Page 5 of Taken to Kor
I frown.
I don’t know why it bothers me so much to be called that by him and I sigh, shake my head, put it out of my thoughts. He’s just as bad as Mathilda and the things…the horrible things he was getting ready to do to Svera…He would have taken her in shekurr if I hadn’t stopped him.
My muscles all firm up at the thought and I get up, out of my seat, and pace around the small escape pod. I locate weapons stashed in a cubby in the middle of the floor and quickly scan through them. I find a sword and pull it out, slash it around a few times aimlessly. I’ve never held a sword before.
I chuck it aside and duel an imaginary opponent with a spear. At least, I thought it was a spear until it started vibrating at one end and a giant bolt fired out of the other. I scream and drop it back into the cubby as the bolt clinks uselessly off of the impenetrable wall of the pod instead of exploding it open and launching me into space.
That was close. Hehe.
I’m not stupid enough to try any of the blasters, or the glowing purple balls that sit in a glass case. Eventually, I get bored of the weapons and try some of the other floor panels. Eventually, one of them springs open.
“Food!” I shriek with glee at the sight of the tubes of black liquid and the clear packages wrapped around a brown mushy substance.
Since the packages look kind of like someone pooped into bags, I go for the tubes first.
“Aguheaaaeeey!” I choke and have a hard time recovering my breath. The taste is like someone beat a fish to death with a bag of garbage and then liquified both with battery acid. It tastes sour and sweet and like sick all at the same time.Not sick, another S-word. Rhymes with spit.
The taste claws up the back of my throat and enters my brain and I immediately chuck the black liquid away and opt instead for a bag of crap. “Huh.” Tastes like peppermint. A little like melon. It’ll do.
I eat three more of the bags of poop and look down at my stomach when I’m finished. I feel full and right now, in just a tee shirt that stopped fitting me a hundred solars ago, it shows. I frown again. My stomach is full and my breasts are even fuller. Monster jugs, they sit heavy on my chest and sometimes, even make my back hurt. One would think that my giant bottom would have balanced out the weight, but I guess it just doesn’t work that way.
Too bad.
I didn’t always used to look like this. Just…after Mathilda put me in the basement. Food was the only thing I had to occupy my time. I didn’t realize that I’d gain weight. Nobody on the colony has ever gained enough weight to get round, so it didn’t even occur to me that I might.
As I walk around the eerily transparent edge of the escape pod, I drop my hand from my stomach and force myself to concentrate instead on the vastness and magnificence of space. Faraway stars blink like beacons to massive ships, calling them home. Though, in a way, I guess planets are kind of like ships transporting millions of people through the enormity of the universe. I smile at that, feeling my cheeks redden for no reason at all.
I press my palm to the edge of the pod and whatever black material that periodically flares up over the transparency appears beneath my fingertips, like it’s trying to communicate.
“What are you trying to say, little buddy?” I ask it, but the black material that looks like inky fabric just darts away and doesn’t answer me.Rude.
I grin, used to things not responding, so I just shrug and continue to count the comets and shooting stars I spy. “Eight…nine…eleven…thirty-three…” The shooting stars are hard to make out because the asteroids are starting to bunch together, closing in around the escape pod like reaching hands, making me wonder if they even are asteroids.
They’re big blocks of black and brown rock, some the size of this escape pod or smaller, but most, huge, hungry, hulking things. Despite their size, the escape pod maneuvers around them easily and I wonder how it knows to avoid the space debris and universe junk. Sensors? Sight? Is this thing alive? Can it see? Can it feel?
“If you can feel me, sorry for throwing around your weapons.” I hold up my hands as I stare around at the transparent walls and the space beyond them. Cautiously, I return all the weapons to their cache while humming a song I made up.
“Do you like music?” I ask the pod.
Crazy person!Yeah, maybe. But since I figured out how to disable my communicator, I know that I’m back to where I started. Alone.Alone in the emptiness of space. Except, is space empty, really? Maybe it’s full. Think of all the life floating through it. Me, just a solitary little pinpoint among the trillions. What’s bigger than trillions? Gazillions? What’s bigger than that? Gabajillions?
“Oh right, you don’t speak Human.”Duh.“Do you like music?” I ask the pod again in Meero.
It still doesn’t respond. “Humph. Maybe you just don’t have experience with music. I can fix that.”
I open my mouth and sing the silence a song I wrote in Meero, “Droganeene nene erro, wa da rogar tre hodona.” I’m belting the words out now. It’s a song about a plant. Lacking some er…inspiration when I was down in that cell under my sweet old gramma’s house, I only thought up songs about the things directly in front of me.
“If you lift your green leaves up to the sun,” or in the basement plants’ case, the sun lamps mounted above them — but who’s really factchecking? “Then you’ll grow big and strong…Ahh!” I scream as the entire escape pod lurches to an alarming stop.
My whole body sails, arms pinwheeling in the air. I’m headed straight for the clear wall on my left and, because it’s clear, I’m caught off guard when I hit it. Luckily, I managed to bring my arm around to cover my head. Unluckily, I hit my elbow against the clear and black surface.
“Augh!” I writhe in a funny sort of agony as my funny bone sends jitters all up and down my left side. “You stupid shroving wall!” I kick my feet on the floor, hoping to dispel the sensation when a hard voice cuts into the quiet, just like it did that very first time…
“You nosey little cretin!” She hits me so hard my lower lip splits and I taste blood the moment I hit the floor. The carpet is hard and scratchy under my palms, but there’s something smooth among the threads, something soft. I wrap my fist around it at the same time that mygrandmotherwraps my locs up in her fist and lifts me up by them. She’s stronger than she looks as she drags me, kicking and shrieking, down the hall, down the stairs into the basement.
I’ve been down here before. I broke the lock. That’s what started this whole mess.
I’m so dazed I don’t realize where I am or where I’m going until I’m on the floor and a door is sealed before me. It’s glass, or something like glass. Something harder because it doesn’t break — I spend the next few solars trying. Realizing it’s pointless on the ninth solar, I eventually turn to the little device. I try to use it in all kinds of weird ways and eventually make it work on accident. I’m sleeping with it underneath my pillow when I first hear the static. I listen closer…and closer…and closer…and then the thingcrawlsinto my ear canal.
