Her apology confuses me. She wasn’t talking long enough to be boring. I suspect this is something someone has told her. Maybe this Jason. I bite back the urge to snarl.
“Like that,” I say, deciding to ignore her apology, not make an issue out of it. “But with less bacteria and eating.”
“Well, good about the not eating part. I don’t want to be eaten.”
“I’m not going to let anything eat you, don’t worry,” I say. “But, you need to be careful of that injury. If you knock it, the toxin will flood your system again. You need to try not to touch it. The toxins will still leach out, but in much smaller quantities, over a longer time. You’ll probably feel a bit fragile for a while, but you won’t get the flashbacks and hallucinations.”
“I would like to not have those,” she says with a shudder.
“Lie on your side when you sleep and avoid putting your head in your hands. I’d say don’t brush your hair, but… I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.”
She gives a small laugh, and my primal side sits up, pleased with itself. I want to see her smile more, want her to laugh more, want her closer to me, her skin against mine, her…
I get the feeling this instinct is going to be very annoying.
Chapter 16
Charlie
There isn’t a whole lot of room in the cabin, something Dhak appears to realise as he lays out the blankets to make a bed. I watch him as he tries several different configurations, but there’s not enough space for us to lie side by side and maintain any semblance of separation, and there’s not enough blanket to make two separate beds in line. His face goes through several different looks of discomfort, before he drops all the blankets.
“I’ll go see if I can find any more blankets and coats,” he says.
I shake my head. “Don’t bother. Just sleep next to me. I don’t mind.”
“You don’t?” he looks surprised.
I shrug. “If you wanted to attack me, you could have done it a hundred times over before now. Not like I can fight you off, even if I didn’t have a bad foot.” I raise my foot and wiggle it at him. “We’ll be warmer this way.”
And I am starting to get cold. I don’t know if it’s because the adrenaline rush has long since faded, along with the warm glow I got from eating, or if the temperature down here is dropping. Whatever it is, I feel distinctly chilly.
Dhak hesitates long enough that I know I’m not wrong about my assumption that he won’t do anything to hurt me. He still thinks I’m a princess for starters, and I know I should tell him otherwise, but… I feel like we’ve finally connected. I won’t go as far as to say we’re friends, but we’re definitely on that path now. And it’s nice. Comforting. It’s selfish and I’m a terrible person, but I don’t want to ruin that before it even has a chance to properly take.
“Are you sure you’re alright with that? I could sleep in the chair,” he says.
“And wake up cranky because you didn’t sleep properly, probably with a crick in your neck and aching everywhere?” I shake my head. “I might need your help tomorrow, we can’t have you injured as well.”
This makes him nod, the fact that he knows it’s the only sensible course of action overriding whatever reservations he has. He picks up the blankets he dropped then lines the floor with them. I don’t even think it’s that late - maybe early evening - but I’m so exhausted the musty pile of blankets looks like heaven. I shuffle round, then awkwardly lower myself to the floor, trying to keep my injured foot off the ground. It’s not the comfiest, the blankets only just taking the edge off the hardness of the floor, but it’s enough. I roll up one of the smaller coats into a pillow, then lie myself down, careful not to touch the injured side of my forehead to the floor. My foot throbs, but it’s ignorable.
Dhak lays a couple of the larger coats over me. They stink, but it doesn’t take long for my nose to adjust to the smell. He lowers himself to the floor next to me, so we’re both lying side by side facing the ceiling. It should be weird, uncomfortable, but somehow it isn’t. His body heat radiates towards me and somewhere beneath the musty smell of the jackets, I detect a hint of his scent - a manly smell that’s both familiar and not. He smells good, of skin and warmth and something I can’t quantify. Something alien.
“Dhak,” I say. “Were there other women taken with me?”
“Yes,” he says.
“How many?”
“Twenty four, including you.”
“Where are they?”
“Safe,” he says. “They’re still in cryostasis. Mylan, my second, has them under lock and key, don’t worry.”
