Chapter 7
The corridor where the creature had left me branched in two directions. The direction he’d gone was sealed with no handle or mechanism I could see.
The other direction curved gently to the left, lit by that same shifting bioluminescence. The floor gave slightly under my feet, and the air tasted like the sea.
The corridor opened into a room. A low, curved surface ran along one wall and there was a couch, padded with something that looked like dark fabric but felt organic under my fingers. An oval table sat in front of it, made of the same semi-translucent material as the ship’s hull.
Unlike that corporate shuttle with its leather seats and its ego this ship was lightly furnished.
I lowered myself onto the couch and hissed through my teeth, pressing my arm against my side to hold everything in place. I needed medical attention. Would I get it or…
was I dinner?
Ronan’s voice echoed in my head. Labor and consumption.
I sat with that for a minute. Then I stood up, because sitting still was worse.
The far wall of the lounge thinned in places, going translucent enough to see through and in the space I couldn’t enter was flooded complexly.
The space extended back farther than I could see, a vast aquatic chamber that dwarfed the dry section I was standing in.
Something moved in there. Deep in the dark water, far from the wall. A tentacle, maybe, curling through the light from one of the nodes and then disappearing again.
I stepped back from the wall.
My throat was raw. I hadn’t had more than a mouthful of water since the pirate ship, and that had been stale and rationed like everything else. I turned to the cabinets, curved panels set into the walls that opened when I pressed them and started looking.
The first cabinet held containers I didn’t recognize. Sealed pods made of something pearlescent, labeled in symbols that meant nothing to me. The second was empty. The third held what I was looking for.
Food, or something close to it. Strips of something dried and salted, laid out in neat rows on a flat tray. They looked like fish, same general shape, same flaky texture, but the color was a deep purple, almost violet, with a faint shimmer on the surface. I picked one up. It smelled like the ocean.
I didn’t care what it was.
I ate standing up, tearing into the purple fish-stuff with my good hand, barely chewing before I swallowed. It was salty and dense, somewhere between smoked salmon and jerky, and it was the best thing I’d ever tasted.
I found water next, a sealed container that smelled clean. I drank half of it in one go, and the cold hit my empty stomach and I almost threw everything back up, but I held it down even if I had to punch it back down!
I ate until the edge came off the hunger. Then I slid down the cabinet and sat on the floor with my back against the wall and the container of water between my knees and I cried.
It wasn’t the wracking sobs from the pirate cell. This was quieter. Tired. Tears that leaked rather than fell, running down my cheeks and dropping onto my shirt in small dark spots.
I wondered where they were. Milo and Zayne.
Flying through some system right now, probably.
Sitting in those leather seats, toasting their new life.
Or maybe they were fucking each other’s brains out without any fucks to give about me.
Did they talk about me? Did they feel anything?
And the dreaded thought that only now crept to the surface.
Were they always planning to betray me? But I didn’t see how, I mean, I saw the ship that morning and we took it around late afternoon going into the evening…
did they decide just that fast that murdering me was the way to go?
I was no idiot. At least I liked to think so.
By now it was obvious the two of them had been fucking behind my back. But killing me?
I pressed the heel of my hand against my eyes.
At least I was eating well before I died. Nobody was going to say I was tough meat or that I was skin and bones.
The thought was so stupid it almost made me laugh. The sound that came out was closer to a hiccup and a half sob.
You will not be harmed.
I recoiled so hard I knocked the water container over. It rolled across the floor in a slow arc, water glugging out onto the surface.
The voice was in my head again, deep, resonant, placed inside my skull without permission.
“Was that…you?” I said it out loud, to the empty room, because talking to a voice inside my skull felt insane.
It didn’t answer.
I wiped my face with the back of my good hand.
My pulse was elevated but not panicked. Which was strange.
A telepathic alien had just spoken inside my brain for the second time and my heart rate was only mildly inconvenienced.
Maybe I’d burned through my entire lifetime supply of adrenaline in the last few days and there was nothing left for this.
I stared at the translucent wall. Could he hear me right now? Not just when I spoke, but when I thought? Was he listening to every pathetic spiral I’d been running in my head since I set foot on this ship?
Yes.
One definitive word, and the hairs stood on the back of my neck. Every thought I’d had since boarding, the grief, the crack about being dinner.
Oh no.
I pressed my hand over my mouth. My face was burning. Every embarrassing, unfiltered thought I’d cycled through in the last however many hours had been broadcast directly into the skull of a creature that could snap me in half with one tentacle.
“How much of that did you hear?” I said out loud this time, because it didn’t matter anymore.
All of it.
I closed my eyes. Breathed in and out. Considered the possibility that the universe had a personal vendetta against me.
“Great,” I said. “That’s great. Love that for me.”
Nothing came back. I opened my eyes. Stared at the translucent wall, the faint shapes beyond it. Somewhere in that dark blue expanse, something ancient and enormous was listening to my every thought, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.
Where are you taking me?
I thought it this time. If he could hear everything anyway, there was no point pretending otherwise.
Home.
Which was where? That water planet? Somewhere else?
I swallowed. My mouth was dry again despite the water I’d just drunk. The next question sat in my chest, and I was almost afraid to let it surface.
What are you going to do with me?
I didn’t know whether to be terrified or relieved. I didn’t know if I even wanted to continue this.
You don’t have to.
I blinked. “Did you just... I wasn’t talking to you. I was thinking to myself.”
Not like it mattered. My thoughts were his to hear whether I aimed them at him or not.
“So, my thoughts aren’t my own.”
No.
“Why did you buy me?”
The silence held. Longer this time. Long enough that I thought he might not answer.
And then, finally:
Everything in my ocean belongs to me.