by Naomi Lucas
I’ve glimpsed my reflection in the pod’s glass. It scares me.
I don’t know who it is looking back at me anymore.
I manage to tell Gemma that The Dreadnaut knows what’s happened to us and that they’re in on it. At least someone in command is in on it. It means there will be no help coming, and I fear what it means in the future if they don’t get the tech they’re so desperately searching for. It’s not like the war is over.
Earth is clear for travel. At least if sanctioned by Central Command. Others will come. It might take some time for them to get here, but they will come. The government is tyrannical, though they live by laws and codes. Others? Not so much.
But they won’t be coming for Gemma or me. Or Shelby, or Peter, or anyone else.
Gemma says we have to help ourselves now. She’s a flitting voice in my head. I think she’s right. It’s the last thing she tells me before she says she’ll be returning soon, that she’ll find a way for us to communicate.
I think I mentioned seeing Shelby to her as well, but I can’t remember. I don’t tell her about the lie. I tell her about the Mercy.
I beg her to stay. I fear for her safety. She says she is safe and not to worry about her. That I shouldn’t focus on anything except getting better. She’s a leader and I’ve always tested as a follower growing up. A sheep.
Gemma’s been claimed by Vruksha, a red naga I sometimes see in a blur behind her. She has claimed him back. I see her leading him outside.
My head spins. The pod pumps me full of more drugs.
Zaku’s claimed me… Have I claimed him too?
Should I claim him? He’s sitting beside me, staring at me. I try to look at him but my eyes hurt. It makes me sad.
I wish… I stayed.
He’s quiet, letting me rest, forcing me to rest. I don’t want to rest anymore. I want to get out of the pod and get dressed. I want to bathe. I want to curl up in the coil of his tail. I want to pound my fists against his chest for leaving me when he did, of not telling me where he was going, of abandoning me after I spent days thinking he might be dead!
He won’t let me do anything of the sort.
“Zaku,” I rasp, trying to sit up. The glass shield of the pod moves back.
He shifts and gently puts his hand on my shoulder, keeping me down. “Do not move. You are not well yet.”
I sigh. “I’ve been here forever.” The fact that it’s only been days should be astonishing to me. It should take me weeks to heal the way I am, months, years even. Then I remember it’s advanced technology being used on me. This pod, while similar to those I’ve used before, is clearly superior. It’s technology that humans like Peter are willing to sell their souls for.
Technology that can restore a human from critical condition to stable in no time at all, would be worth millions of credits. Zaku’s home has more wealth than I can wrap my head around. I’d been flummoxed by the jewels, the warm water, the pleasure, when I should’ve been in awe of this pod.
I haven’t been paying enough attention...
“Not forever, little human.”
He settles back when I don’t fight him. Managing to face him, fighting the taut wounds on my neck, I take him in.
He hasn’t left my side, not once since I woke up. He gives me no privacy, hovering over me every second of every day. I don’t think he’s sleeping now that Gemma’s left, and I worry for him. He’s been wounded, and his chest is still healing. He needs sleep as well as food and rest.
“I wish I could regenerate too,” I say.
“So do I.”
Arguing with him to go take care of himself is futile. He won’t do it, not while I’m awake at least. I’ve tried and failed. But I feel better today, stronger. Perhaps it’s the recent flood of meds. The pod is helping me heal rapidly, repairing my skin, numbing my nerves. “At least let me sit in a chair. If I can just take a dose of painkiller with me, I’ll be fine,” I beg. “I’d like to sit upright. I’d like to look at the trees and the gorge below.”
“No.”
“Please? Just to the window?”
His tail winds over the top of the pod, giving me his answer. “Daisy, not only have you been burned—”
I close my eye. The other one doesn’t open any longer. “I don’t want to know.”
“—you’ve lost sight in one eye. Your arm is broken. You’ve also lost a significant amount of blood and you have third-degree burns down your body from your face to your hip. You are not going anywhere.”
“I didn’t want to know,” I whisper. I’m damaged. I know this. I don’t think I have hair anymore either. I don’t… feel it. I didn’t see it in the glass. There’s a wounded person in it, not me.
“You must rest,” he says.
“What about you?” I ask.
“Rest.”
Heartbroken, I let sleep take me away.
When I wake next, the pod is changing my IVs, and it’s dark. A single candle is lit, flickering shadows across the space. Zaku’s beside me, reading. I’ve never seen him read before.
When he notices me, he puts the book down.
“What is it?” I ask, though it comes out as a croak.
He lifts the book. “An encyclopedia.”
“What’s that?”
His cowl flutters. “I think… It’s a book of many subjects. There is a lot in it about the old world.”
“Is it interesting?”
“I have read it before, so no. But it has subjects on human health, and I have no other books on the matter.”
He goes silent, studying me, and the longer he does, the more nervous I get. I can’t read his expression; shadows cling to his features. My eye is out of focus. I can’t even sit up. My heart quickens uncomfortably the longer he studies me.
“Please stop looking at me,” I whisper when it becomes too much, facing away.
