“Yeah, well they don’t have to sneak around to dump us. All they had to do was let us drown back there if they wanted to get rid of us,” Jill pointed out.
Lori blinked at her, struggling with the logic—which it lacked. No one was likely to blame her when it hadn’t been her idea. She turned and glanced at the men, who were some distance from them and deep in their own discussion. She didn’t think the guys were listening or could hear, but she didn’t want to take the chance so she lowered her voice. “Sooo—points for thinking of us, but you don’t have a clear understanding of our situation if you think we’d be better off without them. It’s clear as bell to me, even if I’d had some doubts before, that they are better equipped for this situation.”
“Because they’re primitives?” Tory sneered.
The comment instantly set Lori’s back up. She had to fight the urge to smack the woman. She could see the others had mixed feelings about it, but she was completely certain that it was way off, that they didn’t deserve contempt in any form. She shook her head. “I don’t know who you are and I don’t want to know because you aren’t going to be around long with that attitude, lady. Maybe you think you’re holding out for the cavalry to arrive, but that just isn’t going to happen the way you think. They are the cavalry. They’re our very best chance of surviving and I’m damned glad to have them.”
She surveyed the other women. “I’m sorry if this upsets you. It upsets me, too, but I’m not going to rock the boat when it seems perfectly reasonable to me that scattering would improve everybody’s chances. It isn’t like we’d have a hell of a lot of hope of defeating those bastards if they do come after us, even if we stayed in a tight group. I hope I don’t live to regret it, but I don’t think I regret anything more than being picked up by the grays to start with. Now, I just want a chance to live.”
She couldn’t say that it was much of a pep talk, but she thought it helped her bring order to her own mind to voice her thoughts on the subject out loud, and it seemed to help the others a little, too. Not that it made them less afraid, but it made them more resigned to something they were powerless to do anything about anyway.
As glum as that thought was, though, the truth was that Lori felt almost hopeful.
She was deep down scared in a way she didn’t even want to acknowledge but at the same time the behavior of the males in her sphere was a focal point of calm. She knew she couldn’t really count on anything, but they seemed willing to help her. They seemed to take it in stride that it was the thing to do even if she was wrong about there being the ulterior motive of ‘saving the pussy’/ female domestic slave.
In all fairness, as bad as she hated the role she’d been expected to play her entire life just because she’d been born female, they had the right to expect some form of payment for their efforts.
It would be nice, of course, if she was just so special/wonderful that they were willing to risk their own survival to ensure hers just because she was so damned cute and cuddly, but she had a streak of realist in her that made it impossible to support that fantasy.
They might be higher intelligent life and have a more complex society, but life was still about give and take, about pulling your own weight in the scheme of things, and that became glaringly obvious in a survival situation.
If you couldn’t or wouldn’t pull your weight, you could be left behind to get on the best you could.
If you wanted help, you needed to be eager to please.
She thought she was.
It made it way easier to feel that way that she felt a physical attraction to her saviors and they’d treated her in a way that had not fostered reluctance of any kind.
Because if it was just about physical attraction she thought she would still have a problem if they’d mistreated her. She just wasn’t ‘in’ to punishment. She might, and probably would have, still struggled to appear eager to please, but it would have been a hardship.
In a way they treated her more as an equal than she’d ever experienced before and still had consideration for the fact that she was smaller and weaker than they were instead of taking advantage of it.
Almost embarrassingly so.
Because when they all split up, Fayn approached her and told her to get on his back so he could carry her.
Dismay joined the embarrassment and that was only partly because it was Fayn that offered and Jarek that walked off. “I’m good. Really.”
He shook his head. “Jarek say feet hurt. I carry, we move faster also.”
So which was it? Consideration for her poor feet? Or she was slowing them down and endangering them?
And had Jarek really told Fayn to take care of her?
And why?
Because he needed to be unburdened, just in case?
Or because he didn’t care enough to do it himself?
She got on his back because it quickly became more uncomfortable trying to assert her willingness and ability to hold her own.
It wasn’t terribly comfortable.
He was huge and it put a serious strain on her thighs to try to encircle his back with her legs, particularly since they were already sore from the high dive from the alien craft when she’d clung to Jarek like a monkey.
She thought it was more exhausting to try to hang on, too.
She resolutely did her best to suffer in silence, struggling to focus on her thoughts rather than her discomfort. But there was nothing that occurred to her that was particularly comforting or enthralling. And she was grateful almost to the point of tears when they finally stopped for a rest and she was able to slip from Fayn’s back and try to work some circulation into her legs.
Fayn didn’t look particularly pleased about her hobbling around as if she was crippled, but then she noticed that he surreptitiously stretched his back and arms and knew he was cramped up, as well.
Jarek reappeared from somewhere down the trail and produced another couple of handfuls of the awful berries Lori mentally thought of as barf berries. She gulped them down like pills anyway since it was something to rattle around in her empty stomach.
