by Maia Starr
Regardless, fulfilling my duty was of the utmost importance, and my leg was starting to feel better on its own, well enough that I could walk again, if only with a slight limp. It made it difficult to keep up with some of the soldiers, but for the most part, I knew how to keep up appearances. If any of them knew that I had been stricken with the disease, they would avoid me like the plague. Nobody knew whether or not it was contagious, and nobody wanted to find out.
I couldn’t let them though, as it would give them something to hold over my head. I could only hope that if I was able to get Christina’s brother out of prison, she would still uphold her end of the bargain, despite the fact that she was now with child and would likely never forgive me. She thought the only reason I had lain with her the night our child was conceived was because it was my duty to create a hybrid with her, when in fact I had been burning for her from the moment I had laid eyes upon her. It seemed the cruelty of this life knew no ends.
“Yul Lorna!”
I grimaced at the sound of the most outspoken soldier on the squad, a boy named Jareal.
“Good afternoon, soldier,” I said, standing in expectation of a salute. He gave me nothing and continued on his way, and I sighed, wondering whether or not to let it go. It seemed unwise to pick a fight with a young man who was eager to shed blood as opposed to sitting on his hands and waiting for orders, so I decided to choose my battle. It would do no harm to let the boy continue walking. I hadn’t been feeling well at all throughout the week. It would be a while before I could stand up for myself again. I wasn’t stupid enough to pick fights that I couldn’t win.
“Commander! Come here and check this out! It’s hilarious!”
Nothing any of these men had ever claimed to be funny ever struck me that way, and I braced myself for something crude as I turned to walk toward the man who had summoned me.
My stomach dropped when I saw the young human boy standing in the middle of a circle of men. His face was flushed a deep red color, and his eyes were watering with strain as he attempted to maintain a squatted position while every Verian man in the area took turns filling his arms with heavy things.
The boy was just tiny, around ten Earth years, and I recognized him immediately. It was Christina’s brother Lucas.
“What is the meaning of this?” I asked, stomping through the circle of laughing men and swatting all of the garbage off of the boy’s arms. I gripped him by the neck and pulled him upright until he was standing tall beside me as he attempted to catch his breath.
“The prison shipped him out here to see if he could be of any use to us. So far, the answer is a big no,” Heane Vagios said, unable to keep the laughter out of his voice. “I mean, they could at least send us a hybrid! What the hell is this kid doing here anyway?”
“That is a good question,” I said. “I’m going to find that out.”
I shoved the boy in front of me and led him to the commander’s tent for privacy. The rest of the men hollered with laughter as they collected their rubbish from the ground, and I did my best to contain my anger.
The boy was clearly terrified, and I sat him down at the round table in the middle of the room and poured him a glass of refreshing iean from the cooler. It was on hand for anybody who hurt or strained themselves minorly, but it was also one of the most satisfying and delicious drinks on the planet Helna that was still available.
The boy drank it greedily, and I smiled sadly at him.
“Have they been picking on you for long?” I asked, sitting down across from him. The boy regarded me with suspicion in his dark brown eyes before he finally nodded.
“Since I got here.”
“When was that?” I asked.
“Yesterday.”
I sighed. It didn’t surprise me.
“What are you supposed to be doing here?”
“They said they were going to test out whether or not I was ready to train for war.”
“For war, huh? Do you know anything about war?” I asked.
The boy nodded grimly, and I thought of his parents, how they had been killed by the horrifically efficient weapons of my people. There wouldn’t even have been a body left for the boy and his sister to say good bye to.
“And what do you think? Would you say you’re ready for war?”
“I don’t want to,” he said, with sudden fire in his eyes. He looked at me seriously, as if ready to do whatever bargaining he had to do in order to maintain his life away from the battlefield. “I can fix things sometimes! Maybe I can just work on, like, machines and stuff like that. But I don’t want to go to war or be a soldier. Especially not if it means being around assholes like them all the time.”
I almost expected the boy to cry, as his sister had been prone to do since the beginning of her pregnancy, but he looked at me evenly, waiting for my response with a kind of grim determination. He would accept his fate, no matter what that happened to be. And as far as he knew, I was the enemy. And frankly, I wasn’t so sure that I wasn’t.
“Well, I’m not really in charge of what happens to you,” I told him evenly. His face fell, but his lips stayed set in a grim line of determination. “But I will put a word in to my friend in the prison that you would do better elsewhere. Between you and me, the guys here, they’re awful. I wouldn’t be working here if I didn’t have to be.”
“Why do you have to be?” Luke asked.
“My boss doesn’t like me very much, so he gives me bad jobs sometimes.”
“Why?”
“You ask a lot of questions, Luke.”
The boy flinched. “How do you know my name?”
I stammered for a moment, unsure of how to answer him.
“I know things,” I said, deciding to keep it mysterious. Kids were always more accepting of mystery than adults; at least I had always thought so. I had never encountered one who asked so many questions though. Especially to their captors. He and his sister were both fearless, it seemed. I couldn’t help but admire it.
