The first one shushed her and continued. “In fact, we’re here to help you. We know you don’t belong here. We know you’ve been thinking of running away, but probably haven’t figured how yet.”
What? How could they know that?
“Come with us, cooperate with our boss, and we’ll get you back to your family on Earth. It’s as easy as that.” I had to admit, for a moment it was tempting, until the other one opened her mouth again.
“Yeah,” said Fish Face. “If you come with us quietly now, we promise no harm will come to you or your Kindred. There’s no reason to prove how vulnerable the rest of your people are while their warriors are off playing heroes.” So, they knew all the warriors were out. This kept getting better and better.
“Shush!” Saccharine hissed at Fish Face. “Don’t threaten her! Let her make her own choice.”
“We know you’re there, Sunny. These are heat vision goggles,” Fish Face gloated, not listening to her partner. “We can see you crouched on the other side of the doorway, hiding in the dark with your little friend. You can’t get away this time.”
“Will you shut up?” Saccharine hissed. “Don’t listen to her, Sunny. We’ll give you a little time to make the right choice,” Saccharine offered.
“Come to us willingly and that ship outside won’t carve the walls out of this Kindred, one by one,” Fish Face threatened.
“Gah!” Saccharine threw her hands up.
“I wonder how long before the whole place collapses?” Fish Face sneered.
“Unfortunately, she’s crazy enough to do it, Sunny. You don’t want that on your conscience, do you?” Saccharine asked as if concerned.
“Yeah, your mother’s already in jail for saving you – probably for the rest of her short life,” Fish Face added. “Are you that much of a coward that you would let innocent people die for you too?”
So, they thought I was a coward, hiding from them in the dark? I felt a flare of anger, but then it was almost as if I could hear Sensei’s calm voice in my head. Use their over-confidence. That could actually work.
“But – but I can’t,” I wailed in my best scared Earth-girl voice.
“Wh-what?” Thal gasped behind me. I shifted slightly and gave him a wink.
“How can I know you’re telling the truth?” I asked on a pathetic sob. “The last one of you tried to kill me and drink my blood,” I whined.
“We’re not rogues, Veridian. We don’t want to harm you or your Kindred in any way,” Saccharine replied. “The boy can stay here, and if you come with us willingly, we promise you’ll be treated very well, like a princess. You’ll never want for anything and your Kindred will be safe. How does that sound?” she cajoled.
I paused as if to think about it. “O-okay,” I sniffed finally.
“Sunny, no!” Thal cried, overacting for all he was worth. I had to stop myself from laughing.
“I have to Thal,” I sniffed again. “But, I’m scared,” I wailed to the women, hoping I wasn’t overplaying it. “My legs. My legs are all shaky. I think I’m going to pass out.”
“Oh for the love of…” Fish Face cursed under her breath before getting elbowed by Saccharine.
"Okay, no problem. We’ll help you to the ship,” Saccharine said consolingly. I heard boots moving towards us. “You’ve made the right decision, Sunny.”
“I know,” I whined plaintively with one more sniff. I tapped Thal lightly on his leg, hoping he was ready.
“On three,” holo-John whispered, showing us the two women’s dark shapes striding arrogantly to the door. “One, two, three!” I jumped up from my pseudo-despondent crouch and swung my scy as the first woman walked through the door. I expected blood and gore and slicing action, but my scy only bounced off her, as if it were as dull as a wooden practice sword. Fish Face looked down in surprise and laughed as I swore.
Chapter 33: Tased and Confused
Thal shot the woman with the taser, leaving her a twitching puddle on the floor.
“Your scy! It’s still locked against human DNA!” Thal exclaimed.
The second woman growled and lunged at me over her partner in the doorway. I ducked and spun, landing a kick to her ribs, despite the darkness.
“Lights!” John’s voice yelled and suddenly the room was blazingly bright.
“Gah!” I yelled, my eyes tearing up immediately, throwing my hands up to shade them. But that was nothing compared with the agonized scream coming from Saccharine, frantically tearing her heat and night vision goggles off.
