Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 63580 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 318(@200wpm)___ 254(@250wpm)___ 212(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 63580 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 318(@200wpm)___ 254(@250wpm)___ 212(@300wpm)
“So brave,” I say.
He snorts.
I decide to do something else. If I can get the ship to dock, I might be able to sneak off. That’s a better plan. And, thanks to how much general skulking about the place I’ve been doing for the last few days, I know where some stuff is. In particular, I know where the maintenance room is, and also know where the ducts are. The ship has pretty big in-wall passages throughout it to allow maintenance to move through. It’s a thoughtful and useful way to keep all the wires and cables and patch panels and whatever else they have out of the way.
It also means that me, a human whose only prior training is in being the daughter of a space junk trader can crawl into one of those ducts with a pair of borrowed pliers and start cutting, stripping, and otherwise messing with wires.
It doesn’t fuck anything up right away. I have to move through quite a bit of tunnel, sabotaging things along the way before it seems as though anything on the ship begins to noticeably break. I can hear cursing and annoyed noises as I guess lights flicker and machines break.
“Again?” a muffled voice complains. “We just got this thing fixed.”
“I don’t think it has power,” a companion says.
“Maybe it doesn’t. Gods. You try to make one portable torture device, and it’s absolutely nothing but a ball ache to get working. We’re going to have to go back to the old ways of hurting captives for no reason.”
“It’s not no reason. It’s fun to hear them scream. And the meat tastes better.”
“The meat tastes best raw on the bone while the food still lives.”
The hair on the back of my neck and everywhere else rises. I have, up until this point, found the lizards to be fairly decent captors. They’ve let me run around the ship like an unattended animal, treating me like a completely harmless presence. But the king has had his moments of sharper tone and intent, the comments about me having made the mistake of being loved by Freak.
“Every time that human scuttles past, it is all I can do not to grab her in my jaws, take her into a death roll, and eat her kidneys from her living body.”
Well. That’s explicit.
I cut a few more wires, then I move on. I can hear some rustling in the other tubes, and I know I need to get out of here before anybody spots me. I don’t want to be caught in here red-handed. I want to be found entirely innocent in any other part of the ship.
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.