Chapter 7 #3
“I am going to drink, and you are going to be far too much trouble if you get away, so you can spend some time in your cage,” Drako says to me, shortly before he dips down and puts me inside a small cage behind his chair.
His chair is elevated above the rest of the seating, so everyone can see him, and he can see everyone.
He has to climb up to it, it’s that high.
Meanwhile, my cage is barely tall enough for me to kneel in.
There is no possibility of standing in here.
It is made of iron bars, and was probably intended to hold an animal of some kind.
A dog, perhaps. They have a few around the place, big wiry, rangy things with powerful jaws.
I pet one or two reflexively as I was carried around, and they seemed surprised at the affection.
I cower in the cage and I am grateful for it, because it means I cannot see the funeral pyre. The dinner ensues and Drako gives a speech.
“It is not often our enemies deliver themselves to us so conveniently,” he says. “But I like to think we provided them with convenience too, in the form of a quick death.”
A roaring laugh goes up around the table at what seemingly passes for Vikar humor. He cuts the speech short, raises his horn of brew to all assembled, and gives the order for the pyre to be lit.
There is a rumbling of drums and a short burst of trumpets, and then even behind Drako, I both see and feel the pyre being lit.
There is a flash of light, and then a heat that washes over everything as the accelerant they used goes up in an instant, sending a bright flame towering high into the sky.
I turn my head away from it, and I close my eyes and try to think of better times.
I think of playing with Mila and Freya when we were kids, when we thought our father would always be there, before they began to make new families of their own and somehow weaken ours in the process.
That’s not how it’s supposed to happen, I think. I wonder where we went wrong.
The feast goes on for hours, and the revelry gets more raucous, and the drinking gets more intense. I am not a part of any of it, though Drako does give me a cup of water, and a little meat I do not eat.
Then, in the middle of the worst party I have ever been forced to attend, I hear a voice I never thought I would hear again.
“Don’t make a move. Don’t say a word.”
That voice, delivered close to my ear is quiet enough to go unnoticed by the revelers, and familiar enough to send a shiver up my spine.
Thor.
He’s alive. He’s here.
Or I just went full crazy, which would be very understandable given the circumstances.
I want to ask him how he is alive, or if I’m hallucinating him, but I don’t. If he is alive, then both of our lives are in immense danger right now. I sit very, very still, and I hear a light clinking as he works on the fastening of the cage.
He gets the door open pretty quickly, takes me by the hand, and the two of us sneak out of the Vikar camp under cover of darkness.
Behind us, the party continues and the pyre burns, and I cannot believe he is not on it.
Did fate really spare just the pair of us from death?
Or are there more of us? We might never know.
It’s possible that some survived and have gone into the depths of the bush or similar to avoid being caught by the Vikar.
We travel for a few minutes before Thor stops and turns to me. “Okay,” he says. “We can talk for a moment. I know you’re dying to…”
His sentence is cut off as I wrap my arms around him and hug him so tight I feel like I might never be able to let go.
“I thought you were dead!”
“I know. I thought you were too. Then I saw them capture you.”
“You saw that?”
“I had been moving through the wreckage looking for survivors, just like the Vikar had. I was trailing them to avoid detection. And then I saw you running and… I knew I had to rescue you.”
“Thank you so much,” I say. “Is there anyone else alive?”
Thor shakes his head. “I don’t know. They might have gotten away from the wreckage if so. We might never know. We might not find them if they do exist. What I do know is that there were a lot of bodies on that pyre.”
I keep holding onto him. He feels like the one thing in this world that is right. Everything else is so deeply fucking wrong.
“They got me,” I tell him.
“I know. I saw…”
“No, I mean they’ve got a tracking chip in me,” I tell him. “They can find me anywhere. Leave me, or they’ll hunt you down and hurt you before they kill you.”
“I abandoned you once,” he says. “I won’t do it again. Don’t worry about the chip. We’ll deal with it when the time comes. For now, let’s just keep moving. Distance is our friend. From what I can tell, the Vikar are limited to foot travel as well.”
“They shot the ship down, but they don’t have a hoverbike or something?”