Through a haze of tears, I saw another figure coming up fast behind her, literally flying through my old bedroom. I couldn’t see it clearly, but gasped and stepped back. The way it moved, the shape, the color was all wrong. And I hated it.
The woman in front of me spun around and fell backward in surprise over her unconscious comrade at the haratchi speeding toward her. It pulled up short with a hair-raising screeeeech before running into the doorway, tucking its wings and stalking awkwardly toward us on its hind legs, focusing on the two women on the floor.
Saccharine tried to scramble backward, seeming to completely forget the weapon on her hand, but got tangled up with her unconscious partner while staring up in horror as the haratchi fell ravenously on them.
Once again, I didn’t think. Instinct took over. I swung my scy, still gripped in my hands, over and around my head in a powerful arc, before bringing the curved forward blade down and through, cleaving the greasy blue head in two. The blade stopped suddenly with a thunk as if hitting a shield, and I heard a grunt from Saccharine below.
I yanked my scy back up at the sounds of rustling and flapping from the bedroom. More haratchi were coming in through the breech. I glanced at Thal, his scy also out and at the ready, and motioned to him to wait. We could deal with them one by one as they bottlenecked at the bedroom door.
We couldn’t see them yet inside the bedroom, but as I listened through the door, I heard the added sounds of a couple of grunts, boots hitting the stone floor as they too came through the hole in the wall, and the familiar whistling of scys singing through the air. A haratchi head with its stretched mask of a beak appeared, rolling sans body into the doorway, dribbling a dark path of unnatural, stinking blood.
Two more haratchi squeezed their way through the bedroom door at once, and Thal and I quickly sent their heads bouncing across the living room.
Lyta and Otrere dashed to the bedroom doorway, breathing hard with scys at the ready, already stained and dripping with dark haratchi blood. They skidded to a stop and stared down at the women in black. “The little losers were right, Ote!”
I looked down and locked eyes with the enemy I’d stupidly saved, only to find her struggling out from under the dead haratchi, bringing her weapon hand up and firing at the twins without warning. Lyta grabbed her sister’s arm and dove for the bathroom, but Ote was too slow and took the blast in the chest. The electricity passed from Otrere to Lyta and they both went down twitching, sprawling across the tiled bathroom floor. Saccharine turned the taser on me and Thal.
Shoving Thal out of the way, I dove and rolled, scrabbling for the other modified taser, still attached to Fish Face’s wrist as she started moaning and struggling under the haratchi corpse.
“NO! Sunny don’t use that!” John yelled, just as Fish Face regained consciousness, saw what I was doing and touched the firing pads together. A flash of white light felt like it fried my eyeballs, and I had the strong sensation of being kicked in the chest. I found myself flying backwards before crashing into a wall, and then my world went dark.
***
When I woke some time later, for some reason I expected to find giant, blood-sucking spiders in the room. I shook off the nightmare and realized I was awkwardly sprawled on the uncomfortable couch with a splitting headache. My whole body hurt and my legs would not move.
“Hurry and tie them up. My head’s killing me,” Fish Face complained. “What a mess. But three Katje girls are better than one, and they�
��re all in the right age group. The boss will be happy.”
“Yeah, but we’ll have to get rid of the boy. No witnesses, remember?” Saccharine said.
My racing heart stuttered in fear. They were gonna kill Thal.
“Now go make sure the ship is still projecting that force-field. The last thing we need are more haratchi in here. Idiot pilot, I’m gonna kill him when we get back.”
I got Thal into this. I had to do something. I slowly opened one throbbing eyeball to the glaring light. Where was Thal anyway? When my slitted eye finally focused, I found him sprawled across my legs, out cold but definitely breathing, as if he’d been tased while trying to check on me.
“The force field is up now,” Fish Face said, returning from the bedroom. “Do you feel weird? I feel really weird and this lightning glove won’t come off, like it’s suctioned onto my hand.”