“I didn’t even think to ask if anyone else had been taken,” I say. “What does that say about me?”
Dhak turns his head so he’s looking at me. “That you’ve had enough to think about and process worrying about yourself?”
“You’re too nice to me,” I say.
The lights are fading, and despite the comfort of Dhak’s presence next to me, I feel myself growing more and more jittery. I try to repeat to myself, over and over like a mantra, that it wasn’t real, none of it was real, just a hallucination induced by the Abbarax toxin. But knowing that and believing it are two different things, and my brain is having a lot of trouble with the second.
“The women I was grabbed with said this mountain is haunted,” I say.
I should probably pick a better topic of conversation, but it’s all I can think of.
“I find that there’s a definite correlation between how much wilderness people live with and how superstitious they are,” Dhak said. “And Denestra is a whole lot of desert and not much town.”
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
He gives a low chuckle, a relaxed, happy sound that does something strange to my insides.
“Maybe this makes me strange,” he says. “But I always thought it would be kind of nice if ghosts were real.”
“Nice?” I say, letting my scepticism fill my voice.
“Yeah. Maybe there would be some that were scary, but don’t you think most of them would just be looking for their relatives, seeing how their families are getting on. Imparting some wisdom here and there.”
“Actually, there’s something a bit like that on Earth. It’s called the Day of the Dead. I saw this documentary about it one time…” I trail off, reining myself in. No one wants to hear about the documentaries I’ve been watching. Haven’t I been told that enough times?
But Dhak rolls onto his side, facing me, and says, “Tell me about it.”
I almost tell him he doesn’t have to humour me, but… he doesn’t look like he is. There’s a real interest in his eyes.
“There’s a country on my planet called Mexico. It’s on the other side of a huge ocean to where I live. I’ve never been, but, I’ve always wanted to go. The Day of the Dead is celebrated there. It’s like a big festival, and the people create altars made up of all the favourite things of the dead person to encourage them to come back.”
I tell him about the documentary and how watching it made me want to see the festival for myself. I don’t tell him that sometimes I imagined Jason would take me there for our honeymoon. Thinking about Jason feels wrong, my thoughts and feelings for him jumbled up with the memories the Abbarax pulled out.
I wonder if I’ll ever be able to separate them out again.
I wonder if I should.
When I’m done talking about the documentary, Dhak tells me about his home planet - a place called Garvenia where the entire population live in the treetops. But not trees like I think of trees on Earth. Trees on Garvenia are these massive, interconnected organisms, their trunks so thick, whole houses can be carved out of them without killing the tree. It sounds incredible, and between the soothing tone of his voice and trying to imagine what his homeworld must look like, my brain switches off all its anxious parts and I drift off to sleep.
I get the sense that a long time has passed when I wake again. Mostly because I don’t feel the
immediate need to roll over and go back to sleep. I don’t recall dreaming anything - good or bad - so figure I must have been flat out unconscious. I flex my bad ankle and it hurts like hell, but everything else feels okay. A bit battered and achy, but bearable.
I expect to find Dhak up and about, but when I turn, I realise he’s still lying next to me. The light from his glow sticks has virtually gone out, but there’s just enough for me to pick out the features of his face. The strong jawline, defined cheek bones. He’s lying on his side, his ever present jacket gone, a tight fitting t-shirt on instead. I take a moment to admire his biceps, my eyes snagging on a change in the texture of his skin just below where his t-shirt sleeve ends. His forearm looks like I would expect it to, but his bicep appears to have scales - a bit like snake skin. They blend so seamlessly from scales to skin, as if the scales aren’t real, just inked on by some incredible tattoo artist.
I wonder what it would feel like to run my fingers over them. I’ve heard snakes are actually quite warm and soft when you touch them, though I can’t imagine them as anything other than slimy and cold. Dhak’s not cold though. When he had to restrain me yesterday, his body all pressed up against mine, he’d felt warm, solid. Maybe if I hadn’t been in the midst of a hallucination about a terrifying ghost, coming fresh off horrible memories about Mark, it might also have felt good.