“All right. Well, don’t tell any of them what my real name is. My parents always told me that if I got caught, to give them the name Max. So just call me Max, all right?”
“All right,” I agreed. Though I couldn’t help but think that Verians wouldn’t give a single care about what the boy’s name was. all that mattered was whether or not he had a function. Otherwise, he would be deemed unworthy of the resources that were being allocated to him. Helna was already lacking. Having another person on the planet to care for who wasn’t serving the express purpose of winning the war was just a waste of space and resources.
“Why don’t you spend the rest of the day working on laundry duty, Max?” I said.
If he was out of the way, then he was less likely to get picked on. It was the very least that I could do for his situation. At the end of the day, he was going to be shipped back to the prison, and probably sentenced to spend the rest of his days there until an execution was scheduled. These men were clearly not going to allow him to join their ranks, unless they wanted somebody to mess with. But even then they weren’t stupid enough to put someone who couldn’t do the job on their squad. It would put every single one of them in immense danger.
“The laundry?” Lucas whined. “That’s girl stuff!”
I grinned. “Actually, the laundry can be done by anybody. I guess you would prefer to be out there with the rest of the men then? If that’s the case, then there is nothing more that I can do for you.”
Lucas sighed and shook his head. “I’ll just do the laundry.”
“Good boy,” I said, standing from my chair. I led Luke to the laundry tent and showed him the basics. I watched him until I was satisfied and then went out to deal with the rest of the soldiers, hoping that the day would bring no more unexpected surprises.
Chapter 8
Dr. Christina Evans (MD)
“Meal time, Dr. Evans.”
I smiled at the kind voice of the Pelin chef, who had agreed to call me by my preferred title, unlike eve
rybody else in the house. It was comforting to know that someone was capable of respect.
Jaize had been gone for several hours, and the house had seemed quiet without him. I had heard and Malnia exchange words before he left. Although their tones always seemed subdued, I could tell that they were at the end of their ropes with each other.
“Please enjoy,” the Pelin said, bowing deeply for me. I couldn’t see his face, but he had been very kind over the past few days, waiting on me if I needed anything and always there if I was feeling ill from the pregnancy.
I had been shocked to find that he didn’t have a name; none of the Pelin did. It was part of their culture, and they had been colonized by the Verians and had pledged loyalty to them. They were underappreciated slaves, from what I could tell, and waited on the Verians hand and foot for anything they could possibly ask for.
“Thank you,” I said. I had learned to slow down on my eating, as eating too rapidly could make the sickness even more powerful. I had begun displaying some fairly typical signs of pregnancy for a human, such as swollen breasts and a sensitivity to smells, and some rather uncommon signs that I assumed came from the Verian side of things. For example, my skin had taken on an ashy sheen, so that my skin looked somewhat more the color of Jaize or Malnia, and my stomach was swelling rapidly, unlike in a human pregnancy.
The Pelin had informed me that I was going to be due within five months of pregnancy—at least that was the average for the human women who had been impregnated in the prison. He seemed highly interested in such matters, and we held long conversations over my meals, as neither of us had anybody else to talk to. He was a sweet little man, if a little odd at times, and I quickly grew fond of him.
“How was your sleep, Dr. Evans?” the Pelin asked as I slowly worked my way through my meal.
“It was…challenging,” I answered honestly. It had been bothering me that Jaize saw no future for our child other than in aiding the war effort. He had called my abduction ‘Operation Super Soldier’ when he’d spoken to his superiors once he had me in his custody, and now I knew why. The Verian-human hybrid children were strong and capable, and he had been wanting one of his own. It had been so stupid of me to let him have his way. I couldn’t think of any way I would possibly be able to forgive him.
“Sorry to hear that. If you’d like, I could make you—”
“Leave us.”
The food in my stomach suddenly felt heavy when Malnia’s voice sounded in the doorway. The Pelin nodded graciously to her and left the room, leaving me alone in the tiny kitchen area with Jaize’s wife. This was never good.
“Hello, Malnia,” I said, standing up from the table. She was significantly taller than me, and I didn’t like the way that she was towering over me, with that distinct look of malice in her eyes.
“I have a task for you,” she said, not bothering with niceties. “If you do not do it, you will be in direct violation of your terms for staying here.”
I stood, doing my best to smile pleasantly at her. I had learned that people like this were even more infuriated by other people’s pleasure, and from the dark glint in Malnia’s eye, I knew that this was true of her.
“Of course,” I said cheerfully. “I would be happy to help with whatever it is you ask.”
A cheerful slave was not a fun slave, we had learned in class, and so it was the first tactic I employed. Malnia scoffed and led the way through the house until we came upon a large room. She pushed the door open, and I immediately started coughing. It was absolutely covered in dust.
Malnia turned the light on, and we walked inside. I gaped at all of the huge furniture inside, covered with white cloths as if somebody inside had once died.
“This is the nursery where I was born and spent the formative years of my life,” Malnia informed me, a look in her cold eyes that I couldn’t pinpoint. “I want you to get rid of all of the furniture in here. We were going to use it for our own children as a nursery, but I wanted to be sure I would successfully conceive before we prepared a room for a child.”