“Stop complaining. You’re probably just suffering from the residual effects of getting taken down by a little boy. Next time I’m taking someone who knows what they’re doing.” It seemed Ms. Saccharine wasn’t so sweet anymore. “Let’s get this over with and get back to the ship.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of them in the doorway of the bedroom. The other woman – Saccharine – was standing over Lyta and Otrere’s limp, trussed up figures in the bathroom. She began to walk toward Thal and me.
“Signal the pilot to move the ship in,” she said. “We can’t have witnesses seeing us with the girls tied up. We were supposed to get the Earth girl to come with us willingly, the stupid brat.”
“We’ll have to take the boy’s body too,” the other continued conversationally, as if they weren’t talking about killing an innocent person.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you!” John’s voice yelled from the bedroom. Finally! But what could he do as a hologram? I hoped he’d called the police. “I’ve recorded this whole thing and help is on the way. If you want to survive this, you’d better leave now!”
“Who in the heck is that?” One of them exclaimed, both of them spinning toward John’s voice and running into the bedroom, arms raised to fire.
Here was my chance. I had to do something, I had to get up! I rolled, grunting with the effort of getting Thal’s limp body off my legs. He flopped onto the floor, groaning as his head hit the stone tile, but otherwise he didn’t move. His link clattered to the floor beside him.
I saw a flash of light from the bedroom and heard John laugh before the women both cursed, and I heard a loud crunch, like a booted foot crushing my link into the stone floor.
I rolled to my feet, caught my balance, and tamped down a wave of nausea. I reached down and fumbled my boot heels open to take out the throwing stars, shoving them under my Kevlar belt.
That first day I’d found the boot weapons I cut myself, I remembered, which meant they weren’t child-proofed, unlike my scy. If only I’d let that haratchi have them. What was I thinking? I shoved the boot heels closed, angry at myself, but mostly angry at these kidnappers. Would-be murderers. I shook out my legs, ready to spring.
John’s full-size hologram came to life a few feet away, next to Thal. “Good recovery time. Ready?” he muttered to me. “Still recording!” he called to the women. I glared at him in disbelief. What was he doing bringing them back in here?
“Shut up! I thought we wanted them to leave!” I growled at him.
“And what were the chances of that?” he asked. “Besides, we just need them each to fire at least once more,” he said as the two kidnappers came running back out. They took one look at me and everything suddenly slowed down.
I could see Fish Face’s fingers come together, and I dove into a front handspring, dodging the lightening that flashed from her fingertips. I took two running steps and grabbed some stars from my belt, throwing them wildly at both women. Fish Face went down to her knees, gasping and clutching her chest, seeming to draw in on herself in pain even though I knew none of my erratic throws had touched her.
Saccharine started to shoot and I dodged again, this time running up the nearest wall into a back flip, all the while flicking throwing stars at her. They skittered and clinked off the stone, missing her by a mile, except for one serrated CD, which actually managed to sink nicely into her arm. She yanked it out, shrieked at me, and charged. I pawed at my belt, but it was empty. I sprang into a couple of back handsprings, trying to kick her and get away from her at the same time, before running smack into the fish tank wall. Haratchi beat at the fish tank from the outside with their enormous bat-like wings, trying to get in. Saccharine plowed into me, pressing her fingers to my temple and her other hand to my throat.
“I wonder if you’ll get back up when I zap you in the head,” she growled, her face looking seriously gaunt and drawn. She threw her head back, screamed and grimaced something terrible, and I saw fangs break through her gums as if for the first time. “But first…” She lowered her head and her fangs seemed to reach for my throat.
Not again! But this time, I wasn’t pinned between the floor and a wall. This time, I could move. I lashed out at her with the flat of my hand to her ear and she jerked her head back, snarling in outrage. The woman had seriously gone unhinged.
I could feel her fingers with the taser-glove coming together as if in slow motion above my ear, and frantically slammed my arm up into hers, hearing the weapon clank against the fish tank before a white-hot flash above my head made me duck. A loud crack echoed through the room and then the glass seemed to slowly shatter into a growing web of cracks all around me.
