A Monster's Light (Kadrixan Mates #5)
Chapter 1 Dana
I fidgeted with the hem of my top as I waited nervously in the stark, white room. Security had patted me down thoroughly, taken any recording devices I had, and shoved them into a locked box behind the counter. The only electronic device I was allowed to keep was my temporary in-ear translator, something required to do my job.
Omnia Pictures, my employer, even had to prove that it didn’t have recording abilities, which was a good thing, both for them and for me. I didn’t want our conversation recorded at all. I had ulterior motives for my trip today.
Behind that heavily armored metal door was a Kadrixan warrior. The demon-looking aliens lived on another continent here on Vokira, the one with the large mountain range. They’d arrived only about five or six years ago, and Nova Vita had started trading with them. The colony would provide women for their yearly rut, and they would give us the ore they mined from the mountains. That treaty had ended about two years ago, just around the time my best friend, Julie, went missing.
She’d disappeared right after successfully fighting off a kidney infection. She’d been MIA for over a week when I got the message that she was finally being released from the hospital and that she’d call me when she got home. But she never did. And she never replied back either.
Julie and I met during a memorial service commemorating those who’d been lost to the Big Tsunami. We’d both been teenagers then, but since our parents had left us both sizable sums, they’d considered us fully independent adults. On Nova Vita, majority status was determined not by your age but by your ability to support yourself. Lost and with no one else, we’d moved in together. Since then, we’d traversed life as sisters from different misters.
We’d lived together until I got hired officially at Omnia Pictures after three years of unpaid internship. Just in time too, because the nest egg Mom had left for me was starting to run out. One of the criteria for working there was that we had to live in company-approved housing in a company-approved neighborhood with no housemates, because of the sensitive nature of our work.
When Julie had gotten that infection and went to the hospital, all communications stopped. I figured it was because she couldn’t take calls in the hospital. When she continued to ignore me after the single message saying she was going home, I’d shown up at her place to find it empty. And by empty, I meant completely cleaned out.
I’d immediately gone to the nearest enforcement station to make a missing person’s report. They’d waved me off and told me she’d gone to the Utopia Project because of medical bills. One of the officers had boasted about arresting her himself for non-payment, and it had taken all my willpower not to punch him in the balls and end up being arrested as well.
I didn’t completely believe them though. There was no way she would’ve chosen the Project, not with what I’d told her about it.
The whole thing was a lie. At the time, we didn’t have proof, but the entire colony knew about it now. The Utopia Project wasn’t the perfect society where the government gave you everything you needed to live like it was advertised, but a thinly veiled excuse to strip rights from poor colonists so they could be used for anything the colony-owned corporations desired. A lifetime of free food and board in exchange for releasing your right to property and autonomy was just slavery repackaged, no matter how many catchy slogans they slapped on it.
The door opened and a guard stepped out, a frown plastered to his face. “They have the monster sedated just enough to see you now.”
“Why does he need to be sedated?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it be hard for me to interview him if he’s all drugged up?”
The man shrugged and said, “It’s spring.”
It took me a moment to realize what that meant. Springtime meant the rut.
“Wait, he’s not…”
“No, not yet,” the guard said quickly. “I don’t think. It’s just a precaution because you’re a woman. But don’t worry. I’ll be right there if he goes feral.” He tapped the energy weapon strapped across his chest. “I won’t let the monster hurt you.”
“I see.” I followed the guard nervously through the hallway, hoping that I’d actually get some time alone with the Kadrixan warrior so I could ask the real questions and not the silly, useless ones on my clipboard.
As we went through several more locked doors, each corridor featureless and identical, I touched the top button of my blouse, rolling it nervously between my fingers. I still couldn’t believe they’d overlooked the signal jammer completely during their search.
The guard stopped in front of another metal door, this one with a window just above my head, clearly designed for someone taller—proof that we were still in a man’s world no matter how we spun it. I got up on my tiptoes, trying to look through, but I was still too short. The guard opened not one but three locks before reaching for the door handle.
I frowned. “Isn’t that a little excessive?”
“No. The Kadrixans are beasts.”
I swallowed the retort that animals weren’t usually kept in super-secret detention facilities behind four metal doors and multiple locks and just nodded.
“Don’t cross the red line on the floor.”
“Why? Is it going to shock me?” I looked warily down at my left wrist, where they’d installed my identity chip when I was born. Law enforcement didn’t need bars to hold Nova Vitans when they could just deliver a debilitating shock to any prisoners who tried to leave their cells. They’d also used this tactic to quell protests.
The fact that this Kadrixan was locked up must mean that they hadn’t installed any chips in him yet, or perhaps the chips didn’t work on them. Was that even possible?
“No, nothing like that,” said the guard. “The red line is how far the monster can reach, even strapped to the wall. I’m not actually allowed to kill him because he’s too important of an asset. So don’t step past the red line.”
So much for his previous proclamation that he wouldn’t let the monster hurt me.
“Okay, stay behind the red line. Got it.”