Who am I kidding? There’s no ‘maybe’ about it. Dhak is all broad shoulders and well defined muscles. There’s no way it wouldn’t feel good to be sandwiched between him and a solid surface. Or a firm mattress.
I mentally slap myself. Dhak has been nothing but kind and courteous towards me. The last thing he wants is me having sordid little fantasies about him.
And I have a boyfriend.
Or do I? Jason’s so tangled with the bad memories, the thought of touching him, kissing him, doesn’t fill me with delight anymore. Nat persuaded me before to stick with Jason because of his better qualities. But right now it feels like his only good quality is that he’s never laid a hand on me, and ‘doesn’t hit you’ is a real low bar for a boyfriend. He did use me as his drug mule without telling me. He did do that. And he never hit me, but he did fight with me, then come begging for my forgiveness, make me feel like it was all my fault, then tell me I’m special to him. I’d forgotten that my father used to do that. I was young when he got sent to prison. My memories of him have faded and blurred over time. But the Abbarax brought them back.
No. I force myself to remember the night at Nat’s wedding. Mark with his boozy breath all in my personal space, hand sliding up my leg. The Abbarax didn’t show me the true memory, but I run through it now. Jason grabbing Mark by the shoulders and dragging him off me, putting himself between me and Mark and shouting at Mark. Putting his arm round my shoulder and leading me away somewhere quiet. Holding me while I shook and telling me it was okay until I could go back and face the party again.
That was a good thing. He did a good thing for me that day. A brave thing. It’s why I love Jason. Part of why I love Jason. There are other reasons. I love him because…
Because.
Dhak stirs beside me and I’m saved from having to dwell on why I can’t think of a single reason why.
“Morning,” Dhak says, his voice a little gruff.
“Maybe,” I say. “Kind of hard to tell.”
He gives a small laugh. “Did you sleep? Bad dreams? You never woke me up thrashing about.”
“No dreams.”
“That’s good. How’s your head?”
“A bit… muddled?”
“I’m no expert on Abbarax toxin, but I would say that’s normal.” He reaches out a hand, brushes my hair back very carefully. “Hard to tell in this light, but it looks a little less angry. No headache?”
“No.”
Not while he’s touching me, anyway. His fingers on my forehead even seem to still my spinning thoughts. I feel safe. Him holding my hand last night until I felt calm has conditioned me to feel safe at his touch. Everything else is inconsequential when Dhakhar touches me, because I know he’ll protect me.
He draws his hand back, and I miss the warmth of his skin against mine instantly.
“Most important question,” he says. “How’s the foot?”
“Painful,” I say.
He holds my gaze, expression serious. “Charlie, if I have to carry you the rest of the way out of this mountain, then that’s what we’ll do.”
Dhak cracks a new glow stick, then uses the brighter light of it to rummage round in the cupboards and draws inside our little prefab building. I manoeuvre myself to the chairs and start pulling on my shoes. Getting my left one on is a burning hot agony, but when the shoe is done up tight, my ankle feels a little more secure. I get to my feet, put weight on it a little bit at a time. It hurts like hell, but it holds.
Dhak moves past me, clutching a bit of paper in his hand. He leaves the office building, his footsteps echoing as he moves round the cavern outside. When he comes back in, he has a triumphant look on his face.
“It’s a map,” he says, putting the piece of paper down on the table. “I’ve just had a look, and we came down from this tunnel last night.”
He indicates a line on the piece of paper.
“It’s labelled up as an exploration tunnel - never finished, that’s why it didn’t go anywhere. Where you were being held on the other side must have been a separate operation. I bet they closed off those tunnels we ran down as unstable when they realised how close they’d got to each other.”
