Page 42 of Taken to Kor
“What is it?” He says, looking down at me as we stand in the hangar.
It’s a huge, vast space with small ships littering the seamless grey floor. Like most of the other pirates, we stand at one wall, watching Kor loom into view. They’re all talking excitedly about beings and places and creatures I’ve never heard Rhork mention before. They’re all talking excitedly about going home. They’re all covered in the same moss-colored blood of the giants that boarded our ship.
Egama-Sky hybrids, they were the biggest things I’d ever seen, towering twice the height of the biggest Niahhorru pirate. But there were only seven of them, and there were over a hundred of us.
Us, us, us— I can hear the word echo.
We decimated them pretty quickly, battling between two yeeyar chambers and over one bridge. That had been the scary part — not falling off. And two Niahhorru pirates did. But what was weird was that when they plummeted to their deaths, the others cheered. Rhork explained that it’s a great honor to die as a pirate doing pirate things.
He used better words, but that’s the gist of what I can remember right now, standing with one palm pressed against the yeeyar, remembering how Rhork cleared a path for me to get to the front of the fighting so I could blast one of the creatures that had a human in a tank under its arm.
My blasting didn’t do much good, so Rhork pulled a sword-like thing off of his back. It had a silver blade — shocker, there — but black sparks wicked off of it whenever it connected with the Egama-creature’s shield, until eventually the shield dissolved beneath it.
Rhork shouted my name and I’d fired on command, killing it just as he and two other pirates lunged for the tank, catching it as it slipped from the Egama’s arms and just before it fell over the edge of the ramp.
They saved the female in it, though she’d be none the wiser. Meanwhile, a half dozen pirates came up and patted me on the back and crossed their lower arms over their chests in a sign that felt wholly reverent and accepting and made me feel like a badass warrior chick.
A badass pirate chick.
And I loved it.
And now that they’re all talking and jostling me from all sides and not pawing at me because they don’t want me for shekurr, but making me feel like a pirate — like one of them — I feel like I am. And I don’t want it to be a lie.
“What’s a lie?” Rhork looks around, his frown only getting worse.
My mouth is sticky and I sound stupid as I curl my palm against the yeeyar wall of the ship and glance towards a planet that, from this distance, only appears as a shimmery dark blue stone against a black backdrop studded with millions of stars.
“That I’m a pirate,” I say bluntly, feeling weepy. Feeling whole.
Rhork looks concerned as he reaches for my chin with his bottom right hand. I wish I had four hands, so I could hold all of his simultaneously. “You are a pirate.”
And then, like the sleep-deprived-adrenaline-addled-moron that I am, I burst into tears. I don’t want the others to see, so I do the only thing I can. I lunge for him, wrapping my arms around his waist — careful for the tines — and bury my face in his chest. The plates are rough against my too-soft cheeks. My left and twisted leg buckles a little beneath me. His hands come around my back while my shoulders jolt.
“Thank you,” I whisper sloppily against his skin, tasting blood as my lips trail spit.
Rhork chuckles and the vibrations turn me on, make me hot, make me feel something too big to hold onto. How can something that feels so good hurt so much?
“Interesting,” he says and it’s my turn to laugh.
“What do you mean?” I ask him, still afraid to leave the cavern of his arms.
“What do I mean? What do you mean? You’re making very little sense. In fact, you’ve made almost no sense at all since I came upon you holding six of my pirates up at gun point. You were shouting your plant song at them. Do you remember?”
Laughing, I say, “Ontte. Of course I remember. But that made perfect sense. Every time I stopped ordering them to keep their hands up, they’d reach for their blasters. But if I talked, then they kept their hands up. So then I ran out of things to say, so I started singing.”
He scoffs. “That was not singing.”
“It was singing. It was a song.”
“Shouting a song doesn’t make it singing.”
I flip my hair back, laughter chasing away the threat of tears. At least, the threat of sobs. There are still tears on my face as I plant my chin on his chest and stare straight up, up, up. I watch his expression soften into something so tender even the lightest touch might break it. It makes my lips warble all over again.
Rhork inhales deeply and exhales just as deeply. So even. So strong. So sure. “You are exhausted. You always get emotional when you’re tired. Or rather, youonlyget emotional like this when you’re tired.” He touches the tears on my face with his fingers, but doesn’t wipe them away. He just smiles down at me sweetly, like we’ve done this a thousand times before and like we’ll do it again a thousand times more and like my brand of crazy is perfectly okay.
“You’re being nice to me.”
“Is that why you’re crying?” He laughs and it nearly breaks the tenuous hold I have on my rapidly unraveling emotion jar. The lid’s been unscrewed. The contents, spilled.
