper came out. My vision was blurring rapidly, and above us, the woman who had doomed us to this fate was shimmering. She was all my eyes could focus on. Her terrible smile made me hate her more than I’d ever hated anyone in my entire life, and now that the rest of her was shifting too, it wasn’t just hate I was feeling.
It was fear as well.
The woman’s limbs were growing longer and longer, like something out of a horror movie. Her skin was shifting in color, the ruddiness of her cheeks shifting to a bright, inhuman yellow. The sweet little old lady that we’d taken her for at first was gone, the thing that was now standing in her place was positively…
Alien.
My chest was heavy, and my eyelids were heavier still. No matter how hard I tried to keep them open, I couldn’t.
And whatever would happen to us when I finally closed them was sure to be nothing good.
2
Coplan
She was painfully thin and shockingly pale. Her eyes were huge, glassy and almost child-like in their hollow sockets compared to her high cheekbones and sunken cheeks. Her wrists were so bony, I could have captured them both in one hand. But they were so delicate that, had I desired to do so, I feared my grasp would have snapped them in an instant.
This was the human female I had carried from the Rutharian base where she was being held captive. I didn’t know many weeks or months she’d been kept there, but where the Rutharians were concerned, any amount of time spent among them was too long by my count.
Now, she was my responsibility. My patient. My problem. She hadn’t yet let me close enough to see how badly they had harmed her there, but the way she looked was enough to tell me they hadn’t been kind. Her long, dark hair was ratted and tangled in impossible snarls. Her small, fragile body was crouched several feet away from me, almost feral.
And those eyes…I couldn’t tell what color they were in the dark, but there was something haunting about them.
After what I could only assume she’d been through since her abduction, they probably had every reason to be.
I had brought her here to the medical bay after her rescue, hoping for the chance to treat her wounds. To learn from her. To help her heal. But for a week now, she had refused medical attention. For a week, she had refused to speak with anyone about how she had ended up in the dark, brutal conditions we had found her in.
For a week, any time I had tried to help her, she had fought me at every turn.
But now, as we sat in the dark together in her room—now, finally, she had begun to open up to me and only me.
Now, this poor, terrified little human was in my care, my trust, and mine alone.
“I am sorry you were taken.” I had been raised as a warrior, trained in the fighting pits of Lunaria, so it was not my way to be soft and kind. Still, I did my best to make my voice gentle for her sake. I was not simply a warrior any longer. I was a healer as well.
And if I wanted to help this female, gain her trust, heal her body and her mind, gentleness was not simply polite. For the moment, it was all I had.
“I am too.” Her voice was coarse, rough with bitterness. She eyed me warily, like she was still unsure whether I was predator, friend or prey. “But it doesn’t matter now.”
She had told me the story of her abduction, but as she spoke, her tale seemed almost beyond belief. I certainly did not want to believe it. Had I not met so many other females from Earth with similar stories, I would not have put any stock in it at all.
Unfortunately, it was real. Horrifically real. Terribly, unfathomably real. Just like all the other humans I had encountered during my time aboard the Avant Lupinia as my people and I combed the stars for victims of Rutharian abductions, this female had been drugged. Taken against her will and whisked away from her home world into the untold dangers of space.
“Everything matters,” I told her. That was important. She had to realize that regardless of what she had been through, there would be consequences for those who had harmed her. There would be retribution. I only had to determine who had taken her and how best I could deal that vengeance out. “You matter. Do no mistake the cruelty of fate for an uncaring universe. I care. You matter to me.”
She crossed her arms over her ribs and looked away from me. That concept—mattering—seemed to unsettle her slightly, though I struggled to understand why. So much of what she had told me, I did not understand. To ask for explanations of her story’s details would have taken us days, weeks. More time than we had to lose.
There were more females out there, still in slavery to the Rutharians. Helpless humans who would need my help, and the help of my commanders here aboard this ship. This female’s own sister was among them.
Every minute I wasted now was another minute those females would have to endure further abuse.
For the moment, I had to focus on the facts. But one question wouldn’t allow itself to be shaken from the forefront of my mind.
She had obviously come from a world of wealth and privilege. She and her sister had been outfitted with guards. Their lives had clearly been controlled by their government and documented publicly for the entertainment of their fellow humans.
Their disappearances would not have gone unnoticed. Their deaths, if faked, would not have only created ripples; they would have made waves.
