Page 40 of Taken to Voraxia
And I believe him. Because deep down in my heart I know that he’d never hurt me. The thought is as stupid as it is reckless, but when he tells me to drink once more, I do.
Warm and strangely sweet, it’s delicious, rich in ways I found the little packet of food he already fed me. I laugh a little and drink some more, lips brushing the rough side of his hand as I slurp.
He jerks, fingers pulling back and parting. Water rains down between us as he makes a brutish sound. I open my eyes and inhale the smell of his skin, that rich wood and spice, his natural musk. And the even headier smell of his cum, still lingering a little on the insides of my thighs. I haven’t bathed yet, and feel myself heat at the pressure of his gaze on my thighs and the juncture between them, as if willing himself to see straight through the lightweight tunic I wear. I lean forward.
His jaw clenches and he takes a few steps away from me, staggering in a way I’ve never seen before. “Come, Rakukanna,” he barks.
Flushing — both out of irritation and out of what I was just denied — I’m still curious enough to follow.
Weaving again through the forest, all is quiet at first and I have the impulse to ask how crowded Voraxia is, how populous. The human colony is always full of sounds. Kids running and playing, the elders coughing and clapping and singing, women shouting over one another as disputes are settled in the market, hunters’ swords clacking as they train, preparing to leave the safety of the dome to scavenge.
Here, there is very little in the way of noise. The sounds of branches creaking, but very far away. Leaves crinkling high overhead. Sand shifting under our footsteps. The river carrying its light around the capital. Distant voices, whispers, getting louder. And then I see them. Hidden at first, but once I relax my gaze, I catch sight of people in my peripheries.
Beings with blue faces watch us from open doorways and windows in the werro trees — some as high as ten, twenty heads up — and I’m floored by the world that these Voraxians have created out of them. Hollowed out, vertical worlds that still ascribe wholly to the planet’s natural beauty. Like everything they could keep as it was, they did.
Xoran doesn’t stop for any of the beings we pass, but he does step closer to me and places his hand on the small of my back. I flush when his claws brush my skin through my thin shift. I keep thinking about our pact and what it might be like if we could just have the pleasure part without having to barter for it…What would that even look like?I can’t picture it. A relationship where we stand on equal ground.How could it exist, when we never will?Before it consumes me, I quickly shake off the thought.
The hill we’ve crested begins its descent and I focus on the werro in front of us. It’s the largest I’ve seen yet, and its doors are wide open. Light shines outward and silhouettes two figures who bow deeply when we draw near.
“Raku,” the woman says, her long, straight hair grazing the sandy floor when she dips.
“Lemoria,” Xoran answers, and I notice that he bows a little bit this time when he hadn’t the last.Does he know her too? Even better than Ixria?I bristle, irritated with myself more than I am with him.
This female has dark grey, pearly skin and wooden beads decorating her hair. Her chest is bare, but she wears a thin, tan skirt that flows to the ground and covers her feet. Nearly the same height as Xoran, she is a combination of long, yet muscular limbs and soft, feminine power. Like some kind of universal being.
Her attention pivots to me then and she bows once more. “I had heard tales of the beauty of the Rakukanna. For once, they were not wrong. You must be very proud, my Raku, that Xaneru created your Xiveri in such a way, and that Xana brought her into your path.”
Xoran gives her another slight nod before pushing me out in front of him towards the female, who clasps both of her hands together against her chest. “I am Lemoria. You honor me with your presence here.”
“I um…am happy to be here.”I can put a fusil tank together with a flex rod, but I can’t put two coherent sentences together…
“We do more than seek the grace of your presence, but we also seek your counsel,” Raku says at my back. “We will enter now.”
The woman, Lemoria, steps aside with a flourish, and the man behind her bows. He looks first into Raku’s eyes, then into mine as we pass him and just before he turns to shut the doors, I see him stare at Lemoria with an expression that makes my pulse thunder.
His ridges flare subtly, but in a multitude of colors. Xoran’s looked at me like that before and I suddenly get the feeling that I knowexactlywhat it means, and it doesn’t make sense with anything that he’s done…with the pact…with the person — the alien — I thought he was.
And that terrifies me.
“We would like a word alone.”We. He keeps saying we.The panicky sensation I feel just gets stronger.
“Of course. Ki’Lemoria, would you take over in the Frakar’s room?”
“Of course,” Ki’Lemoria, the one with eyes wreathed in color and devotion, says behind us.
The female moves forward down a flight of three stairs and as we follow, the room opens up. This isn’t a house like I’d thought it was — this is a hospital.
Huge paneled windows on the walls let in the same fire light from the river, almost as if — actually,exactlyas if — they make their windows with water inside of them.Incredible.
Abandoning the natural aspect of the city behind us, this structure, wreathed in an orange-yellow glow, has the same hard paneling of the ship we left behind. The walls are paneled too, and so is the ceiling, though I can hear the muted sounds of bodies thumping across the floors above.
Cooridors branch off left and right. We take the first and head down a short hall. At its end, a door opens onto a smaller room equipped with a sturdy plastic table and implements of all kinds — scalpels and tools with hook ends and scopes and probes and fluffy pink balls in murky glass jars and long white tables and giant, metal machines hanging from the ceilings and a scope in one corner and a machine that looks like it fits a Voraxian sized body inside of it and — is that agammalaser?
So focused on the glass tube mounted to the ceiling filled with the same pink liquid Xoran calledreien farrn,I jump half a head into the air when the door behind us swishes firmly shut, leaving us alone with her in this room of wonders.Or horrors.
“How can I be of service, my Raku and my Rakukanna?”
Xoran slips his hand under the curtain of my hair in a gesture that makes me heat. It’s sopossessive. Possessive, but also reassuring.
