Chapter 9 #2
“I met him several years ago,” she says, answering me bluntly.
“I was in a bar in a city in a place you would never go because for reasons that have always escaped me, you choose to hang out around ratty old space stations, mixing with the rabble of the universe. Kroc met me there, at the bar. We struck up a conversation, and over time I realized that he had more direction in his little finger than anyone here does in their entire body. He made it clear to me that he could elevate us all. We have been going about this in entirely the wrong way. We have been pruning around the edges of fate. But Kroc has something far greater in mind.”
I listen to her confession, and I know it does not matter because even if I were to tell every single Psyon in the realm what happened, they would not believe me. Alara is above reproach. She is our spiritual guide and soul protector. What she says, goes.
“I know,” she says. “It’s frustrating, isn’t it, to know something and to know that the knowing makes no difference at all. It’s a particular kind of dreariness, isn’t it. You believed in something that is now unbelieved.”
I don’t think that sentence makes any sense at all.
“Nobody will believe you,” she says, grinning quite wickedly. “It’s already been done, Freak. It’s already happened. Over and over. Again and again. There’s nothing you can do…”
* * *
Mara
I almost forgot what the main function of a prisoner is supposed to be.
It’s actually very simple, really. Escape.
I have to escape. I have to get the fuck off this lizard ship, I have to find Freak and find my dad, and I have to get water for the colony.
It’s a very reasonable to-do list, really.
The fact that I haven’t done any of it is probably some kind of indication as to what a damaged and terrible person I am.
I do not know where Freak is, but I know I cannot handle the idea of him being hurt on my account. I do not want him to be recaptured. I am bait, and I have to become not bait.
Escape is easier than it might be, because they do not have me tied up or caged, but it turns out there’s no real reason for them to do that because I am under reptilian observation at almost all times.
They laze about under steaming red lights for relaxation. They bask, they feed, and they never allow me to wander very far at all. The king seems to find me particularly amusing.
“Tell me again how you came to be trained as a pet?”
“I was drowning inside a booby-trapped spaceship designed to kill me,” I tell him again, giving him the shortest version of the story possible.
“Yes, because after your father went missing, you refused to be married off and allow his business to be absorbed into the families of your elders. You could have become a pawn in their games, but you refused, and instead you became an amusement for a Psyon.”
“What’s wrong with that?” I sound a little defensive, because I am.
“What’s wrong with following around a creature so much more advanced than you that you will never entirely understand his mind and powers?
You think he cares for you, but the truth is the depth of his love, when he gives it, would be enough to drown you.
Meanwhile, your human devotion is so shallow he can barely dip his toes in it.
It is a mismatch of truly cosmic proportions.
You should have stayed home and married the one you were offered.
You would have been pregnant by now. You would have had a human child. ”
I do not say anything to him. I do not want to speak so much as a word to him.
His thoughts echo my own somewhat. I have thought many times that I have made mistakes.
Too many of them. I wonder if I am the reason my father left and did not return.
I have wondered if I should have stayed and gotten married as the elders wanted.
But the one thing I have never questioned is if being taken by Freak was not the best thing that could have happened to me.
“Retreat into silence if you want,” he laughs. “I hope to reunite you with your lover soon enough, if only for a short while. I imagine you will be excellent leverage to use in order to get him to cooperate.”
“He might not come for me,” I say. “He might have already forgotten about me. You’re right. I’m so insignificant. Why are you keeping me as leverage? I’m pointless.”
The king flashes his teeth at me. “For now, you are an amusement. Think about that.”
“You must be very bored to find me an amusement,” I reply.
He chuckles. “I enjoy the thought of your precious Tasin not knowing where you are, or what has become of you. If he takes too much longer to come and find you, I might have to send him a bit of you to remind him to hurry up.”
Tasin. He uses his home realm name. That fact sticks out to me, but for the moment I cannot tell why it seems so important. There is too much happening here in this terrible place.
“Take her away,” he says to a guard. “Put her somewhere out of my sight.”
