Page 75 of Taken to Voraxia
“Go on,” I bark, not interested in this matter now.
“They thought they knocked me out when they took the human females. They didn’t. They intended to kill me but your Rakukanna spared my life. She offered herself in exchange for keeping me alive.” Fury makes my pulse spike, but when Krisxox leans more of his weight onto me, I accept it.
“I followed them out, tracking them from a distance. They made their way just south of Illyria to the flat lands and when they arrived, they…I have no idea what tech they used, but like some kind of strange gravity drive, they were propelled up into the sky where they vanished.
“Svera’s tracking beacon deactivated in that instant, but reappeared not too long after. Here. Look.” He swipes his good arm across his left, mangled one and his life drive activates. Quickly navigating its controls, he draws up a star map. “Here. She’s here. Just at the border of the quadrant.”
“How inxokdid they acquire technology this advanced? Who sold it to them?” Xa’Raku says, coming up beside me.
I lift my hand. “Irrelevant now. Now we fight. We must retrieve Svera and the Rakukanna.”My Rakukanna. My Miari.
“Hexa.” Krisxox bleeds between his teeth. He looks at me and his eyes are feral and wild, his need to destroy Rhorkanterannu rivaling mine. His ridges are an explosion of violent, visceral greys, as bloodthirsty as the black that has consumed my ridges, my face, my neck, my arms. I look down. I am a nightmare reborn and I will be until I see her, until I touch her, and until I ensure that any Niahhorru who wronged her, falls.
Xa’Raku steps up, looking at the map before us and the small speck of light among the stars that is more valuable to me than all the rest of their light. It is what will bring me back to her.
“We won’t be able to take off in the battle cruiser,” she says.
“We do not need to use the battle cruiser to take their ship.”And their lives.
“But the docks — they were destroyed.”
“Hexa.” I exhale. “But not all of them. I did not come to be Raku without surprises of my own.” And weapons enough to tear Rhorkanterannu to a thousand pieces, and from those thousand pieces, patch together a quilt from all his bloody parts.
21
Miari
A scream rips through my unconsciousness, bringing me back with a start.
Heat dripping down the right side of my face is what I feel first. Slow and syrupy, it glides from my temple to my chin, thick and viscous. Another glob drips, this one splattering over my forehead and sliding down the arch of my nose. My mouth opens and the glob enters like it was headed there all along. Sour meets metal and overcomes it in a taste as bitter as it is vile. Blood. Some of it my own, and some distinctly not. I cough and the jolt to my body is what stirs the rest of me to life.
I gasp, sucking in a breath that tastes like fire and mold. I cough and gasp again. I can’t get in enough air. There’s a pressure on my chest keeping me from it and when my eyes blink open I see a whole heap of wrecked metal crisscrossing in front of me, caging me in. I’m trapped.
Movement near my left shoulder grabs my attention and I shudder at the sight that greets me — a Niahhorru pirate impaled to the wall above my head by a fractured pipe. His black blood drips on me, yes, but there’s also thick waste water spraying into the space in wild abandon. It drips into my eyes, through my hair, over my scalp and down the back of my neck. It feels like fingers.
It’s disgusting and I want away from it, but the table that had at one time been the platter to serve me up, and at another time served as my shield, is now my prison. Braced across my sternum, I’m pinned to the wall behind me.
My breaths come shorter and harder and then cut altogether at the sound of a woman’s scream, because I know that there’s only one other woman in the room.
“Svera?”
She screams again and I hear the sounds of scrabbling. There’s a struggle happening and I can’t get to her.
“Female. You with child,” a voice below me croaks. To my right lies a Niahhorru trapped beneath another fallen pipe, this one oozing the same black slime that cascades over my face, drenching my hair and dampening my resolve. “You must calm yourself. For the sake of the kit.”
“My friend, she’s out there…”
“With Nondah, ontte.” He nods solemnly and leans his big, square head back down and that’s when I notice his spikes…they’re all broken. I see the shattered shards scattered around him and wince. He speaks evenly, but I can feel the pain emanating from him like a tangible presence. “He will keep her safe.”
I shake my head. “Then why is she screaming!” I demand as Svera screams again. Metal clangs and I hear a Niahhorru voice curse.
The Niahhorru lying prone exhales, “If it is true that she has never lain with a male before, then perhaps it causes her pain.”
“What! He’s raping her?”
“He has the rutting fever. It is a dishonor to her, not to be taken in a proper shekurr, but there is nothing that can be done when he is in the fever’s grasp.”
“You have to stop him!” But as I shout, my gaze sweeps the full length of his nude body. One of his legs is trapped beneath the far corner of the table that also cages me and the metal haspiercedhis plates and flesh and bone all the way through to the other side of the thigh. He can’t move any more than I can. He’s barely alive.