The woman gasped suddenly, like her friend before her who was still lying unmoving on the floor. I watched in close-proximity horror as the flesh on her face seemed to be sucked grotesquely into her skull. She fell to her knees in shock, frantically pulling at the taser glove before clutching wide-eyed at her chest, and staring at the glass shattering behind me.
I dove over her, grabbed Thal, threw him over my shoulder, and sprinted into the bathroom. The glass exploded behind us in a deadly spray of high speed shards, saltwater, and silvery fish with giant teeth and snapping jaws. I slammed the door against the tidal wave behind us and sank to the floor, bracing my feet against the wall as the onslaught thudded into the door at my back. I locked wide eyes mutely with the now conscious, trussed-up twins who were struggling against their bonds while a rush of saltwater swirled around us from under the door. Beside me Thal moaned, opened his eyes and puked, mostly on Lyta.
Chapter 34: Aftermath
“And that is why I never put an ambient energy sponge on the taser!” John argued with his parents during a holo-link conference with Alten in my mother’s office. His parents stood on either side of him and they both looked majorly ticked. John hadn’t looked at me once since the conference began, which mostly consisted of the McCalls making sure everyone was okay and apologizing profusely for their son’s stolen technology being used to attack us. I wondered if he was mad at me.
“Didn’t I tell you it wasn’t ready for sale?” his father demanded.
“Yes!” John replied, exasperated. “I already told you I didn’t sell it to anyone. Those women must have stolen my design! It’s not my fault they were stupid and altered it. Who puts an energy sponge on something you wear?”
The women he referred to had both suffered massive heart attacks and were pronounced definitely dead by both Penthe and Micha. Unfortunately, their ship had flown off right after the attack, as soon as whoever was still aboard realized the two women wouldn’t be returning.
Micha had been first on the scene, showing up right after the tidal wave broke from the apartment. The tanks on the two levels directly above were connected to our tank, so when it broke, the ones above gushed out through Mom’s apartment too, flooding most of the level. Thankfully, it never got above our knees inside the bathroom, and Micha had no problem taking care of the last few haratchi who’d flown in to feast on the piranha flopping around on the flooded stone floor. She was not impressed to find all four of
us unarmed and stuck in the bathroom.
I’d apologized to Thal for almost getting him killed, and amazingly he seemed okay with it. It wasn’t a lesson I was likely to forget anytime soon.
Lyta and Otrere were fine, other than being embarrassed at being zapped, tied up and unconscious in the bathroom for most of the fight. I think they were grateful that I’d managed to save Thal so their mom didn’t kill them.
Despite the victory, no one was very happy when the warriors returned to find two dead Anakharu, four teens in the infirmary, a missing wall, hundreds of lost gallons of water, and dead, stinking haratchi inside the Kindred. They’d taken care of the outbreak and fixed the fence, so the Kindred was safe again, at least from any more haratchi. A special Kindred Council meeting was called immediately after ending the holo-conference with the McCalls.
“She attracts them! We never had problems with Anakharu before she came here,” Myrihn said, arguing my faults to the Council. With Mom in prison and Alten now on maternity leave, observant but quiet Teague was left in charge. “She’s reckless and untrained! She barely avoided getting herself and her cousins killed, plus she managed to flood a whole floor of living quarters! The wasted water alone is unforgivable!”
Teague only grunted, made a note, and looked around at the rest of the Council for comments.
“Sometimes women have to fight their own fight, Myrihn. You know that,” Sarosh replied. I smiled at her in thanks as she continued. “She did manage to kill the Anakharu attacking her and not get anyone killed or kidnapped in the process.”
I looked down at the table and shook my head.
“Fight her own fight!” Myrihn exclaimed in outrage. “She didn’t even kill them – their weapons malfunctioned!”
“She’s right,” I muttered.
“Sunny?” Teague’s voice brought my head up to see she was holding a hand up to stop Myrihn.
The Faarian Chronicles: Exile Page 27