So how had this female been abducted at all? Or, perhaps more importantly…why, despite every indication that it shoul
d not have been possible, had it happened anyway?
“What happened once you woke up again?” I knew this would be a more difficult line of questioning. I had heard the tales of the other humans we had rescued already. I had an inkling of what her answer would be, and I knew that it would not be one that left me with much faith in the goodness of others.
“What do you think?” She glared at me like I was a simpleton. “For a long time, I barely woke up at all. When I did, I was being probed. Prodded. Treated like an animal by machines operated by people I couldn’t even see. And then, when it was over, I was knocked out all over again. Is that what you want to hear?”
It wasn’t what I wanted to hear at all, but I knew I had to hear it all the same. The yellow skin and sharp teeth of the woman who had abducted her suggested that she had been taken by Jeorkanians, a race renowned throughout the galaxies as great trainers of high-end breeding slaves. But humans were not yet a race that had been legalized for entry into the slave trade. Lunaria had put an end to the Jeorkanians’ endeavors in the trade nearly a year ago—or so we had thought. And that did not explain how she had ended up in Rutharian hands.
Rutharians did not abide by the slave trade commission, and they certainly did not pay for their slaves.
“When did you come into contact with the Rutharians?” I could tell this female had some inexplicable desire to raise my temper, but I held it in check. I had to keep my line of questioning focused. It was the only way to get the answers I sought. “The horned, red-skinned aliens that were holding you prisoner before I found you—”
“I know what Rutharians are,” she snapped at me. “And I don’t know that I would call myself their prisoner. Prisoners…” She shuddered. “The things those baz-terds did to me aren’t the things you do to someone you’re just keeping locked up until release.”
“I understand.” I closed my eyes and bowed my head. I would not make her say it. She had already endured so much, and I knew enough of the Rutharians to imagine the indignities she had faced while in their grasp. It would be cruel to make her relive them all over again by speaking them aloud. “But how did you become their captive? How long were you kept there?”
“When I woke up, I was in the dark. Collared and chained and…” Her voice broke, and my heart crumpled in on itself along with it. “Naked. I don’t know for how long. Long enough to break me before you and the others hauled me out of that place.”
“You are not broken,” I told her. That, too, was important. Even broken things were not beyond mending, but there was still a fire in her. I could sense it. As I raised my fingers to the hot, tender marks on my cheek where she had clawed me just a few days before, I could feel it, too. Gently, I smiled at the memory. “If you were broken, you would not have had the courage to put up such a fight.”
“It was the first chance to fight that I’ve had since I…since I left Earth.” She looked around the room for a window, as though she might be able to stare out into the star-speckled expanse of space and see her tiny blue planet floating there in the darkness.
“Do you miss it?” It was a sentimental question, lacking focus, but…it seemed wrong not to ask it anyway.
“Earth?” She scoffed. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. It makes me feel helpless, and your questions aren’t exactly making me feel any better.”
“Just one more, then,” I assured her. “Will you tell me your name?”
“Savannah.” She would not meet my gaze. “Savannah Tremaine. Or at least, it used to be. Sometimes…I think Savannah Tremaine might’ve died in that dark little cell the Rutharians kept me in. Now…like I said, I don’t even know who I am anymore.”
“You have been very brave, Sah-vahn-ah.” I was not a sentimental man, but I was a healer, and before me was a woman who needed to be healed. Badly. I longed to reach out and take her into my arms. To hold her. To make this better, somehow, even if it was only for a little while.
But when I reached for her, she skittered backwards and looked at me with murder in her gaze.
“I don’t care how brave you think I’ve been,” she warned. “Don’t touch me. I never want to be touched—by you, or anyone else—ever again.”
I sighed. That would be an issue, given what I needed to do next. “I understand your reservation, but—”
“It’s not reservation. It’s a threat.”
At that, I had to exert a certain effort to keep myself from smiling.
No—this female was not broken. Not at all.
“I am here to help you, Sah-vahn-ah,” I explained to her.
“That’s not how you pronounce—ugh. Never mind.” She groaned and tucked her knees up to her chest, giving me a flash of the backs of her thighs—which I did my best not to notice. “Call me whatever you want. Just, keep your hands away from me while you do it.”
