Page 12 of Taken to Kor
Because loneliness is my only real friend.
Even Rhork lies to me.
“Rhork, I…” I bite my bottom lip to stop myself from saying the pathetic words I want to say.I’ll miss you.Because I do miss him. He thinks I’m disgusting and I’m obsessed with him. I close my eyes and turn forward towards the rot-colored walls, determination steeling my resolve. Then, without another thought to Rhork, I climb up into the dark.
3
Deena
“Humans? It’s safe! I’m me! I’m one of you! You can come out now. Want to hear my song about plants? It’s in Meero, but it kind of translates.” I shouted it in the first hall. Now, thirty endless hallways later, I’m whispering it.
I thought I’d find someone sooner than this and I’m starting to worry that I mightnotfind anyone at all. Maybe they didn’t survive. Maybe…maybe they’re all corpses waiting to be found. Maybe they managed to escape. Yeah, maybe they escaped and found a world with vast oceans and beautiful moons hanging like colored lights in the sky. Maybe they have a thriving community somewhere safe in the cosmos where Rhork and the exiled Bo’Raku, Pogar, and Mathilda can’t find them.Where no one can find them. Because they’re corpses.
I wince and cling to thoughts of beautiful planets full of blue water twinkling like jewels, because the idea that I’m going to round the next corner and find a pile of bodies or bones makes me sweat. I’m sweating a lot. Too much. I’ve been using the goop to mark my path, but I’m running out. What if I can’t find my way back to the pod? That thought bothers me until I remember why I’m even here at all.
I have nowhere else to go.
There are no other coordinates in my head and the pod can’t fly around until I find some place that’s nice and safe — it was running out of energy, whatever substance powers it —or maybe because nowhere’s nice and safe for a human in this great gruesome galaxy…
“Lift your green leaves and stretch onto your toes. Bend like the wind, tracing the patterns it blows…” I sing softly to myself, first in Human then repeating the words in Meero. My voice doesn’t echo. I feel like it should echo but it doesn’t.
There’s no wind either. Like everything is holding its breath. My feet don’t even anchor to the ground like they should. I feel halfway weightless. I’m still out of breath, but my bad leg doesn’t drag as much.
I stop walking-floating in the middle of a hallway so dark, I can’t see anything outside of the ambient glow of my lantern. It illuminates quite a bit. Maybe twenty paces in any direction. Standing still like I am, I take a few deep, calming breaths. They don’t help. What helps is reaching my hand into my right pocket and fingering the token I’ve still got there.I’m not alone. No, that’s not important. What’s important is the knowledge that I won’t die here.
Iwon’tdie here.
If there aren’t any living humans, then it makes sense to just tell Rhork the coordinates. If I do that, then he’ll come get me, I’ll perform shekurr for him and his brothers and it’ll suck but not as much as it’ll suck dying of dehydration on a ship full of corpses.Corpse rhymes with…
“Hello?” My voice warbles. There’s movement up ahead. No…there’slight.
I don’t know how to turn the lantern off on my wrist, so I cover its shine with my opposite hand and, sure enough, there’s a subtle blue glow emanating from the distant end of the hallway. From here, it looks as distant as starlight, but equidistant from me and that light there’s something that can only be described aspalein the middle of the corridor, huddled in front of the next intersection.
“Hell…hello?” I ask it.
The thing moves abruptly, shifting over the floor towards me. I jump and my heart rate starts to accelerate. I remove my hand from my wrist, allowing light to filter into the space so I can get a sense of what the shit that thing is, but the moment the light touches it, the thing screeches and disappears.That wasn’t a human screech. That wasn’t a person.
Nope. Uh-uh.No. FTS, my favorite Human expression. Fuck. This. Shit.
The thing was white against the black walls and floor and it was crawling. What the shit could it have been? It looked like a rug being pulled around the corner. Was it some kind of like…sentient bacteria? Rhork once told me about creatures calledOosa. They’re apparently gelatinous blob beings that like to have sex with everything. Maybe they made it onto this satellite. I can deal with a nymphomaniac blob.
I exhale, smile shakily and shrug.Still better than cocks for eye sockets.
I take a step forward, after the blob, when suddenly the light at the end of the tunnel shifts. I glance up and I can see a figure silhouetted against the blue glow. This one’s standing, which is already a better start than that crawling rug.
I cover my lantern again and take a few quicker steps towards it, passing the intersection, which is empty. No Oosa or rugs in sight.
I cling to the wall as I move. It’s covered in that weird grit that’s everywhere. Under my feet, on the ceilings, getting into the cracks between my toes. They curl, not wanting to touch the substance. I don’t like this. I don’t like any part of it and the farther towards the light I walk, the less I like it, which is already not at all.
Not at all. Not at all notatall. Sounds likenot a ball. Ball rhymes with drawl. That’s what I wish I were hearing right now. Rhork’s calming drawl in my ear, telling me that he’ll take me to the ocean, show me sand that’s not like colony sand but that’s soft and forms a thing called a beach. All I have to do is shekurr in exchange. Shekurr? Eh. It might not be so bad. Just thirty cocks. I don’t even have to grow them out of my eye sockets or anything.
“Holy…” That’s all I manage to say as I finally get close enough to the light to see it clearly. Nothing else shifts in front of it, so I can see what’s causing it. What’s behind it. What it illuminates. “Oh my shroving shrov…” If only Svera could see this. The little human with more prayer rugs than sense would flip a lid.
I hasten towards it, elbows dropping to my sides as I break out into a sprint. Well, a shuffling, awkward sprint that makes my lungs catch as I take in air from the tube underneath my nostrils. Did I mention I’m out of shape?
I wheeze as I slow down, a stitch spearing my left side. It feels like a clawed hand reached out of the darkness to latch onto my ribs. I take shallow breaths, but that doesn’t seem to have any effect on my pounding pulse. The T-intersection leaves me feeling exposed as I step into it, out of the hall and into the violence of the blue light. Dark, empty hallway stretches off to my either side. These three blue cages block my path from the front.
“I…” I want to tell the beings trapped in the light that I’ll help them, but they can’t hear me trapped in cages that look like they’ll need a crowbar and a blowtorch to get into. Or a hammer.