“They have defenses,” Thor says. “Because they’re Vikar. But they’re not here to build up tech. They’re not like us.” He squeezes me tight. “I don’t know how you got out of that crash alive. But I’m going to make sure you stay that way. Come on. We need to keep going.”
We move through the night, in which shadows are thrown back and forth like crazed demons as a result of the pyre that burns so bright and so high that even at this distance it can be seen.
The souls of the crew I barely knew are being sent off by those who claimed them, and I could not be more sad, or more furious.
“They’re like animals,” I say.
“They’re worse than animals,” he replies. “Because they’re men, and they know what they are doing and they take pleasure in it. Come.”
We keep going for another few minutes. There is great tension in the air, because at any moment Drako may realize I am missing and then a search party would be mobilized. It would be a drunken, stupid search party, but still.
We stop by a river, and we boil water in a little pan Thor has managed to salvage from the ship. I don’t know how he worked out what he needed. I guess I tried the same thing but I was forced to drop it to try to run. The pack on his back is all that separates us from surviving like animals.
He motions to me with a finger to sit down and turn around.
“I’m sorry, baby, but I need to get the chip out,” he says.
“How?” I ask the question, but I already know the answer. There’s only one way to do something like this.
“It can’t stay in there. I have alcohol wipes from the ship, a couple of small first aid kits. We dig it out. Then we put it on or in something. An animal. They can chase that for a good long while.”
I almost ask if it is going to hurt. Then I realize it doesn’t matter. I want that chip out of me no matter what.
I turn around. The mark from where the chip went in is still evident of course.
Thor takes a scalpel, and does what needs to be done.
It does not hurt as much as I thought it would.
I think my body has been through too much too quickly.
I’m not reacting or even sensing the way I usually would.
I feel almost numb, or maybe that scalpel is just very sharp.
Either way, I don’t really feel anything until there’s a stinging from the alcohol washing the wound he just made.
“Good girl,” he praises me.
I feel a tremor of excitement run through me, a flush of what feels like joy but might just be the first positive thing that I have experienced in a while.
Pain is a weird thing. You’re supposed to escape it, but so many times in life you just have to fucking endure it.
And sometimes, you can be praised for that and then it’s quite the heady cocktail.
“There,” he says. “It’s out.”
He puts a butterfly clasp over the incision he made, then follows it up with a small bandage.
We look at the chip in the moonlight. It is an old-fashioned silicone chip, a thinking rock, with red pulses running through it as the battery powers it. It looks brutal and rough, just like the Vikar themselves.
“What are we going to attach it to?” he asks.
“We could tie it to a rock and throw it off a cliff. They might think I died and got eaten by animals.”
“They might,” he says. “That’s simpler than trying to wrestle some of the wildlife into submission.”
“I think we should just smash it,” I say. “We’re literally leading them right to us.”
Thor snorts, then agrees. The most satisfying moment is the one where we place that chip on a rock on the ground and then I pound it into fucking dust with another one.
It’s the only sound we’ve allowed ourselves to make this whole time, and it is worth it.
With every blow, I grit my teeth and think of the arrogance that has to exist to think such a thing would ever be effective on me.
With the chip destroyed, we get moving again.
It’s important to put as much distance between ourselves and the Vikar.
From time to time, it sounds like loud shrieks and wails are coming from their direction.
The sounds are made thin by the miles though, so we can’t be sure if they are giving chase or just having a good time.
Eventually though, we have to stop.
“We’ll make camp,” Thor says. “A small one. You sleep. I will watch.”
“I have to do something first,” I say. “I need a knife. A real one.”
He fishes one out of his bag and hands it to me. I set to work.
“What are you doing?”
Thor asks the question as I bend green branches into shape and tie them with vines and bits of string and wire from the wreckage.
“It’s a trap,” I explain to him. “I learned how to make them when I was tending the herd. We can maybe try to catch something to eat.”
He nods and lets me finish what I started.
When I am satisfied with my work, we sit in the darkness at a distance from the trap. We cannot risk even trying to light a fire. We have to be still as the rocks around us, and just as silent. We are being hunted.