by Rosette Lex
She nearly lunged across the room, seizing the glass and drinking it down greedily. She spared only a moment to inspect the food—an assortment of what seemed to be fruits with soft, colorful, pungent flesh, numerous seeds, and skins like a bird of paradise—before she laid into it like a starving bear.
After all, if she was so important, no one was going to poison her.
Of course, that thought brought her back to the present. She was important to these people, true, but only as a place to put a penis. What would happen to her when that role was fulfilled?
She sighed softly and abandoned the empty plate, to resume pacing across the room. Something would occur to her eventually, surely.
And in the mean time, she was…somewhat safe, for some definition of the word safe. She didn’t need to fear dying, at least.
It was hollow comfort.
Chapter Four
It came as a surprise the next morning when her breakfast—it resembled some sort of slightly green-grey steak and some sort of fibrous vegetable—came with a fork and knife.
Either they all thought she wouldn’t dare to fight back if she felt threatened, or they all thought she was harmless and that it wouldn’t matter if she fought back.
She ate it slowly and resumed pacing, but only for a few minutes. She paused once more in front of the mirror, inspecting her reflection closely.
Even when she was calm, Vivienne could still swear that there was something wrong with her reflection. She just couldn’t put her finger on it. It was something to do with her eyes, she thought.
She laid her hands against the mirror’s smooth surface and leaned close to it, until the tip of her nose was nearly touching it.
Up close, she was positive that it wasn’t just her imagination. There was something off about her reflection, and it wasn’t from the mirror. It was her.
She scrutinized her reflection like a strict teacher looking for something to pick at. And then she spotted it, and she had to wonder how she hadn’t noticed it before (then again, she had been a bit distracted, and she had never been one for needlessly admiring herself in the mirror).
There was a latticework of faint, silver lines surrounding the pupil of her left eye, over her iris. It was only by accident that she knew what it was. She had managed to befriend one of the developers of her organization, and he had shown her the schematics for a camera designed to be surgically grafted to someone’s eye.
Her mind leapt back to the procedure she had undergone before first climbing into the pod. It was just supposed to be a routine thing, to make sure she was healthy and physically fit and to install a chip in her arm to monitor her vital signs.
They had numbed her arm, and she had passed out. When she woke up, they told her it had been a paradoxical reaction to the local anesthesia.
But as Vivienne stared at her wide-eyed reflection and the proof that she had been tampered with, she knew it hadn’t been a paradoxical reaction. They had knocked her out on purpose to install the camera.
Was that what all of this was? Some sort of experiment?
Just throw a vulnerable human at an unfamiliar, potentially hostile, unknown species and see how it went, in order to gauge how safe it was to make a proper attempt at “first contact.” So that was all Vivienne was to them. She was just their guinea pig.
She grabbed the knife from the empty plate, her fingers wrapping around it in a white-knuckled grip, and she lifted it to her face. Hand shaking, she pressed the edge of the blade to the soft, delicate skin beneath her left eye.
She wanted to get rid of the camera, to be rid of the last, monstrous connection to the organization. They had done this to her. It was their fault she was stuck here. She couldn’t escape, and she certainly wasn’t going to let them benefit from her helplessness.
She tried to press the blade to her eye, but her hand was shaking, and she couldn’t even bring herself to press on the knife firmly enough to draw blood. With a shriek of outrage and despair, she hurled the knife against the wall, its gleaming black blade striking the wall beneath the window with an almost musical chime.
She pounded her fists on the mirror and she wished it would break, but in the back of her mind, she knew that wouldn’t do her any good. A broken mirror wouldn’t get rid of the camera; it would only lead to bloody fists.
Panting quickly, she curled her hands around the edges of the mirror and rattled it, shaking it against the wall. She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her forehead against the cold surface and stayed there until her breathing finally slowed back to normal.
With a slow, deep breath, she leaned away from the mirror. She spared the foggy surface only a brief look before she tore her gaze away from it.
She had to do something. She had to stop thinking, or at least stop thinking about this. She dragged her hands over her hair and stepped over to the door. To her surprise, it slid open.
Perhaps they had given up on locking her in; they probably knew she had nowhere to go. And no one to talk to. She needed a distraction, but what was she even supposed to do?
She roamed the base aimlessly, working under the assumption that eventually she had to run into Que. It was not a scientific process, but at least exploring the base was better than endlessly pacing her room.
Que was not what Vivienne would call a gentleman and he drove her insane, but he had at least proven himself adept at distracting her (in…more ways than one).
The base was massive, and Vivienne spent much of her exploration ducking into corners and down corridors to avoid running into anyone who wasn’t Que. After all, the prophecy hadn’t said that Que specifically would fuck her, just that whoever managed to would become king. She could only assume a lot of the others were gunning for that position.
