6. Chapter 6
six
Hue
“Stop!” I scream at the top of my lungs. Sofaxi’s slipping fur getting in my mouth, but I don’t let go. She isn’t warm anymore; she’ll never be warm again, and it feels like my heart is shattering in my chest. “We’re supposed to leave!”
“No! Please! We have to take her to Lunareth! We have to get her there, please!” I sob, pleading with them to make them understand how important this is.
“Sofaxi is a Nysharil! If they aren’t buried in their chosen place, their souls will be lost!
Please, I’ll never see her again! We have to put her in her chosen place! ”
Glamorith casts Ualate a pleading glance, her skin turning a deep, heavy blue showing her sadness, but Ualate doesn’t care.
I can see it, the moment she forms the no inside her ugly stone head.
I glare up at her, tightening my grip on Sofaxi’s stiffening body, my throat raw from screaming.
Outside the hatch, I can see the huddled forms of other children watching.
I hate them too. I hate everyone and everything.
I hate this pod. I hate Sofaxi. I hate Glamorith and Ualate.
I hate space and the stars. We were supposed to leave.
Leave and never have to see the horrible stars ever again.
“She promised me!” Sobs wrack my chest as Ualate’s rough stone fingers dig into my arms, pulling me away from Mom, from the woman that called me her little cub. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry I told them! Please don’t hate me! Please!”
Pain flares in my shoulder as she gives me a rough tug that rips a scream from my mouth, Glamorith’s color slamming from sad blue to heavy red. “Ualate manage yourself, she is a grieving child.”
“Please, the Nysharil was a cook, not even a carer. They never should have even had contact had you been watching!”
The group of children skidder away as I land in the middle of them in the hall, my knees hitting the metal floor hard enough to bruise. I pay it little attention; I’m back on my feet, bolting toward the hallway hatch that leads to the main deck of the ship.
I’ll make this right.
It got so messed up, but I swear I can fix this.
The dream leaves me roughly, gruelingly.
My chest tight and my lungs vacuumed shut.
This time there’s no gentle waking, no drowsy confusion, just stark dread and understanding.
My hand flies to the fang on my neck and the scar underneath, both of them signaling the same failure.
A promise I haven’t made right. I’m not even surprised when a swath of darkness fills the otherwise eerily white room.
Sor’en breezes in, or blips in more like it.
“Go away,” I whisper, my eyes crusty from old tears.
“My people's hearing is not great, please repeat that.”
I don’t, making his brow furrow. He sits slowly on the bed, his palm coming up as if he means to comfort me, but I shove it away. “You were upset. Melion saw you thrashing while you rested.”
I have no clue who Melion is or why he was watching me sleep, but I’m too empty inside to ask.
One upset at a time. I give him a silent once-over instead, wondering how I’d missed the true state of him.
His heaving chest, the wild look in his eyes.
He must’ve been far away; he must’ve ran all the way here.
He must’ve been worried about me.
Something odd blooms in my chest at the thought; it’s been…
well, a long time since someone was worried about me.
I clear my throat, rolling away from him to my side, the fang prodding my hand painfully.
The bed shifts, but only barely, as if it’s been formulated to narrowly react to the large being who sleeps on it.
I don’t hear him leave, but I know the next moment he’s gone.
I decide to hate him for that too. Then myself, because I wanted him to go, right?
It doesn’t matter he’s gone.
At least for now.
And so is she.
I failed her that day, my mom. The Nysharil are a proud spacefaring species.
Their culture was mostly lost after the demise of their home planet, but some things stayed.
Especially with the older generation, the ones that remember a past with dirt.
There are a few taboos for Nysharil people.
A main one being death; to them, it’s the ultimate weakness.
To speak or plan about your death is something you only do with the ones you trust most, and only for a practical reason.
To ensure they put your soul where it needs to be.
Looking back, I now know Sofaxi was dying, for a long time, probably before I even met her.
She knew we’d never make it off that ship; we’d never have the credits to get to Lunareth even if we did.
