Page 9 of Taken to Voraxia
The suns’ light is strong in the sky by the time we finish clearing the rocks, which open to reveal the entrance to a cave. I’m uneasy when we slip inside — even more uneasy when Kiki starts stacking the rocks back into place.Buried alive.
This was always the plan, remember?It took us half a rotation to come up with this plan and the rest of the rotation to pull it together and even now, with so much planning, it still feels flawed.
Using a hologenerator that I cobbled together, Svera took my place after third meal, giving Kiki and I time enough to escape through the sewers, out of the colony and out from under the protection of the Drolax Dome. Disguised as me, Mathilda would have come for her already. She should be preparing for the choosing now…
Meanwhile, Kiki and I trekked across the outer territories. Kiki, as a hunter and a tracker, was familiar with some of the landscape and helped guide us to where the spindly trees grow, where sand becomes moss.
But after that, moss became rock. Rock became more rock. Now, this is all new territory. The uninhabited place. Where no one goes. And eventually we couldn’t continue any further — the rock cliffs were just too jagged and deadly.
Finding a small clearing among them, lined in caves, we picked one and now we’re here, burying ourselves inside of it. Hoping that the distraction will work. Hoping that my hologenerator will work. Hoping that Svera won’t get hurt in the process. Hoping that he won’t come looking for me and that if he comes looking for me he won’t be able to find us. Hoping that when he leaves, frustrated and angry, he doesn’t take it out on the colony.
It’s a garbage plan.I wince.I’m an inventor and it took me an entire rotation to come up with this shit?
“What?”Kiki flashes me her notepad. She doesn’t have many pages left and it’ll cost her a solar’s worth of meal rations to buy more.If we make it out of this alive, then I’ll buy it for her. Anything she wants.
“Nothing.”
Kiki gives me a look, but doesn’t say more and I don’t offer anything either.
Time passes. I don’t know how much of it. A half solar? More? At some point, a sound jerks my attention up and I hallucinate the sounds of a ship descending onto the planet.Is he here?If he is, it doesn’t matter. He’s far away. He can’t get me here.Yes he can.
I shudder at the same time that Kiki groans. In the light of the solar lamp, I watch her rifle through her pack — wrapped in plastic, it was the only thing we smuggled out that isn’t completely covered in sewage and waste.
I take the water canteen Kiki offers me in dirty hands and when she offers me a piece of hard sand bread and a fruit leather, I take those too. Taking one of each for herself, we sit opposite one another against the black stone walls of this cavern and chew for a moment in silence.
“Do you think the offering has already been gathered?” I ask, swallowing hard, throat clogged by flecks of dry, tastelessness.
She considers, then nods.
I feel my expression twist. “I hope when he realizes that Svera is actually Svera, he calls off the Hunt.”
Kiki’s full lips have set into a thin, hard line. She scribbles something quickly on her pad and in the light of the solar lamp, I read, “They can fuck themselves for a change.”
I snort, daring a smile that Kiki doesn’t reciprocate. She would have, though…before. Back when she still spoke. Back when she laughed. Back when she used to sit on the front step of her mother’s hut and help braid little kids’ hair and regale them with her songs. She had a beautiful voice.Hasa beautiful voice.But where has Kiki gone?
We lapse into a silence so silent then, all I can hear is the beating of my own heart.Dum dum, dum dum, dum dum.The sound of Kiki’s calming breath.Hmm, hmm, hmm.Condensed water on the cave’s high ceiling dripping onto the floor at irregular intervals.Plonk, plonk, plonk, plonk…
“I just…” I start, then stop. A fluttery heat ignites in my belly. I feel faint. I feel…everything.He’s here. Nowhe’s here…
I tried to tell Kiki and Svera before, but they don’t understand.Can’tunderstand. And Kiki of all people could never fathom what it had felt like…that awfulwonderfulburning in my stomach.
That blitz of immobility coupled with a surge of heat and…and treacherous desire…it had been stronger than any emotion I’ve ever felt, hitting me like a body shot. Like a punch to the gut. Like words shouted in my face, funneled down my ears and left to incinerate the space between my temples. Words defying me not to belong to him, and him not to belong to me.
And I have felt bound, ever since. Irrevocably.
The subtle buzzing in my belly drifts through me like the ghost of a greater desire. Even though it felt like a fever dream, I remember every second of it acutely. Hazy images. The pressure between my thighs. Theneed.
This garbage plan isn’t going to work.
Kiki wasn’t there. Kiki didn’t see. Kiki couldn’t. Her hate…it’s justified and it’s a hate I thought I shared but I…I don’t know if I do. What does that mean?He’s coming for me.
Kiki gives me a flat look then and nudges me with the edge of her notepad. She taps on the word she wrote there earlier with one end of her charcoal.“What?”
“I…” I shake my head, debate lying, and then admit, “I just don’t know that this is going to work.”
Kiki’s eyebrows draw together. Her shoulders tighten by her ears and when she shows me her angry, violent scrawl, I read,“You’ll go into one of those harnesses over my dead body.”
I shudder, her words dragging me back and serving as a painful reminder of what should happen should we fail…
