Chapter 9 #3
I make my way to the nearest vent and sneak out moments after a tech has just gone in. He is moving away from me and doesn’t even look back over his shoulder. I slip out and into the light chaos that has been caused by the sudden failure of several systems.
“Where is that human?” I can hear the king snapping for me.
“I’m here,” I say, presenting myself.
“I thought you might have been trying to make an escape,” he says. “But you haven’t.”
“I was trying to see if the food replicators would make noodles. Sorry if I broke them. They stopped working. I was thinking I could make a chicken noodle soup with extra chicken, but all I could get was amino broth.”
The king makes an annoyed sound at my blathering.
“Engineering report!” he snaps.
A voice crackles over the old-fashioned intercom. “I’m finding a bunch of cut wires,” the technician says. “Looks like someone’s been breaking things on purpose. I’ll get the cabling reconnected and we should be good to go again.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know about that, would you, Mara?” The Lizard King asks the question bluntly. “I can’t think of anyone else who would try to sabotage the ship.”
“Don’t you think that’s a good reason to suspect anyone other than me?” I ask the question with a happy emptiness about my eyes and tone. “Having me on board is good cover for malcontents to do ill deeds and blame them on me.”
That argument might work on Freak, if he turned his brain off. It would work because he’d find it cute. The Lizard King does not find me cute, and it does not work on him.
“Seize her,” he says. “Prepare her for punishment.”
“No!” I cry out.
I am taken in two pairs of lizard hands and stripped down entirely. My nudity becomes an immediate source of shame as I cry out for my Psyon lover. Surely he won’t let anything bad happen to me? If he’s going to stop it, he has to stop it very, very soon.
I am pressed across a table and held down while the Lizard King makes comments about getting the very worst of his canes for this occasion. I am shivering and trying to rise, but there is no chance of doing that. These evil aliens have me and they have no intention of showing me any further mercy.
“After the kindness we showed you, you decided to act against us,” the king declares. “There are tens of galactic dollars in damage from what you’ve been doing, and missed productivity.”
“Like the torture machines they’re working on?”
“Like the torture machines they’re working on,” he says, with an apparent complete lack of shame.
He is standing in front of me so I can see him in all his cruel lizard glory, and the cane too, a long wand of some kind of substance that looks as though it is covered in the same skin he is. It’s a creepy sight, and one that gives me real fear.
“This is going to hurt,” he says. “And you deserve every bit of pain you are about to suffer.”
He walks around behind me, swishing the cane as he goes. He is drawing out the moment before I am punished, letting me anticipate the terribleness of the events about to unfurl.
Smack!
Suddenly, the cane bites across my bare flesh with wicked intensity. I draw in a deep breath at the first flare of pain and let out a scream.
“I told you,” he says with barely contained sadism.
“You had full warning of what would happen to you if you tried to escape or interfere with the ship, but you did it anyway. All you had to do was be good for me. All you had to do was play nicely and you’d have lived out the rest of your life here. ”
Smack!
The cane comes down again with aggressive vengeance. A second line sears directly below the first, and another scream follows. I very nearly fly out of my body, or so it feels.
This is nothing like what Freak’s discipline felt like. It is cold, calculated, and designed to do one thing: hurt. There will be no softness after this, only an expectation of obedience. And if I don’t give them what they want, then there will be more pain.
I cry out for the ones I love. I cry out for my father. For Freak. I scream for mercy. None of those three things seems likely to come. I have been lost to the dark side of the universe and I may be beyond reach.
Maybe they’re not even trying to find me. Any of them. Maybe, I think, as the cane lands for a third time and the crescendo of pain peaks again, he was never going to come.
I’ve been abandoned.
The Lizard King gives me three more harsh strokes, each one of them worse than the one before. His merciless beating is nothing more than recreational cruelty, and I hate him for it. I hate everyone. Freak, too, for leaving me to this fate.
“Put her in the brig. Let her suffer,” he says when he is done. “And take that suit away from her. She has lost the privilege of clothes. She can cower in our prison, naked and punished, until she comes to her senses.”
I am carried off to the brig by the lizard guards who have no guilt about what they have just participated in. They do not see me as being in any way human, as it were. I am nothing to them. Not even a sentient being deserving of mercy.