He shifts, and I try curling into a ball to make my body small. “Why?” he rumbles.
“My face—”
“Is the same as it has always been.”
Tears spring. “No, it’s not. I’ve seen it. I’m not me anymore. I’ll never be beautiful again for you. I’m—”
“Look.”
I open my eye to find a mirror posed over me. “I don’t want to see,” I cry, turning away.
“Look, Daisy.”
“Please don’t make me.”
He hisses. “You have nothing to fear, little mate.”
Mate. He still claims me. My heart cracks and swells and I shudder.
Slowly I look into the mirror. Tears escape when I do, slipping down my cheek. Bleary, I blink them back until I face my reflection. It hurts. It hurts more than what’s happened to my body.
I’ve always been Daisy, the daughter of a great commander. I’ve always looked like my father. I’ve always been that, and nothing more, until I was an orphan, a disappointment, and then a pilot, and then nothing at all. But it was my identity and no one else’s. Now, like everything, it’s gone. I don’t know who I am anymore.
I don’t know what I am anymore.
Why does everything have to come to an end?
The face staring back isn’t me. It’s also not the fearful thing I’d seen in the glass. It’s my face, only different.
My hair is gone on the left side of my head, and shorn short on the right. My left eye is scarred, swollen, and closed. There are blotchy red burns all along the left side as well that goes down to my neck, shoulders, and lower still under the sheet, but the char of my skin is gone. And the right side of my face is almost entirely untouched. I have no eyebrows, and the one eye I can open is still bloodshot and red, still... I see me—me—behind the burns.
“Every day, you are healing. Every day, the pod grafts your skin. You’re mending, Daisy, and you will live. Tomorrow you will be stronger, and you will be better. You will be closer to sitting up and looking out the window. You won’t be alone.”
I fall asleep staring at my reflection.
When
I wake next, it’s bright, and the pod is vibrating beneath me. My gaze goes to the ceiling—which is moving—and then to the view of the mountains next. Trying to sit upright, the pod stops as the glass above me shifts, and Zaku’s hand is back on my shoulder, stopping me.
I glimpse him behind me, seeing he’s rolling the pod across the main room. “I can sit up,” I say softly.
“Not yet.”
Sighing, I slump, and Zaku removes his hand from me, rolling me to the window. Once there, the glass screen of the pod lowers once more, and Zaku moves to my side with pillows under his arm. Carefully, he helps me rise and places them behind me.
I’m not sitting, but I’m a little more upright. Looking out the window I’m reminded there’s a world beyond this glass. When he tries to move away, I reach for his hand.
“Stay with me.”
He coils his tail under him, and we stare at the landscape together.
“Thank you,” I whisper, just to fill the silence. He doesn’t respond, and I get twitchy. “Can you tell me about your home?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything. Anything? I know so little about this planet. I want to know more. I’ve got nothing else to do.”
Zaku’s eyes twinkle in the glass. His tongue swipes his lower lip.
He tells me about the animals that scurry past the window first. Squirrels, rabbits, birds, and once he’s done with the animals we see outside, he tells me about the animals we don’t see. The pigs, the bears, and the monsters.
“Fearsome beasts once wandered this land, but they have been gone for many years now. They attacked indiscriminately, viciously, and so I and the other nagas who were strong of body and mind hunted them down.”
“But monsters? Not just other animals?”
“The orbs did not know what they were. They are not of this land.”
“Do the orbs know about you?” I ask.
His eyes pierce me and he doesn’t answer. I let it be, already knowing his species is not from Earth. They can’t be. Fifteen hundred years is a long time for a planet like Earth to be uninhabited, something would’ve returned in that time. The plants had, even animals. Why not other aliens, aliens that also worked with the Ketts? Every couple of hundred years or so, humans encounter a new alien species.
Shivering, I ask him what these monsters looked like, and where they came from, trying to glean more from Zaku’s origins, only he shakes his head. “I have never seen them in my books. I do not know.”
He shows me his encyclopedia, flipping to different points of interest he finds fascinating. One is a map of Earth and the old oceans. He can’t fathom an ocean but thinks they must be several times larger than the lake.
I smile. “Much, much larger.”
He tells me about his favorite battles. The nagas he’s killed, and the skulls on his lawn that he enjoys the most, one being the head of a Death Adder—a notorious rapist and killer—that he and several other nagas took down many years prior.
As the sun sets, Zaku feeds me berries from his hand and tells me about his father.
“I was searching for him. I had not seen him for some time, and we often kept in communication. One day, I scented his body in the wind. I followed the scent and came upon his corpse. It… was mangled and broken, but not torn and bitten. I could not figure out how he died. He did not have the wounds that would indicate another naga had killed him, or a beast from the forest. For days, I stayed by his side, trying to figure out how a king, a male that even I feared could be dead. I needed to know. I had to know. And until then, I remained and kept the scavengers away from his corpse. On the third day, I realized a truth I didn’t want to accept. There were steep cliffs nearby.”
Zaku goes silent.
“Why?” I ask quietly. “Why would he do that?”
