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)
But I am not a good Psyon anymore. I am what is left after everything that can be taken from a man is taken from him. My pride, my dignity, and my pet.
I move to the little campsite I set up earlier. A gas burner is alight under a pot of boiling water.
I drop the egg into the boiling water.
I sit down beside it and I wait for seven meditative minutes. Then I turn the boiler off and drain the water. I reclaim the egg, crack the shell, and eat it whole.
I chew slowly, then I swallow. From here, time ripples out in a long ribbon of cause and effect, myriad uncontrollable changes taking place in times and places I have never gone and will never be. I cannot feel any of it from this place, but I know the home realm with be awash with temporal distortions. Alara will be furious. The council will be assembled. The foundational laws will be enacted against me.
It does not matter.
It is done.
CHAPTER 10
Mara
The Lizard King keeps me close, out of the brig, but now on a chain. He finds me amusing in the way old mad kings used to find jesters amusing. He thinks my reactions to his horrors are funny to provoke and observe. It’s like what Freak did to me, but worse in every single way. There’s no softness to this lizard. He has no fondness for me. I am entertainment and nothing more.
The world is very cold for me now. I do not know where my rescuers are, or if I have rescuers at all. Something is keeping Freak from coming for me. Something is preventing my father from returning. Everyone I love is taken from me and I never get to know what happened. For all I know they are both dead now.
I am starting to lose hope. I am starting to forget what hope even felt like. I do not know how long I have been in the lizard’s custody. I do know that it has been too long.
I shift in the attempt to get more comfortable, but the riveted floor is brutal on every part of my body. He prefers me to kneel, but I can only do that for so long. Now I am sitting beside his space throne, my head in my hands, knees drawn to my chest.
“Hello, darling.”
It’s a feminine voice, and an elegant one. It lacks all the sibilant hissing of the lizard aliens, so I know it doesn’t come from one of them. It’s also familiar, though my fear- and hunger-addled mind can’t place the origin.
“Hello, my love,” the Lizard King greets the new arrival.
I lift my eyes and shrink back as far as I can, as a beautiful, elegant, far too comfortable Psyon female glides into the room. I recognize her as the leader of Freak’s society. Alana? Alma? Alara. I remember now.
The memory of my master’s world is faint, even more shadowy than the dreams I have been subject to of late. I have a distant impression of sand and buildings that turn in on themselves and creatures who are psychic and animal at once, and…
“I got you a present,” the Lizard King says, snapping my chain, then dragging me forward in front of his throne. He pushes me over with his foot so I go sprawling in front of her.
She looks down at me with an expression that just barely avoids being disgust, and I am pretty sure only does that because she doesn’t want to insult the lizard dude she’s apparently boning.
“Oh, yes,” she sighs. “That Freak has been whining to me about her.”
“You couldn’t catch him again?”
“I tried,” she says. “But he refused to consume the sedative and instead stormed off into god knows where. Do not worry about him. He is isolated and heretic. He has no allies among our kind, and you have this thing of his, too. He presents no further danger.”
“Ah, then perhaps we should keep this little human as a sort of trophy?” The Lizard King is a great and powerful beast of an alien monarch, but in the moment he asks the question, he sounds more like a little boy asking his mommy if he can keep the insect he found outside.
“Kill that thing,” Alara says to him, her eyes locked on me. “She’s filthy time debris. She’s a sticky little thing, collapsing reality fields around her wherever she goes. It’s not hygienic.”
The Lizard King does not look as though he understands that accusation, but he understands that she does not want me to live, and that is enough for him to kill me.
He yanks on the chain again, pulling me back toward him. His jaws snap in an unsettling way, and I face the end of my existence yet again.