Page 22 of Taken to Nobu
Xiveri mate. There’s that term again.“If the Raku thinks Miari is his Xiveri mate, then that means that he got her, doesn’t it?”
“Of course. Did you really thinkyoucould stop him? He is leader of the Voraxian Federation and a fearsome warrior. He cannot be stopped by the likes ofyou.”
I hate the way she speaks to me. Like I’mnothing.It reminds me too much of the way the red alien looked at me, spoke to me, hurt me — and I could do nothing to stop him.
I bite down hard with my back teeth and try to keep myself from hitting her as I say, “And now? Where is Miari?”
She flashes yellow then and quickly looks away. “They are in Illyria, Voraxia’s capital.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“How…how is she?”
“How should I know?”
“If my trial is talk of the town, then she would also be. What do people say about her?”
The bitch waits for a moment, as if considering what or whether to tell me. Finally, she says four little words that change my life. “She is with kit.”
Stunned, I let the revelation sink in, but only for seconds that take eons.She’s pregnant. Possibly forced to mate. Abducted by strangers — aliens — I’ve never even heard of.I failed her. I failed her in every possible way.Not again. Hate flowers again in my chest, finding purchase in my doubt and hanging on. Turning away from the bitch, I swallow hard and look at the only other door in the room, the one that emanates such oppressive cold.
“Tell me where to find a transporter. I’m ready to go home.” The bitch hesitates one last time, ridges flashing an unsettling peach. She seems uncertain herself, and I don’t like it. Barking sternly now, I say, “Do you know the way or don’t you? I did my part. If you want me to leave, then tell me the way.”
Her features harden. Her colors die. She cocks her head to the door and says, “Follow the eastern sun until you reach the black screa cliff face. The door to the Okkari’s private transporters will open for you as you are Xhea. It won’t for me, so you have to do this on your own. Inside, you’ll find the transport pod. You’ll be able to take it where you need to. You’ll have plenty of time. I’ll keep the Okkari distracted. By the time you reach your pathetic human planet, you’ll be a distant memory for him.”
The thread in my chest opens up, forming a hollow gong which rings. I take another painful step until I can feel the cold breach the barrier of the door and my gloves and wonder if the temperature outside hasn’t dropped even more significantly.
“How far?”
“It is a quarter span walk, not far. Though with your short, stumpy legs it will probably take you a half span at least.”
“I don’t know that measurement,” I snap, ignoring the insult. “How many paces?”
She shrugs, her ridges swirling with a tendril of black. “Three hundred. Then you’ll be free.”
I turn to the door again and this time she presses her palm to a panel beside the door before it releases and slides open, letting in a burst of bright white light and a blitzkrieg of frigid, biting air. I take the first step outside of his home quickly, before it’s too late.Before I succumb to the oasis and let it drown me.
“Human.” I turn. Her ridges are calm once again, and I can sense a satisfaction simmering beneath her words. “Don’t come back.” The door shuts between us silently, with no great ceremony.
Putting the house to my back, I turn to face a shocking sky. Red strips shine through a limitless white, which screams down at me. Cold falls from it like needles and melts where it touches my skin. Squinting, I see the murky outline of cliffs in the distance, just as the bitch promised, even if they do look farther than three hundred paces.Three hundred of their paces is probably five hundred of mine.The world is flat everywhere else and there are no houses here.We must have come out on the other side of the hill.
I measure out forty paces and when I look back, the purple alien’s house is barely visible. Ahead of me the horizon is still just a seamless white, only the vaguest outline ofsomethingup ahead to give me direction.
I take another twenty steps, then another ten, then another five. The wind feels like fire. I don’t understand how something so cold could feel like this. It’s even worse than it was on top of the mountain, and I hadn’t thought that possible then.Does that mean it can get even worse than this?Meanwhile, the ground beneath my feet has shifted from plush, springy white to a hard, unyielding cold, like the tundra I ran onto, even though the female leader told me not to.If she said not to run onto the tundra, why would they keep transporters here?Maybe she lied.Maybe Kuaku did. After all, she wanted me gone. Why did I think she’d care if I lived?
A blast of cold cuts across my cheek and I can’t push forward against it. I turn my back on it and even then, the needles seem to flutter around and eventhroughmy suit. It hurts and I feel the fluttering in my chest devolve to the first whispers of a very real panic.
I turn around, but I’m not so sure I’m facing in the exact same direction. Trying to orient myself, I look back for the house — gone — and then for my footsteps — but they’re gone too, erased as soon as they’re created. The wind is too hard. The white is too white. The cold is too brutal.I need to go back to where it’s safe.I can fight him there about the trial. I can fight him there about Miari. I can fight anything in the warm, but in this cold white it’s getting harder and harder to move and to breathe — both things I desperately need to do.
Picking a direction, I take a step, only to feel the hard cold beneath me rumble, the sensation almostexactlylike when the red aliens touched down onto our moon colony in their large sky ships. Is there a port around here? I haven’t gone three hundred steps yet, but maybe she just miscounted. I must be close. No other sound could sound solargeor so exactly like an off-world transporter.
Hope lifts my chest and urges me forward, but where I walk, the ground beneath me darkens. There are no shadows overhead and it’s too white and all encompassing for me to have created a shadow myself.
Confused as much as I am curious, I bend down and swipe away the top misty layer clouding the packed cold and jump — damn near out of my own suit and skin — when the shadow passes by below my feet.Something ismovingdown there.And then I feel it. A muted thump and a distant, terrible wail coming frombelow. From underneath.
The thump comes again and when I look up, it’s without caring that I have no points of reference to guide me. None of that matters. I don’t know if whatever is below the hard cold can get through it, but the thumping is enough to shake my whole body, to lift my feet off the ground, to make me stumble. It’sbig. And I don’t want to be here to find out just how thick that hard cold is. I thought fighting khrui was difficult, but I’m in the alien world now where I know nothing of monsters. Because everyone is.
