Page 45 of Taken to Kor
I’m having a complete out of body experience right now, taking whatever Rhork hands me and doing with it whatever he tells me. This is the first time I’ve hesitated in the past solar, seconds, rotations — how long have we been here? Oh, right, the triangle was the tip of one port and we rode a lift inside of it down to Kor’s surface. The doors opened and sensations swarmed ceaselessly, as they continue to now. My best guess is that it’s been about a half a rotation. And I’m beat.
I lift the bowl on autopilot towards my mouth before the smell — more than the microscopic squiggly blue tentacles reaching out of it — deters me. “Is this for eating?”
“What?” He asks distractedly before glancing over his shoulder at me fully and gasping. “Shroving stars! Centare.” He grabs my wrist and laughs so loud that it draws stares. Who am I kidding? People have been staring at him ever since we set foot on this planet. Well, maybe a little at me, too. Mostly at me.
“Centare, this isn’t for eating. It’s shoes.”
“Shoes?” I don’t understand. “I don’t understand.”
“Shoes.” He slips a hand into the bowl, removing half the contents. He flings the blue goop onto the filthy ground at my feet. In response, the blue tentacles start inching towards me over the ground that isn’t concrete so much as itsnotconcrete. I don’t know what it is. It’s scratchy though, almost like it’s made out of the same thing Rhork’s plates are.
“Shoes rhymes with bruise, which is exactly what you’re gonna get if this thing touches me! Eeeaowk!” I scream and grab two of Rhork’s wrists while the blue and I tap dance around one another, but it’s a clever beast. When I try to kick it, the blue uses that as its opportunity to latch onto my toes, then slide over them up to my ankle. “Aaherrerhggg!” I shout in blind terror.
“Deena,” Rhork snorts, but he’s laughing too hard to say more. “Sh…shoes…” Is what he manages to grunt in between snorts.
“This is not shoes! Shoes don’t fight back!” But, alas, I’m proven wrong when the goop grabs my foot and refuses to relinquish its hold, no matter how hard I kick. Rhork takes the bowl out of my hand and dumps the contents onto the ground near my blue-free foot and the three of us — Rhork, the goop, and I — repeat the same process.
With both feet on the ground covered in blue goop, I shudder and cringe. Then I realize that the blue has stopped fighting me and isn’t, evidently, planning a takeover of my whole body and actually feels quite cool against the cuts and scrapes that have already formed on the bottoms of my feet.
“Huh.” I take a few steps and the blue molds to the arches of my feet, making them feel buoyant and relieved in a way they didn’t a moment ago. “Huh,” I repeat.
“Shoes,” Rhork says to me with a grin.
I lean forward, fighting the urge to kiss him. Luckily, he leans in and kisses me first. Someone very close to us gasps-shrieks so loudly it makes me jump. When I wrench back from Rhork, still holding his hand, I glance up into the orange face of a being that looks like it was made entirely out of fins. It’s watching us, black diamond-shaped eyes pinned to me, I think.
“Ignore him. The Hypha aren’t used to seeing intimacy in public.”
“Um, Rhork, in case you haven’t noticed, it isn’t just him,” I whisper.
“What did I tell you about that Human word?”
I grin, remembering him chastising me for usingumall the way back in our very first conversation. “You’re deflecting,” I say.
“You’redeflecting.” Rhork pulls me along to the next batch of stalls. We’re deep in the Reaver market now.
What looked like enormous black tents from above look exactly like black tents from below. Each one is the size of one of the adobe homes on the colony at the smallest, and the size of the entire colony itself at the largest. Okay, maybe not that big, but stillbig. Bigger than any standing structure on the colony, for sure.
“Everyone is staring,” I rasp.
He tugs me towards the opening of the next tent where a cluster of Eshmiri stand waving colorful fabrics in the air with all of their arms. I sayallonly because I find the quantity of arms they have shocking. They have two arms. Just two. And they’re also not that tall. They’re shorter than I am — which is a rarity among the creatures I’ve seen so far — but insanely bulky in the chest.
The way they’re shaped just doesn’t come together because their faces are kind of…cute? They have tiny mouths lined in razorblades and they’re almost constantly smiling or laughing, which sort of undercuts some of the razorbladeyness but also…at the same time…exacerbates it? I don’t know! They’re freaky and cute at the same time with their big bug eyes and their high-pitched laughter and the way they speak which sounds like laughter and is disorienting when it feeds through the token in Human.
“Catacat silk! Nena furs! Edena hides!” One of them giggles, practically leaping at Rhork as he approaches.
“Do you have gormar fabric?”
“Gormar. Gormar? Gormar Gormar.” About thirty of them are clustered in the entrance of the tent and a flurry of activity reveals at least thirty moreinthe tent behind them. It’s illuminated by large floating light orbs that the Eshmiri push out of the way when they walk. They float up into the roof of the tent like balloons, capturing my attention. They’re beautiful. Like stars.
“What are?” Rhork says and I realize I’m talking out loud again.
“The lights.”
“Simple torches. Kind of like the one you found in the escape pod. The Eshmiri buy them from us cheap now that we’ve switched to yeeyar.” He turns away from me and haggles with the Eshmiri in verbose, colorful language while I turn in a circle, utterly mesmerized by the swarms of people around me.
People?
I grin. How can I possibly keep thinking of these creatures as people? They come in all shapes and sizes. Round like actual rolling balls, tall, like the stalks of mighty trees, thick in the chest with arms and legs like humans or Niahhorru, females with chests so large they cast shadows, beings with tentacles for arms and more tentacles for legs.