“My name is Healer Coplan Majari,” I continued. Human names were sometimes…difficult on Lunarian tongues. I would have to endeavor to pronounce it correctly in the future. In the present, though, there was a more pressing matter: the issue of the wounds she had sustained before she came into my care. Some had been healed while she was unconscious after her rescue, but even those would need to be monitored, and others had yet to be attended to. “I am the heir of High House Majari, and I am not a brute. I will not hurt you. But you are injured, Sah-vahn—”
“Just call me Savii,” she grumbled. “That’s what my sister… What some people used to call me.”
“Savii.” It was a beautiful name, like the wind off the ocean and a ringing of a bell, and it was admittedly easier for my lips to shape. “I do not wish to touch you against your will, Savii, but I need to in order to treat your injuries. Will you allow it?”
She glared at me for a long time. For much of it, I imagined, she was fantasizing about different ways she might kill me for asking.
But finally, she nodded her head. “Do what you have to. But if I feel you taking liberties for even a second—”
“You will sink your teeth into my neck and tear my throat out with them?”
For a moment, I thought I almost saw a flicker of a smile. “Something like that.”
I moved to her slowly, the way I had approached the wild steppe-beasts that my family raised and trained in my youth. I held my hand out so she could keep her eyes on it at all times and moved with care. She would be able to track exactly where I was going to touch her, and when. I allowed her to anticipate my every motion.
Even then, when my fingertips brushed against her rib cage, she flinched.
“Does that hurt?” I feared that even in my efforts toward gentleness, the soldier in me had still been too rough.
“No,” she admitted. A light pink flush rose to her cheeks. “Sorry. I’m just…I told you. I don’t like being touched.”
“Then I will be quick.”
Softly, I pressed my fingers against her ribs. Many had been cracked when I first brought her aboard the ship. If there was any benefit to how thin she was, it was that I could feel each one through the thin fabric of her gown with ease. As I pressed my fingers to one of her lower ribs, though—the one that had been damaged the worst—she let out a pained whimper.
“Does that hurt?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yeah. Not…not that much. But a little, yeah.”
“It is still healing. Likely, your, ah…your recent exertions have left it more tender than it should be.” I was annoyed that she had hurt herself further in her previous attempts to attack me, but it was difficult to be angry with her for it. I still took her spirit as a good sign for future recovery, and ribs healed easier than minds and hearts. “You will need to take care if you wish for your body to recover properly. No more fighting me—or anyone else, for that matter.”
“Then maybe people should stop giving me reasons to fight,” she grumbled.
“I will take that into consideration.” This time, I could not help my smile. “You have a warrior’s heart, Savii. Your bravery
through all of this has not gone unnoticed. But I can assure you. You are safe now.”
“Yeah? According to whom? You?”
“Me,” I confirmed. “You are my patient now. You do not need to protect yourself any longer. I will take that duty over myself, if you will allow it.”
“Patient, or prisoner?”
I laughed. “I suppose to you, the two might not seem so different right now. But to answer your question—patient. Completely. You must stay here in the hospital ward until your wounds are fully healed, but I can transfer to a more comfortable private room if it suits you. One without a lock on the door.”
“So…I could leave, if I wanted to?”
“You would have free roam of the ship, yes. As long as you promise not to overexert yourself, that is.”
She considered it for a long moment, then nodded. “It suits me. I’ll take it. But…what about when I’m healed? Can I go home after?”
“That…may be possible.” I was hesitant to promise her more than I could guarantee. I still had many questions about her abduction—and I was sure that Generals Kloran and Haelian, my commanders, did as well. Depending on what the answers to those questions were, there was a chance it would not even be safe for Savii to return to Earth. And there were additional matters to attend to before we could even address such a return. “If we can return to you Earth without putting you under greater threat, we will. For now, though, we must focus on your recovery—and recovering your sister as well.”
“You didn’t save her when you rescued me?” Savii blinked. The flush on her cheeks disappeared, leaving her looking paler than ever. “I thought she must have been in one of the other cells, or…if she’s still with the Rutharians—”
“She was not being kept on the base we recovered you from, no.” I could understand her concern. If my own younger brother, Palan, had been a prisoner of the Rutharians, I would not have been at ease either. “Which is why we’ll need as much information from you as possible. I will inform my commanders of everything you have told me today, but they will likely want to speak with you after you have regained your strength. Your sister’s safety and rescue will be our next mission. Anything you can tell us will aid us in tracking her down so the two of you can be reunited once more.”