She would never have thought that she would miss the tasteless ‘paper’ bread they lived on while in captivity, but she found that she did—at least for the moment.
Surely they’d be able to find something a little more palatable?
If they didn’t, she couldn’t see a huge chance for survival.
The poor giants weren’t getting any more of the barf berries than she was, unless they were popping them on the sly, and she hadn’t gotten enough to fill her own belly. She could imagine theirs must be clapping together with emptiness in this time.
She discovered that the plan the guys had hatched was to trade off on carrying her. She protested, again, for all the good it did.
Jarek loaded her onto his back and struck off again.
She didn’t even know how long her ordeal would last. She thought it might have been easier if she had, if she knew how much she had to endure and when she could expect the ordeal to end. All she knew, though, was that there was a mountain peak they were headed toward and they would wait there until everyone made it to the rendezvous point.
The Satren Jarek called Aidan appeared shortly after they stopped for their second break.
She thought the timing was just perfect.
She was so exhausted by that time that she wasn’t able to protest or to feel the terror she might have otherwise when he cradled her against his chest and launched the two of them toward the sky.
It was deeply disturbing all the same to notice the strain of rising with her in his arms. “Oh god!” she gasped. “Maybe we shouldn’t try this?”
He made a sound in his chest that might have been a chuckle. “I will not drop you, dear heart. I give you my word.”
The promise warmed her. The endearment had an even more profound effect even though she told herself that it was clearly just a quirk of his speech, or habit that he wasn’t even aware of. Because, she recalled, he’d
always called her dear heart.
Amusement flickered through her when she realized it was probably because he had no clue of what her name was.
Just like a man to take the safe route!
“My name is Lori,” she said when he’d safely navigated a path upward through the tree canopy.
He glanced down at her with a look of bemusement. “I know. I have known from the first.”
That was cryptic.
She wanted to know more, but she just couldn’t convince herself it wasn’t really difficult to carry her and fly at the same time. She was no lightweight even if he was a very big guy and at least seemed to hold her effortlessly.
“No helpful air currents so low,” he said almost as if he read her thoughts, apologetically, as if he was aware she was unnerved by it. “But we need to stay close to the tops of the trees in case I see a drone.”
“They have drones?” Lori gasped in dismay.
“None we have seen close, but we cannot take a chance that they will learn of the rendezvous. That would endanger everyone.”
Lori’s arms tightened involuntarily around his neck.
“Not that I do not enjoy your embrace, dear heart, but you will strangle me if you keep that up.”
Lori loosened her frantic hold immediately.
He uttered an amused huff. “I was teasing, Lori.”
Lori lifted her head to study his face. He really was distressingly handsome, she thought uncomfortably. “How is it that you speak English so well?” she asked curiously.
His black brows lifted almost to his hairline and a look of amusement lit his expression. “You call it English?”
Lori frowned. “I’m confused.”
“Granted, it is a different dialect than we speak now, but this is our tongue—the language of the Satren—taught to your people long ago.”
Lori stared at him blankly while that slowly sank in and she thought about how she’d instantly thought of demons when she saw him the first time. “You’re saying your people contacted Earth people a long time ago? I mean—that would be thousands of years, I think.”
“Yes. Long ago, long before my time.”
Denial leapt to mind, the impulse to say that wasn’t possible, but then she was in his arms on an alien world, taken by a race that had planned to enslave her.
And there was no getting around the fact that he looked a lot like depictions of demons. She’d always figured those were pure imagination, but it seemed very unlikely under the circumstances.
And then there was the language.
He clearly had a very good grasp of it—like someone completely familiar. The Hirachi were good enough at speaking to get their meaning across, but it was just as clear that it wasn’t their first language.
She frowned thoughtfully. “So—you taught the Hirachi English so the grays wouldn’t understand what y’all were talking about?”
“The Sheloni know our language and the language of the Hirachi and they also mind speak like the Hirachi so that would not have worked. I taught them the dialect that the Earth women use because it is different enough from our modern language I thought it doubtful the Sheloni would understand.”
“Mind speak?”
“The Hirachi are telepathic. Did you not know?”
Dismay flickered through her and for several minutes she was too busy trying to think of what she’d thought around them to consider a response.
“I take it that is a no,” he said wryly.
Indignation surmounted Lori’s embarrassment and confusion. “Why would I even consider that? We don’t have telepathy.”
The look he sent her made her really uncomfortable. “You did not notice that they are beings of the sea?”
She hated to admit it, but she sure as hell hadn’t—not until just before they jumped ship, at any rate, and that had just been too blatant to ignore.
“So—you’re saying I should have known because of that? Well, I’m pretty sure we don’t have anything on Earth that’s telepathic even if they are sea creatures, because they make noises to communicate.”