“You want me to move the furniture?” I asked incredulously. “But I’m—”
“And don’t just leave it scattered about, either. There’s a code for picking up old things like this. If it’s not neat and tidy, they will leave it in front of the house for ages. We wouldn’t want you to have to haul it all to the dump yourself, now would we?”
“Malnia, this is dangerous,” I said, furrowing my brow. “It could hurt the—”
“And don’t forget to clean all of the dust out of the room when you’re finished. I want this place spotless. I’ve decided to take up a new hobby, upon my father’s urging. It will be nice to spend some time in a familiar space.”
“I can’t just—”
Malnia turned to me, her gaze sending a chill down my spine. “If you aren’t up to it, then there are other consequences.”
She was trying to get rid of me, I realized. That, or she legitimately did not want this baby to be born without complications. But since she couldn’t outright harm me or the child, she was going to try to do it with indirect means. I felt sick suddenly, and swallowed hard.
“Of course I’m up to it. Is there anything else you would like me to do for you?”
“Nothing,” she said, the tone of her voice one of disgust. “The last thing I asked you to do, you couldn’t be bothered with. But you will regret not staying away from my husband. He belongs with me, not with you, and there is nothing in this universe that will keep us apart.”
“How many times do I have to tell you? I can’t stand him!” I exclaimed.
Malnia narrowed her eyes. “If you shout at me like that again, you will be executed on the spot, and nobody will be able to save you.”
I opened and closed my mouth in exasperation, finally nodding. “I understand. I’m sorry.”
Malnia tilted her chin up at me, and I suddenly realized that she expected me to kneel. I did, and a cloud of dust swarmed around my face. I coughed and sputtered, tears welling in my eyes. I glanced up at Malnia just in time to catch her grinning at me maliciously before closing the heavy door of the room behind her.
***
I slowly dragged the heavy frame of the bed through the long, winding hallways and out in front of the house and fell back against the big collection of dusty old furniture, coughing and panting. I held my hand over the tiny mound of my child, silently apologizing for all that I was putting it through. It deserved better than this, better than this horrific world, but there wasn’t much that I could do about it. At least not yet. I was trapped.
“What the freg is this?!”
I winced at the sound of Jaize’s voice. I had been too exhausted to even register the sound of his thuse when he parked in the driveway, and now that he was standing in front of me, his purple eyes flashing with anger and concern, all I wanted to do was collapse into his arms. No matter how much I hated him, I had worn myself out. It had been stupid of me to try so hard to please Malnia. If she wanted to execute me, then what was the harm in letting her?
“Yula!”
I didn’t have enough time to tell Jaize to call me by my proper name before the world around me began to double, and I blacked out.
***
“How could you be so selfish! This isn’t about you! The human could have been seriously hurt! Or worse, the child!”
“What do you care about the human? Or the child for that matter?” Malnia said, her voice quaking with rage. “They are both just marks to you to show everybody that you’re a good patriot!”
“That’s not true!” Jaize growled. “I care about her! And the child that we bore together. And whether she knows it as the truth or not, I would rather have her as my wife than you!”
“Well, that’s just great, Jaize. Thank you for being honest about that. But you know what? We are stuck together! For the rest of our natural lives, there is nothing we can do about it! You literally ruined my life!”
“Oh no, Yula,” Jaize
said darkly. “You have by far ruined mine. Every time I try to please you, it backfires. I get seriously harmed along the way. All you have ever done is cause harm! To me, and to anybody you feel threatened by. But tell me, what exactly is it that you don’t like about the human? She is sweet, kind, compassionate. Everything you never have been for a second in your life!”
“I am done talking to you about this,” Malnia said. “I’m going to tell my father, and you are going to regret every single word you have just spoken.”
“I will never regret speaking the truth, Malnia! That is why you and I have never worked well together!”
I sat up weakly in my bed when I heard a door slam shut, and then the heavy sound of Jaize’s boots as he paced outside the bedroom door. They finally stopped, and for a moment I thought he was going to enter. Instead, he began to speak in hushed tones, a prayer I recognized from my cleansing. He was invoking the power of the ancient Verian gods. He wanted them to protect me and his child from all harm.
I fell back against my pillow, my eyes filled with tears. Nothing had happened to the child as far as I could tell, but it had been a close call. Living with a malicious woman like Jaize’s wife meant that neither I nor my baby would be safe. I couldn’t stand to be in the house a moment longer. I knew exactly what I had to do, and I was going to have to act fast, while Jaize, and everybody else, thought that I was incapacitated.
I crept to the window of the guest room and opened it as quietly as I could, stepping out carefully onto the sandy ground. A wave of dizzy nausea overwhelmed me, but I wouldn’t let it stop me. Jaize had left the thuse parked outside, and if I tried hard enough, I would be able to remember every turn he had made that led me to the laboratory by the prison. I was going to find Luke, and the two of us were going to get the hell out of there. One way or another.