Page 7 of A Monster's Light
And then there was Gnnar. I remembered the golden fire of his eyes and the wiry muscles over his tall, broad frame. Even chained up and looking half-starved, he oozed power and dominance. I hadn’t missed the way the guard flinched at his every movement like he’d expected Gnnar to break out of his bonds at any second. If that was Gnnar at his worst, what would he be like at his best?
Penny wished me good luck and hung up, and I got to work preparing for my exodus from the only home I ever knew.
Chapter 4: Dana
I’d made it most of the way across town when I ran into my first problem. The route I was following was called Snakes and Ladders because it went through a series of unmonitored parks and alleyways. Of course, we didn’t have Earth style snakes here on Vokira—our version of elongated reptiles had tiny little legs—but it still worked. But there was a newly built surveillance tower right in front of the alleyway I was supposed to traverse. It must have been put there after they’d made the map I’d found.
It was an iffy section of the colony; one plagued not just with crimes but with secret talks of uprising and revolution. An exposé on a rebel group last year found that several of the members had come from this sector. It made sense that the colony had put extra surveillance in the area.
Ducking inside a recessed entryway, I dug out my hand-drawn map of the Snakes and Ladders Path. Too paranoid to download the map, I’d done it the old-fashioned way, copying it down the best I could by hand. It wasn’t so much a single path but a vast series of unmonitored routes spanning across the colony. I’d only copied the routes I believed most useful to me.
Now I wished I’d saved the image on my phone. But then again, I hadn’t known I’d have a functioning phone with me.
I tested Penny’s program after I downloaded it. And sure enough, my phone could no longer access any of the colony’s networks.
If I backtracked, there was another route I could take. It would take longer and have me trekking right behind one of the colony’s enforcement buildings. But surely, not every enforcement officer was looking for me, were they? I’d just act normal and walk right on by. That was the pro of looking like everyone else.
I made my way back the way I came, speed-walking it since I wanted to be out of this sector before it got dark. The colony had installed curfews during the riots when the truth about Utopia had come out. But they’d never removed them in the outer colony. In some sectors, it was easier to sneak around after hours, but not this one. If they’d added extra monitoring towers, then I was damned sure they’d increased nighttime patrols as well.
But the loop around took much longer than I’d thought, and the streetlights changed from white to bluish-purple, which was the universal signal that curfew had started. It was much too early for that.
What was going on? My question was answered when the loudspeakers came on announcing an emergency early curfew for everyone since they’d detected nearby activity from the native Vokiren tribes in the area. This was a bald-faced lie because all Vokirens in the area had been driven out of their homes years ago.
Could they be looking for me? It had been much longer than an hour since I’d gotten that message, and I most definitely hadn’t made my way to an enforcement station.
I continued along my new path, almost at jog now, even though that would make me look more suspicious. I just had to make it to the industrial zone, where I knew of several abandoned factories I could stay in. But my impromptu run was cut short when I noticed movement in my peripheral vision. I turned toward the purple glow of the streetlamp, but whatever had been there was gone. I didn’t need to see it to know what it was though; they’d released the surveillance drones.
Shit!
I had to stop and hide now. I stepped into a residential building. Unlike the ones in the nicer inner and mid-colony neighborhoods, this one didn’t have a concierge. It also didn’t have any amenities or special facilities I could hide out in. And where the hell were the elevators? Despite the lack of amenities, it still required a face scan to get past the first floor.
It did have a laundry room though, one of those pay-per-use ones, on the first floor. There was no one in it, and a quick visual sweep showed no cameras either. I’d hit the jackpot!
While the drones predominantly used visual detection and movement, they also relied on detecting our ID chips and devices. Here was the big test to see if this signal jammer I’d strapped over the chip in my forearm and Penny’s program were really working.
I pulled out the rusted metal and plastic chair and sat down at the only table in the room. With nothing left to do, I dug my phone out of my bag and pulled up Penny’s book. The cover image was a stylized drawing of a Kadrixan warrior, complete with horns, wings, and tail, carrying a blonde in his arms.
His face was partially hidden, and my brain automatically filled it in with Gnnar’s features. The illustration was stylizedenough that the woman could be me. I mean, was it so bad to fantasize about the alien warrior?
And there, in the dimly lit room, surrounded by peeling paint and laundry machines that really should’ve been decommissioned long before I was born, I started to read.
Chapter 5: Gnnar
Dana’s scent lingered in my cell, making me think of her and those bright green eyes so full of grit and determination. I wondered if she’d read Penny’s books yet and what she felt about them. I hadn’t read the books myself, but from what I’d gathered, they were stories about Kadrixan warriors finding human mates. And Penelope described everything in detail, even what went on inside our nests during ruts.
At first, I’d wondered if that would frighten potential human females away, but she’d assured me that the ones who would be scared off by her writing wouldn’t be the ones we wanted to be sent to us anyway. She insisted that human females loved a good romance, and it would convince the right ones to volunteer for the rut. Too bad the agreement between our stronghold and Nova Vita to exchange ore for willing participants had ended only after three years.
Even if her writing changed how potential females thought of us, there was no way for them to reach us. At least not yet.
We had a new agreement with the small human settlement at the base of our mountain, but there weren’t many females there.I’d met as many as I could and tested compatibility by shaking their hands. My mate was not among them.
We were supposed to know our mates by touch. Some warriors fell to their knees at first touch, so stricken by the mate bond that they could no longer stand on their own two feet. For others, it was more subtle. During the rutting season, our bodies produced chemicals and hormones to soothe and woo females of our species. The final way to form a mate bond was to slowly build one throughout a rutting season, or several, with a chosen female.
Outside of the rutting season, our bodies only produced these chemicals for true mates. These hormones worked on humans, too, since we were biologically compatible.
But I sometimes wondered how I’d know from just touch alone whether I was producing these chemicals or not. Because of this, I doubted that this method of testing compatibility was effective. What if I’d already met my mate and even touched her but simply hadn’t recognized the bond?
And that had me thinking about Dana again.