Her dour thoughts were cut off, however, when she ran face first into Que’s chest. Vivienne bounced back a step and looked up at him, to find him blinking at her in bemusement.
“Graceful,” he stated flatly.
“Are you going to run away again?”
“I was looking for you, actually,” Vivienne replied, and she was just a little bit gratified to see him looking surprised.
“I need to be distracted.” She held up a finger and her eyes narrowed sharply when Que’s eyebrows rose.
“And if you even think about trying to have sex with me right now, I will punch you in the crotch and happily deal with the fallout afterwards,” she informed him, and it was possibly the most serious she had ever sounded.
She was expecting an argument. She was expecting him to try pinning her to something again. She was not expecting him to simply roll his eyes and crook two fingers in a ‘follow me’ motion.
“If it will keep you from howling for a few minutes,” he muttered, “fine. Hunting we shall go.”
Vivienne didn’t know what she had been expecting, honestly. That was not it. But she fell into step beside him.
She expected him to lead her to some sort of armory. Instead, he led her to what seemed to be some sort of stable. Que unlatched the door of one stall and Vivienne leaped back when the very same raptor-like creature that had helped to capture her barged out of the opened stall.
“What is that?” she demanded, standing rigidly straight as it buried its snout against her and snuffled her vigorously.
It hopped back and yowled at her, its tail fanning open and its claws clicking together.
“He’s a crawler,” Que replied. “His name is Bai.”
“A…crawler,” Vivienne repeated dubiously.
“You haven’t seen one climb a tree,” Que replied.
He walked away after that, stepping into a small room and leaving Vivienne and Bai to eye each other warily. And then the crawler sighed out a breath, his feathers fluffing out slightly. With a grumbling hiss, it sulked out of the stable.
A moment later, Que returned with a small vial in one hand and a dart rifle in the other. He followed Bai out of the stable, and Vivienne followed him.
Outside, Q
ue flipped open the vial’s lid and held it out towards Bai. The crawler crept forward to smell it, and then straightened up. Head craning in all directions, Bai chirped once, and then his jaws quartered and he shrieked and took off at a run towards the north.
Que pocketed the vial, slung the rifle over his shoulder by its strap, and set off in the crawler’s wake at a run.
He was a hunting dog, Vivienne realized as she sprinted after them. Not literally, obviously, but he played the same role.
It was actually sort of fascinating to watch, as the crawler loped along, long legs eating up the ground. He would slow now and then, head bobbing around and occasionally almost touching the ground, before he once again continued running.
With energy and determination that both seemed boundless, the crawler led them away from the base. They stayed on the road for only a few yards before Bai veered to the side and kept running, trampling the grass beneath his feet.
The three of them bounded over a stretch of plains, and then they were in the middle of the woods, trees rising around them like dark, glassy spires, when Bai finally slowed. His feathers rustled and his tail fanned out slightly, and he pointed his nose to a stream. Que and Vivienne slowed to a halt, and Que pointed with two fingers.
It was one of the long-nosed, fluffy, two-legged creatures Vivienne had seen when she first climbed out of the pod. It was crouched beside the stream, its tongue darting in and out rapidly as it drank.
“It’s a leaper,” Que explained quietly, as he slowly pulled the dart rifle down from his shoulder.
“You’ve eaten one a couple times.” He tapped a finger against the rifle.
“The poison in these darts is specifically made for them; it’s harmless to anything else.”
Well, that nixed any plans Vivienne might have had to try and shoot Que, and that also explained why he was comfortable enough to hand her the rifle.
She lifted it, adjusting to the unfamiliar weight. It was lightweight in areas where Vivienne was accustomed to a rifle being heavy, and heavy in areas where she was accustomed to one being lightweight.
She took a few careful moments just to let it settle in her hands before she lifted it. The butt rested against her shoulder, her finger rested against the trigger, and she took careful aim.
Once she pulled the trigger, there was hardly any knockback. The pressure against her shoulder was less like a rifle as she knew one and more like a hand on her shoulder. If not for the whoosh of air of the dart shooting out of the barrel, Vivienne might not have even realized the gun had fired.
The dart sailed through the air, straight and true. Noiselessly, it sank through the leaper’s fur and into its rear end. The fuzzy creature straightened up with an alarmed whistle and took off into the woods, bounding along like an oversized kangaroo rat.
With a sharp bark, Bai bolted after it, sprinting full tilt. If he expected Que or Vivienne to be able to keep up, he was sorely mistaken.
Que, however, seemed unconcerned, and he set off at a leisurely pace. Vivienne slung the rifle over her shoulder and jogged a few steps to catch up with him before slowing to a walk.