I am taken and put in a hallway. There is no other place for me. There is not a room, or a cell, or a cage. I do not matter to these aliens very much at all. They clearly doubt my ability to escape. I am the human equivalent to a small shaking dog to them. I am the chihuahua of captives.
People are always underestimating little dogs.
And right now, these aliens are underestimating me.
I start to look for a way out. It’s going to have to be an escape pod again.
I try not to think about the fact that the escape pod route hasn’t worked out for me once.
I couldn’t find one on Freak’s ship, and I couldn’t get out of my own ship with one. But the third time may be the charm.
I search for several days, slowly, in a way that makes it look as though I am not looking at all. I am being underestimated again, and I could not be more pleased about that fact. I scuttle about the ship, most of the time drawing no attention whatsoever to myself.
Eventually, I find the escape pod rack. These sorts of things are never too difficult to locate because they have to be easily accessible during complete and utter crises.
They are small. Barely bigger than a lizard-sized coffin, really.
Clearly designed to be expelled and then maybe have enough power to route to the nearest safe place.
Hm. Not ideal. I’m looking for a smaller shuttle.
“What are you doing, human?” One of the lizards stops to question me.
“I was wondering why all these beds are in this room?”
The lizard gives me a pitying look. He thinks I am very simple and very stupid, and I intend to let him think that.
“They’re not beds. They’re stasis chambers for long-term flights. They allow us to go cold if we need to travel between galaxies.”
“Why?”
“Because there is no point consuming resources if there’s no need to. And our bodies do not age while in stasis, so instead of arriving where we need to be at advanced ages, we arrive in peak condition.”
“Just a little cold,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Do you have normal escape pods as well, or do you just explode with the ship?”
“Why would the ship explode?”
“I don’t know. Like, technical failures? Or maybe some kind of attack, from an enemy?”
“Our shielding is beyond the tech you can even begin to imagine,” the lizard says. “We have no need to run. We do not abandon our ships.”
“So brave,” I say.
He snorts.
I decide to do something else. If I can get the ship to dock, I might be able to sneak off.
That’s a better plan. And, thanks to how much general skulking about the place I’ve been doing for the last few days, I know where some stuff is.
In particular, I know where the maintenance room is, and also know where the ducts are.
The ship has pretty big in-wall passages throughout it to allow maintenance to move through.
It’s a thoughtful and useful way to keep all the wires and cables and patch panels and whatever else they have out of the way.
It also means that me, a human whose only prior training is in being the daughter of a space junk trader can crawl into one of those ducts with a pair of borrowed pliers and start cutting, stripping, and otherwise messing with wires.
It doesn’t fuck anything up right away. I have to move through quite a bit of tunnel, sabotaging things along the way before it seems as though anything on the ship begins to noticeably break. I can hear cursing and annoyed noises as I guess lights flicker and machines break.
“Again?” a muffled voice complains. “We just got this thing fixed.”
“I don’t think it has power,” a companion says.
“Maybe it doesn’t. Gods. You try to make one portable torture device, and it’s absolutely nothing but a ball ache to get working. We’re going to have to go back to the old ways of hurting captives for no reason.”
“It’s not no reason. It’s fun to hear them scream. And the meat tastes better.”
“The meat tastes best raw on the bone while the food still lives.”
The hair on the back of my neck and everywhere else rises.
I have, up until this point, found the lizards to be fairly decent captors.
They’ve let me run around the ship like an unattended animal, treating me like a completely harmless presence.
But the king has had his moments of sharper tone and intent, the comments about me having made the mistake of being loved by Freak.
“Every time that human scuttles past, it is all I can do not to grab her in my jaws, take her into a death roll, and eat her kidneys from her living body.”
Well. That’s explicit.
I cut a few more wires, then I move on. I can hear some rustling in the other tubes, and I know I need to get out of here before anybody spots me. I don’t want to be caught in here red-handed. I want to be found entirely innocent in any other part of the ship.