Page 64 of Taken to Heimo
She is split in parts, equal or perhaps, unequal.
She is saving my Xiveri mate.
And she’s saving my life.
She unwinds her cloak from around her body and exposes a shape that is reminiscent of Svera’s — full chest mounds, a slit covered in fur, though hers is colored black where Svera’s matches the color of her hair.
The Oosa hesitates, then changes course as the hybrid begins to back away. Her gaze flashes to me, that bright white and that hard black. She needs me to save her. And she is human. And I shouldn’t want to.
Butshouldshave only ever held me back.
I roar a battle cry as I charge the Oosa, spearing its flesh with my blade. I run it through and ordinarily, this would do nothing if I didn’t suddenly have the idea to kill as the Oosa kill.
I’ll kill it from the inside.
I thrust my arms into its gelatinous blue body, following the line of my sword. There is resistance, but I fight my shoulders inside. Beneath me —around me —the Oosa rolls away from the female and tries to attack me, but every move it makes only helps further my cause. I’m inside of the thing up to the shoulders, blue jelly squeezing me from every direction, tickling my arms, suffocating my mouth and nose, getting into my wounds.
I slash and fight and I keep slashing and I keep fighting until I see red. Until I no longer see blue. And when I come to, I’m wavering on my knees and the Oosa lies in thousands of pieces around me.
The spectators are on their feet and the Eshmiri announcer hovers on his platform a few paces above my head. He is saying something to me — nox, not to me, to the hooded female. And she is saying something to him, but I can’t hear them. All I can hear is Svera’s reply as the hooded female clutches her arm and demands why she won’t leave me.
“He is my Xiveri Mate,” she cries and I waste to the side with a smile.
“Whiff,” I croak. “She is mywhiff.” And then the lights dim and agony gives to numbness and the heat simmers down until I’m shaking and cold and, above all else, satisfied.
18
Svera
“You’re a human, huh?” The female plops down across from me. A cracked plastic seat squeals under her weight. It looks like it’s seen better days, but then again, so has the frayed pillow visibly losing its stuffing at her back, the shoes she wears, which are scuffed beyond recognition and have leather patches sewn over the toes, and the entire rest of the ship surrounding us.
Like the last Eshmiri ship I saw — the only other Eshmiri ship I’ve ever seen — this one is all blocks soldered haphazardly together. Metal slats and planks cover the floor and rattle beneath my heel, which is beating frantically against the metal below.
I only have one shoe on — my other sandal broke somewhere back in that arena — and the floor is cold. My nipples are stiff, still crusted in blue seed, while the orange blood of that tentacled thing and the blue gel of the Oosa wet the rest of me. All of it, an unwelcome experience.
I dab a bit of the prayer rug in my lap to my forehead, trying to wipe off some of the slime. “I am,” I answer the female in Meero. “And you appear to be human as well.”
“Ha! Appearing human is what I’m best at,” she crows. Her lips curve up in a smile that would have made the colony boys wild. Then they’d have looked into her eyes and run screaming the other direction. She wears her colors in there.Fascinating.Beautiful. Deadly.
“You were sold by a human traitor to a Voraxian traitor. The former Bo’Raku.”
“Don’t know who that is or what you’re talking about, but I’m quite familiar with traitors. Go on.”
This is why I’m here. Why she convinced the Eshmiri that she should get to claim both me and Krisxox as battle prizes. It helped that she speaks fluent Eshmiri — or maybe, even, that she knew them? They seemed familiar with one another, all laughter and smiles.
Then again, that’s been the entirety of my experience with Eshmiri, to date.
“And your mother…” As of yet, I have no guesses as to which female that might have been. “…was killed. I’m so sorry…”
“Don’t be,” she snaps, cutting me off. “I have a mother. Well, not a mother, per se, more like fourteen fathers, but still. They treated me right.”
I blink at her, surprised, and for the first time since she brought me and carried Krisxox on board her ship and we took flight off of that asteroid, my foot stops shaking. Silence. I didn’t realize I’d been rattling the floor boards so loudly. She looks down at my leg then and grins. She hasn’t stopped grinning. Her eyes are still bright white, betraying no color.
“You…are an Eshmiri reaver?”
“And proud of it.”
“How did you end up in the derby?”
