Page 67 of Taken to Voraxia
Thunder shakes the whole werro. A pile of paper and metal spills from the edge of one table and as it hits the floor, emits a small explosion of its own. Someone outside screams. There’s a roar that I immediately identify as Krisxox’s. I hope it’s a victorious one.
It’s the sound of pain. If he’s fallen, then they all have. Sweat wicks off my brow and I taste it on my skin when I lick my lips.
“We need weapons, Svera,” I whisper. My experiments with the knife lay scattered on the table behind me. I grab for two, but they were failed ones so they don’t burn or sear. Still, a knife’s a knife.What are we going to do with knives? Outside, they have guns.“And we need to hide.”
I hand a blade to Svera but she just stares at it, her hands full with the hologenerators I gave her. “I…I can’t take that. I don’t know how to use it.”
“I know. But Kiki isn’t here.” Kiki is the warrior. She’d go down fighting. “If she were, she’d want us to try.”
“They’re…you think…are they dead?”
Yes. They are. “No, but we just need to be ready for anything. In case they get in, we need to be ready to fight. I gave our Raku my word. And you know Krisxox would accept nothing less from you. We have to try for them. For us too.”
Svera stares at the knife numbly for a beat more. Outside, I hear something breaking — a holoshield fissuring, which I didn’t even think was possible. There are shouts and screams. Closer now. Much closer.
I say Svera’s name again and grab her wrist. With force, I pry her fingers apart and shove the more stable of the two trial daggers into her hand.
I meet her gaze, which is wide and watery — not dazed though, as I first thought, butcalculating. What is she thinking?
Something huge slams against the door with enough force to knock me off my feet. I crash into the table behind me and drop my knife. As I scramble to pick it up — and regain my breath — I see Svera tuck her blade somewhere into her flowing aquamarine dress as she also picks herself up off of the ground. Her gaze however, is pinned to the doorway and I follow it.
“Comets,” I say at the same time Svera says, “Tri-God, help them.”
The door at the end of the room is cracked in the middle. Gunfire passes across it. Bright white-blue ion rounds, but also rounds in reds and purples. I don’t know what those are but they must be powerful if they can crack holoshields and the stalyx-reinforced werro doors protecting us. The last thing protecting us.
A purple haze shimmers in front of the gap in the door and another thunderous roar follows it. The door caves a little further. And then I hear metal on metal, plus the zing of my new weaponry being deployed. Roars. Gasps. Pain. Anguish.
“Svera,” I call to her, intending to offer assurances or who knows what. But I’m never given that chance. Svera shocks the stars out of me when shethrowsherself at me. She rips at my hair with her little fists and as she flails, she knocks the knife out of my hand for the second time.
“Svera,” I gasp, slapping her hands away from my face, “what are you doing?”
She wrenches back at the same time the door caves fully. I can see our xcleranxpiledin front of the doorway, trying to use their own bodies to stop whoever’s coming. They’re dead.Oh stars, I hope they aren’t. Please don’t be dead.None of them can be dead…not for us…not forme…and Krisxox…where is he?
“Svera, do you see…” But Svera isn’t looking at them. She’s looking at the hologenerator she’s clutching, feeding my hair into the insert. Mere moments are all it takes before the hologenerator fires to life with ticks and clicks and whirs and suddenlyI’mstanding where she just was. Her hands disappear into my —her— hair and I imagine that she’s tucking away the generators in her hair wrap.
“Oh no…Svera, no!”
“They’re here for you. Now hide!”
“No, Svera!” But the door explodes open and takes me with it. We fall to the ground, apart from one another and it takes me too long to reorient myself. I’m on my hands and knees. My head is spinning. Spots burst behind closed eyes. I can hear a distant moaning, and then rough commands barked in a voice I’m terrified to recognize.
I start at the sound of boots on dirt, crunching through moss and dragging through the sand beneath it. “Take the Rakukanna,” he says and it can be no other than Rhorkanterannu.
“Shouldn’t we take both? There are two,” another voice calls.
“Centagwhat you do with the second. One breeding female does us nothing. Not when we want the entire offering. The Rakukanna will get us that.”
I shake my head, fighting to clear it, as I push myself up to sitting and blink up at the beast. The four-armed king glances at me, but only briefly. His gaze rather focuses on the other side of the room where Svera kneels wearing my face.
“Should we kill her to send a message?”
Rhorkanterannu rounds on the male beside him and with nothing more than his deadly sharp claws, slashes through the soldier’s powdery skin.
Despite the plates, dark black blood flows freely and the one who’d spoken folds back between the bodies as he seeks his escape. Bodies. There are so many of them. As they spill into the room and step over the xcleranx corpses, I count at least thirty.That makes one hundred and twenty arms. Comets,where did they come from?
“We do not kill females. Not even human females,” the king snarls, flashing shards of sharpened teeth.
Across the room from me, Svera stands wearing my skin. “I’ll go with you willingly. Just please. You must stop the violence. Let whatever xcleranx you haven’t killed yet, live.”