He points at a different tunnel opposite the one we came in by. “This one appears to be a straight line up to the surface. If we follow this and don’t deviate down any of the side paths, we should be out of here in a couple of hours. Maybe even less.”
“And then what?” I say. “Won’t we be stuck in the desert?”
A slightly grim look crosses his face. “I think it’s still early. The sun won’t be at full heat. The mountain blocks electronics, so I can’t send out any signal, but Jax is looking for us. He won’t give up easily.”
“You trust he’ll find us.”
“I do.”
I nod. “Then I do too.”
Chapter 17
Dhakhar
I wrap her in one of the old coats before we set off. It’s not freezing, but it’s not warm, and with only her thin, desert heat appropriate clothes, she’ll feel it far worse than me. The coat was clearly designed for someone much bigger than her, and she has to roll the sleeves up several times before her hands emerge out the ends of them.
Her bandaged hands. Stars I’ve done a vecking terrible job of looking after her. All this time I’ve been worried about how she’ll report on my behaviour towards her, that a bad report would lead to H’Varak firing me. Now I’m going to have to find a way to spin this to H’Varak so I only get fired, and not further punished for negligence in my duties.
“Sure you’re okay to walk?” I ask.
She nods and we leave the relative comfort of the prefab office and head out into the mines.
It’s slow going, Charlie adjusting to walking on her bad leg. As she warms up a bit, she picks up the pace, but it’s still slow. I don’t push her. I promised I would carry her if things got too much, and I will, but the longer she can manage on her own the better. I don’t know what hazards might lie ahead of us that I’ll need both arms and legs for.
My light doesn’t breach the darkness much, but it’s enough to navigate by. As we walk down the corridor that I’m betting our lives will take us to the surface, I look round at the structures that hold the tunnel in place. They’re archaic, but not yet old. There’s no sign of significant wear or decay on any of the fixtures. So, whatever is causing tech to fail was already in the mountain, not some sort of defence system set up to protect their operation, necessitating archaic installations.
Leshantu crystals then. My mind goes back to a fierce battle against the Prenetashi. They were one people of one small planet, but the Vetru
en Empire hadn’t only made enemies of them. So many of the people they’d stepped on or squashed down over the years joined the Prenetashi cause. They brought them battlecruisers and weapons and soldiers until the two sides were almost evenly matched. But the Vetruens had the upper hand. Organisation and experience and infrastructure working in their favour. So the Prenetashi fought dirty. They had to.
That day, I was flying a fighter - a small little ship barely bigger than its pilot. I was on defensive manoeuvres, protecting the battlecruiser from the Prenetashi fighters. Laser fire from a little ship like a fighter is like insect bites to a battlecruiser. Annoying, but ultimately of little consequence. But, if the little ships concentrate their fire on a battlecruiser’s shield generator, then the battlecruiser can find itself in trouble. My unit were tasked with defending it, which meant I got a front row seat when one of those small little fighters dropped a Leshantu bomb on the battlecruiser. It was suicide to do so. Flying high above the battlecruiser, chasing down a different fighter, I was outside of the range of the bomb, but the bomber wasn’t. Their electronics fried, along with those of the battlecruiser, and I had to watch as both went down, exploding as they hit the surface of the planet beneath them.
“Dhak?” Charlie’s voice cuts through the fire and the smoke and the weight of all those lives lost. “You okay?”
My heart is pounding, adrenaline racing through my body. My scales harden in response, and when I start walking again, it’s with awkward, robotic movements.
“Sorry,” I say. “War memories. Sometimes they come at me out of nowhere.”
“Stop a minute,” she says. “I could do with a rest anyway.”
She sinks down the tunnel wall, stretching her bad leg out. She winces, and there’s sweat beading in her hairline that I don’t think has anything to do with exertion. I sit down opposite her, stretching my own legs out alongside hers, close but not touching. I want to touch her. Want to bury my face in her neck and breathe in her scent until the memories fade.
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