“How long until it’s dead?” she asked curiously.
“Not long,” he answered. “The poison spreads faster, the faster it moves.”
As if on cue, Bai came barreling back towards them, sprinting through the trees before he slid to a halt in front of them, the leaper’s dead, limp body held carefully in his jaws.
He dropped the body at Que’s feet and held his head up proudly.
Vivienne stared at the body for a moment. “So,” she started, “I take it this is dinner?”
“Thanks.” The word left Vivienne’s mouth reluctantly. “For earlier.”
Que’s eyebrows rose. “Do my ears deceive me?” he asked, because god forbid he simply accept thanks like a civilized person.
Vivienne rolled her eyes. “Whatever,” she sighed in exasperation.
“I needed a distraction, you provided it, and you didn’t molest me in the middle of the woods.” She pumped one fist in a ‘go team!’ motion.
“A for effort. Gold star; you tried.”
She turned on her heel and stalked away, Que snickering snidely behind her.
Chapter Five
A single day of distraction, while appreciated and a decent start, did not take all of Vivienne’s problems away and it did not magically make her forget everything that had gone wrong.
She didn’t forget that she was stranded, that she was a captive, that she was being held there purely to use as a sperm repository at some nebulous point in the future. She didn’t forget that people she thought she could trust had launched her into the entire mess, or that she was being spied on like a caged lion.
It had surprised her that Que had been so willing to distract her without trying to turn it into something sexual, and she had appreciated it, but it hadn’t actually fixed any of her problems.
It was the middle of the afternoon, almost a full day after the hunting trip, and Vivienne lied on her bed and stared at the bland ceiling, one hand under her head and the other sitting lightly on her stomach.
Her mind wandered endlessly, to the past and to the future. Back and forth, her thoughts drifted ceaselessly, until the door slid open.
Que thundered into the room like an oncoming storm, a tornado waiting on the horizon. Vivienne didn’t even have time to react before he was kneeling on the bed, his knees framing her thighs and his hands pinning her shoulders to the mattress.
She stared up at him, eyes wide in surprise, and bit out, “Can I help you?”
“I would like to think so,” Que very nearly snarled, “but I’m beginning to have my doubts.”
He pressed her more forcefully against the mattress, his fingers digging into her shoulders.
“I have tried to be nice. I have tried to be civil and to win your favor. But I have seen the way the others look at you, and I know how they yearn for you to be theirs.” He shifted his legs, so his lower legs were pinning her knees.
“I will not let that happen.”
Vivienne thrashed viciously beneath him, writhing like a captured wildcat. Her back arched as she tried to buck him off, but to no avail.
“So ‘no’ really does mean nothing to you,” she spat, doing everything she could to keep her voice steady, even as terror began to build, pooling in her chest and her stomach like molten lead.
He scoffed.
“I have tried to earn a yes,” he snapped, “and that method seems rather slow and inefficient.”
He dug his fingers against her shoulders again, almost to the point of bruising.
“The fact remains that I could have you however and whenever I wanted, and you would not be able to do anything about it.” His expression seemed torn somewhere between a vicious glower and a triumphant grin.
“I would stab myself,” Vivienne informed him, with a voice as hard as steel and as cold as the mirror.
Que stilled, his grip on her shoulders loosening. “I beg your pardon?” he asked, in a voice gone carefully neutral.
“If luck was on your side and I became pregnant after just one attempt,” she continued, her words low and determined, “then I would stab myself in the stomach. I would cut it out of my belly and throw it at you, just so I could watch you mourn over it as I bled to death.”
They stared each other down, like buffalo facing off on the plains, neither one ready to give in.
Que gave in first. He sat back against Vivienne’s legs and after a moment, he managed a faintly disbelieving, “You would really do it, wouldn’t you? You would kill yourself.”
“If I could keep you from getting what you wanted from me?” Vivienne laughed harshly, and it felt and sounded like broken glass. “I would do it in a heartbeat.”
Without his hands pinning her shoulders, she could finally get enough leverage. She twisted sharply against the bed, dislodging him just enough for her to pull her legs out from under him.
Like s
ome sort of eel, she squirmed away, twisting away from him to plant her feet on the floor. She lunged for the door, dodging away from Que’s grasp as he reached after her.
The door slid open, and Vivienne sprinted out. She followed the path to the stable, because from there she knew how to get outside. Her timing turned out to be impeccable, as she bolted out the stable doors just in time to see a transport lifting off of the ground.
She hopped up onto the back edge and curled her hands around a bar along the rear entrance, pressing herself to the back of the transport so she wouldn’t fall off. There was barely enough room for her feet, but she had balanced in more difficult places before, and anger and adrenaline made it easier.