Page 30 of Taken to Kor
The blue glow gets brighter the farther forward we walk until soon, the short breezeway ends and a universe of light opens up before us. My jaw goes slack. I glance down and see Deena’s mouth hanging openly as stupidly as mine is. The males to her left and the males to my right all wear identical expressions.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Rhegaran says beside me.
I nod, incapable of responding.
“Beautiful,” Quintenanrret answers on Deena’s other side. He has tears swimming in his silver eyes. “Don’t you think, Deena?”
Deena doesn’t look away from what’s in front of her. The unimaginable sight. It’s more than we could have ever hoped for. It’s more than I ever thought I’d find. Deena doesn’t look particularly thrilled, nor do I blame her. She reaches her free hand up to her hair and, when I go to firm my grip on her hand, she rips it away. I frown. Her hand that belonged to me for a time reaches up to join its mate in her hair.
She’s breathing hard again, only now she’s cursing. “Ifuckedup, didn’t I?” The word she uses in Human translates loosely to shrov, but a pirate behind us still picks up on it.
“Fuh-huck,” he says. Another repeats more closely to the intonation Deena used. “Fuhhk. I like this word. Fuhhk!” And soon they’re all shouting it.
Deena’s not paying any attention to the rabble behind her, though. She’s staring at the tanks lining the circular room, stretching up above our heads ten stories. Cautiously, she enters the room until she’s standing in the center of the space, blue light pouring over her, turning her skin unusual colors and making the bright blood splashed all across her chest and arms and face glitter like precious stones.
Her hands are still in her hair as she looks up, up, up, and ever farther up at the tanks holding members of her species. There are not hundreds of them, but thousands. Enough to fill one of Kor’s smallest cities. And that’s saying a lot. Kor is inhabited by millions.
But I can’t keep this many humans on Kor. Correction — I can keep them there, but I can’t keep them safe.
A cold trickles through my chest as a dozen warning bells go off in my mind in uncoordinated cacophony.
Fuck,as Deena and these humans would say.
My gaze returns to her and more alarm bells sound. Rage or shock or fear or something else has her shaking even more violently now. She looks like she’s going to shatter into a billion pieces and if she does that, I worry about my own ability to collect and reassemble the parts.
“Deena,” I say, keeping my voice severe.
Her gaze flicks to me. She sucks in a ragged gasp, and then she says the last words I would have expected her to say to me. “I guess you don’t need me for shekurr anymore. I guess you don’t need me anymore for anything.” Laughter that does not sound like laughter fills the room around us and does not echo.
I reach her and grab both of her wrists with two of my hands, pull them away from her hair, lest she yank it out at the root. “Deena, I needed you the first time I heard your voice, though I didn’t know it then. I needed you the first time you called me Rhorky bear. I need you now more than ever.”
I don’t know if she’s listening to me. Her head is swiveling on her neck, gaze seeking salvation, but finding only pirates. And we have never looked like salvation, not to anyone.
“I shouldn’t have brought you here, should I?” She tries to twist her wrists out of my grip, but she isn’t really trying that hard.
I laugh in a short burst, “And leave these humans to the cannibals aboard this satellite?”
“Shrov.” She’s sweating, twisting her wrists, blinking uncontrollably. Losing control. Her left knee buckles, but I still have her by the arms and hold her up.
“Deena, look at me.”
She looks at me.
“Deena, take a breath.”
She inhales once jerkily, and then inhales again.
“Deena, I was not expecting this quantity of humans. I will need your help. You already fought a war for me. Are you really going to fail me now?”
“What?” She shakes her head, looking stricken, looking like she’s been struck. “I would never fail you.” Her voice warbles. Water wells on her lower eyelids.
I smile and stroke her cheek with my thumb. Her words have just confirmed a previous suspicion.
I love her, ontte, this I knew.
But she also is in love with me, too.
She has no idea about the former, and is even less aware of the latter. But it doesn’t matter, because I’ll spend however long it takes to convince her. However long she needs.