“I have never known, until recently… He was not the king he thought he was.” Zaku’s cowl falls. “Our females were dying. They were beginning to band together and leave us, to travel west. Rogue males were appearing and much more was lost in the shift. My father chased after things that I did not care about nor understand. It was wet that summer. Water fell from the sky for the first time. The skiesss opened up and water poured for weeks on end.” Zaku shudders.
“Rain?” I say.
“Yes. Water that comes from the sky.”
“I know what rain is, but here? That’s not possible. The oceans are gone. The water has to come from somewhere to rain.” My brow furrows.
I never paid attention to my history lessons and had very few on the ancient home planet, though it occurs to me that there’s a lake here, and that shouldn’t be. I saw no other bodies of water from the sky. Maybe the water is coming from under the ground?
Is the lake big enough to make rain? It can’t be. Glancing at the trees in the gorge, I wonder how they’re alive at all.
Perhaps that’s why Central Command wants the technology here so much. My stomach drops and I try to push the feeling of unease away. It’s not my problem. Still, I look at my hands and the scarring on them, tracing them with my fingertip.
“I do not know. Are there not oceans and lakes in space?”
“Not… quite. On other planets, yes, but not in space. It’s not in one of your books?”
“Not that I have found. I have never thought much about it.”
I turn back to the landscape, recalling what I’ve been told about the Lurkers and their precious tech. Even so, no tech could control the weather.
“I’m sorry about your father,” I say.
“I am sorry about yours too.”
I go still, my gaze finding him. He’s looking at me and not out the window. He reaches over and cups my cheek where I’m not burned.
“I would have chosen to save the young as well. In that, you and I are alike,” he rasps.
“Zaku…”
He drops his hand when I nuzzle it.
“Rest now. It’s getting late.” He rises and moves away.
“Zaku, wait,” I say. He stops and comes back to my side. I grab his wrist and curl my fingers around it. “Why did you leave me?”
He tilts his head.
“In the shower,” I clarify. “Why did you leave? Where did you go?”
“You were right,” he says.
“Right about what?”
Instead of answering me, he leans down, putting his face before mine. I fall back upon the pillows. I lick my chapped lips when his mouth moves close.
But it doesn’t fall upon mine. It doesn’t kiss mine. He presses his lips to my forehead and slides his wrist out of my fingers. “You will always be my queen. Regardless of what I am, you will always be that.”
And with the silence clouding in around me, he rolls me back to the room, breaking my heart.
Twenty-Nine
The Hard Truth
Daisy
Zaku makes me stay in the pod until it stops grafting my skin and administering painkillers. And even then, he keeps his tail over the glass until my vitals are normal and stable. We don’t talk again. Not after that last time. I try to start a conversation, but he dodges. I have never been stationary for so long before. It’s worse because Zaku’s pulling away. He’s different around me. The days come and go and with each new sunrise, I’m stronger, healthier, better. The pod’s AI verifies it.
It begins administering steroids, boosters, and stimulants to help return my strength.
When it starts to return, it returns fast.
Afterward, the pod began signaling low on stores, making Zaku erupt at the house. Like it’s the house’s fault. Seeing emotion from him brings me hope. Managing to calm him, I tell him I’m going to be fine, that we’ll replace what is lost, that unless every hospital on Earth has miraculously vanished, there will be ruins for us to scavenge through. Later.
And then it occurred to me…
I’m making plans. Plans here, with Zaku. I didn’t have a choice when I was stuck, though now that I’m not, now that I’m fr
ee, I can’t help but think about my future.
I’m not going back to The Dreadnaut. I want nothing to do with them and the people who are in command. I can’t help but think of them all as child killers. Dream destroyers. Though it’s not true. There are good people. It’s just… you have to break down too many walls to find them. And I’m tired, so very tired of doing that. I see those babies on the rooftop often in my head. Hearing Zaku’s response—that he even heard my story at all—healed me more than the pod ever could.
He’d save them too.
I don’t have to wonder if I made the right choice any longer.
We should have evacuated Colony 4. Not try to keep it. So many lives would have been saved if we had. So many children…
I want to be with him. We’re more alike than I ever imagined. Sucking in a breath, it’s deep and satisfying...and scentless.
He’s sweet, kind, and patient, and not at all the Zaku who pulled me from the lake weeks ago—who chased me down and caught me up in his arms. And it scares me. It scares me as much as my choice to stay has.
Staring at my reflection in the window, I gently trace the wrinkles on my skin. I’ll never look the way I did before the crash. I’ll never be what I once was. I stretch out my fingers, loosening the scar tissue that’s stiff between them, peering between them. The pod has been unable to return my sight, and I’m slowly getting used to my altered vision.
Facing the room, it’s empty. There are no robots, no visitors, and no Zaku. He’s around. I think...I hope he’s just giving me some space.
Now that I can move freely, he’s gone distant. He stiffens when I touch him, only giving me his tail to use as a crutch. Besides that, he’s avoiding touching me at all.
Is it because of the way I look? Is he afraid he’ll hurt me?
Hugging my body, I walk to the kitchen.