Our long hours after lights out sitting and talking in the habitat room modeled off the stunning, sunny planet, was nothing more than a dying woman’s attempt to inject hope into a cub that had never had it.
Her cub she’d called me, despite me being a human.
It never mattered to her that I was less than.
That I had nothing in the universe to offer her.
When I was younger and far stupider, I hadn’t realized she’d had nothing to offer me either.
Aside from that horrible, devastating hope.
But it worked.
Too well.
I believed her.
When I found her that day, I lost more than a friend; I lost my mom, my hope.
I was desperate, so I told them. She’d made me swear, explained to me so many times her culture and her desire to be laid to rest on Lunareth was sacred.
I was never to dishonor her by repeating it.
It was a wish shared between our souls, the closest thing they have to a promise.
But I did share it.
I begged them, told them everything while her body cooled in the corner.
I betrayed her, perhaps in the only way that really mattered to a dying female with nothing else left. It would’ve been a more forgivable crime to the Nysharil if I had stolen her last credit and gutted her on the way out.
It was a mere moment after I was shoved out into the hall that I barreled through the inner-workings of the ship.
I’d beat them to the hull. They just stared as I attempted to drag her back to apologize to a corpse that no longer cared.
I offered them everything… my life, credits I didn’t have, servitude.
I even offered to let Ualate eat me, which she took great offense to.
The only friend I ever had was about to be lost.
She’d trusted me, a stupid child.
A stupid human.
She trusted me.
But I was powerless, even more so than her. I hadn’t known it at the time, but Sofaxi was working off a debt, sure, but a life debt. She’d stolen from the pod years and years ago.
She was going to die there and she knew it.
It was an impossible task.
So I sat there sobbing on the hull as Glamorith now an odd mix of deep blue and orange, reached down and plucked the fang from her mouth. It wasn’t the same.
We both know it wasn’t the same.
But it was hope.
And I was fresh out.
That’s the thing about hope; without it, it never occurs to you to be afraid to lose.
It takes mere ontics for my pity party to subside, and as I emerge on unsteady legs from the bedroom, it’s to the smell of something utterly divine.
My head snaps up to the strong toned back of my so-called kidnapping mate.
The bundle of sheets and pillows nearly dropping from my arms as I strain to get a look at what he’s started cooking.
Hunger is nothing new to me, but the smell of whatever alien food he’s preparing makes my gut let out an unhappy little spasm.
Between that and the thirst I just haphazardly took care of in the wasting room, it only deepens my scowl.
Sor’en turns, the tops of his ink-colored forearms smeared with something white and powdery.
In fact, he’s almost entirely smeared in the stuff.
Something dangerously close to amusement bubbles in my stomach.
Not the haha that was the funniest thing I ever heard funny, but more like it's entirely absurd that a huge, deadly, regal as all hell death-touch alien that could wipe out a spaceport in a few onitics flat is also a messy cook.
I shift on my feet as his milky white eyes track the exposed state of my breasts down the toned plane of my stomach until they stop right there.
A glob of white stuff falls off the spoon he’s using, splattering onto the floor, making him mutter something in his language before he turns.
His spine a little straighter than it was before.
Despite my bravado and lack of shyness around my physical body, my cheeks heat a bit, the warm slick of the jerk's oil bursting to the forefront of my mind. I don’t snap out of it until a soft buzzing fills the room, probably a cooking tool he’s using.
Whatever.
He doesn’t ask why I’ve stolen all his bedding, and that works for me. The white, sterile, wide-open caverns of his evil lair make my skin itchy. Like I’m standing in a blank room with nothing but my own thoughts bouncing back at me at light-speed.
Fuck that, my thoughts are awful.
So I get to work building my space. I’ll be dammed if I go to sleep consensually or by force and wake up in the forever long bed again.
If I’m stuck here, at least for the time being, I need somewhere that feels, I don’t know, less exposed.
So, I claim my territory in the sunken living area.
It's been a long time since I built a proper hideout. It’s almost exciting to have one in this soft, clean space and not the dirty walls of a port.