“I don’t know how the Psyon puts up with her,” the Lizard King mutters just as they take me away. “She’s so disobedient and dramatic. One must spend near constant energy on keeping her out of trouble. A very poor pet indeed.”
“She remains edible, sire,” one of his underlings says.
“True. She does.”
I am thrown into a small cell in the brig. There is a plastic bed with a plastic blanket, and nothing else. I stand, crying. When I twist to look around at what was done to me, I see bright red marks still searing into my skin. Whatever that awful implement was, it has effects beyond the immediate.
Eventually, I try to lie down. I have to do so on my stomach, for obvious reasons.
I am crying tears of soft misery, because nothing I have done has worked and all of it has made me worse off.
I thought I could go out into the universe and take care of myself, but it turns out all I am really capable of is almost drowning in my spaceship, getting kidnapped twice, and ending up a prisoner. It’s all a bit pathetic.
At some point, I dream of Freak.
He is in the room with me, looking at me with golden-eyed compassion.
“I’m sorry, pet,” he says. “I know this is awful for you, but I beg you. Hold on. I am coming for you. Even if you do not believe me. I am going to take care of you…”
His little speech is cut short because I throw the live fish in my hands directly at him. It is a dream, after all. Of course there is a fish. There is also an assignment I have forgotten to do, and all my teeth have fallen out.
The fish hits Freak, and turns into little furry hamsters. Those hamsters start running in wheels embedded in the walls. I watch all of this happen with the impassive hostility that can only come in a dream.
My father is suddenly in the room. “Hello, Mara,” he says. His face in the dream isn’t his face in the real world. In the real world, he looks like an older, weathered, male version of me. In the dream world, he looks like ancient human heartthrob, Liam Neeson.
“Hello? What do you want?”
“I want you to know that I’m in the…”
“In the what?”
He opens his mouth again, but nothing comes out. I try to get closer to him. Maybe he’s whispering. Maybe if I can just understand what he is trying to say to me, I’ll be able to work it all out. Maybe I can find him…
“Wake up, human!”
A harsh lizard voice cuts through my dream, and in an instant Freak and my father are gone. I am opening my eyes to a captivity that feels worse than anything that has come before it, and I am feeling my soul sink into my gut in a sick kind of way.
My body throbs where the cane made contact, reminding me of the agony of being caught out by creatures who have no fondness or kindness in them.
The lizard guard steps into the brig and throws my suit at me. “Put this back on,” he says. “Your bare flesh is making the guards feel ill.”
They’d prefer I was scaly and knobby like them, I suppose. If I was, their cane would not have been so brutal.
I am taken before the Lizard King again. My guess is that he is bored and wishes to torment me again. Or this is another interrogation to try to get some angle on Freak. These creatures have a cold intellect that is capable of far darker machinations than I would ever tolerate.
“Are you ready to apologize?”
“What do I need to apologize for? Trying to escape? I wasn’t trying to hurt you, I just want to be somewhere else in the universe. Anywhere else. I need to find my father.”
“You sabotaged our ship. You could have killed us all, you filthy little rodent,” one of the others says.
“I’m not a rodent. I’m a human!”
“Same thing,” they insist. “Same common ancestor.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” I argue.
“You don’t think anything of value,” they riposte.
“You said you are looking for your father?” The Lizard King tilts his head. “Should I know him? Is he a monarch?”
“Of a kind. They used to call him the Scrap King,” I say.
The Lizard King throws back his head and laughs in a hearty fashion. “The Scrap King?”
“Yes. His real name was Alan.”
“Alan the Scrap King. You wish me to find this man for you? Would you assist us if I did?”
“He’s missing,” I say. “So yes, you’d have to find him first, but I don’t know how to help you any more than I have, which is not at all. I don’t know anything about the Psyons.”
“I see, so you wish to find him to ensure that he is well and to tell him that you are the captive of one monster and the pet of another?”
“Sure, if that will all fit on the postcard,” I quip.
He laughs again, a rough sound.
“Not many captives ask me for favors. Then again, not many captives come to me as you have. You haven’t screamed or begged for mercy once. Aside from when you were being beaten for punishment, of course.”