Chapter 21 Aera
Evo came for me, and the damned Solcrue caught him. Again. I fight Captain Crezlith harder.
“Aera, I swear to the black holes, I will cut you again if you don’t...” He wraps an arm around my waist and hauls me through a doorway.
I launch an elbow into the side of his head.
“Stop!” He slings me into a cell and smashes a button on the side that sends a door closing between us and metal arms unfolding from the ceiling, the kind meant to control unruly anajas. They pin me back against the wall, binding my arms and legs so I can’t move.
He runs a finger over his cheek and wipes blood away. Then, he taps the screen and the door opens again.
Crezlith storms up to me, grabs me by the face, and gets close enough that I can smell the gilkyworms on his breath.
I stifle a gag when he bares his pointed teeth at me.
“Let me be clear. The only reason you are not already dead is that Titan wants you. And he is also useful. If I kill you, knowing Titans, he will decommission himself. Which, in hostile situations, turns him into a bomb. And we can’t have that.
We’d much rather have a servant we can count on.
“As for you...” Crezlith’s green eyes dance over my face with interest. His jaw muscles flex. “Your kind are supposed to be submissive.”
I growl at him, and it makes him throw his head back laughing. “A feral female. Perhaps I should try Evolution’s corruption code on you and see if I can get you to behave.”
He draws a pen-shaped injector from his pocket and taps it against my forehead. “One little prick, and you’ll willingly take mine for the rest of your existence, even pretend you like it.”
I squint at him in disgust.
“Oh, I know how much you loathe us.” He rakes his teeth up my neck, letting me feel the full potential of his ability to rip out my throat.
I can’t slow the pace of my lungs or the tears that blur my eyes.
“That’s what it takes to hurt you?” he simpers. “Teeth?” He hums a low note. “Why don’t you tell me where the weapon is, and we can just forget all this. I’ll let you go.”
“No you won’t,” I reply. “You will gut me like Cadan, or launch me out the air lock alive like Ellie. Perhaps you will use me up like Daphne and leave me for dead, let me die with the self-destructing ship.”
His satisfaction turns to a hint of curiosity. “Hazareth...”
“Dead.” It’s my turn to smirk. “Stardust.”
“How unfortunate.” He looks away, then grins. “Room for me to move up. What do you say? Tell me where the weapon is, and I’ll let you be my little pet instead of dying a horrible death. And I won’t use this little beauty on you unless you resist.”
“What are you going to do with Evo?”
“Evo, huh?” he spins the pen in his palm. “He’s going to be part of the crew again. Your little protector isn’t coming for you.”
Crezlith braces himself on the wall to either side of my head. “What is it going to take to get you to surrender to me?”
“Nothing.” I glare at him. “I will resist until I have nothing left to give.”
He shakes his head. “So you’re all just going to have to die if we want to restore order?”
“If that’s how you want to look at it.”
“I didn’t believe Hazareth. But I see what he was talking about now.” Crezlith leans coolly against one of the walls like he thinks he’s hot. Maybe to his Solcrue females he is. But he is rotten inside to me.
I tug on the restraints, but they don’t budge.
“Wasting your energy, babe.”
I scoff in disgust. He’s so confident because he’s got me in shackles when he doesn’t see that his binding of me is the sign of his weakness. “Don’t call me that.”
“Just think it would be a shame to kill all of you when there are a few of you worthy of joining us.”
A laugh of realization slips out. “Is that what you told CSP to get them to betray us?”
“Something to that effect.” He shrugs. “The scared, the paranoid, and the weak-minded are easily swayed with simple offers of kindness. I give freedom to good girls.”
“You killed my friends. You starved my colony.”
He nods a few times. “Yes, yes. There is that. An unfortunate race to be the strongest and survive.”
“Are you?” I ask.
He narrows his eyes at me like he can’t believe I would dare say such a thing.
But I am sliding into the numb phase of battle.
I’ve been shot at, bound, cut, and threatened with death if I do not comply.
He can cause more pain, but I am committed to my freedom, if the only kind I maintain is what is left in my mind.
“Are these bindings for me or for you?” I challenge. “If I kicked you out onto a planet with a Titan, who do you think would survive? I’d even put you up against a really pissed-off human Rebel, which is basically all of us at this point.”
“You don’t think I’d win?” he snarls, coming closer.
I study his eyes, and I know he’s not what he pretends to be.
Energy pulses in me as I confront him with a new idea.
“Strip away all the technology, all the tools, everything we have built that you have stolen, and put us all on a world together as just creatures. You would not survive the day. You have lost your natural survival instincts, haven’t you?
That’s why you need practice mates. That’s why you need us in the mines, why you need suits on planets.
And it’s why you have to keep your females in special ships where you grow your next generation. ”
Crezlith straightens like he’s calculating what I’ve said. Then he rears a fist back and smashes it into the wall beside my head with a fury uncommon to Solcrue. They are sinister, manipulative, but not full of rage, not like Titans and humans.
“What? You didn’t know?” I ask.
He grabs me by the throat again and gets uncomfortably close to my mouth. “You think you are superior because you are relics of an ancient way of life. But you are rudimentary beings. Animals.”
I catch an unusual scent in his breath, the kind of change in Daken’s breath when he wanted me. “You’re lying. You don’t hate humans. Not for the reason you say.”
Crezlith wrinkles his nose. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You hate us because we can do what you can’t. And you hate that you wish you were us. It’s why you take humans to fuck in your sadistic cages. But your belief system won’t let you procreate with us. That’s why you drug your anajas. Sterilize them in many cases.”
Crezlith hisses at me in distrust.
“I can smell the hormones in your breath. But you wouldn’t know what that’s like, since your kind can’t...”
His body tenses, and he backs up, “Shut up!”
Crezlith points at me. “I’m going to give it to you later, and you’re going to like it, or you’re going to die a very slow death.”
I fight to strengthen my voice as I decide my fate. “Slow death it is. At least I will be with my people again. All the ones you took from me.”
There’s a shimmer of something new hiding in his hateful eyes as he slams the door to my cell and storms off.
Fuck you too, snake.
I rest my head back against the wall.
See you soon, Mom, Dad, Ellie, Cadan, Isa... Xiphos, wherever you are, you’ll just have to work with Esthi and Navi after this. I am not giving up my body to the enemy.