Chapter 9
NINE
Drex would like to not be an ass, but he feared all the cycles of shutting himself off from others had rendered him prone to it. Slowly, still seeing stars, he straightened up. “I fear I deserved that.”
“Don’t ever accuse me of murder again,” she fumed. “I can’t believe you would think I’d do this.”
“Madison.” He shifted, gathering her into his arms. She was shaking, with fury, with the dawning horror of what lay on the floor around them. “Sweet stars, I am sorry.”
“I didn’t do this,” she whispered. “I would never.”
“I know.” He brushed his lips over her hair. “I saw death and horror and little else. And my own fears came into play. I had a sudden fear that you had been sent to destroy me.”
She turned glistening blue eyes to his. “I did not come here to destroy anything.”
“I know.” He traced a thumb down her pale cheek. “You came here to create.”
Madison held his gaze. “And escape.”
Drex nodded. He understood, now, why his great-aunt was keen to keep her on Virilia.
“Can you forgive me?”
He felt her body give a great sigh, as if releasing something from deep inside. “You’ve been apologizing a lot.”
“I have been pushed completely out of my comfort zone with you.” He kept his hold on her light, despite the urge to pull her closer. “The fact of the matter is, it is not the Virilian way to mistreat females. It is not the Virilian way to mistreat at all, unless we are provoked.”
She kept her gaze on his. “You did not kill the giant worm that attacked our transport.”
He smiled faintly. “That creature would have been very difficult to kill, even if we had wanted to.”
“You slaughtered that–that thing in the desert that wanted to eat me.” She shuddered. “It was like you were possessed.”
“The rilh relentlessly track prey, traveling across the entire desert,” he explained. “It would have eaten you, eventually, if someone had not killed it.”
“Someone did kill these poor souls.” Her gaze shifted to the corpses before them. “What happened here, Drex?”
“I don’t know.” His chest tightened at the sight. “There are now eight fewer Virilians.” He pointed. “Look. All of their supplies, armor, weapons, and devices have been stripped of them.”
“Thieves?” she asked. “Was it those Sifters you talked about?”
His gaze narrowed. “Maybe, but how did they get in? The airlock doors show no signs of forced entry.”
She eased from his grasp and stood up. “You said there were eight fewer Virilians.”
“Yes.”
“There are seven bodies here.”
He rose and ran tense fingers through his hair.
“Moons above, you are correct. One of them was a traitor.” He walked around, looking at the faces of the dead.
“I know some of the guards personally, but not all. The one sitting next to you on the transport was one I had never seen before. I assumed he was new.” He crossed his arms and studied the faces. “And he is the only one not here.”
“You know who your traitor is, then,” she said. “But why would a Virilian kill his own people?”
“Sifters join their ranks for many reasons. Blackmail. Wealth. Power. Revenge.” He shrugged. “Sifters recruit from all races and species. Those who are recruited all have their own motives.”
“But they spared you and me.”
A sudden thought jerked through Drex like a punch. “Did they?”
She spread her arms. “We’re alive.”
“Come.” Drex made his way through the still bodies on the floor to the steps up to their small chamber. Sure enough, most of their belongings had been taken, including their helmets. “They believed us to be dead.” He snarled out a curse.
Madison picked up her backpack and shook it out. Only the tins of food clattered out. “How did we not hear them come up here?”
Drex raised one eyebrow. “Perhaps we had sufficiently exhausted ourselves and slept too deeply.”
A blush stained Madison’s cheeks. “Perhaps.”
“It probably saved our lives.” He kicked his own empty pack across the room. “When we didn’t stir, they thought we were dead, too.”
“And how exactly did we not die?”
Drex bent slowly and picked up an unopened ration tin. He turned it over. “Madison, did you eat last night?”
“No, I…” She put a hand over her mouth. “Oh, the food.”
“It was the one thing they didn’t take.” He dropped it to the floor. “The traitor must have switched them for tainted tins. Probably before we even boarded the transports. I ordered the preparations to evacuate. It was a perfect time to switch out the rations with poisoned ones.”
What a gruesome thought, that this whole massacre was premeditated.
“What do we do now?”
“We get out of here before they return to cover their tracks,” he replied. “Which they will. It is their pattern to clean up their messes as if they never happened.”
“How will we leave?” Madison gestured to herself in her suit. “We have no helmets. The only things they didn’t take were the translation devices in our ears. Thank goodness for that.”
“They didn’t know we wore them,” he said. “There is a compartment around here somewhere that should hold some old supplies. Hopefully the traitor wasn’t familiar enough with this outpost to know about it.”
“And there’s no way to transmit a message with the equipment on the second level?”
“No. Anything useful was stripped out of there long ago. Even if it wasn’t, the generator is so old and worn out, we’re lucky it was able to run the air purifiers.”
Drex went back alone to the first level and found the storage compartments, which were well hidden in the floor beneath one of his fallen guards.
He felt sick as he rolled the male over and wrenched open the well-disguised hatch.
Inside he found an assortment of items, most of which were useless or no longer working, but helmets were among them.
They were all from the last era, but helmets were helmets, and as long as they filtered the harsh air, they would do.
He plucked out two of them and re-latched the hatch.
He returned to Madison, who was looking anxiously out the window.
“Here.” He handed her a helmet.
She wiped off the dirt coating her face shield and pulled it over her head. “Wow, this is dusty.”
“Better dust than toxins.” He put on his own helmet and tried not to cough. “Let’s get going. There is a trading post not too far away. It will be a hard walk, but we can make it before nightfall.”
Madison nodded, but he could see the strain on her face. They were both hungry and utterly distraught. He placed an arm on her shoulder and was relieved to see she didn’t flinch. “Are you okay?”
“As okay as I can be,” she replied.
“I mean about what happened between us this morning. With my terrible behavior.”
She smiled, but it was a sad curve of the lips. “Drex, it was understandable behavior. Seven members of your guard were murdered while we…had sex and slept. You didn’t hurt me, and anyway, I know you’re not some sadistic monster.”
“How do you know that?”
“Ferias would not have matched me with you, if you were.” She placed a hand on his face shield. “Your heart was broken and it never healed. I truly can’t fix that, but I think a part of you is worried I can.”
“Are you sure you’re not a Sage?”
She laughed and the sound rippled through his aching heart. His great-aunt could probe a mind and know how it worked. Whether he liked it or not, Ferias had paired him with Madison because they were a good match. And the female saw so much…more than he wanted anyone to see.
They slipped outside, leaving the outpost and its horrors behind.
With luck, they would reach the trading post and get a team to collect the dead before the Sifters returned.
This would not be an easy trek. The wind had whipped up the sand, making it hard to see or know where to step.
Drex had learned to navigate by the suns and moons long ago.
He took Madison’s hand and they started off.
She looked tired and frightened and there was no way she wasn’t hungry. Nevertheless, he heard no complaints from her. This human was proving to be more resilient than many Virilians, and his species was not a soft lot.
Still, he couldn’t help but acknowledge one thing: Madison surely did not have any of this in mind when she signed the contract to be entered in the running to be matched with a Virilian male.