“Then again, you are not telepathic so I have to suppose you would not know.”
Sarcastic asshole, Lori thought irritably, realizing in the next moment that she’d somehow soured his good humor. He’d been teasing her before she’d gotten so upset about the discovery that the Hirachi might have read her mind.
So maybe it had occurred to him that she’d been thinking things she didn’t want to share and she was worried about what they might have ‘heard’?
Naturally enough, that discussion dispersed any sense of goodwill between them that had developed previously and discomfort began to creep in so that Lori was very thankful when their surroundings began to lighten enough that she could see the thick jungle was thinning and that there was an area not too distant that was sparse of vegetation. Her immediate thought was that they must be nearing the rendezvous point. She was certain of it when Aidan began to descend.
Once he’d landed and settled her on her feet, she looked around hopefully for any other arrivals. She’d just decided they must be the first when she spotted a couple of figures sheltering beneath a rock outcropping that formed something of an alcove even though it wasn’t quite a cave.
In point of fact it caused a leap in her pulse that wasn’t gladness with her first glance because the first thing that popped into her mind was that they were hidden predators, not hiding prey like herself. Thankfully, there was just enough light to recognize them when she stared bug-eyed at them for several moments.
Almost as if they, too, were hiding from presumed threat, several got up and moved toward them and she easily recognized them as some of Aidan’s people.
They spoke in a dialect that only vaguely resembled English, though, and she had no idea what the discussion was until they disappeared into the woods and came back with the makings of a fire.
They had assembled the tinder and begun trying to coax a fire to life when the first group of Hirachi arrived with Jill. One left the group immediately and went to join the fire makers, humming at the dry starter until it burst into flame.
Lori was impressed despite her best efforts not to be.
It must be nice, she thought, to be born with a super power.
Jill had a different perception of the situation. “We’ve gone back to being cavemen,” she said unhappily.
Dismay fluttered through Lori, especially when it occurred to her that Jill was actually absolutely right. “We have no access to the internet, computers, of cell phones. So what we have in our heads is all we have.” She allowed that to settle in her mind for several moments, thinking unhappily about all the things she didn’t know, struggling with panic and regret for all that she’d lost when she hadn’t allowed herself to look back at all because she didn’t think she could handle it. It wasn’t that she was helpless and couldn’t make anything. It was that she couldn’t make it from absolute scratch. Previously, she’d gone to stores to get the things she used to make other things. Now, all she had access to was the raw resources of an alien world—not even plants and things she was used to. “We’ve lost more than we have. Everything we’re used to and familiar with has been un-invented.”
She didn’t grasp the full depth of their danger, though, until May arrived.
Chapter Fourteen
May was sick. Lori could tell as soon as she saw her, before she ever approached her.
One of the Satren had brought her, landed with her in his arms and carried her over to the overhang and gently settled her on the ground.
Lori rushed over immediately, but one of the Hirachi still managed to get to her first. He was examining one of her feet. When Lori got close enough she saw May had stepped on something that had gashed her foot. It didn’t look like a very large cut, but it did look infected.
Lori felt a wave of dizzying cold wash over her as that sank in.
They didn’t have any antiseptic or antibiotics and nowhere to get any.
Trying to act calm, Lori spoke to the Hirachi in a low voice. “Do you know what to do?”
He glanced at her. “Clean dis.”
Lori chewed her lip.
Well, at least he knew that much.
She did.
And that was just about all she did know about any kind of doctoring.
Which meant she didn’t feel confident enough to shove him out of the way and try to do it herself.
When he left, presumably to get something to clean with, she settled closer to May. “How are you feeling?”
“Like shit.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault I stepped on something.”
She realized she was just damn lucky she hadn’t managed to step on anything that had infected her feet.
Well, not altogether luck. The guys had started carrying her as soon as they noticed her feet weren’t holding up well to the trek through the jungle. And, since May had arrived in the arms of a Satren, she supposed all of the women hadn’t gotten a lift.
The Hirachi must have thick hide on their feet to have weathered it without apparent damage.
That thought made her realize she hadn’t seen a single female of any species besides human since they’d escaped.
Actually, it had been before that—when she’d had the nasty encounter with that Hirachi warrior woman.
She’d thought they had just been separated and that had prevented her from seeing any of the other alien women, but then some of their women seemed to have vanished, too, she reminded herself. And that had happened before the disastrous escape efforts.
Anyway, it wasn’t logical that only the women would have been sucked out and or lost.
The grays had removed them and done something with them. She’d noticed. She’d just been too focused on her own problems for that to really sink in.
She shook the thoughts after a moment, realizing it was just something else that she couldn’t do anything about but worry over it.
She needed to keep her mind on things she might be able to do something about.
Like May, whom she could see had started shivering. “You want to move closer to the fire?”
Alien Enslaved IV: Spoils of War Page 11