The door swung open, and I gasped at the sight of the alien warrior chained up against the wall. I’d seen them in videos before. Hell, I’d been the one who’d written the article about the meeting between our officials and their leader. But I’d thought maybe they’d doctored the videos to make them look more like old-Earth-style demons—we did that a lot to prove our point at Omnia Pictures—but now I knew they hadn’t.
The one before me had dark red leathery skin and the telltale horns and wings that made them so demonic-looking. I knew that if he stuck out his tongue, it would be forked. But unlike the one that had met with our leaders, this one wasn’t wearing a human-styled suit. Instead, he had on a shredded pair of leather pants and nothing else. The lower half of his pants had been ripped off, showing their backward-looking, satyr-like knees. I knew from my research that their knees weren’t actually backward. They just looked that way because what we thought of as their knees were actually their ankles. But faced with it in real life, it was hard to distinguish the difference.
But I didn’t have much time to focus on his knees because what really shocked me was how thin and gaunt he was. The ones I’d seen had been big, burly specimens, extremely masculine and clearly in their prime. Wearing human-style suits, I’d even venture to say they were devilishly attractive, though I’d never say that out loud. This one had been starved. His muscles, while still present, were sinewy at best now. And his once chiseled cheekbones were hollow, and his jawline too sharp.
How had that happened so fast? According to my sources, he had only been captured a day and a half ago. It matched the timing of the videos and images that had come out from citizens of a transport crash at the edge of the colony. There was a long, red, angry line even brighter than his skin running across his chest, and patches of his leathery skin were lighter than others.
“Was this from the transport fire?” I asked, taking a few steps forward. I wasn’t expecting a response, but I got one anyway.
“Yes,” the guard said from behind me.
I eyed the tubes attached to his arm. “Is he being given healing drugs?” I’d heard about a special drug made by Exotech Pharmaceuticals that can speed healing up and make scars a thing of the past.
“Him? Hell no. We don’t waste expensive drugs on prisoners. That’s all-natural. Can you believe all that was second and third-degree burns just yesterday?”
“He healed this much in one day?”
“Yeah, they weren’t kidding when they said the monsters can… shit…” The guard shook his head. “What clearance do you have?”
“Everyone knows they have crazy regenerative powers,” I said, brushing off his concern and trying my damnedest to look nonchalant and totally not freaking out at what I’d just learned. “That’s not story-worthy. Trust me, I know. That’s like saying the sun is bright.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
My gaze fell on the Kadrixan again. He hadn’t moved or shown any signs that he knew I was here. He just hung there.
“He’s passed out. I can’t interview him if he’s unresponsive.”
“Trust me, lady, you don’t want him awake.”
“Then why have me here at all? I can’t leave without my story. You know Omnia Pictures has the exclusive on this one, and we have to make it count. There are already rumors floating around claiming that Nova Vita is kidnapping Kadrixans and trying to start a war. The people are scared and angry. That’s why I’m here: to calm their worries and put a stop to all the fake news.”
That was rich, coming from the woman tasked to write the ultimate fake news meant to make the colony look like the good guys. But I didn’t care about that. If things went according to plan, I’d be long gone before they realized I didn’t plan on writing anything. I needed the Kadrixan to be awake and functioning. The truth about where Julie had gone was so close I could taste it.
I’d learned early in my career that my life as a journalist was a farce. Sure, I could go find the truth, but I’d never be allowed to publish it. Omnia Pictures was elbow-deep in every single media outlet in our colony. Just like their namesake implied, they literally owned them all. Any new companies that popped up were inevitably absorbed by the state-owned media giant.
I’d been in the industry long enough to know that my “research” was done just to find enough truth to make the lies believable. My real job was to write pro-colony pieces and keep the public of Nova Vita under control by feeding them what the big bosses wanted them to hear.
I hated my job. But I didn’t dare say that out loud, especially when I was so close to finding out the truth of what had happened to Julie. It had taken me years to get my bosses at Omnia Pictures to trust me so I’d get the juiciest pieces. That was the reason why I was here in this top-secret detention facility to begin with.
I was one hundred and ten percent sure that Julie had gone to the Kadrixans for the rut and not to Utopia. It didn’t matter to her that the Kadrixans looked like demons of old Earth; she was more frightened of the colony and the fact that no one ever came back from the Utopia Project.
The guard sighed. “They have it all wrong. We didn’t attack the Kadrixans at all.”
I put a hand on the guard’s forearm. “I know, and I’m here to clear it all up. People have to trust their media, or else things will go sideways. At Omnia Pictures, we understand that.”
I tried not to let the sour taste of the lies show; Omnia Pictures didn’t care about anything other than views and profit.
My shpiel worked because the guard said, “The doctor left for his office, but I’ll call him and see what I can do.”
I pulled the chair that was leaning against the side of the Kadrixan’s small cell to the red line, but instead sitting on it, I sat down on the ground to get a better look at his face, wanting to study him as the guard made the call just outside the door. As my eyes traveled from his chest to his head, I noticed his lashes flutter. With his head bowed, it hadn’t been obvious, but from my lowered position, it was.
The demon warrior wasn’t passed out at all. He was awake and alert. And he had his eyes on me.